Mike's Wine Blog

My wine tasting notes, both current releases and older wines from my cellar.

Name:
Location: California, United States

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

2003 Fleming Jenkins, Chardonnay, Santa Cruz Mountains

Straw colored. Lemon and oak on the Nose. Lemon and butter on the fruit, oily feel in the mouth, high acid and a long fruity finish with a grapefruit aftertaste. This wine was better balanced when it warmed up a little. When it was cold, it seemed too oaky, but as it warmed up it became better balanced. I found this wine just slightly too much oak for my taste, but I’m sure many will like it. List price is $35. Not rated.

2002 Ravenswood, Zinfandel, Napa

Medium dark. Nose has cherry and strawberry aromas. Cherry and strawberry forward fruit flavors, high acid, soft tannins, and a long fruity finish. Nice fruity Zin for near term drinking, and a good value if you can find it at discount. List prise $15. My rating 84.

2003 Fleming Jenkins, Syrah, Madden Ranch, Livermore Valley

Dark garnet. Raspberry aromas on the nose. Big jammy raspberry and cherry fruit flavors with hints of spices, very high acid, moderate tannins and long fruity finish. This is a very good, fruity Syrah. List price is $40. My rating 88.

Fleming Jenkins is a new winery started by Peggy Fleming of Olympic skating fame and her husband, Greg Jenkins. This wine comes from a vineyard owned by the family of John Madden, the ABC football commentator and former coach of the Oakland Raiders. In spite of all the celebrity names, the wine still is very good. This is a promising initial release from this small new winery.

Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Better Winemaking Through Chemistry

There is an article in the New York Times Magazine about the wine consultant Leo McCloskey. He has developed a method of analyzing about 100 trace chemicals in wine and has correlated these with the rankings and scores given to these wines by wine makers and wine critics. He analyzes these trace chemicals in grapes before harvest and in the juice just after the crush and uses this to recommend when to harvest and how to process the wine.

To those who think winemaking is an art form, using chemistry to improve the quality may sound offensive, but I don’t see anything wrong with this. What has gotten some people all bent out of shape about this article (see this thread at Robert Parker’s web site for example) is that McCloskey claims he can predict the score that major wine critics will give a wine from measurements of these trace chemicals in the wine.

The style of wine McCloskey seem to be encouraging requires wineries to get the grapes fully ripe (overripe?) and then to limit the amount of skin contact during fermentation to reduce the tannins. McCloskey says critics and I guess consumers favor highly extracted wines with softer tannins that are more drinkable when they are young. The article does point out that this may not produce wines that age as well, but again I don’t see anything wrong with that. Most wine, even high priced cabernets are drunk fairly young. Very few people have wine cellars with 10-20 year old Bordeaux or California Cabernets. Wineries sell wine as a business, and that means they need to make a profit. Basic business 101 is to make your product more attractive to the consumer, and it only makes sense that a consumer that just paid $30-100 for a bottle of Cabernet would want to drink it sometime relatively soon, not put it in a cellar for 15 years before trying it.

The article does mention that Joel Peterson of Ravenswood, famous for their No Wimpy Wine slogan, tried McCloskey’s analysis but decided they didn’t like the results. Some people are worried that this kind of analysis is accelerating the trend towards homogenized wine making, where everyone tries to make wines that taste the same, but it is really the wine critics and the consumers that follow their recommendations that are responsible for this. Presumably, critics like Robert Parker are so influential because many consumers have found they like the wines that he likes.

The winery most prominently mentioned in this article as a McCloskey client is Chappellet. I have tasted a number of Chappellet wines in the last year. I liked some of them (here and here) and didn’t like one (here), so I have an open mind.