Great article on Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat

I love this, especially the picture:

http://bbrblog.com/2016/03/31/wildest-winemaker-west/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3

Dug this quote:

[They] have their heads so far up their asses that they will not buy non-Italian-made Italian varieties, and it’s completely crazy. They buy their lettuce from the US, they probably buy their pasta from the US, but they just don’t want to have any non-Italian wines on their list. And I just don’t get it.

Paging Gary York?

Though I’m also guilty of this as a consumer. I’ve bought his Burgundy varieties, and others from CA. But it’s much harder for me to convince myself to pick up CA versions of Italians - reds, especially. Enjoying some of Florida Jim’s whites from the recent BD offer, and have a few Nebbioli from Castelli napping (for quite some years, I think, given that the Pinot I opened seemed to me promising but far from ready).

Thanks for posting, I enjoyed it a lot. He also did a great interview on the podcast “I’ll drink to that”, in case anybody is interested.

He brought up something that always made me scratch my head about the French varietal domination in CA:
“I think climate-wise we have much more in common in California with the kind of aridity and climate that grows Italian varieties than we do with the French.”

Thanks for the link, Blake!

On a related subjet, if anyone is going to be in the SF Bay Area on Saturday, April 9th, we’ll be holding the 6th Nebbiolo Enthusiasts & Believers (NEB) tasting for domestic Nebbiolo, from noon-4pm at Domenico Winery in San Carlos. Emilio Castelli will be there along with a bunch of other California producers of Nebbiolo - I’ll be there pouring for Harrington Wines. Jim Clendenen will be there for our growers/producers session the previous day, but not yet sure whether he’ll be able to stay for the public tasting on Saturday afternoon.

I loved that quote as well.

Re his Italian wines, they are over the top good, especially his Nebbiolos which are aged for many years before even being considered for release. The 05 is just now starting to open up and others I have that are older are still coming around and are fabulous. Italian like, they are not; the true expression of new world Nebbiolo, there are and theres not many others that approach them at this level of excellence IMHO. BTW, those wines are released under the Clendenen Family Vineyards label.

Once Clendenen gets over his shyness, he is quite talkative.

As are you my friend. It`s always great to get your responses to these threads Mel.

I thought his comments about Italian restaurants rang true. They will buy all the French varietals made in the USA, but rarely the ones made with Italian varieties. Some of the same restaurants talk about being locavore and then serve Italian wines.

He’s right about the dominance of French grapes. But it’s a historical artifact. After WW2, the French set about rebuilding. They had the Marshal Plan and lots of loans and they set about making themselves an important nation again. In addition, Great Britain had always been a major customer of French wine, particularly Bordeaux. So Bordeaux came to dominate the world wine market, which was defined by the Brits and supported by the national government of France.

Italy was dysfunctional as a country. It never had the unity or sense of nationhood that France had developed during the Middle Ages. Nor did Spain actually. So when the Americans decided to restart their wine industry, they wanted to measure themselves against the “best” and at that time, it meant France. Jackie Kennedy charmed de Gaulle and all things French became the epitome of fine living.

Italians and Italian cuisine and wine were very far down the list in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. And Spain was still under Franco, Portugal under another dictator, Greece utterly dysfunctional as a nation, and so for wine, the Americans decided to model themselves on Bordeaux.

I think if the US wine business were starting in California today, given the improvements in wine making world wide, it would be far more logical to look to grapes from south Spain, Italy, Greece, Croatia, etc. But the Paris tasting made a big impact on the US psyche and everyone wanted to make Cab. That got picked up all over.

So there’s a lot of experience world wide with Cab and Merlot and when someone tries doing something else, it gets dismissed because everyone knows that some grapes only do well in their “native” homes.

It’s ridiculous. Guys like Harrington, who has the guts to make Trousseau, are proving it. California is huge, not to mention Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Arizona, British Columbia, etc. People haven’t even begun to explore the capacity of the US or Canada, or even Mexico.

Great post and so true on so many different levels Greg.

Jim is way ahead of modern times thinking and consensus as most who know him well will agree. IMHO, he is a genius and has vision and intuition beyond most people I know. He has a fantastic memory and discerning palate and the ability to synthesise years of experience and exposure and translate it into something much greater than the individual experiences. His awareness goes much deeper into levels most of us do not even broach.

For me, he is a mentor as well as a great friend and one I look up to and in his presence just absorb his wisdom and look at it and use it for future observations and deductions for my own conclusions.

Until I found Jim’s Italian varietal wines I was quite turned off by California producers using these grapes. Probably the first 10 or so California Italian wines I tried were over ripe and over oaked. Perhaps the producers just treated their Sangiovese the same as their Cabernet. At the ABC open house last year I picked up a case of 1997 “Bricco Buon Natale” Nebbiolo. Half way through the case now and it’s mature but far from declining. Simply wonderful wine. Restraint in wine making can be a wonderful thing.

