A Chardonnay evening

[B.Eric]

A dinner was organized and inspired around Chardonnay. In particular, a question about a certain style, minerality and how that is conveyed in a wine, and to discuss white wine winemaking. It was a nice gathering of wine savvy individuals, which included another talented winemaker. It was amazing to talk about our different experiences, natural yeast versus commercial strains and thoughts on that and impact on quality and translation of vineyard character to a wine. I didn’t arrange the wines or vintages, but did contributed a stunning example of a beautifully aged chardonnay-the 2014 Ridge Estate Chardonnay (Featured in Decanter Magazine in 2016 as one of the top chardonnays of CA.)

Here’s what we tasted:

2023 Ridge Estate Chardonnay, 14.1% ABV
Translucent color, pale sun-bleached straw. Quince, pear, yuzu citrus, lime peel, delicate white flower, and a subtle hint of ocean fog salinity. It enters the mouth with a delicate mix of citrus, yellow plum, braised pear, and medium level of acidity. Overall, the wine has an elegance, straight-forwardness of flavor and medium-body texture. It’s sleek, concise, distinct in showcasing mountain fruit and cool-climate character from a particularly cold and late growing season. I tasted this wine over the evening, having it with and without food, and it didn’t change or open up further. I think bottle age will benefit this wine.

2021 Ridge Monte Bello Chardonnay, 13.9% ABV
Beautiful pale gold color; This wine had outrageous aroma, it was very distinct Monte Bello, showing toasted brioche, baked dessert-apple crisp sweetness, and gorgeous sweet oak intermixed with the fruit and minerality. The reductive nose was a bit strong at first, but with swirling, dissipated and became integrated. It’s almost like a previous vintage, I think 2004, where decanting was beneficial in helping open up the aromas and blow off a bit of reduction. This 2021 Chard MB shows full body, oily texture, great mineral display, and complexity from entry to finish. However, the acidity felt light. Usually, the acidity is a prominent feature of Monte Bello Chardonnay and gives the wine a refreshing quality. I’m pretty good at sensing acid and predicting pH. My acidity receptors were not being triggered by this wine.

2021 Dragonette Black Label, 14.2% ABV
Pale sunbleached straw, slight gold color; This wine had intense aromas of pear, apricot, pineapple, and citrus blossom, attractive oak, and incredible minerality. It had such wonderful texture in the mouth, with matching fruits, great intensity, and here my acid receptors were firing…this wine had lively acidity which heightened the sensation of fruit and minerality into a long finish. This wine, just got better and better through the evening, and paired well with food. It was my favorite wine of the evening-of the three young wines.

2014 Ridge Estate Chardonnay, 14.3% ABV
Golden yellow color; Baked apricot cobbler dessert nose, ginger root, caramelized apples, and dried fig. On entry, it showed similar beautifully developed flavors, burnt butter, compote, and firm acidity that helped cut the heaviness of the baked dessert-like flavors. It was extremely long in the finish and nothing light or simple about this wine. It was a serious chardonnay. Something I’d like to taste again in another 5-10 years. I have more in my cellar.

I think we could only surmise that minerality is a taste component like umami that is hard to define or characterize. Analytically, I’m not sure there’s a way to quantify what that flavor is comprised of. I’ve attempted it with ion chromatography and measuring calcium, magnesium, potassium as consituents. It’s just not well understood how a subsoil, mineral enriched water, and how the vines’ roots can interact and absorb these minerals. Can the dirt from farming, being deposited onto the clusters, influence minerality. The other question is how come natural yeast fermentations lead to greater vineyard character and minerality display than the same juice fermented with commercial yeast. I did numerous side-by-side experiments like this and it was always clear that the natural yeast wines were far more distinct, complex, and contained higher amounts of glycerol (contributing to mouthfeel.)

It was a great evening and I truly enjoyed all scientific discussions we had about chardonnay winemaking.

EB

[Gary_Schulte]

Sounds like terrific evening with chardonnay. What was the food that you were paired with the chardonnays. I have always been interested in the Dragonette wines but have yet to get out there and try them. You point to one of the beauties of wine appreciation and that it is subject to individual taste preferences and the accompaniment of friends, family, and food. Thank you for sharing ! Cheers, Gary

[Jim_Stewart]

Nice notes.

[B.Eric]

