TN: '00 Beckmen Grenache HdR Cuvee

This baby is 100% banging on all cylinders-no sign of age, deep purple, F-You-Sive nose, hate to use the phrase, but this is one of those wines you can just sit and smell for quite a while. But it tastes damned delicious too. There’s still a backbone to this wine but it’s soft and does the tightwire between lush and soft and unami. It doesn’t smell so much of grenache as very nicely integrated oak and stone fruit-much like an well aged top-level Rhone.
So to adopt my best TomHillism, at my first Hospice du Rhone there was tasting and silent auction in between the morning and afternoon seminars and my two favorite wines that day were a Jaffurs Syrah and this wine. I won the silent auction on one case of this. It amazes me that it has held up so nicely which is basically what prompts me to post about it. I have always liked Beckmen the wines and Steve the man but the later grenaches tended toward the more is more camp. I have come to learn that buying blockbuster grenaches that are huge and clumsy in their youth leads nowhere. This was graceful and balanced out of the gate and has remained so ever since.
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Great note - and I guess my first question . . . why are you surprised it aged as beautifully as it did? What would make you believe it would not? Just curious.

I would agree that the Beckmen ‘house style’ has changed quite a bit and I’m not sure current releases would age as ‘gracefully’ as this one did.

Cheers.

Larry-other than Alban which as TomHill says does not age like Dick Clark before he died, virtually every other grenache based wine I have let sit-French, American, Aussie, or otherwise, has shown age within seven years or so. At the risk of insulting your mathematical acumen, this one went ten years beyond that. I have a few Kangarilla, Eclipse(s), and Mon Aieuls in need of opening but I have been convinced that I get more joy out of seeing them in my cellar and laughing at myself (sorta like looking at photos of yourself from high school) than I would ever derive out of putting them in my mouth.

Did Joey Tensley make this wine? Pretty sure it was not Steve Clifton.

That was a mouth wateringly good note.

Steve Beckmen, not Steve Clifton . . .

Cheers!

Yes, Joey Tensley was making the wine from '98 through '01 or so.

I am surprised that the wine survived so long:

A) I never had ~2000 Beckman reds; although the early 2000’s Syrah wines from the winery often placed well in Wine & Spirits magazine’s “Best Syrahs of the Year”.

B) It is Grenache, an oxidative red variety.

According to Steve Beckmen or Joey or both?

He was the assistant winemaker at that time - not sure he was ‘responsible’ for those wines . . .

Clifton made wine @ Beckmen at one time, according to Clifton.

I have a few Kangarilla, Eclipse(s), and Mon Aieuls in need of opening but I have been convinced that I get more joy out of seeing them in my cellar and laughing at myself (sorta like looking at photos of yourself from high school) than I would ever derive out of putting them in my mouth.

LOL. Okay, I have couple of Clarendon Hills Grenache wines in the cellar. No Mon Aieul CdPs (and not just because I can’t spell it without cheating).

-Al

You’re in the area, Larry, how 'bout picking up the phone and asking him? You could preface it with a description of this note. I recall that Joey was winemaker from the first released vintage ('98) and by '99 Mikael Sigouin was assistant and cellar monkey while Steve was learning to make wine. I am not sure that Steve has ever been head-winemaker though. Where’s Tom Hill? It was Tom that first brought Beckmen to my attention by way of one of his famous twenty-wine tasting notes of syrah back in the WCWN days. I’ve visited at Beckmen two or three times but never asked about the winemaker history or I have forgotten all if I did.

Since my name is being bandied about here, Mitch…I be here. Just a bit of name-dropping to up the hits on your post?? [snort.gif]
And…for the record…I have never said that about aging Grenache. I’ve lots of very clever sayings/turn of phrase to my credit…but that is not one of them.

I find Calif Grenache to be a bit hit or miss in its ability to age. I would not have guessed that this Beckman had held up so well as Steve’s (won’t get into
who made this wine debate) lush/ripe/juicy style I would not expected to do this well.

Tom

Dearest Tom;
Yes, I named you three times to keep the thread going as much as possible. Nothing hurts me more than putting up a rare tasting note and watching it sink rapidly to page 3 with nary a response. Those kinds of rebukes by my peers have put me in month-long crevasses of bleak despair that only massive quantities of Prozac, meditation, and psychiatric counseling can lift me from.
And with equal sarcasm intended, I did not accuse you of belittling the aging ability of grenache in general, but instead referred to your recent one-man waged war and written campaign to correct the mistaken image of Alban wines as age-worthy seminal examples of heroic winemaking and in particular, I cited and agreed with you that Alban grenaches evolve at the same pace as our national campaign finance reform and that Alban grenache is an outlier. And I also agree that for whatever reason, the winemaking team at any particular time at Beckmen is not something that has been made public. For quite a few years I belonged to the Beckmen wine club and received regular shipments of both the reserve level wines and the regular bottlings. The regular bottlings were restrained and nicely balanced while the more expensive bottlings were flamboyant, to put it mildly. With the exception of another bottle or three of the wine that started this humongously vital and immensely popular thread, I have drunk those up a long time ago.

Just polished off an 04 Beckmen Grenache Purisma a few nights ago. Slightly port like at first and I figured it would go down hill fast. Instead it continued to open up and turned into a very enjoyable wine.

Last week we had a bottle of 01 Ridge Grenache that was fantastic - but that one had some Zin and Petite Sirah in it. (I always thought it was Syrah but the labelled listed it with the i.)

I think that, as Tom said, the way that Grenaches were made in the past here in CA (and I mean perhaps pre-2007 or so), they may not age that beautifully. There certainly will be exceptions - but also remember that very few varietal grenaches used to be produced. If CdP was what people were trying to ‘replicate’, then you would see blends like Cigare Volant and not straight grenaches.

A lot has changed, and my guess is that you will find many more over the past decade that may certainly stand the test of time. But just like with other rhone varieties - like Syrah - site and winemaker ‘intent’ will certainly be a good factor in determining whether the wines may or may not have the stuffing to age. It may remain a field full of ‘landmines’ out there.

Now that winemakers are working with different clones of grenache that provide smaller berries/clusters, now that grenache is planted in areas where acid levels are still retained fairly well, even at higher brix levels, and now that winemakers understand the oxidative issues of grenache, I think you may see more age-worthy ones out there.

Cheers.

And just an FYI - Steve Beckmen made that way (confirmed yesterday by Steve while at the day of remembrance for Seth Kunin, who left this world way too early . . .)

Cheers.