Remarkable interview with Master Sommelier Cristophe Tassan from the relatively new Moon Hollow Winery on the top of Moon Mountain in Sonoma county. He is also Beverage Director at the restaurant “The Battery” in SF (same owners as the winery).
I have to admire this guy’s Chutzpah. He gets the smoke taint discussion going at around 52:30 with this gem, tasting and talking about the 2017 Moon Hollow Grenache ($80/bottle, BTW):
They are a fantastic wine because they will tell you a story. And they will tell you the smoke taint on some of the vineyards in '17 will tell you the story of the vintage, and somehow, in a weird way to think, that some of the smoke flavors [some unintelligible speaking]…I believe are really gonna integrate and merge with the Grenache style. Grenache has the style of smokiness of dark tea…the dark smoke tea which is a marker for Grenache…The more there is a vintage signature on the wine, the more the notion of terroir and unicity of the place is popping out. If you have the same wine every year, something is wrong.
Later,
This Grenache, the '17, has been harvested two weeks after, with all of the fog, all of the smoke, all of the thing hanging around, and it has smoke taint. Is this detestable, is this mean, I don’t think so. First, it’s not hurting you or anything on your body…but I think its going to be a signature of that vintage.
To be fair, the 2017 Grenache is not listed for sale on their website (the 2018 is) and he does mention that some wines that “don’t make the cut” will be served by the glass at The Battery.
He later doubles down on the hard sell, when discussing consumer response to these smoke tainted 2017 wines, and astonishingly declares:
If you decide to join the wine club, if you do 16/600 and you’re part of the wine club [a reference to the podcast host’s winery], you’re not part of a wine club, you’re a partner of the production. You’re a partner of the farming. You maintain your support of the business, and that’s the point.
Uh, no. If I don’t get to share in the profits, I’m not going to share in the pitfalls of the business.
This is worth a listen, if only to be in awe of this guy’s audacity.
Yeah, that’s pretty interesting so say the least (over-the-top). Barbecue wine! “There will be a way to enjoy the wine”. (Same with many natural wine eccentricities, no? Trying not to say “faults.”) As a wine maker dealing with smoke issues for the first time in the Willamette Valley I kind of get it. But hopefully the wine they were tasting was actually pretty good (as they all agreed, but $80 worth?). And we feel that many of our 2020 WV wines will be great. I feel great that my Pinot seem to be fine because I’ve tasted some harsh ones… that said, I haven’t tasted enough to get a sense of percentages.
(I stopped listening to this podcast last year due to poor sound engineering and the ramblings. Too bad because these guys are talented and have lots of knowledge. It does always give me interesting news from Sonoma.)
Most wine clubs are indeed like a farming CSA: pre-ordering and getting a share of the farmer’s harvest, no matter the year. But in reality, it’s hard to retain club members when quality or interest drops. I decided to have a simpler rewards program-based club. No annual or other obligations, just use your discounts when you want. The key is that it’s up to the client to decide what and when to order. I think that’s a better model. It’s what I always wanted as a consumer!
Think 2020 will be the worse smoke taint year given how early and long those fires burnt. May have to do some tasting before buying with the 20’ vintage.
“This is almost motivating me to focus harder on getting the 2020 stuff we have out into the world somehow. I mean — cuz it is – this is our livelihood, and we can’t survive on skipping vintages and crop insurance. That’s not a sustainable way of life for any of us.”
How 'bout some euphemisms from the Oregon Wine Board?
Be cautious about the words you choose.
Please avoid using phrases with negative connotations like “smoke taint” or “ashtray.” A good alternative is “localized smoke impact.”
Barbeque wine isn’t $80 per. $10/zinfandel out of plastic crushy cups is what folks around here throw back when standing around smoky grills. In that case a little smoke taint isn’t going to hurt anyone, and note the price adjustment.
