TN: 2010 Clos Saron Home Vineyard Pinot Noir

WINE TALK
1

Ive had a rough day so I wanted to open something nice for some comfort and this did the trick.

2010 Clos Saron Home Vineyard Pinot Noir - This is just a beautiful, holistic wine with tons of soul. It has beautiful aromatics of flint, red flowers, sweet herbs and other things I don’t have a name for. It has a real zen mouthfeel with lightweight yet powerful tangy flavors. Its graceful, alive and vibrant. Just a wonderful wine. I’m not sure if I will ever know if Gideon’s wines age well as I just can’t keep my hands off them.

2

This is one of my favorite Clos Sarons yet, up there with the '07. Renaissance has one of the best track records for aging in the state so I’m not worried much about these. But I do have a '99 that I’ve been dying to crack open. You know, for science.

3

The 07 and 10 tasted at the last open house were great. I had a slight preference for the 10.

The 2012 blocks from barrel were stupendous.

4

Fabulous wines, but big VA problems with lots of bottle variation. The best examples are amazing, but the flawed ones are . . . well, flawed.

5

Ive only been buying since the 2009 vintage but having tasted through the whole range Ive never encountered VA or actually any flaw. But then again the wines travel straight from his cellar directly to my 50 degree wine fridge about 70 minutes away and never move until I open one to drink. With the wines made it this natural manner Im sure I’ll run into a bad bottle eventually but it hasn’t happened yet.

6

I Still have not tried these wines.
Need to fix that.
Sounds great, Berry.

7

I think the trip cross-country may not treat these wines well. I had a couple of jaw droppingly good bottles in SF, then had mixed luck with bottles bought in NY, some with serious VA issues; reports from fellow NYC berserkers have indicated the same issues with bottles purchased (or tasted) here in NY.

I’m still a buyer because I can’t resist the allure of the good bottles. Good Clos Saron is real, real good.

8

I wanted to like their wines but went 2-for-2 on Bretty bottles of 09 Home Pinot. I’m fairly Brett-tolerant but in the end these were over my limit. They clearly would have been very fine wines otherwise. My bottles came direct from the winery to N. California.

9

I’ve had dozens of bottles over the years, all shipped cross-country by ground. I’ve had very few flawed bottles. The handful of flawed bottles I did have were all from one particular bottling of 375mls, suggesting some issue with that bottling run and not the wine itself. The rest have been in pristine shape, without any bottle variation.

10

Love the '10’s. Won’t get to try an old one 'cause I’m drinking them too fast. Not an off bottle yet.

11

My take is similar to David’s, great wines but lots of bottle variation. I went to a tasting Gideon did at a store in NYC, where I presume the bottles came directly from either Gideon or the distributor, and of the six wines he poured, two were definitely flawed (one with VA, another with reduction). The rest were excellent. The variation makes me feel skittish about buying, since the wines are not cheap – worth the money when right, but there’s added risk there.

12

Thank you all for posting both praise and concerns.

My goal as a producer is to make wines which express their place of origin with as close to uncompromising truth and clarity as possible. This goal drives every choice made along the path of growing the grapes, harvesting, and making the wines. This is why we do not inoculate, nor fine, nor filter, nor use new oak, nor adjust anything in the must or wine, and so forth. This is why we use little or, sometimes, no sulfur in our wine.

The “sulfur management” is one of the most challenging areas of wine “making” for us. Conventional modern wine “making” calls for maintaining significant levels of sulfites in the wine (the rates and level of “free” SO2 are a function of the wine’s pH, and multiple, periodical additions are made from crush through the aging process until the day of bottling). In my experience, at such levels, the sulfur - while ensuring micro-biological stability and limiting oxidation - also significantly cripples the wine’s expression and limits its aromatic spectrum. It affects its appearance (color), aroma (nose), and flavor significantly. It also dramatically changes the aging process, as it affects the process of phenolic polymerization. Over the years, I have experimented with numerous sulfur “regimes”, with varying results. We are still experimenting and doing the best we can to learn from our mistakes. My conviction is that a solution to this puzzle is possible, and will include various pieces: a minimal yet critical sulfur addition (different and specific for different wines), sufficient barrel aging to ensure both alcoholic and m/l stability, ensuring the wine is aged, transported, and stored at proper temperatures.

I would definitely acknowledge that wines may and do go through funky/unpleasant/offensive phases during their aging process - especially if made with little intervention - and sometime simply require to be left alone for a while longer in the cellar to recover from whatever they were undergoing. I have seen a number of our wines go through such phases, only to recover a few months or a couple of years later. Wine consumption is a process of education: we begin wherever we begin, and start learning and refining our habits, gradually learning and increasing in our ability to buy, store/age, select, serve, food-match, enjoy, and understand wine in general, and INDIVIDUALLY.

