At Jay Murrie’s new place - what a pleasant, unexpected surprise to be handed a glass of this juice at 11AM on a Saturday morning.
Hmmm… where to start?
Well, apparently the folks at the AOC are furious with Éric for making this wine - they won’t even allow him to name it “Vin de Table”, so he’s calling it “moût de raisins partiellement fermenté” [partially fermented must of grapes], although Dressner is using the term “white table wine” on his label.
The name, “opale”, is a play on words, trading off between the semi-precious opal gemstone, and a French term meaning “pale water”, so it ends up being sort of a double entendre for “mineral water of opaque stones”. Also, Éric does pronounce the final “e” in “opale”, although he doesn’t pronounce it as “é”.
The site is in Côteau de Vernon, within Condrieu, and Éric says the soil is “loess” - a dusty sand with lots of “sicile” [hydrogenated silicon dioxide? BTW, I just looked it up, and the opal stone is itself a silica gel], which Éric thinks is actually a pretty lousy soil for Viognier, so he decided to try something a little off-beat with the vinification.
He picks very early - the 2008 that I tried was picked in the first week of September 2008, and the 2009 was picked on August 22nd of this year. The units he works with don’t readily translate into our units, but he did a quick back of the envelope calculation, and thought that he was picking at about 18 or 19 brix!!! He ferments the juice until he’s happy with what he has, then he stops the fermentation hard at -4°C. He lets the lees settle to the bottom of the tank, then bottles in January, and ships in June.
The 2008 that I tried came in at 7% alcohol, and 0.9% or 1.0% acidity.
As for a tasting note: It’s not riesling, obviously, but you do get the sense that it’s what Manfred Prüm or Helmut Dönnhoff would be making if they worked with Viognier. It has outstanding, really magnificent acidity, and it sips very, very easily. I could see opening a bottle of this on a hot summer’s afternoon, and sitting there contemplating it for fifteen or twenty minutes, and then looking over at the bottle and realizing that it was already empty [it really does drink like pale water!].
I asked Éric about cellaring the wine, and he that said he has been very happy with what he’s seen so far. With a little age, the wine is developing “petrol” notes, but instead of the kerosene that one would expect from a Riesling, Éric said that he is getting more of an “encaustique”, which is a mixture of turpentine and wax that is used as a furniture polish in France [Éric says that the scent is like a petrol, but “sweeter”], and that these notes start to develop at about 21 months post-harvest.
The annual production amounts to only about 100 cases; Jay Murrie has five cases of the 2008 right now, and might get another two cases, for a total of about 7% of the entire run.
PS: I don’t know how to use this word “verjus” in an English sentence [I don’t know whether it refers to the grape bunches, or the technique, or both], but on the red wines, Éric is picking the “verjus” bunches [the wines out on the end of the vine] very early in the season, to use later for natural acidification, but instead of chilling them [he’s picking two to three tons, and chilling just wouldn’t be practical], he’s pressing out the juice and then some of his friends are “dry-vac-ing” the juice into a powder which he can add to the final product to produce a natural acidification [or acidulation or whatever the correct technical term is].
PPS: I thought about declaring that the Opale was Éric’s “Spätlese” of Viognier, but
A) It doesn’t drink like a Spätlese, it drinks like a Kabinett, and
B) I’m getting to the point where most Spätlesen are just a little too soft and flabby for me, so, from my point of view, calling it a Kabinett [or even an Estate QbA] is a very high compliment [not an insult].