Robert Biale Winery in Napa - Part I

Recently I was lucky to be invited to the Robert Biale winery in Napa. Robert Biale makes year after year one of the most sought after by collectors cult Zinfandel blends, called the Black Chicken. The Black Chicken began in the 1940's as a bootleg wine by 14-year old Aldo Biale and his mother, just after Aldo's father died, they needed money to keep the farm going. They kept the Zinfandel bottles hidden behind stacks of wooden picking boxes and people came by to buy codeword "black chicken". Funny thing was, the Biales only had white chickens at the time. Aldo Biale passed away recently, late 2009, but left behind his vineyard, equipment, and old wisdom.  You can still sometimes see his widow Clementine at the winery, and Aldo's son Robert Biale, who tends to the vines and is the current President of ZAP. Besides high quality Zinfandels, Biale also makes high quality Syrahs and Petite Sirahs.

The day of my visit, our goal was to blend 150 barrels of 2010 vintage wine into the 2010 Black Chicken. The barrels had already been taken down from the stacks and spread out on the winery floor on 2x2 racks. Our first job was to taste each barrel, rinsing the thief (pipette used to draw out a wine sample) between barrels using grain alcohol, one of the best sanitizers available in a winery.

One single bad barrel could ruin the whole lot! At stake is the livelihood of 15 different local grape-growing families whose grapes are represented in those barrels. We were looking for barrels that either were obviously bad (tasted like vinegar or sauerkraut or gym socks) or those that just didn't taste "right". The latter is very subtle. It could be that the aromas or wine taste flat, just not as good as they should. For each barrel, we took note of the barrel maker, year the barrel was made, vineyard source of grapes and how that barrel tasted.

I learned that in a true blend, complexity comes from not only choosing different varietal grapes from different vineyards but also mixing barrels from different makers and years. The oldest barrels on the floor dated back to 2002, the newest ones were from 2010, with the vast majority on the neutral older side (~80% old neutral wood). I started noticing the different barrel flavor profiles. I took note that I particularly loved the aromas & flavors coming from old Francois Frères barrels and from younger barrels of a brand that looked like "MV" (but later learned was "MU" for Marieu, pic of 2008 barrel below).

Our approach to blending was to separate the entire lot into 3 groups, each representing a different "terroir" and therefore different flavor profile. Group 1 was the field blends which almost by definition come from old vines. Group 2 was old vine Zinfandel from the original Aldo's vineyard. Group 3 included Zinfandel, Primitivo, and Petite Sirah from the "home ranch" in Oak Knoll District. For barrels in each group, we were tasting for "unique expression of terroir". We representatively sampled from each group, then the "all-in" all 3 groups together. From there, we tried altering more/less of a particular group. To simulate adding 1 barrel from a new (to Robert Biale) Mt. Veeder Zin vineyard we had to go down to just droplets for our 50ml sample.

Steve Hall, winemaker at Robert Biale

Blending is the art of focused sensory perception and expression. Supposedly the average human can detect 300 different aromas. Smell is one of those senses that is directly stored in the brain as a memory. So as we smell, we directly recall to mind certain memory associations. The act of blending means smelling, concentrating on what you can remember, and then vocalizing that memory. As we blended and smelled and tasted, we each talked non-stop, forming our impression of each blend as we talked and putting into words what we smelled. Steve Hall, the winemaker at Robert Biale, has a concept in mind, what he wants the Black Chicken to be. He described it to me as light like a feather while deep & dark, tension between rich booming low and high notes, a wine full of life, images of contraband and mystery. What we did was a sort of pattern-matching. We vocalized what we perceived in a blend and then tried to find the closest match of our description of that blend to Steve's original description of what the Black Chicken should be. The blending process took 1.5 days; in the end we reached the 2010 Black Chicken "recipe". It's an ecstatic blend, and I can't wait to taste the finished product in the bottle! But for that I've got to wait until Winter 2012.

Current wines available at Robert Biale Winery
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