These days I rarely go to wine tastings because I am a) starting a winery, and b) I have a 4-year old, and c)I don’t like big, crowded “hog-call” wine tastings (more about this later). But a few weeks ago I decided that I needed to get out more, so I hoisted my periscope out of the water to have a look around, and found “The Pinot Noir Summit”, by Affairs of the Vine in San Franciso on Saturday, March 11. “Taste thirty-five luscious Pinot Noirs top rated wines from The 4th Annual Pinot Noir Shootout in a blind tasting. Pit your palate against the expert panel” was the billing on their website. This intrigued me: a blind tasting and of only 35 wines that had already passed through a judging. There were also seminars on various topics, and I thought it would be fun to sit in the audience and listen to my winemaker peers talk, something, again, that I rarely get the opportunity to do. So I went.

It turned out to be an interesting, fun and thoroughly educational event. There were (I’m guessing) 150 attendees, some of them winemakers, winery owners, winery employees, or wine journalists, but most seemed to be regular wine-interested folks. There were 44 wines to taste blind and were spread out within a relatively large room. Each bottle was wrapped in foil and color-coded. The room was a little cool for tasting red wine (the wines were not as aromatic as they probably could’ve been), but it was pretty well organized otherwise.

My impressions of the 44 wines: there was an incredible wide-range of style and quality in this tasting. A few negatives: there were many wines that were almost undrinkable and had some really awful glaring defects (it surprised me that these wines had made it through a previous judging). There were also a shameful amount of corked wines (although apparently each wine had been tasted as it was opened, there were still corked wines on the tables). But there were far more positives: a delightful variety of different styles of Pinot, a big range of flavors and aromas, oak attributes, color, weight, etc. My own, personal preference, is that I generally don’t like light-hued Pinot—these wines to me tend to be thin and lackluster. But in this tasting there were some light Pinots that were really beautiful wines: elegant, interesting flavors, spicy, and a nice suprise. Some Pinots tried for a darker hue/heavier weight/darker fruit profile that just didn’t work—the tannins were rough or overextracted or (many times) the oak profile was awkward or coarse. But there were other, darker Pinots that were elegant, interesting and well-made as well.

Some Surprises

Casa de Caballos was a wonderful surprise. They are located in the Templeton area, more generally in the Paso Robles region which isn’t known for producing great Pinot, but they are about 12 miles from the ocean and the vineyard is at 1200ft. The winemaker/owner, Tom, says that it can get to be 100 degrees during the day, but will cool quite quickly into the 50’s or lower at night. This was a very nice wine, elegant, subtle, med-bodied.

My friend Sal Godinez (we worked together at Saintsbury for a few years) has his own wine label out called Carneros della Notte and he is putting out some dynamite, medium-bodied yet sophisticated Pinot. Go Sal!

Now, I’ve heard tidbits here and there about Laetitia wines, but never really have had the opportunity to taste them or learn much about them. If you get the opportunity, check them out. Their winemaker, Eric Hickey, has been there for quite some time and is doing a dynamite job. For you folks interested in Pinot clones, there is an old clone called Martini that has been in California for years, but it is, by and large, relatively unremarkable on its own. It almost acts like Syrah in that it is dark and has, for Pinot, a lot of tannin, but unlike Syrah has very little character on its own. Eric brought along a wine made entirely from Martini clone that is grown on their La Colline vineyard and it was a fabulous wine on it’s own—by far the best wine made from Martini I have ever tasted.

Blind Tasting Format

As the day wore on I met up with friends I haven’t seen for quite some time and was able to catch-up and (hee hee) gossip a little too. I met some new friends as well. I prefer this type of tasting to to other big tastings that aren’t blind for many reasons: there is more time in which to savor each wine and appreciate it for what it is (or isn’t); an event that has a smaller attendance (such as this one) is more conducive to meeting people and catching up with friends; tasting blind completely throws out any hype associated with a certain winery, style, pricepoint, etc; it forces the taster to accept what is in the glass without any predetermined notions. I hope to see more tastings like this in the future to help folks evaluate wine in a slower-paced, intimate and unbiased environment. Good job Affairs of the Vine!!

This entry was posted on Monday, March 13th, 2006 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Wines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.