I guess that is the problem here with the discussion. You can’t bring yourself to say that the 2006 CA vintage was overall poor. You can only say that it was not as high in quality as others. You have 06s on the shelf that you want to sell and you don’t like the WSJ making it more difficult, I understand.
I have to applaud Harvey Steinam in a recent WS blog. He came right out and said that the most of the 07 pinot vintage was poor. There were exceptions, and he named a few, but overall the wines were lean at best. Having tasted far too many of this vintage pinots, I agree with him. But do you know, every winemaker I talked with while in Oregon told me they made stellar pinots in 07, just stellar, and it was the all other winemakers that made those poor wines. OH, and the 06s and 08s are just more stellar than the 07s. They have 07s they want to sell. This all goes with the “vintage of the century numbness” thread. If one can find just 5 wines out of thousands , in any given category, no generalizations about that category are allowed.
2006 in CA was incredibly hot, even thru coastal Sonoma and Marin Cos. i know folks who live without AC there and they camped outdoors it was so warm even @ night.
not ideal Chard conditions for sure. may be why i have seen 06 The Judge under $100 recently.
What an utter load of crap. Everyone whose palate I respect (and that does NOT include Harvey, who must have kimchee for breakfast when he tastes) prefers the 2007 Willamette Valley pinots to the 2006s. Everyone . . . including Rich Trimpi, Jason Hagen, Vincent Fritzsche and Phil Franks along with every winemaker I know, and I know a bunch. And none of them would EVER accuse another winemaker of making poor wines while extolling the virtues of their own. They might have stylistic differences as do you and I, but they don’t badmouth each other and most of them are friendly, if not friends.
EDIT: Newsflash! There are still a bunch of 2007 wines that have yet to be released. So much for pressure to sell them.
We’re off thread now, but there you have it. According to Bob Wood, 2007 was another stellar year for Oregon pinot.
Oh, and Bob, I can add to your newsflash, there are still quite a few 06s not yet released from several producers you don’t really like. They’ll be released here in the next couple of months. Kind of a funny situation really. According to a couple of posts I’ve seen there is already 08 pinots on the street (although I haven’t personally seen any) and the late release 06s aren’t out yet.
Just for comparison , what is your feelings on the new winery up Ribbon Ridge Road that sits behind Beaux Freres? Went there but can’t remeber their name. Have you tried their wines yet?
The timing of this article is interesting. I think 10 years ago I would have completely agreed with it. But today, I feel there are more enjoyable unoaked chards and moderately oaked chards than any time in my wine drinking life (which is only 10-12 years).
Chehalem Inox
Four Vines
Mer Soleil
Patz and Hall makes some very moderately oaked chards - that are delicious.
I don’t feel that the Rochioli chards are overdone on oak - though I have only had the River Block.
Not stellar, but it’s better than 2003 and 2006 for certain, and not according to me, but to everyone I can think of except you and Harvey. The wines are very pretty and lithe as opposed to the 2006s which are endomorphs. Lisa Kudrow and Rosanne, if you will.
Trisaetum . . . 100% new oak, made by Josh Bergstrom, at least in 2005 and 2006. Over done, over oaked, overpriced. Another building that’s out of place in the valley, containing a gallery of the owner’s paintings. WTF? When did Donald Hess move to Oregon?
Bringing us back to chardonnay, I haven’t read the entire thread in detail, but it seems to me these authors used the words “American chardonnay”, not “California chardonnay”. That’s way too broad. Not only are there some excellent chardonnays being made in California (the Merryvale Hyde is one) using burgundian methods, there are excellent ones being made in Oregon, Domaine Serene among them - notably the Cote Sud.
Again, missing the point of the column. The column is not about whether it is possible to “select an appropriate group of wines” that represent the “top echelon” of California chardonnay. The column is about whether, if you randomly walked into a wine store and picked a $40-70 chardonnay off the shelf, would you or would you not be likely to walk out with a good value. The only way to assess that is to broadly sample what’s available on wine store shelves, with perhaps a little bit of focus on names consumers might recognize and gravitate toward. That is exactly what the columnists did.
You can complain that this sort of column is useless to you – and maybe it is – but it would be silly to dispute that there is an audience to which it is useful. In any event, there is no point in judging the column against a standard that simply is not what the columnists set out to achieve.
Yes, but the wines you are talking about are not the wines they reviewed. Everything except the Rochioli retails for $30 or under and the Rochioli is nearer to $100 than $70.
Fair point. I said California because that seemed to be most of what they had reviewed. (And also is what you would expect to find if you pulled a bunch of $50 U.S. chardonnay off retailer’s shelves – there are certainly a few Oregon and Washington wines available in the right range, but it would be a special effort to find them: they are not all over the place.)
