2012 Cameron Blanc Clos Electrique- USA, Oregon (12/22/2017)
Yellow-gold in the glass; to be honest, the nose has a light sherried note to it - if I were drinking a white Burg, I would say this wine was starting to begin a journey to pre-mox city.
Palate is consistent with that - bummer. I guess I’m just “lucky” or this is a randomly flawed bottle. Either way, considering the price, not the best way to start a Friday afternoon.
2013 Cameron Blanc Clos Electrique- USA, Oregon (12/22/2017)
Similar in color to the 2012, with (thankfully) a nicer/better nose. A note that reminds me of grilled nuts.
This comes across as a full-bodied Chard on the palate, yet lifted with good acidity. This was popped and poured, so it may flesh out more once it’a paired with some food, but very likable and complex on it’s own. According to the label, only 12.8% alcohol, yet this wine is no shrinking violet.
2013 Crowley Chardonnay Four Winds- USA, Oregon, Willamette Valley (12/22/2017)
A lighter yellow-gold in the glass (clearly lighter in color than the two Camerons); nice “crisp” nose, almost reminiscent of a Chablis. The most focused nose of the three wines.
Crisp and dry on the palate - this comes across as lighter-bodied and somewhat tight/coiled. Likable, and a very different expression of the grape than the Cameron.
We opened a 2012 Clos Electrique Blanc last night, and it showed no signs of oxidation, either in the color, aroma, or taste. As a matter of fact, it was fantastic - bright, clean, well balanced, with very good acidity. How did you acquire the bottle? Is there a chance it was abused along the way?
I add that I generally find that both of the SVD Chardonnays from Cameron can easily last 10 years. His Chardonnays are some of the few that I feel really comfortable aging.
Two of my favorite Oregon Chards. Agree with Rick that the CE should just be rounding into form at this point.
Had a 2011 Bachelder Johnson Vineyard Chard tonight. Wonderful stuff. Very light. Super expressive nose with (surprisingly) a hint of blue cheese and fennel that evolved over the evening. Medium+ body with zingy acid. A wonderful expression of OR Chardonnay, and much more elegant than any other Yamhill-Carlton Chards I can recall (although I’ve not had many). These wines can be harder to source, but worth the effort IMO.
I can see the comparison to Meursault, Rich - having the Cameron and Crowley side-by-side was cool because they presented so differently, but were both drinking well. My better half preferred the Cameron, my daughter liked the Crowley and I honestly couldn’t decide which I liked better.
Rick, regarding whether the 2012 was abused in some way, who knows? I can tell you I bought the wine from the same Oregon retailer that I purchased the 2013 from, and they were shipped to me in the same case, and by appearances nothing seemed to be amiss when pulling corks yesterday. And like I said, if it had been a white Burg I would have immediately concluded pre-mox just by the taste profile - I am unfortunately very familiar with that tell-tale sherried scent that is the scourge of all white Burg drinkers.
I ended up opening a 2010 Cameron Clos Electrique on Christmas Eve, and found that it was superb (very concentrated green apple/lemon), though beginning to taste more mature - along the lines of what I would expect from a 7+ year old Chardonnay. I then opened a 2011 Cameron Clos Electrique, which tasted very fresh around the edges of the corked aroma… So we dumped that and I opened a second bottle, and found that it was fairly well advanced - still drinkable, but much more down the oxidation road than the 2010. So I had my first corked Cameron wine in the past five years (and I drink a lot of Cameron) and my first pre-moxed Cameron wine ever on the same night.
From 2000-2009 we got the Chardonnay (and the Pinot) from Four Winds Vineyard. After years of putting out what I would describe as non-descript to not-so-good (to not releasable in the case of the 2009) we concluded that Four Winds was simply not that great a site for Chardonnay production and we stopped purchasing it (we had the Pinot Noir for another couple of years).
