St. Joseph Conclusions:
- St. Joseph is a unique appellation worthy of exploring.
- Great values.
- The big names are not necessarily producing the best wines.
2006 Francois Villard – Fruit d’ Avilleran
Medium to light golden color. The nose is clean but slightly muted – over time some floral and perfume characteristics emerge. Very flavorful and intense on the palate. Honey. Bees Wax. Some spice. Slightly oily texture and a very long pleasurable finish. (80% Marsanne, 20% Rousanne)
90
1989 Pierre Gonon – St. Joseph “Les Oliviers”
This is simply a classic, beautiful example of aged Syrah. Floral, menthol and rock dust on the nose. On the palate spice, licorice, tomato and dusty tannins. Surprisingly this continued to open throughout the evening. I elected not to decant this given its age – in retrospect I would have opened it at least 2-3 hours before drinking.
93
2007 Herve Souhaut – Syrah
Not sure if this came from St. Joseph but it is certainly in the vicinity. This is an amazing wine that I have had three times before and each time I open this wine it is a favorite of the night. It has a beautiful intoxicating bouquet of violets and other flowers. It is smooth and delicious to drink and disappears fast. Suzanne Camhi described it as GULPABLE - this is actually a perfect tasting note and all that needs to be said…except that the 2006 version of this was a mere $20!
94
2006 Domaine Faury
Fresh earth and rocks on the nose. Dark fruits, blackcurrants violets, minerality and with time smoked meats. For me a perfect example of Syrah and for others too much funk.
92+
2005 Ferne des Sept Lunes
WOW! The surprise of the night. I was unsure of this wine and almost did not add it to the lineup because it is new to me. Biodynamic. Perfume and smoke aromatics. Amazing zing that wakes up your palate. Minerality, spice and some clean funk. An extremely pure and enjoyable wine that was a big hit with a very diverse group of palates.
From the Domaine Select Website:
“La Ferme des Sept Lunes situated in Saint Joseph between Vienne and Valence was founded by the grandfather of the current proprietor Jean Delobre in 1984. From then, the estate has growing vines, apricot trees, and grains. Acre by acre, they converted to organic agriculture and biodynamic vineyard management. Jean had been selling his wine to local co-op until 2001, when he made his first vintage in a converted cowshed from a 5.5 hectare vineyard of Syrah, Marsanne and Roussanne planted on granite soil. The wine is vinified in open cylinder-shaped concrete tanks and aged in oak barrels.”
93
2006 Laurent Betton
Very dark color. Soaring violets on the nose. Bacon fat. Smoked meats. Juicy flavor. Great acidity Enormous structure. Bigger in style than the wines before it but balanced. Others did not like this as much as me – I think it just needs a few more years.
94
2005 Chave – Offerus
Decent aromatics. Juicy. Dark medium tannins. I have had this wine before and it showed much better. In this lineup and on this night it showed a bit too extracted and lacked complexity. I still think it is a good value.
89
2005 Chapoutier – Les Granites
Just as the Ferne des Sept Lunes was a surprise hit this was a surprise dud with the group. I liked it more than most but I do feel it needs 3-5 more years before it is approachable. Extremely big and dark wine. Muted nose, big sweet dark fruit, rocks and huge tannins that make it very difficult to drink young.
94 (for potential)
2005 Guigal – Vignes des Hospices
Very dark color similar to the Chapoutier. Smoother and more approachable. Enormous amounts of fruit that is uncharacteristic for St. Joseph. This was the biggest disappointment for me….I love the La Las and like the other higher-end Guigals recognizing their style but in this lineup this wine seemed too sweet and clumsy and overpriced. To be fair others liked this much more than me.
89
JUST LIKE A GOOD FIREWORKS SHOW WE FINISHED WITH A SPECTACULAR GRAND FINALE!
