WTN: Martinelli Wine Dinner

Thursday night was the night for wine dinners around the Triangle area and I went to the dinner at Bloomsbury Bistro in Raleigh. Julianna Martinelli was there as a representative of the fourth-generation grape and apple growing and family winery business. They have been growing grapes for 100 years and grow all their own grapes. She concentrates on promotion and marketing while her father and brothers do the farming and Helen Turley is the winemaker. They use indigenous yeast and the wines are unfined and unfiltered. Cropping reduces the output of grapes by about half.
2006 Tessa Lee Sauvignon Blanc was very nice. It was crisp and somewhat reminiscent of sweet grapefruit. One of my two favorites of the evening.

2005 Martinelli Vineyard Dry Select Gewurztraminer
Pale and transparent with a strong nose. Rich, luscious mouth feel. It complemented well the spicy tiger shrimp dish with diced mango in green curry coconut milk broth.

2005 Zio Tony Chardonnay
I believe I tried this at the tasting room last October. Bubbly when first poured. A little bland to me but at least not oaky.

2005 Bella Vigna Pinot Noir
Pretty color of a light burgundy and semi-transparent. Spicy with berries on the nose and palate more than cherries. Beautiful and elegant but still rich, vibrant and fulsome. This, along with the Sauvignon Blanc was my favorite. I have a bottle at home that I purchased on the California trip.

2004 Terra Felice Syrah
Dark purple to black; opaque. A little jammy to my taste and to that of the gentleman to my left at the table.

2006 Guiseppe & Luisa Zinfandel (Julianna's great-grandparents and founders of the farm.)
16.4% alcohol
Darker even than the Syrah. Forms legs on the glass. Somewhat extracted. Dark berries. Didn't taste as hot as the alcohol percentage would suggest. I purchased a bottle of a different Zinfandel (the Evo?) in October.

While I liked the Sauvignon Blanc and the Pinot Noir best, the woman across from me liked the Chardonnay and Zinfandel best.

I dumped the Martinelli mailing list after the 2002 vintage due to pricing and bundling on the list but also the wines seemed to be getting biger each year with some retaining nice flavor and balance but many getting too hot or jammy. In the mid 1990's I really loved the PN and at that time I think there was just the one bottling (reserve). Now it seems they have so many bottlings of each wine that I can't keep them straight. In your notes, three (maybe four) of the six wines are not ones that I recall available when I last ordered. This winery just went a direction that I didn't like and to my taste it is a shame but I am sure that they are making more money now than they were a decade ago.

JC,

Thanks for posting this. After I decided to start taking notes on the wines I drink, one of the first (indeed I believe the first) that I took notes on was the 2001 Martinelli Russian River Valley Pinot Noir. I still remember that wine--not because it was interesting, but because I found so little there there and was totally miffed at the price I had paid, around $40 at the time (you can tell I'm not exactly well-suited to go hunting around Burgundy). Anyway, I was so jilted by the experience that I never paid Martinelli any attention since. It was fun upon seeing your post to look up the wine in CellarTracker and see the plethora of tasting notes both before and well after I had mine (I seem to end up doing a lot of data entry for my wines in CT and rarely see a note at all in CT archives for the wines I drink). Oddly enough, Lyle Fass (a rhetorical muse of some sort for the New York Times's Asimov) best reflected my experience with the wine. Thanks for the opportunity for this trip down a relatively short memory lane--and very interesting to hear a bit more of the how and why behind Martinelli's wines, I appreciate that, thanks!