Each of our regular WRO contributors has selected a Wine of the Year and a Wine Producer of the Year for 2007. We will feature one of their write-ups each day in this space through the end of the year, and if you’d like to nominate a wine or winery , email your choices to [email protected] –Ed.
Winery of the Year: Chateau Ste. Michelle, Woodinville, WA: It’s my pleasure to echo my colleague Paul Lukacs (quite unbeknownst to me) and select Chateau Ste. Michelle as my 
winery of the year. Here in these pages, and elsewhere, it seems I’m going to have to get in line. Wine & Spirits, Food & Wine, and the Wine Spectator all gave Ste. Michelle special distinction in the past year for its across-the-board efforts in quality, value, and quality for price.
The winery’s parent company, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, has had a busy year to say the least. In September, with Italy’s Antinori Family, they completed purchase of one of the most storied wineries in the Napa Valley, Stags Leap Wine Cellars, adding to their presence in California in a dramatic fashion. In June, the winery hosted an international conference on Riesling at their winery in Woodinville, WA, with Germany’s Ernst Loosen. They called it the “Riesling Rendezvous,” and it gathered Riesling producers from all over the world to celebrate and evaluate the variety in its myriad forms. Ten years ago, there my not have bee a quorum for such an event; in 2007, there wasn’t an empty seat.
The setting was an apt one to admire one of the winery’s great recent successes, “Eroica,” a Columbia Valley Riesling winemaker Bob Bertheau makes in partnership with Loosen. With each vintage since its inception in 1999 we’ve watched this wine improve in clarity, tone, and fruit expression, as if it has been warming up its voice, just to hit the perfect note.
The winery has also taken great strides with its “Ethos” tier of top premium wines, which to my palate, in its first few years, have been generally expressive of expensive wood and lavish winery treatment. Something happened with the 2004 and 2005 vintages however, and the fruit dramatically took on a more principal role. Their 2004 Ethos Columbia Valley Syrah was appropriately inky and dark, but a shimmering red raspberry fruit showed through.
Meanwhile, the 2005 Ethos Columbia Valley Chardonnay was without question the finest Washington Chardonnay I’ve ever had. Too often Chardonnays from the state seem overly shellacked with oak. Not this one; it was vivid, bright, and refreshing, with generous pear flavors and acids that suggested a deft, confident hand from Washington’s most important winery.
Wine of the Year: Royal Tokaji Wine Company, 1999 Essencia (Wilson-Daniels, $500/500ml): There are some wines that are so delicious you want just to slug them down, and then there are others that seem so precious you want to measure your intake in droplets. That is certainly the case with the 1999 
Essencia from the Royal Tokaji Wine Company. The wine is in fact made drop by drop from juice that dribbles out of dense, botrytis-packed must; it reaches almost unheard of concentration and yet remains as sensuous and lustrous as silk, with a litany of flavors that might take a half a page to report–orange, apricot, mango, peach, assam tea, bergamot, saffron, bee pollen, caramel, toffee–and that’s just scratching the surface. Its texture is as sexy as any wine I’ve ever tasted–thick as honey, yet bright as a lemon blossom. It seems it would have to collapse from its own weight, and yet the wine’s breathtaking acidity leaves the wine buoyant, the palate alive. All you can do is marvel at the performance and hope for another precious drop.
14