I still find some Rochioli River Block on Wine Searcher for $70 right now, but I’ll grant you that it is at the high end. Patz and Hall however, is right in that price range (typically $40 to $45 at my local Costco). The Mer Soleil averages $39 on Wine Searcher for the 2005 and $36 for the 2006 - pretty darn close.
I still think the thought process of the article is very outdated. Chardonnay styles vary more then ever, IMO.
The only thing you can be sure of when making an absolute statement is that you will find more than your share of exceptions.There is plenty of dreck in all wine styles, and I won’t be the first one to go out of my way to defend Cali Chards, but to say one style of wine is so uniform from one producer to the next and cover an entire industry with the same blanket is complete bullshit. If the consumer lives in an isolated or wine poor area, then I can understand a lack of diversity due to a lack of choice. But if you are someplace that does have a choice, if you are too lazy to ASK FOR HELP or READ A LABEL, you deserve to pick nothing but lemons at random. How about listing some of the other wines on the shelf that they DIDN’T pick? How many wines had labels that said things like ‘neutral oak’ or ‘cool climate’ that they neglected to purchase? How about giving readers some ADVICE on how to AVOID these types of wines if they aren’t your cup of tea, instead of saying ‘all these wines are this way, so don’t bother’?
Didn’t want to offend you. I just read back through the posts, and it seemed to me that the ITBers were getting far more worked up, on average( a generalization), over the article than wine consumers. I shouldn’t have picked on you directly.
If the WSJ had listed 24 chards they didn’t like that was sampled, I don’t think that would have satisfied any of the critics. Then they would have wanted to know why those wines where chosen in the first place. Why weren’t wines A-Z chosen instead.
IMO, the writers biggest fault was trying to put in a short article what would be difficult to do in a long book. Especially, when reviewed by the crowd on this forum!
If you go into Lowes or Home Depot and purchase a tool in the $40 to $70 price range, then do you think there ought to be a reasonable chance that the tool will actually work as advertised?
Or do you think that you ought to have to get on the internet and spend a day researching the tool and reading reviews of the tool and searching for the lowest prices for the tool [including S&H charges], so that you can be absolutely certain that you won’t be wasting your money?
If only 7 out of 50 of the wrenches/drills/saw blades/levels/whatever that I encountered actually worked as advertised, then I’d be kinda pissed off too.
And, as a journalist, who is writing an article on shitty tools in the $40-70 range, you ought to include examples of what was shitty, otherwise you are telling the consumer to avoid all $40-$70 tools, right? Except for the 7 that you liked.
Parker used to play that game, but he ended up with so many people out for his blood that he finally had to say, “[u]No Más[/u]”, and introduce the 85-point threshold.
Bottom line, though: If the average price of these wines was about $55, then John & Dottie [or at least their employers at the WSJ] spent about 50 X $55 = $2750, and found only seven wines that they enjoyed, so the numbers kinda speak for themselves.
Which is to say: If your taste in wine is similar to John-n-Dottie’s, and if you walk into an average package store in the Northeast USA, and if you purchase a random California chardonnay in the $40 - $70 price range, then there’s only about a 7 / 50 = 14% chance that you will enjoy the wine.
I absolutely would (and do) research things like power tools before I buy them. Spent several days researching a circular saw before buying one for when I remodeled my basement, perfectly happy with what I got because of it. I’m too poor to throw good money around after bad products.
Also, when it comes to wine, its all a matter of taste. There are many many peeople out there that like this style of wine. That’s how it became so popular. There may very well have been some very good, highly rated wines in that group. Where I get bothered is that there wasn’t any comment about how to help people find the Californian wines that don’t fall into this broad category. And the easiest way to do that is to ASK SOMEONE .If the store you’re in doesn’t have anyone that is educated enough in wines to help steer you in the right direction, GO SOMEWHERE ELSE THAT DOES. If it is important enough to you to find a Cali Chard that isn’t like all the others it should be easy enough in most places to find something that suits you.
Which means Cali/New World styled Chardonnay is not their cup of tea. Which is absolutely A-OK by me; it’s not my favorite either. There comes a time when you can say a certain type of wine is just not to your personal tastes. But as a critic if you can’t be objective and have to paint an entire region with one negative brush stroke, you are doing your reputation a disservice. Look at all the wines Roberto champions that get zero positive publicicy by Big Bob. Was Parker ‘wrong’ to say those wines are not to his tastes? No, because that is an honest evaluation of how the wines taste to him. Is Roberto ‘wrong’ for stocking them? No, because those wines fit his palate, and he can find customers that agreee with him. But there are plenty of good wines out there that do not fit to Parker’s palate, or roberto’s, or mine, and there are plenty of wines that don’t fit to John-N-Dottie’s palate. And it does their reputation a great disservice to make a statement that is patently false.
