Winery Watch: Navarro Vineyards

An ongoing series of Friday posts highlighting California family wineries. You might not be familiar with all of these vineyards and winemakers--yet--but they produce wines that speak with the voices of this state's people, places, and history. They are worth seeking out. These posts will be longer than most posts on the blog, but I hope you will find them perfect for leisurely weekend reading and internet browsing. To read previous posts in the series, click here.

Tucked into the hills just off Highway 128 in Mendocino County is a winery that produces cult wines for the common person. Navarro Vineyards is something of a cult favorite among people like you and me--folks who like fine wine, who appreciate when wine reflects the place where the grapes are grown and the varieties that go into it, and who don't want to spend an absolute fortune to drink it. Thanks to Ted Bennett and his partner in life and work, Deborah Cahn, it's been possible for ordinary people to drink extraordinary wine ever since they started Navarro Vineyards in 1974.

When Ted and Deborah began working the land and planting their vineyards, vineyards were few and far between in the Anderson Valley. They took over a former sheep ranch, and planted unfashionable varieties for the time, such as pinot noir, gewurztraminer, pinot gris, chardonnay, muscat blanc, and riesling. If this makes you think "Alsace," there is a reason. Ted and Deborah love the wines of that region, and they are perfectly suited to the Anderson Valley's soil and climate. Critics agree. The wines are regularly praised by Dan Berger, who frequently includes specific bottlings in the recommendations he makes for exciting and high value wines in Tom Stevenson's annual Wine Report (ps., the new edition is just released, so you may want to pick up the 2008 Wine Report now).

Today Navarro Vineyards is still a family affair, with Ted and Deborah working alongside their children Aaron and Sarah. If you are lucky enough to visit, you will feel like family too as you are welcomed into the friendly tasting room, given complimentary tours and pours, and lead over the hills, past the llamas, and into the rooms where the huge oak casks hold the wine until its ready to be bottled and sold to consumers like you and me. This is a working farm, run by people who love the land and live as lightly as possible on it, using cover crops and sheep to enrich the soil instead of chemical fertilizers. (photo of Ted, Deborah, Aaron, and Sarah, along with their beloved dachshund, from Navarro Vineyards)

Navarro Vineyards devotees are usually members of the Pre-Release Club, which delivers a personal stash of Navarro wines to you each June and December at 10-33% discounts. The friends I visited the vineyard with late this summer are members of the club, and were able to pick up some of their wines while they were there. They were even kind enough to share a bottle of Navarro's special pinot noir, the Deep-End Blend, with me over dinner after our day out in the Anderson Valley.

Below you will find my tasting notes for the wines I tasted recently at the vineyard. Prices indicated here are the suggested retail prices at the winery; as always the price you pay may be higher or lower at your local merchant. Clicking on a wine's name takes you either to a list of merchants who stock the wine, or to Navarro's online store where you can order what you want and have them shipped directly to you as long as your state allows it. Navarro wines can be hard to find in retail stores, because Ted and Deborah prefer to keep their prices low, cut out the middle-men and middle-women, and sell directly to their customers. With wine this good, and prices this reasonable, who can argue with their plan?

2005 Navarro Vineyards Pinot Noir ($18) I promised you I would tell you when I found a really good pinot noir under $20. I found it, and I'm telling you, this is excellent QPR. Rose aromas and juicy black cherry fruit usher you into the equally juice cherry flavors. There is medium toast on the mid-palate and a good balance already for a young wine between fruit, spice, and acidity. Not as complex as the Methode a l'Ancienne pinot noir, but a great deal for the price.

2004 Navarro Vineyards Pinot Noir "Méthode à l'Ancienne" ($25-$35) Really impressed with this year's bottling. I tasted nuts and earth, along with mushroomy and truffley notes, that accent the core of bright acidity and cherry fruit. I think it will age very, very nicely. Excellent QPR.

2005 Navarro Vineyards Navarrouge ($12) Eight red varietals, including syrah, cabernet, pinot noir, and carignan go into this excellent QPR wine that should be a leading contender for your house red. Cherry blossom aromas, black cherry flavors with a fair amount of oak in the midpalate, but it's interesting and flavorful. I suspect it will be even better in 4-8 months. This is one to buy by the case and just have on hand for when friends drop by at the holidays.

2006 Navarro Vineyards Edelzwicker ($12). A lovely wine for the money, made from riesling, gewurztraminer, and pinot gris grapes. Enticing flower aromas, with a palate of litchi and lime. Our favorite wine to have with Thanksgiving leftovers, or for any holiday lunch, don't be surprised when this turns up on my holiday wine picks this year. Excellent QPR.

