Mary Elke Vineyards in Anderson Valley

Harvest 2011.  It's early morning and I'm driving from San Francisco, across the foggy Golden Gate bridge, north on hwy 101.  After Hopland, I hang a left at hwy 128.  Headlights are on because of the fog.  The drive takes about an hour just on the narrow twisting part of hwy 128. This feels like a different world.  A secret back country.  Tree-studded mountains embrace the valley.  Little creeks criss-cross and join the Navarro River that burgeons to the Pacific Ocean.  At Boonville, I make a few wrong turns and every time I get curious looks from locals trying to assess my intentions.  It's a rural valley and outsiders are not insiders. I eventually pull into Elke's Donnelly Creek Vineyard where the deeper into the vineyard I go, the darker the shade of red the rich earth becomes.

The historic Donnelly Creek Vineyard is on elevated sandy loam benchland with a perfectly sloped and well drained Southwest exposure.  It's fruit is sought by Mumm Napa, Roederer Estate, Radio Coteau, Copain Wine Cellars, Londer Vineyards, Au Bon Climate, Mendocino Wine Company, Far Niente, ICI/La Bas, Franciscan, Goldeneye (part of Duckhorn), and Breggo Cellars.

The fog is lifting now.  Mary greets me and digs her toe into the dirt to show me the large round stones that are everywhere. The vineyard is planted to Chardonnay, Pinot Gris, and Pinot Noir.  The Pinot Noir is Pommard 5, Dijon 113, Dijon 115, a field selection called the "Elliott", and another called the "Stang" ("selection massales" or field selections are colloquially called "clones" but there is a difference).  The Elliott clone is an old heritage vine from Napa Valley named after its grower; it has similar traits to the Martini clone.  Most Pinot Noirs are a blend of Dijon/Pommard clones from France.  The Stang and Elliott clones are what give the Elke Pinot Noirs their distinctive nose.  The Elke "Blue Diamond" Pinot Noir is a blend of 50% Pommard 5, 25% Stang and 25% Elliot (same blend for the last 15 years!).   Mary is proud of and responsible for both the Stang and Elliot clones grown only here, as far as anyone knows right now.

The vines are cane-pruned to four positions, 4 spurs and 2 canes (except the Pinot Gris which is cordon-trained). The whole Elke family used to live on the property when it was an apple orchard that Mary converted to an organic orchard before planting it to grapes.  Today, three of her employees and their families live on-site, so she keeps the vineyards and property as free of chemicals as possible.  While I'm there, fat happy chickens run around scratching between the vines, testament to a good ecosystem.

The Elke approach to winemaking is to keep it as natural and simple as possible. The winery consists of a small red shack without climate control and an outdoor concrete pad with an overhanging roof.  The interior of the red shack doubles as the tasting room and cellar.  A young winemaker from New Zealand, Matthew Evans, has been making Elke wines since the 2010 vintage.  His name serendipitously is the same as Mary's son's.

The grapes are hand sorted and destemmed into fermentation vats where minimal sulphites are added.  A specific strain of yeast isolated in Burgundy is added.  Punchdown frequencies follow heat temperatures - more punchdowns when the temperature is hot and fermentation is active (maybe 3x/day), fewer at lower temps (maybe 1x/day).  Since gentle extraction is important, all punchdowns are done by hand.  Once fermentation is complete, the must is pressed in a manually operated wooden basket press directly into 30% new french oak barrels where malolactic conversion happens.  Aged about 16 months in barrel, handling is kept to a minimum, ideally no racking until bottling, which is the "burgundian" reductive technique. 

Mary Elke is a hands-on grower, winery owner, business woman and seems like everyone's mother. Jesus, her vineyard foreman, has been with her from the beginning and takes care of the vineyard as if it were his own. She met him when he was harvesting apples at age 21. Now he is over 50 and his two children come to lend a hand during grape crush. In 1990 when Mary heard the Stanford graduate housing trailers were going to be moved, she rallied to have them brought to Anderson Valley, which is remote, and before then had very few places to stay. Now harvest workers at Roederrer, Scharffenberger, Navarro and even I have a place to stay thanks to Mary.

Elke wines are extremely food friendly.  The Pinot Gris is a dry style I pair with citrus salad.  The Rose of Pinot Noir is also dry and perfect with light meats.  The sparkling brut is ever so slightly sweetly orange blossom flavored, I paired it with pumpkin apple soup.  I had the Pinot Noirs with Thanksgiving Dinner turkey and fixings.  The winery is closed during Winter, but here's some sugestions for your next trip to Anderson Valley and Elke Vineyards.

Current wines available at the Elke Winery
Elke Wine Pairing Menu
Winter Alsace Festival in Anderson Valley
Spring Pinot Noir Festival in Anderson Valley
Suggested Google Map tour of Anderson Valley

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
Source vineyard sites

Join the Hatchling Society 
Annual PS I Love You tasting

# syllables used to describe wine is inversely proportional to the value of the wine

After Monday night's Muscardini Cellars tasting at the Secret Wine Shop, one reviewer left me this sheet of paper, which I found fascinating. According to this wine reviewer's self-referential definition of good value wines, Muscardini Cellars wines are good value since the reviewer gave very short word descriptions of the wines: "good nose", "tannin & struct", "balance", "best, yummy".

