The evolution of California wine over the past quarter-century has been anything but a smooth ride. Some of us who go back that far well remember the “nimmy” wines of the early 1980s, about the time several of the gatekeeper wine competitions were launched.
Judges would often disqualify a wine based upon the rank smells in the glass, refusing even to taste it. The expression they used was “nimmy,” which was a judge’s shorthand for “not in my mouth.”
Because so many commercial wines were badly flawed, the goal of many winemakers from that era was to simply make “clean” wines that exhibited freshness and varietal character.
With time — and wave after wave of highly skilled graduates of the enology and viticultural programs at UC-Davis and Fresno State — the California wine industry found its legs and began to improve quality across the board.
Of course, any new industry experiencing rapid growth amidst an influx of ambitious raw talent is going to see its share of excess and one-upsmanship. You can see where this is leading.
So we, the consumers, endured the assault of the new French oak brigade. We got butter in our Chardonnays until it oozed from our pores. And Cabernets so jammy you could serve them with toast and butter. Above all, it became monotonous and tiresome as a pack mentality settled upon the winemaking class.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There is a place for all of this. If a person loves the creamy thickness of a Rombauer Chardonnay, I say God bless! But change is the mantra of the moment and change is what I see on the horizon, most noticeably in California, where the excesses were the greatest.
Those of us who prefer to choose from a broad spectrum of wine styles, recognizing that circumstances often dictate which we crave, can take heart in one of the new wineries on the California winescape — Freestone Vineyards, which straddles the Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley appellations and specializes in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
Thanks to Freestone and a handful of other bold California producers who would buck conventional wisdom — Sonoma Cutrer, Kistler, Corison, Truchard, Nickel & Nickel, Alma Rosa and Elizabeth Spencer, just to name a few — the crowd that prizes balance, elegance and diversity now has some good options. That is the subject of my Creators Syndicate column this week. Read the whole thing, as they say.
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