2005 Navarro Vineyards Muscat Estate Bottled Dry (around $18 if you can find it). This is a wild, wild wine with pure orange blossom aromas and a searingly crisp and dry lemony palate and finish. Very clean wine, and schizophrenic in a good way--or at least a way that works! Perfect for sushi with wasabi. Very good QPR.

2004 Navarro Vineyards Syrah ($22) Huckleberry and cranberry dominate the fruity notes in this syrah. Good acidity, but I would prefer to taste more spice. I think this wine will continue to develop, though. Good QPR.

2005 Navarro Vineyards Pinot Noir Deep End Blend (price N/A). This wine has a lot of potential and is already drinking beautifully. High-toned cherry and cinnamon on first opening, with a dark ruby color. As it opens up notes of cedar, cocoa powder, and blackberry enter into the palate and aromas. Continued to develop and gain complexity as we drained the bottle. Wait a year and check again, but I think this one will age well and develop in interesting ways. This will be expensive if you can get it (as in more than $40), but it is an awfully complex pinot and good QPR.

2003 Navarro Vineyards Riesling ($18-$19). Very good dry riesling with apple and apricot fruit and a little tropical fruit lift in the midpalate. This resembles a German kabinett, but lacks the mineral dimension to make it outstanding. Good QPR.

2006 Navarro Vineyards Pinot Noir Deep End Blend (Barrel sample; not yet released). Beautiful color and pinot texture on this wine, with rich cherry flavors and nice cedary notes underneath with some earth, mushroom, and thyme. Lots of acidity now, giving the wine the structure that promises great things to come. Will be more than $40 if you can get it, but in time it is likely to be worth every penny. Good QPR.

Navarro Vineyards has a great website, with detailed information on every wine that they make. They also answer their email, so if you have a question or want to check to see if they have any bottles of that dry muscat hanging around, don't hesitate to drop them a line or give them a call. If you are a Navarro fan, feel free to leave notes about your own favorites in the comments below.

Wine Blogging Wednesday #38: Portuguese Wine

It's that time again: Wine Blogging Wednesday. Today, bloggers all over the world will be telling us what they tasted when they uncorked bottles of Portuguese table wines. Ryan and Gabriella at Catavino cooked up the theme for WBW #38, and asked us to look for Portuguese wines that were not the fortified port wines most of us associate with the region. Portugal makes beautiful table wines, too, and they challenged us to look beyond the popular Douro region, and beyond the familiar Mateus and vinhho verde to look for something new and different to taste our palate.

I succeeded in steering clear of the Mateus, and the vinho verde, but I did end up with a pick from the Douro. It turned out to be oddly challenging to find a Portuguese wine in LA, and the best selections were often in chain shops, like Beverages & More. But I did find a bottle--a white, no less--at a local store and it impressed me enough to wonder why more merchants don't stock wines from this region. If they are anything like this one, they are good, affordable food wines. My pick for WBW #38 was the 2005 Adriano Ramos Pinto, a white wine made by an old wine house that specialized in port founded in 1880 by the man whose full name is on this wine: Adriano Ramos Pinto. ($10.99, Mission Wines; available from other merchants for between $10 and $13).

The wine is blended from three varieties of grape: Viozinho (60%), a low-yielding white variety used in white port; another low-yielding white variety, Rabigato (30%); and Arinto (10%), a white variety that brings acidity to the mix and is used in making vinho verde. I've never tasted anything made with any of these grapes, so I wasn't sure what I was in for. Turns out that this white blend resembled an aromatic, bone-dry riesling or a medium-bodied, barely oaked sauvignon blanc. There were soft aromas of grapefruit, citrus pith, and a whiff of petrol when you first opened it--just like a riesling. These appealing smells led into the flavor palate, where clean grapefruit and mineral notes met up at the back of your throat with a whiff more petrol. At 12.5% alc/vol. it was a very pleasant food wine, all the more so because it was very lightly oaked. The wine was aged for only six months, with 80% of the juice spending its time in steel vats, and 20% of the juice spending its time in new French oak. Given its low price, and its interesting mix of aromatics and dry flavors, I thought this wine represented very good QPR.

This wine would be an excellent pairing with not-terribly-spicy Indian or Asian food, richer fish dishes, light chickendishes, and salads. We had it with Indian-spiced Bombay Sliders, mini chicken burgers with lots of aromatic spices and herbs in them. These were popped onto dinner rolls, topped with some curried mayonnaise, and some sliced veggies. We had oven-fries made with sweet potatoes along side. The wine really went well with this range of flavors and ingredients, and would have been a particularly good option for those who don't like the sweet impression that rieslings (even dry rieslings) give.