Last Monday, 20 people showed up to taste 6 different Michael Muscardini wines. Of the 20 people, 12 filled out their reviews and favorite rankings sheets.

Lesson #1 about tastings is when you greet people, get them to sign your signup sheet, then hand them a score sheet & ask them to score the wines & give you any comments. That way you'll get more ratings results and handwriting clues if you need them.

The results: 2008 Barbera won people's favorite wine 5 times! The 2009 barrel sample Zinfandel won 4 times. 2009 "Tesoro" won 2 x. The 2008 Sangiovese won 2 x. The 2009 Rosato won 1 x. One person voted a tie for favorite wine between the '08 Barbera, '09 Tesoro and '09 Zinfandel.

With this tasting, I paired a very smoky sausage with the 2008 Barbera. Everyone, except 1 person, said they loved the sausage with the wine. Interestingly the 2008 Barbera won this tasting as most people's favorite wine of the evening; usually it's the Zin that wins.

Lesson #2 about tastings is food can make a big difference in how people perceive & rate a wine. Don't worry about getting the pairing perfect for everyone. Pairing is a matter of personal taste, so not everyone is going to love your choice but more people will love the wine.

Golden Glass 2009 Slow Food expo yesterday

Some of my faves were:
* http://inka.fm/ - a food-growing sculpture/energy/ecosystem for cities where there isn't much space or locations where fresh water is in short supply
* http://harvest4you.com - my new go-to place for sourcing local high-quality produce for home production of pickles & spirits
* http://poggiotrattoria.com/ - traditional yet nouvelles terrines. downtown Sausalito

Talking about natural fermentation w/:
* http://broccellars.com/ (made from native bacteria from Berkeley, CA. About $35/bottle) available at http://events.sfgate.com/san-francisco-ca/venues/show/8792-william-cross-wine-merchants and
* https://www.bonnydoonvineyard.com (no more red truck)

Originally the "slow food wine expo" was an Italian wine show, which explains the majority of Italian wine vendors. Most of the Italian wines showcased weren't that expensive and the importers told me I should be able to find them in local stores. However, when I looked for the wines online, I couldn't find them on mos of the stores' websites. Maybe you just have to call them and ask or go there to look for yourself?

Some wines around $20/bottle:
* Fratelli Alessandria's verduna pelaverga 2007 - http://www.villaitaliawines.com and http://www.beltramos.com/
* La Crotta di Vegneron's gamay 2007 - http://www.thejugshop.com
* Lini Lambrusco's Rosso sparkling (sweet & tangy, good for parties) - http://www.plumpjackwines.com/plumpjackwines/fillmore.aspx?loc=fillmore
* Marchesi Incisa della Rocchetta's Rosso 2007 - http://www.buyserendipitywines.com/contact.html
* Catherine & Pierre Breton's Borgueil Les Perrières 2004 - http://terroirsf.com/

photo gallery - some wines I enjoyed in 2008

Cliff Lede Cinnamon Stardust 2005, Stag's Leap District, 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, very dark rich complex berries with hints of cinnamon, good sipping wine, purchased at winery in Yountville, CA, around $90






Cliff Lede 2005, Diamond Mountain single vineyard, 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, dark rich berries with herbal nose and hints of sage and eucalyptus, purchased at winery in Yountville, CA, around $80






St. Magdalena Südtirol – Alto Adige 2007, DOC Santa Maddalena Classico Huck am Bach (located in Bolzano ITALY), Schiava (90%), Lagrein (10%), biodynamic no sulfites, aromatic fruity ruby red, pair with charcuterie, purchased at Terroir Wine Bar in SOMA San Francisco, around $20



AOC Crozes-Hermitage (26600 Tain L'Hermitage i.e. Cotes du Rhone FRANCE), Domaine du Colombier Cuvée Gaby 2005, Syrah mostly, Marsanne next and Roussane 15%, THE STINKIEST BARNYARD EVER! Pairs nicely with Grayson (a stinky soft cow's milk VA cheese at Cowgirl Creamery), purchased from Raphael Knapp, http://www.intvin.com



Wilson Winery 2005, Dorothy's Vineyard single vineyard, Dry Creek Valley, 100% Syrah, dark tannins with light aromatic fruity taste and gamey nose, good sipping wine or pair with meat, purchased at winery in Dry Creek Valley, CA, around $35




AOC Madiran(located in Corbère Abères F64350 i.e. Hautes-Pyrenées Sud-Ouest FRANCE), Chateau Peyros Vieilles Vignes 2003, 60% Tannat, 40% Cabernet Franc, dessert red wine, pairs well with blue cheese, purchased from Raphael Knapp importer in San Francisco, http://www.intvin.com


AOC Ste Croix du Mont (J.M. Tinon, Sainte-Croix-du-Mont, i.e. GirondeBordeaux FRANCE), Chateau la Grave Ste Croix du Mont 1998, 90% sémillon, 10% sauvignon blanc, dessert white wine, pairs well with almond biscotti, purchased from Raphael Knapp importer in San Francisco, http://www.intvin.com