Not sure why a surprise. I pointed out all the marketing BS right after the '20 crush, even some of same people who were screaming about smoke taint and “no fruit for me this year”, all of a sudden picking same quantities as the year before with, Oh, miracle!, no smoke taint in sight (or palate, rather). Montelena made the call on no reds in ‘20 due to heavy smoke taint, any reason why no one drew a, say, 2 mile radius on a map to see which wineries decided to pick? Plenty of “language manipulation” took place right after, or even during, and plenty to be had going forward. As in the OP missive. Follow up with each and every winery and/or vineyard that decided not to pick last year, draw a radius, its not that difficult to see the real map and "language professors’" moving lips.
Someone served a smoke-tainted wine (2008?) to my brown-bag tasting group a few years back that was sold under a new second label the winery created. I considered it tainted in a bad way, but it wasn’t undrinkable and some people liked it. To each his own.
It was not $80 a bottle, though. More like $20-25, as I recall.
yup. i don’t think producers are going to be willing to take near total losses selling the juice to bulk CA labeled stuff, so they’ll try new stealthy ways to pick off clueless consumers.
Can you explain to me why a winery that decided not to pick is the point you draw a radius from?
Every winery is staffed by people of varying degrees of being risk averse. With smoke taint it’s apparent, in Oregon, that there were a lot of decisions made without any real knowledge of the severity. Lab results were backed up, as you know, and people had to choose basically blind. And at least one winery chose so quickly that it was hard to conceive that they did so based upon the conditions at the time.
I understand Montelena has both history and reputation, so I get that choice. But I don’t know that I would just pick any random winery that opted out and give them the same benefit.
It’s pretty interesting how this winery is trying to ‘spin this’ - and probably not in a way that will make their wine club happy. Yes, they are being ‘transparent’ in some ways, but they are SELLING HARD and that, to me, is problematic.
I truly hope that the smoke taint issues many wineries were worried about are somehow minimized compared to their predictions. And I remain thankful that the vintage here in SBC will not have an asterisk next to in any way (and I just spoke to one vineyard owner who sold quite a bit of Sta Rita Hills PN to wineries up north who are coming back for more this year).
It is interesting advice. As someone living here and producing wines, impacts are expremely varied. We finally got some lab results, and things range considerably, from unaffected to considerable impact.
Wines are in progress, so I am still not going to make predictions.
But individual wineries do not exist in a vaccuum and it is very important that wineries, in Oregon, choose their words well right now. This is a remarkably collegial place, and the division of ranks between those who picked and those who did not is a big divide, with wineries on either side having considerable investment in the choices they made.
Avoiding grand pronouncements, and sticking to what we actually know, versus what we think, is going to be very important.
It’s taken me 20 years to build the my wineries reputation, I am not tossing it out over one vintage. But I am also waiting to see results before I choose my words.
I agree with Greg calling out the OWB over spin control so early on. Being disingenuous is a worse fault than the smoke. And if it tastes like ashtray, it tastes like ashtray. But there was a LOT of adrenaline running in the bloodstreams up here last fall(mine included) and calming everyone in the industry down was also necessary. People were hyperanalyzing wines with no lab results and making huge decisions blindfolded. The pain and angst here was intense and very real, similar to CA(although we are drop in the bucket production-wise). Things are more normalized now, and there is a range of realities regarding smoke, so “localized smoke impacts” is a smart choice.
I have two blocks in the same vineyard with drastically different numbers, where my best guess is that the aspect of one block faced away from the oncoming smoke and suffered little exposure while the other faced roughly into the smoke and paid the price. So very, very localized.
I’m with you on this Larry. If the Club members are part of the winery and should step up regardless of quality, it just seems like the prices for the wines should be pretty modest.
I’m also really happy to hear that you have no issues with smoke at all! I have been meaning to try some of your wines for awhile and David Bueker and Tom Hill’s recent notes reminded me to make that happen.
The only thing that would make that hard sell better would be a video of guys crushing grapes with cigarettes dangling from their mouths, saying this is your next wine!
Question: Does smoke taint happen quickly, or is it from prolonged exposure? I ask this, because I have done controlled burns on very large tracts of land, and after the initial burn, there are places that seem to smolder for days, and light smoke never stops wafting.