2006 Scholium Project Margits MB
Lenny Fox graciously brought a 2006 Scholium Project Margits MB. Dan Tisch who prefers lighter more elegant wines surprisingly liked this wine and said it was INTELLECTUAL! I agree with him because it is a difficult wine to get your head around it is a HUGE wine but it is also light and elegant. The color is extremely dark almost black but yet it does not seem overly extracted or manipulated. It has enormous amounts of minerality, violets and other complex characteristics. Even though it is a Cab I think of Barolo and maybe Priorat for reference points. This really needed several hours of decanting but it was still amazing direct from the bottle and disappeared faster than any other wine. My only conclusion having seen the vineyard is that this wine is a product of an incredibly unique vineyard site and Abe’s best winemaking skills might be his ability to discover and evaluate vineyards! Sadly this wine will never be made again…
98
From the Scholium Project Website:
We will…only make two unblended wines from this remarkable vineyard. I have named the wine for the woman who planted it. I must admit that I have just lost my trove of information on her and must go live before I can recover it. I must leave her last name anonymous and speak more vaguely about the vineyard than I would like to. The vineyard was planted in the 70s on a forested hillside in Kenwood. It is near the end of Nun’s Canyon Road, on the west facing side of Spring Mountain, at about 1000 feet above the floor of the Sonoma Valley below. What was most remarkable about its condition in 2006, is that there were still vines extant from the original planting–in spite of the fact that this isolated vineyard had never been irrigated for 30 years. I struck a bargain with Joe Votek, who farms the vineyard for the Hamilton family, Margit’s heirs, to harvest for me only the fruit from the old vines. It was a generous agreement on his part, not easy for him to arrange or his workers to accomplish. Even more generous on his part was his willingness to harvest the vineyard in 5 sections for me. I had decided on these sections by monitoring the growth of the vines for two years and tasting fruit nearly daily in advance of harvest. The reason for the sections is demonstrated in the maps at left. The vineyard itself is a trapezoid, somewhat more wide at the top than at the bottom. The top of the diagram is the top of the vineyard, at the crest of a slope that is so steep that the vineyard can be worked and harvested only by caterpillars; regular tractors suffer. The red lines indicate two crucial geographical figures that completely determine the nature of the fruit that the vineyard produces. There is a spring at the top right hand corner of the vineyard. It flows below ground most of the year (it is visible above ground during the rainy winter) and feeds the vines in a triangle that becomes wider as the spring flows downhill. This region of subterranean irrigation is indicated by the lower red line and the smaller triangle that it borders. The higher line indicates the contour line of a swale that affects most of the vineyard. As you walk one of the upper rows from left to right (in the map), you drop suddenly a little downhill partway down the row. This means that the most elevated and driest section of the vineyard is the upper left-hand corner, the section marked “A” in the lower map. A1 is the highest, driest, least vigorous section, A2 next . . . The B section is the part of the vineyard most affected by the spring; it was so much more vigorous than the A-section that the two sections did not look like they were part of the same vineyard. I fermented each of the A sections separately and divided the B into B1 and B2. I aged each fermentation in its own barrel (or barrels in the case of the B lots) and have still not blended any of them. We bottled the A1 by hand on May 30; later this summer, we will blend all of the remaining wine together and produce the 2006 Margit’s blend. We anticipate about 100 cases of wine. Harvest conditions were brutal in 2006. There were weeks of beautiful cool, calm weather in September and October– but too cool. I was afraid that the fruit would never ripen properly and completely. My hand was forced on October 25, already very late in the season. We suffered winds up to 60 miles per hour and day-time temperatures up to 85 degrees. In a day, all of the remaining leave were stripped off the vines. The forecast for the next day was less wind, but 100-degrees at noon. We began harvesting at dawn on the 26th and brought all of the fruit in with no leaves remaining on the vine, but no raisining of the fruit. The vineyard looked ravished. This is the only vintage that I will release from the old vines at Margit’s. I failed to make an excellent wine in 05 and so could not release it as a single-vineyard wine. It was blended with some syrah and became the Satrapies. After this brutal harvest, Joe felt obliged to replant the remaining old vines and complete the renovation of the vineyard that he had begun ten years before. I made about 12 cases of 07 A1 that I hope to release in the summer of 2009-- but it is from the best of the young vines. 2006 was the last vintage for the old vines planted by Margit herself.