While finding the wine was a challenge, I'm glad I did locate a Portuguese table wine--and a white, no less. I'm going to keep looking for wines from this region, and try to learn some more about the grape varieties. This wine was a real surprise, and I think I'm missing a lot of interesting wine. Thanks to Ryan and Gabriella for the great theme, and as always thanks to Lenn Thompson of Lenndevours for dreaming the event up more than three years ago. I'll post the link to the roundup when it is available, as well as a link to November's theme.

We Worked Our Magic: Hocus Pocus Wins WS Video Contest

Hey, readers! We did it.

Thanks to your many outclicks to Wine Spectator to check out Amy and Peter's Hocus Pocus video, "A Toast to the Little Guys," they WON. (Still from the video from Wine Spectator).

Seriously, it probably wasn't all due to GWU$20 readers, but I happen to know that many of you did at least take a peek at it. It was a good video, and a great glimpse into the "glamorous" world of wine.

I hope they enjoy their vacation...and then make some more of that great syrah. (Only partially kidding, Amy and Peter!)

Aren't Blends Beautiful?

Orchestras. Mutts. Fusion food--even weird fusion food. Historical- mystery- suspense- thrillers with a horror twist. Blended wine. I love them all. I see nothing wrong with mixing things up and experimenting with new combinations of sounds, tastes, and images. (Picture of the Philadelphia Orchestra from the Official Philadelphia Visitor's Site)

Which is why I find it so weird that 85% of any grape variety is enough to warrant slapping "sauvignon blanc" or "cabernet sauvignon" on a label. Do people think this makes me MORE likely to buy the wine? It turns out it makes me LESS interested. Am I alone in loving blended wines like Sauvignon Blanc and Viognier, Grenache with Shiraz and Mourvedre, or Roussanne and Marsanne?

Is this labeling practice a weird hangover from when purchasers were scared--rightfully so--of everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blends? Do we still think that just because a wine includes a single variety of grape or the juice comes from only one vineyard, it's a better wine? Sometimes, this is true. But certainly not always, as anyone who drinks Rhone blends, Bordeaux blends, or some of the excellent blends coming out of California or Australia knows all too well.

I've been thinking about this a lot lately because of a recent dispute on CellarTracker! that had to do with labeling a wine as the varietal "Fume Blanc." I thought the varietal was sauvignon blanc, and the style off wine was fume blanc. Turns out our friends at the ATF recognize fume blanc as a synonym for sauvignon blanc. Weird, but hard to argue with even though I passionately believe that this just confuses consumers and is wrong, wrong, wrong. Then I argued that the wine had 88% sauvignon blanc and 12% viognier and should be labeled a white blend. Foiled again, since as long as there is 85% or more of a single varietal it counts as a single varietal wine.

This goes against everything I believe about promoting the widest possible number of grape varieties, and telling people exactly what is in the wine they are drinking. How will people learn about viognier if they don't even know that they're drinking it?

I don't need calorie counts or carbohydrates on my wine labels. I just want to know what grapes went into it!

Tasty Tempranillo

This week it seems only right to focus a bit on Iberian wines, with WBW #38 coming up on Wednesday featuring Portuguese table wines. Today, however, I'm going to review an excellent tempranillo that I tasted recently. It came from Bodegas Arzuaga, a winery in Valladolid that also has its own hotel in case you are interested in wine travel. A vacation in Valladolid sounds pretty good to me right now, I must say.

The 2003 Bodegas Arzuaga Ribera Del Duero Crianza may be the best tempranillo I've ever had. ($12.99/375ml, Chronicle Wine Cellar; available from other merchants for between $15 and $27 depending on bottle size) I looked through my notes, and haven't found one that seems to beat the high praise I had for this bottle of inky, plum-colored wine. The rich plum colors beautifully foreshadowed the deeply plummy aromas and flavors that followed. But there was a lot more than just plumminess. In the aromas, I detected scents of grilled meat and pepper, too. And in the flavors I tasted not only plum but blueberry, spice, and pepper with a caramelized brown sugar note as you headed towards the finish line. There was a lot going on in this wine, yet it was still very drinkable and went well with food, specifically an orzo salad that riffed on the theme of paella with lots of peppers, chorizo, and other yummy ingredients. (note: the leftovers made a pretty spectacular lunch the next day).

While this wine was a bit more than most tempranillo I buy and drink, it was also a lot more complex, so I still consider this to be a very good QPR choice if you see it in the wine store. I'd definitely buy again. And speaking of buying wine, if you haven't done so already head out tomorrow and buy a bottle of Portuguese table wine--not port!--and join our hosts Ryan and Gabriella of Catavino on Wednesday for WBW #38.