Not quite a year ago I had an illuminating email exchange with Josh Jensen, the owner of Calera Wine Company. Jensen also makes the wines at Calera’s somewhat remote location in the mountains of California’s Central Coast, about an hour south of San Francisco. Calera is famous for its Mt. Harlan Pinot Noirs, and rightly so.
Long before other California vintners had figured out this tricky grape variety, Calera was getting it right. Jensen (pictured here at his Mt. Harlan estate) saw to that. He chose the location for its limestone soils, rare in California but abundant in Burgundy, and he possessed a clear vision of how truly great Pinot Noir should taste.
I was therefore a bit surprised at my disappointment while tasting a few young Calera Pinots earlier this year. Jensen, knowing I had admired Calera’s Pinots over many years, wrote to suggest that my impression of those lean, tightly structured wines might change if I would only have the patience to wait for them to come around.
He indicated five years might be the optimum, depending upon the vintage, but we all know few consumers actually buy these wines with the intention of aging them. Hence Jensen often holds back release of his Pinots to give the wines more time to evolve.
Last night Josh spoke to me again, but this time it was through his wines — the lovely 2002 Calera Reed Vineyard Pinot Noir ($48) and the tightly wound 2002 Calera Selleck Vineyard Pinot Noir ($58).
The Reed is already beginning to blossom, fleshing out and developing more depth of aroma and length on the palate as it sheds the leaness of youth. The Selleck remains fairly tight, but already you sense this wine is finding another gear.
What I admired most about both wines was their connection to the place where the grapes were grown. Both wines were earthy on the nose, though the Reed is more precocious and expressive at this time, and there was a strong thread of minerality in each, though strongest in the Selleck.
The fruit aromas were more in the realm of red fruits — strawberries, raspberries and cherries — than the darker, black fruits that can sometimes be confused with aromas found in other red wines, such as Syrah.
It says a great deal about the courage of Jensen’s convictions that he continues to seek these characteristics in his Pinots, bucking the trend toward riper, more voluptuous, even sweeter Pinot Noirs that are favored by many of his neighboring vintners
There is room for both.
The big difference with Calera Pinot is that it requires something of the consumer. That would be patience.
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