A Site Seer

Wine culture is at once ancient and up-to-the-minute. Even after 8,000 years, it continues to evolve dynamically, vintage by vintage. Tasting the fruit of that evolution is one of the greatest pleasures wine has to offer.

Here in California, where the wine industry is evolving in leaps and bounds instead of in increments (as it does in Europe), we have the bottled evidence of truly spectacular changes.

Just in the last 10 years or so, the viticultural landscape of Northern California has been transformed by wide-scale replanting, with attendant redistribution of grape varieties and other viticulture changes. We’re now in the midst of tasting the first generation of wines reflecting that revolution with, for example, the high-profile Napa Valley Cabernets and Merlots.

We also get to experience something that the Old World, for the most part, is long past: the emergence of brand-new viticultural areas.

That’s virtually unknown in Europe, where wine geography has been well defined for centuries. By contrast, vines planted within the last 20 years on Sonoma County’s extreme coastal ridges are already delivering some of California’s most distinctive wines.

That was clear in a recent tasting at New York’s TriBeCa Grill, where Wine & Spirits Magazine gathered a dozen of New York’s top sommeliers to scrutinize 1997 Hirsch Vineyard-designated Pinot Noirs from Williams-Selyem, Littorai, Siduri, Whitethorn, Kistler, Flowers, Rochelle and Whitcraft. It was a remarkable showing for a vineyard that until a few years ago was virtually unknown outside a tiny circle of cutting-edge Pinot Noir producers.

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David Hirsch’s vineyard, on a high ridge in Sonoma overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is considered the epicenter of extreme coastal Pinot, and not just because it sits atop the most active seismic fault network on the North American coast. Hirsch belongs to the breed of slightly mad visionaries who have always carried the evolution of wine forward.

When he planted his remote property some 20 years ago, it was crazy to think he could make a living growing wine grapes out there, much less the unreliable Pinot Noir. But now that his vines are among the few mature plantings of French-clone Pinot in California, and cult Pinot producers are competing to buy his grapes for single-vineyard bottlings, voila, Hirsch is a visionary.

This was the first formal tasting of Hirsch Pinots, and expectations ran high. The point of the exercise was not to rate or rank the wines but to look for some commonality that might be attributable to the vineyard, to get a feel for what kind of animal the coastal Pinot Noir really is.

Certainly there was no commonality in winemaking, aside from the obvious presence of new French oak, which has become a generic signature of expensive wines worldwide. The wines ranged widely in scale, from the heroic ripeness and depth on the palate of the Kistler and Flowers to the lighter, more elegant and fragrance-oriented Siduri and Whitethorn.

What they did all have in common was what I call the three Cs of distinctive wine: concentration, clarity and complexity. For all the subtle (and not so subtle) differences derived from winemaking decisions, the wines displayed the focus and definition of fruit from a superb site.

The sommeliers’ discussion kept coming back to acidity. The ability of the winemaker to craft a seamless, layered wine is inherent in the multifaceted character of the grapes. That character resides to a great extent in natural acidity, not just the amount but the sensory qualities of the several fruit acids that make up the total acidity.

This fundamental principle is particularly apparent in fine white wines like Riesling. For example, taste a Zind-Humbrecht “Brand� ’97 or Grosset “Polish Hill River� ’98. Note the radiant crystalline quality on the palate. Now, add dense red grape fruit and tannin to see how ripe natural acidity works in Pinot Noir, the taste equivalent of afternoon sunshine through stained glass.

Wines made from Hirsch Vineyard fruit show that kind of resonant acidity to a greater degree than typical Pinot Noirs from Carneros and most of the Russian River Valley. They vibrate on the palate and fix the impressions with a kind of luminosity that reminds me of the quality of light in paintings by Rembrandt and Vermeer.

Though varying slightly in specific aromas and flavors, all the wines in the lineup showed that character. Each, in its way, said more about the vineyard than about the winery, a relatively new concept in California.

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Among my personal favorites in the tasting were four wines from Littorai. There was one each from three single blocks within the Hirsch Vineyard and the Littorai “Sonoma Coast,� a blend of all three. The wines showed different characteristics related to site, clone and winemaking choices, such as the percentage of whole clusters. Yet the commonality was astonishing.

I tasted those wines again the next week in San Francisco with Littorai owner-winemaker Ted Lemon. We also tasted his Hirsch Vineyard wines from 1994 through ’98.

It was a fascinating deconstruction of the phenomenon. It showed how one block of vines offers relatively light strawberry-inflected fruit with brilliant aromas and a juicy mid-palate, and another is less overtly fruity but has elegant high-toned structure and a strong line from attack through finish. And then the third (which Lemon shares with Kistler and Williams-Selyem) fills in tannic bass notes and spreads a classic “peacock’s tail� of vibrant, spicy flavors in the finish.

I loved each one for itself, but I couldn’t deny that the sum, the Littorai “Sonoma Coast� Pinot Noir ‘97, is greater than the parts.

The nature of each block’s contribution, said Lemon, has been similar from vintage to vintage. He was quick to point out that the three single-block wines were not made for commercial release but only to show the representative character of the sites.

Yet seldom, in my experience, has a reference tasting been so purely hedonistic. It not only confirmed the stellar quality of Hirsch Vineyard fruit but demonstrated that on the Sonoma Coast, as on the Cote d’Or, individual sites along the continuum make their own unique statements.

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Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits magazine.