@Gary_Schulte

What was the food that you were paired with the chardonnays

Hi Gary, we didn’t organize a fixed menu, everyone got to choose their own entrees. For apps, we had burrata cheese, caviar on toast, and baked mushrooms. Entrees ranged from steam clams and linguine, to pan seared scallops, and I had a roasted chicken breast on polenta. We sat next to the open kitchen which made it somewhat challenging to assess the wines since the wafting aromas of the dishes being prepared were strong at times.
There are so many great chardonnays made in the world, outside of burgundy. I’ve never experienced Dragonette prior to this dinner. We would occasionally do comparative tastings at Ridge, to take our current release and select 10-12 highly acclaimed chardonnays and blind taste. I recall, one of those tastings we did that included a $450 bottle of Marcassin (which I now believe has appreciated to $650) and in our blind tasting wasn’t in the top five wines. Hype and price didn’t necessarily equate to a heightened tasting experience, at least for what we all were tasting for. Perhaps, we had a skewed sense of taste towards our own wine and similar styles made in burgundy. That’s always the danger of a blind tasting, knowing your wine is in the mix, and you want your wine coming out on top of scoring. Casually tasting, with no prior knowledge, is a wholly different experience-like tasting Dragonette. It was a wine that really stood out with an awesome display of fruit, minerality, and vibrancy. It also stood up to the wafting aromas of the kitchen and the cuisine we were enjoying. For me, that’s the ultimate experience with wine.
It reminds me of a time I was enjoying dinner in Spain with friends (who were all smoking cigarettes heavily inside the restaurant) and it was late at night as we just sat down to start our dinner together. One of my Spanish winemaker’s friend had just come from doing an internship (“stage” as its called) at the famous DRC in burgundy. He pulled out a small bottle of DRC Montrachet from a barrel sample he had taken when he left. We all got a small aliquot in our glasses and it was one of the most incredible aromas I’ve ever smelled in a chardonnay. I can only imagine if I wasn’t in a smoke-filled room, just how much more glorious it would have been. The wine was utterly sensational and commanded your senses. It was an inspiring moment to come back to Ridge and really elevate our white winemaking. That was spring of 2005, I came back and we hit a home run with that year’s chardonnay, the 2005 Santa Cruz Mountains Chardonnay (as we called it then.) It was a moment when the Wine Spectator said a kind word about Ridge chardonnay and awarded it 95 points and #2 on the top 100. Not that it was important to have the score, we already knew this was a sensational wine; Our customers also knew, too, loading up their cars with cases. Then the score came, it was suddenly a feeding frenzy for the few cases remaining. I think I’ve got a few bottles of this left and probably should open it now that the wine is coming up to 20 years old.
All this to say, white winemaking is an art in itself. It’s equal parts science, alchemy, and perfumery. I know the vineyard’s terroir is important, that sets up the wine with the right acidity, flavor precursors, and mineral content. How it converts to wine, via yeast during primary fermentation, synthesizes complex aromas and textural compounds of esthers, higher alcohols, and essential oils. Malolactic then contributes another interesting set of aromas and tempers the acidity. Once finished fermenting, then it comes down to barrel stir frequency to fluff up the lees and incorporate the fatty acids, lipids, mannoproteins from the dead yeast, all contributing to the aromas and texture of the wine. Overstir-the wine become developed, flabby, and heavy. Understir-then it becomes tighter, less evolved, and highly reductive (matchstick/burnt rubber.) The balance is to taste barrel first, decide to stir or not. I would spend a great deal of time in the cellar at Ridge doing that work, judging which barrels to stir or not-guiding the individual barrels along.
The amazing thing with natural fermentation, thought the barrels of a single vineyard lot was all the same juice at the start, they deviated in flavor and character during the fermentations. Each barrel was its own micro-environment, the mix of natural yeast strains of one barrel could be different than the barrel next to it. This is where the trio of science, alchemy, and perfumery came into play during the assemblage process. I would analyze the wines for their primary and secondary chemistry, taste many different combinations of lots/barrels within lots, and see what synergy could be found-where aroma and texture were elevated by the unique combinations.
This approach is still important to me today as I barrel ferment the white wines under my own brand. The key is to ferment cold, delay the wines reaching dryness and quickly starting malolactic. It’s important to stress the yeast, make them work hard under cold conditions. This allows the yeast to create greater essential oil content, which can then be brought into the wine later on through lees stirring. Delayed malolactic also helps the wine maintain a freshness as the carbonation that is released helps protect the wine from oxidation. This allows barrel stirring so that oxygen is prevented from entering the wine.
Once both fermentations are finished and no further carbonation is present, the lees forms a reductive layer at the bottom of the barrel. This sequesters oxygen that enters through the barrel or during additional lees stirring. The lees helps maintain a freshness in the wine. Ahead of assemblage and bottling, the wine is allowed to fully settle, then be clean racked off the lees. Generally, this is done around periods of the moon being perigee and underfoot (under the horizon) so as to yield a stronger gravitational pull downwards to keep the lees fully settled for the cleanest decanting possible.
This would allow for unfiltered bottlings or occasionally a very coarse porosity filtration to remove haze. I did not like using fining products such as isinglass and bentonite. These are common products used to clarify wine prior to tight submicron filtration. The next thing I would check is for stability within the acidity, would the wine throw bitartrate crystals in bottle if subjected to very low temperatures (for people who like to overly chill their whites.) Usually, we had no issue of instability due to the low potassium concentration in the chardonnay. However, I would rack the wines to a tank that could be chilled to 28F for a week, then seed with cream of tartar to knock out any unstable bitartrate crystals. The alternative is to use a nasty product that disrupts the formation of bitartrate crystals. This stuff adds an awful flavor, changes the mouthfeel, hollows out the mid-palate, shortens the finish on the wine.
I recently was blind tasted on such treatment to my wines seeing if it was a viable option to cold-stabilize. We blind tasted the control (untreated) against the treated. It was absolutely shocking the difference. They control vs treated didn’t taste anything alike. So we are not using that product to artificially cold stabilize our 2024 white wines. Instead, I’ll chill them down, seed with cream of tartar and get stability in the most gentle way. Historically, wines were cold stabilized by just being in very cold cellars and enduring two winters of exposure to very low natural temperature, the unstable acids would drop out inside the barrels. If they didn’t, then it would happen in bottle and it wasn’t a big deal. For some reason the US market freaks out over crystals inside white wine bottles (fearing its shards of glass.) For reds, it happens and its fine, you can’t even see the crystals in a red wine bottle until you get the last pour then you get tiny chucks of ruby wine crystals. They might be annoying, but they’re not going to hurt your body. It’s just potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar.)

Off to ZAP in SF to pour Zin. Everyone enjoy your weekend. EB

[Chris_Seiber]