At the risk of sounding jaded, I get to taste delicious wines all the time. However, it is relatively rare for me to taste a wine that seems important, or a wine that makes me want to congratulate the people who grew the grapes or crafted the wine.
Stated in rather more snarky terms, it is rare for me to taste a wine that makes me wonder why hundreds of other vintners were too lacking in imagination or initiative to make something like it themselves.
The wine in question is a Grüner Veltliner, sourced from the Paragon Vineyard in the Edna Valley in California’s Central Coast and bottled by Zocker Winery. Grüner Veltliner is a grape closely associated with
Austria, where it is a distinctive specialty that excels at every level from a simple jug wine served by the pitcher in a tavern (a Heuriger, in German) to a high-end, single-vineyard, estate-bottled wine. Grüners are terrific young but capable of development with age, and are amazingly versatile and delicious with food.
All of which raises the following questions: Why the hell aren’t there dozens of Grüners available from California or Oregon or Washington? At least in limited production, to see what the grape might do in these locations? Out of those thousands of acres of Chardonnay in Monterey County alone, wouldn’t it have been worthwhile for a bunch of vintners to devote a row or two to Grüner Veltliner? When so many vineyards had to be replanted after the failure of AxR1 rootstock in the 1990s, wouldn’t it have made sense for many wineries to try some relatively rare grapes that have achieved excellence elsewhere, pushing past Viognier to try Verdejo or Vermentino or Verdelho? (And those are just the “V” candidates.)
I mean, really, given the great success of Malbec in Argentina and Carménère in Chile, why are we not seeing dozens of experimental Albariños and Grüners being made in the USA? An unwillingness to gamble a little on grapes like these seems very curious to me. Curious, or maybe brainless. Or gutless?
Of course, this is easy for me to say, since I’m not the one who would have to sell the resulting wine. Perhaps what Zocker Winery has done is a bigger gamble than it seems to me, and in fact “Zocker” is the Austrian word for “Gambler.”
In any case, Zocker’s gamble has paid off, as the wine shows true varietal character in the form of tasty fruit recalling white melons and peaches with a fresh citrus edge. There’s a suggestion of ripeness in the midpalate, but the acidity is so energetic that the wine really could pass for an Austrian rendition of the grape, and its vibrancy and freshness should make it a prized object in California, which rarely produces edgy whites from any grape other than Sauvignon Blanc. Congratulations–on grounds of foresight–to all who were involved in bringing this wine to fruition, including the Niven family and winemaker Christian Roguenant. I scored the 2009 bottling at 91 points, and posted a review here on WRO.
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Questions, or answers? Write to me at [email protected]
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