TN: ZD Chard Calif '86...(short/boring)

WINE TALK
1

Tried last night:

  1. ZD Chard Calif (13.8%) Norman&Robert DeLeuze/Napa 1986: Med.gold color w/ no browning; strong toasty/smokey/oak some herbal/melony/Chard bit earthy/dusty quite interesting complex nose that speaks strongly of young Chard; fairly tart strong charred/smokey/toasty/oak rather herbal/thyme//melony/Chard/spicy some complex flavor; long quite tart bit austere strong smokey/toasty/oak quite spicy/thyme/herbal/melony/Chard/appley bit lean finish; no signs of oxidation & lots of oak and rather herbal/melony austere Chard; amazingly fresh & alive. $17.50

And a wee BloodyPulpit:

  1. I, of course, followed ZD from the very start, and before. First met GinoZepponi over at DarrellCorti’s before or about when ZD was just getting off the ground. Did a visit there at their wnry in Vineburg w/ Gino way back when. Gino was an aerospace engineer over in Sac and also owned a small Chard vnyd there in Vineburg. The early Chards were rather lean/austere/Chablis-like Chards a bit like DaveBennion’s early ones. They also went down, very early on, to buy Chard & Pinot out of TepesquetVnyd in SantaBarbara/SantaMaria. Gino was a very likable Italian guy, very gregarious.
  1. This wine was another from my stash of poorly stored wines I found in my garage; there for some 15-18 yrs. This case had 6 different Chards therein. The first 5 went down the drain as way over the hill. When I poured this one into the glass, I could tell it had a chance of still being alive. Annd alive it certainly was, showing zero signs of oxidation or dreadful storage.
  1. Corks: All of these wines I’ve been ripping thru have been stored standing upright, w/ the cork not in contact w/ the wine. Because the corks can be pretty tight, I use the Ah-So remover to remove the cork. The Ah-So can be a bit tricky because if the cork has dried out & shrunk, it can easily punch the cork down into the wine. What’s amazed me, thus far, is that most of the corks have been sound and fairly moist, especially on the inside end. Not punched one down into the wine yet (though a few have started to slide downward).
    Yet we are told by wine authorities that a wine must be stored on its side to keep the cork moist. This isn’t jiving w/ my experience here w/ this batch of wines. What the heck gives?? Surely…but Shirley…the authorities cannot be wrong? Can they??
    Tom
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ZD was one of the wineries my wife and I visited on our first trip to Napa some 20+ years ago. Been back a couple of times since. Always nice people.

Once we were there, we did a tour, and some elderly man followed along. Asked us our thoughts on some wines - he was tasting just like everyone else. We visited throughout the tour with the guy. He seemed very knowledgeable and had some good insights. At the end, someone introduced him as Norman deLeuze, the “D” in ZD. Was very nice, and we sat and talked with him for quite awhile.

Interesting story he shared - while he is the D in ZD, and I guess Gino is the Z, he said they also chose the name (as Tom mentioned) because they came out of aerospace, and ZD stood for Zero Defects.

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Good tale, Paul. I never met Norman, but have met son Robert several times over the yrs.
ZeroDefects is the exact same story Gino told me as well yrs ago.
When I did my visit w/ Gino yrs ago, he heard I was going to dinner at Darrell’s the following night. So he gave me a btl
of his first TepesquetVnyd SBC Chard to pass on to Darrell to try. We had it at dinner and Darrell dumped all over it. But I
noticed, a yr later, that he had it on the shelf there at CortiBros. Gino probably leaned on Darrell to carry it.
Tom