Then Tyson started buying it and making terrific wine. It, I think, at first sucked to realize that the problem lay within and not without. Never fun to be confronted with your obvious shortcomings. However, those wines served as a back-of-the-stove source of motivation and inspiration for some time to learn more, learn better and implement when we felt ready. We went five vintages without producing Chardonnay but the stuff Tyson made from Four Winds was certainly an impetus to buck up and tighten our shit up and try again.
I like the 2015. I’m proud of it and happy with it. That being said it is the first effort along the way. The amount of fruit was minimal and the inexperience high so I felt like playing the middle of the road was the best option. While made deductively it lacks reductive qualities. The 2015 vintage was warm, it is Dijon 95 of 20 years vine age from a warm-ish site. I learned that you pick Pinot when it tastes ripe and that applying the same standard to Chardonnay leads to over ripe wine soon enough that I picked this early enough. It still is rich and fruit dense but has enough acid. I’m not wanting to make Chablis. I want intensity and richness. Oregon should aim for acid based fruit dense Chardonnays at the highest levels. In 16 I have a cooler section to integrate into the wine and feel like I’m more confident about what I’m doing and have more material to monkey around with to get the some necessary funkiness incorporated in there. I really like what we are doing with this small program. Oregon has vast potential here and I am thrilled to be dragged back into this.
Jim, not asking for any trade secrets, but what kind of thing makes the difference here? I guess (from your other post) that one is to not pick the Chard grapes too ripe. Just curious.
There are lots of little things that go into Chardonnay production that I am still learning the nuances of so I would say I am still figuring my way through that landscape. I know the vineyard quite well as we have been buying Pinot there since 2000. I know what I think it can do, what the 2 blocks we have should do and I know what we are intrinsically looking for in the wine. Those are all good starting points. However, coaxing the sort of complexity that Chardonnay should offer up out of the grapes is much more about pressing technique, grape and juice handling concepts, yeasts used and application of them, fermentation curves and things like that where Pinot is picking and fermentation management almost exclusively (at a simple level). Chardonnay is just trickier in my estimation to get en pointe than is Pinot from equivalent level sites.
I opened a 2007 Cameron Clos Electrique Blanc on Christmas Eve. It was excellent. Pomme fruited nose and palate – Granny Smith apple / d’Anjou pear – with lip-smacking acidity. Very tasty.
I don’t think so. No. I am telling you it is harder, at least for me at this stage, to properly assess what it is that I need to be doing to make what I consider to be the terroir most evident in Chardonnay. Christophe Roumier once told me, while tasting his 2006 and 2007 Corton Charlemagne from barrel, that he got consulting help on his Chardonnay (I believe from Dominique Lafon if I am not mistaken but I could be wrong here) because he was terrible at making white wine (while this was certainly overstating the case I think he believes this to be true at least relatively speaking and that he was not humble-bragging at all) and that people should buy red wines from a white wine maker but not necessarily buy whites from a red wine maker. White wine production at high levels is much more discrete and naked and the skill set very fine. Not that high level Pinot production is not. They just are not necessarily the same skill set.
Thanks again, Jim. So maybe it’s that there are more types of things that need to be controlled to succeed with Chards than with PN, so more ways to go wrong with Chards than with PNs. Here I’m thinking of your comparison
However, coaxing the sort of complexity that Chardonnay should offer up out of the grapes is much more about pressing technique, grape and juice handling concepts, yeasts used and application of them, fermentation curves and things like that where Pinot is picking and fermentation management almost exclusively (at a simple level).
Again, this is my perspective on Chardonnay. Basically I am on the 3rd vintage. While SB has its applications, Chardonnay is really much different than that from a crafting perspective. There are probably winemakers out there that view it the other way around. As Gisele Bundchen once said, “My husband cannot both throw and catch the football.”
Jim, I’m looking forward to trying the 2016. The 2015 was very good though, given how well you do with Pinot, I can’t wait to see what you can do with Chardonnay when you get some more vintages under your belt.
Our Pils is a difficult beer to make, but as one winemaker told me, “You have harvest every week!” So I’ve had lots of chances to get better. It’s tougher with wine!