A perfect case in point.

I’m not sure I appreciate being called a knucklehead.

I think what he meant to say was that one thinks consumers are a bunch of knuckleheads but they are not, they are smarter than that.

Jim is still selling 97 Nebbiolo?? Maybe he is the knucklehead…

You’re right about many of those early Sangioveses from California - I think many vintners made them just like their Cabs. There have been some relative under-the-radar labels like Jim’s, made by people who knew what they were doing, though they’ve been largely ignored, especially in light of the failure of a few high-profile but misguided “Cal-Ital” projects. But I’ve seen things change dramatically over the past 10 years or so, with many more California vintners showing a much better feel for where various Italian grape varieties should be planted here and how they should be treated in the winery. Of course they won’t be the same as wines from Italy, just as California Cabs, Chards, and Pinots are not the same as their French counterparts. I believe there’s a bright future ahead for Italian varieties in California and we’ll see some major steps forward over the next decade.

I believe there’s a bright future ahead for Italian varieties in California and we’ll see some major steps forward over the next decade.

Jim’s comment in the article was that Cali-Italians don’t go over in restaurants. I’d like to hear him expand on that. My thought is that it’s more about price than perceived quality. Do we even need Italian varietals in California? My reasoning is that dozens of top Bordeaux producers sell for hundreds of dollars a bottle, same as Burgundy. Other than a few outliers (Biondi Santi, Conterno, etc.) many of the top Brunello and Barolo are under $100 a bottle. If I can buy a 2010 Altesino Montesoli at $75 or 2010 Ciacci Pianorosso for $55…Not to mention the hundreds of $15-$30 wines of perfectly fine quality coming from Italy. do I need California producers to dig in on these varietals? Maybe the demand isn’t there?

I do not know Jim as well as Dr. B, few do. But I have been at maybe 40 tastings where he appeared. I can say without reservation that he is very shy, very soft spoken and one hell of a nice guy and generous as can be. He typically is overshawdowed by Doug, Frank and Bob.

Reasoning such as this makes little sense to me. If you want to drink Italian wines, buy Italian wines. If you want to drink California wines made from Italian varieties, buy those. They’re entirely different. You cannot compare one to the other just as you can’t compare Napa Cab to Bordeaux or Sta. Rita Hills Pinot Noir to Burgundy. It’s a line of thought that seems peculiarly prevalent among lovers of Italian wines - I see far less of this reasoning applied to grape varieties from other regions.

And it’s true that demand for California wines from Italian varieties isn’t what it could be, but I think that’s largely because they’ve had a (mostly-deserved) poor reputation from the past. California Pinot Noir was in a similar situation 30-35 years ago and look what’s happened there - I’m sure lots of people said “why bother” to making Pinot here back then (some still do ). Once the improved quality of Italian-variety wines becomes apparent and more widely-known - and more California vintners join in with making good ones - I believe the demand will increase just as it did for Pinot Noir, Rhône varieties, etc. (and the same will be true of wines from Spanish and Portuguese grape varieties).

Do we need Italian varieties grown in California when we could get them from Italy?? That is the question.

Where does this logic take us?? To native American grapes?? Indeed, do we need 900 kinds of toothpaste or 400 kinds of Mountain Dew? Do I need far too many bottles in my wine cellar??

Do we need wines from Canada, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Greece, Australia, New Zealand, India, China, Turkey…Probably not…but let’s face it: this wine thing is an addiction…growing the grapes, making the wine, watching it age, drinking it…do we need it??
All I know is that people just cannot stop themselves here.

In every other business people ask, do we need another ______ and analyze the situation before investing, but not with wine. Every time you turn around another software tycoon/movie star/famous athlete/industrialist is starting a winery.

I think Ken is right, in that as more Californians make progress with Italian varieties, the market will grow. Good Pinot Noir was a rarity in 1980 and ten years later it was all over the place. Back then there were articles every week about Pinot Noir being the HolY grail etc…Never seen that on Nebbiolo.

Exactly. And the examples of some attempts twenty years ago that weren’t stellar should not be taken as evidence that the US can’t produce anything worthy with Italian grapes. We do pretty well with a Croatian grape after all and I would think we do it better than they do it back home at this point, but if we give them time, they’ll do just as well.

Syrah is a perfect example of what we might expect. Is it all Hermitage? No. But there’s a huge diversity of styles all over the west coast and many of them are splendid examples of the grape, independent of any antecedent, just reflecting where they come from.

I had Harrington’s Nebbiolo last night. It’s a wonderful wine. Is it either Gaja or Giacosa? Of course not. But it’s also not as costly as either and I didn’t drink it assuming it should measure up to Barolo that’s been made by people whose families have been making it in the region for years.