Sat down with members of the Monterey County Vintners and Growers Association yesterday and tasted through a selection of 39 Monterey Pinots, with most wines narrated by either a vineyard owner or a winemaker.
It was an ideal tasting: pleasant, educational, and highly informative. And Monterey is like Alice's Restaurant: you can get anything you want.
The wines were delivered up in flights, with the wines grouped by price range: we tasted $10—19, $20—28, $28—35, and $35—55.
The first flight was, as expected the lightest of the bunch. All from the 2005 vintage, they were almost all lightly colored, and they tended to the simple, straightforward and occasionally spun-candy pretty side. But there were some satisfying wines in the flight nonetheless, solid, chunky, earthy and quite sound. Nothing earth shattering, mind you, but decent withal. I thought the Arroyo Seco Steel Creek release at $12 and their Muir Woods at $14 were both pretty solid for the price points. The Monterra Night Owl was a CA version of a Cotes Chalonnaise: sturdy and solid, with some hefty berry flavors. The Talbot, at $15, had a nose of bloody meat and a good solid middle, but finished a bit on the tart side for me.
The $20—28 range showed more intensity, and more distinctly PN varietal character. Paraiso had a lovely and well made Santa Lucia Highlands 2005, plump but not overweight, with good sweet PN cherry in the middle. And the tiny San Saba ($28) had an excellent entry into the PN wars with a sturdy little beauty, all of 300 cases worth. For a winery without much in the way of resources, they did a superb job with 3 and 4 year old vines---the only blemish was that four of their eight barrels were brand new oak and put the wine out of balance. Still, the essential quality showed through past the obvious cherry pie. A small winery to watch, this brother and sister winemaking team.
The spectre of PinotSyrah began to raise its head for the first time in this flight, with some obviously overworked and overweighted grape jelly entries shoving their way forward. Some of the winemakers narrated with apparent glee and ribbons on their chest candor about their heroic manipulation of the grapes to attain that quality too. One unapologetic winemaker declared loudly, “I like big wines!” Unfortunately, his was the one that tasted most like overboiled Welch’s Concord. Big it was; balanced it was not. One entirely weird wine, which tasted for all the world like a Frankenstein cross (as in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein more than Shelley’s version) between severely overdone Pinot and even more overdone Late Harvest Zinfandel…with an additional dollop of what tasted like a pound of crushed cloves added at bottling.
The last two flights saw this trend continue, but we also saw the emergence of some concentrated, serious, intense, but not at all overdone wines as well: Carmel Road Arroyo Seco 2004, Pellerin SLH 2005, Paraiso West Terrace 2003, a lovely dowager empress Silver Mountain 2004 SLH, and a couple of standout Michauds from the Chalone AVA (but not Chalone Vineyards), the 2004 and 2003. The 2003 Michaud was especially profound, stubborn and ungiving at first, but opening up when coaxed to an eminently balanced, deep and inviting wine. “Dense and graceful” was the term one envious winemaker used.
The takeaway: Monterey is producing some good Pinots now, but they are getting better and better, with clearly delineating terroirs (or you can say sub-regional motifs if you’d like) emerging distinctly. And Monterey has enough range to make the quaffing stuff right along with some superstar standouts. Monterey is establishing its very own identity in Pinot, and they are proud not to be Santa Barbara, or Russian River/Sonoma Coast, or Carneros. Separate out the quaff from the bottom and the occasional grotesqueries that come from being overzealous and unbalanced, and you’ve got some Pinot contendahs!