In my view, one of the facts least understood about wine is that it lives in time. Life is Change. When we open a bottle and taste it, we get a narrow glimps into its travel through time. We taste, spit or swallow, enjoy - or not, we assess and conclude… but in fact this is comparable to having seen a single frame from an entire movie. Do we imagine we understand, or meaningfully assess that movie? It is unfortunate when our only exposure to a specific wine happens to be while it happens to be undergoing its equivalent to measles or chicken pox… But (not to start another controversial topic) growing evidence seems to suggest that even our own immune systems are being negatively affected by the increasing sterility of our modern habitat, so disconnected from nature. If we choose to sterilize, immunize the wine in order to turn it into a perfectly safe, stable, predictable product, we have to accept the crippling side-effects of our actions. As a wine producer, my choice is to not do that, and accept the consequences, which sometimes take the shape of “childhood diseases” on the wine’s path to full maturity.

Please read my response to a similar thread in May, 2013 - Barrel and wine tasting at Clos Saron - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers. What it points out is that as long as the storage of the wine is in proper conditions, by far most of our wine do age very well.

As a footnote: there was a mention of the 09 Home Vineyard Pinot. I have tasted a couple of funky, unpleasant examples of this wine with a visiting customer about one year ago. If you own that wine, my advise would be to leave it in the cellar for at least a couple of more years. That is the only vintage of Pinot we made without any sulfites, and while I have regretted that decision, I also believe it will recover in time if you give it a chance.

13

Prompted by a question by Berry, I would like to open the question of “wine flaws”… and, ultimately, who should bear the weight of their cost when they do occur.

There are at least two aspects to this question: one relates to who tastes and reports the “flaw”, the other is what the “flaw” is.

When we, as a wine producer, sell wine to restaurants and/or bottle shops, our policy is to replace bottles which were declared “flawed” by the sommelier or store manager. For the most part, this comes down to mainly cork taint (TCA), as well as the mysterious rare cases of severe oxidation or vinegary bottle - most likely also due to a faulty cork. But what in the case of the “end consumer”? One immediate problem is that of education: many consumers, even with considerable knowledge and exposure to wine, can correctly assert that the wine “has a problem”, but most often lack the ability to correctly analyse and diagnose it reliably. Very often, my own assessment of a reported “problem” by a consumer, ends up being different than theirs. (and yes, I may be the ignorant one).

So, the next open question is about the definition of a “real flaw”. Are the “funky”, “reduced”, or “Bretty” “real flaws”? Or, the less offensive to some - the very green, acidic, disjointed, sharp, astringent, flat (lacking acidity), over-oaked, or alcoholic? These conditions may be more or less permanent - sometimes a passing phase of a few months, or years, other times nearly or completely permanent. Any of these may or may not be offensive to your personal palate, but may be extremely so to others, or not at all… And any of these may - or may not - be further accentuated, or may choose proceed to entirely disappear with further aging… In these cases, my thought is that it is the responsibility of the consumer to get educated in order to minimize their disappointments and maximize their enjoyment of the wine they have purchased by carefully studying the effects of proper shipping, storage, serving, food-matching, aerating, etc. on each and every individual wine in their possession.

I am curious to hear other points of views about this, and would like to start by volunteering my working definition of a “real” flaw as an offensive characteristic in the wine, which does not come directly from the soil or grape, but is rather the result of a wine-making choice/decision, and which will not improve and/or go away with further aging.

Cheers!

14

Gideon - I feel that excessive brett is a flaw because is occludes terroir. Just my personal opinion.

I don’t feel reduction is a flaw unless its mercaptans because otherwise it blows off with some air.

15

Thank you. As I was reading this thread, I was going to ask what to do with the few 2009 Home Vineyard pinots that I purchased but haven’t tried yet (deterred by a slew of bad notes about the wine on WB and CT). I’ll let them sit in storage a few more years and try one – if it’s not in a good place today, why waste one.

I’m looking forward to visiting next time I have a chance, I’d really like to try all the wines and to meet Gideon.

16

Both of these may at some extreme cases be “permanent” and really dominant to the extent that makes them “real” flaws, crippling the wine for good or nearly so; more commonly, both are examples of something which affects the wine for a period of time, only to become integrated later into the wine in its next phase.

17

My intention is to wait a few more month and then try a bottle, perhaps at our open house tasting next spring. I may then send out an email to our list with a “status report” for that wine. Another Pinot of ours which went through a nasty phase was the 03 “Pinot Too”. That wine recovered very quickly (within 6-12 months), and fully. It is delicious to drink now.

18

I’ve been buying since I think 2005 and have yet to come across a flawed bottle. I think the oldest I still have is 2006. I’ll pop a bottle next week to see how it is doing.

19

Ive gone through 4 of the 2009s and every bottle Ive had is pristine. I think there must be a good batch and an infected batch.

20

The other problem is that folks sensitivity to flaws varies widely. It sort of helps to know your own “flaw” profile - I’m hypersensitive to VA, more sensitive than most to brett, less sensitive than most when it comes to TCA, and very insensitive to reduction.
A wine that may seem pristine to Person A may be undrinkably volatile or bretty to Person B.