The world of wine is largely a commercial one. Although passion gets people into the business, the choice of what to plant and what to make in California tends to be limited by the range of what people love to drink. This range rarely extends much beyond a dozen varieties or so–the Pinots, the Cabs, the Chards and Merlots, with an occasional wild hair thrown in the direction of Rhône varieties.
So let us remind ourselves that nature in its infinite variety has bestowed us with nearly 5,000 grape varieties. It has, as well, given certain winemakers sufficient curiosity to venture beyond the usual suspects. Sometimes it’s a question of resurrecting an old vineyard that produces extraordinary fruit from an all but forgotten variety. Or it starts with a form of mildly obsessive curiosity that grows in the mind of a winemaker until they have no choice but plant a trial row or two, and before too long, you’ve got bottled obsession. Here are three Californian cases in point:
Albarino:
This Spanish varietal hails from the northwest corner of the Iberian Peninsula, where the grape produces the luscious Albarino wines from Spain’s Rias Baixas appellation and, from Portugal, vibrant Alvarinhos or Vinho Verdes. In the late nineties these wines were brought to the attention of the American public by tireless importers like Jorge Ordonez, Eric Solomon, and Stephen Metzler of Classic Wines from Spain.
Like Pinot Gris, Albarinos can be remarkably different from one another: brisk and lemony in the hands of one winemaker and rich and peachy when crafted by another. They’re sufficiently chameleonic to capture the imagination of thoughtful California winemakers like Michael Havens and Louisa Sawyer Lindquist.
Michael Havens, known for his iconic Merlots and brooding Syrahs (as well as one of the first and most successful Cabernet Franc blends, Bourriquot), planted Albarino in Carneros, releasing the first wine in 2001. The Havens rendition bears a Carneros imprint. The 2003 Havens Carneros Albarino is firm and stony, with a bright lemony scent and citrusy flavors, all couched in an intensely mineral texture; it has an appropriately windbitten quality in its firmness and intensity. The 2004 will be available in March.
Louisa Sawyer-Lindquist has been drinking Albarinos since her days in retail in Long Island. Several years later with her husband Bob Lindquist of Qupe, she had the opportunity to plant Tempranillo and Albarino at Ibarra-Young Vineyard in the Central Coast, and together they established a new label devoted to their Spanish project, Verdad. Sawyer-Lindquist’s 2004 Verdad Albarino Ibarra-Young Vineyard in the Santa Ynez Valley falls into the ripe and peachy camp of Albarino. It is a rich and mouthfilling wine that almost resembles a Viognier in its lush intensity.
Gamay Noir:
Gamay is the grape of Beaujolais in France, the region responsible for filling the bistros and wine bars of Paris with delicious, accessible, uncomplicated wines for everyday drinking. In this country, Beaujolais has a devoted following just before Thanksgiving when Beaujolais Nouveau invades every wine shop in the country; no one thinks much of it otherwise, in part because it’s not a wine to ponder; being too easygoing for that.
For years a version of Gamay–Napa Gamay–has filled jugs with Central Valley plonk, and thankfully, it’s nearly all gone. But about five years ago, winemaker Steve Edmunds wanted to see what he could make of the real thing, and convinced a grower in the Sierra Foothills to plant Gamay. At the time his colleagues thought this was a little kooky. After all, Gamay is like the un-Cabernet: too light in color, too juicy in flavor. It goes against just about every wine trend going right now. This, of course, is vintage Edmunds–fervent about making a wine that quite possibly no one will ever want to buy. But he’s been making a delicious Gamay Noir he calls Bone-Jolly.
From two vineyards in the Sierra Foothills, Edmunds’ Bone-Jolly Gamay Noir tends to be a little deeper in both body and color than its French counterpart. The 2004 Bone-Jolly has a forward, but oddly delicate dark cherry scent, and flavors that revolve around a juicy core of red cherry fruit, grounded by a mineral imprint from the volcanic soils of the Foothills. It’s a delicious experiment, and as unusual a wine as you’re likely to find from California.
Charbono:
Charbono has been planted in California for almost as long as there have been vinifera grapes here; it’s of uncertain origin but bears a resemblance to Dolcetto and to Bonarda in Argentina, and may have originated in southern France. Charbono was almost certainly brought over by Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century and planted all over Northern California, particularly in the mountains above the Napa Valley; but less than fifty acres remain in the ground.
Robert Foley makes wine from some of them. Foley is the winemaker for Pride Mountain Vineyards, but his inspiration to become a winemaker at all came from an Inglenook cellar, where he tasted a sample of Charbono in 1968. The taste of that wine, he says, was enough to set him down his career path.
Nearly forty years later, when he was given access to some old vine Charbono from a grower who used to sell his fruit to Inglenook, he jumped at the chance. Charbono is typically a tough black grape making chewy, tightly knit wines high in both acid and tannin. In the wrong hands they can be sort of bright and wiry, making for a curious combination of firm tannins while lacking much depth in the glass.
Foley’s 2004 Napa Valley Charbono breaks the pattern. Make no mistake, it’s a chewy, intense wine; its evolution when I last tasted it was helped along by decanting and an hour of air. But the wine seems to crawl out from under its own structure with time, with a vinous aroma giving way to a mysterious blue-flower scent, all supporting fruit that’s as fresh and bright as a bowl of berries. It’s intense and very firm on the palate, with a bright blue fruit profile and a dense texture; not a quaffer; it’s an ideal wine for beef–in fact, I can’t think of a better wine for a fat grilled burger than this wonderfully obscure one.