Jess Jackson's predominantly wild, 5,100-acre Alexander Mountain Estate ranges in elevation up to 2,400 feet; its 900 planted acres yield fruit for Jackson's Stonestreet label, among others.
Mountain ChardonnayBy Jeff CoxManchester Ridge Vineyard is being developed by a group of investors, including esteemed vineyard manager Martin Mochizuki. Of its 161 plantable mountaintop acres, 30 are thus far cultivated (19 to pinot noir and 11 to chardonnay), with 100 more made ready for vines.
“Mountain” is the key word. Though strapping reds are most often associated with the mountain-grown designation, something metabolic happens at higher altitudes that allows chardonnay to fill out in a lean, minerally, sophisticated way. The resulting wines offer a palette of flavors more evocative of pastels than pure colors.
Chardonnay made from grapes grown on valley floors certainly can be good, but they also have the potential to be flabby and overly fruity. La Follette calls the latter donut wines. Instead of a middle with structure, where the fruit flavors recede in favor of a sturdy mineral core before re-emerging in the finish, there is a hole. In essence, they lack backbone, and backbone equates to a lengthy life for any wine (reds have the advantage of naturally higher tannins). Absent from those big, buttery Chardonnay fruit bombs from warm valley floors is the firm acidity that long aging requires. Within five years from vintage such wines can seem tired, oxidized and over the hill.
Acidity can be acquired in one of several ways:
• A winemaker can acidulate the must by simply adding citric, tartaric, or malic acid, but this method can knock a wine off balance pretty quickly.
• The fruit can be picked slightly underripe, while the acids are still high and the sugars still low. This technique can yield a wine of modest alcohol and firm acidity, but the grapes likely won't be mature enough to produce the luscious, ripe flavors of which chardonnay is capable.
• The grapes can be grown in a relatively cold climate, such as Chablis or other parts of Burgundy, where the winters are long, making the growing seasons shorter.
• Most ideal is the mountain vineyard setting that enables acids and sugars to remain in perfect balance for as long as possible; sunlight is plentiful, yet temperatures are moderated by the elevation.
Mike Chelini, winemaker at Stony Hill Vineyard in St. Helena, is a consummate white wine specialist. He says his estate chardonnay vineyards range from 1,200 to 1,600 feet elevations. “Our vines are on a northeast-facing slope that gets sun from morning to mid-afternoon,” he says. So the vines aren't subject to the hard, hot sun of late afternoon that characterizes sites that face west or are located on the valley floor. “It's cooler here than at lower elevations. That makes for gentle ripening. We don't get a lot of sunburn on the fruit clusters. So consequently we have lower pHs and higher acidity.” Stony Hill's impeccable 2007 SHV Chardonnay has a low 3.33 pH and .68% acidity, indicating flinty flavors and bright structure. To protect its Chablis-like flintiness, the wine isn't oaked or put through malolactic fermentation.
As to aging potential, Chelini asserts, “I recently tasted the 2001 and it's still very young.” At a recent tasting in New Orleans, he recounts that he poured 1972, 1973, and 1974 Chardonnays, “and they're holding up very well.” Harking further back, he says his favorite vintage from the 1960s is the 1964.
The very French-styled Chardonnays of the erstwhile Chateau Woltner, made from chardonnay grown at 1,800 feet on Howell Mountain (since budded over to red Bordeaux varieties by the new owners, Ladera Vineyards) were lean, acidic, lovely expressions of chardonnay fruit. Chateau Woltner's Chards could have fooled more than one savvy enophile into thinking they were drinking Chablis.
For that matter, so can Stony Hill. Its mountain site is fortuitous, Chelini says, because “while the soil is well-drained, it also seems to hold enough moisture so we don't have to irrigate. We don't get tropical fruit flavors up here. Our characteristics are apple and pear with an earthy, flinty minerality.”
At Ridge Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 100-plus miles south of Stony Hill and the Napa Valley, things are done a bit differently. Founder/ winemaker Paul Draper has been making Monte Bello Estate Chardonnay and Santa Cruz Mountains Estate Chardonnay here since 1962, but not in an unoaked, Chablis-like style. “We use whole cluster pressing and the juice goes to barrel for the primary fermentation, and they go through a natural malolactic fermentation. We stir the lees weekly through April.”
The elevated vineyard site, between 1,900 and 2,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean (which literally laps at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains), yields crisp acidity and an intense minerality. Draper achieves a lovely, apple-pear-lemon fruit profile and relatively full body.
The wines are tasted and apportioned and then blended for either the Monte Bello, which Draper says is the more complex wine, or the Santa Cruz Mountain Estate wine. They then go back to barrel for an additional 15 to 17 months of age before bottling. Between 1,000 and 1,500 cases of the Santa Cruz Mountains Estate are made annually and, in years that nature cooperates, anywhere from 400 to 1,000 cases of the Monte Bello (Draper skipped 2001 and 2005 in recent vintages).
Given their lees contact and time in the barrel, both Chardonnays are richer than the flinty Stony Hill. Draper notes that British wine writer Hugh Johnson has compared the Ridge Chards to those of Meursault, part of the Cote d'Or. Meursaults are known for their deep chardonnay flavors and buttery and oaky characteristics; they can be insistent and even aggressive. Because Ridge Chards are more pure and refined, “Meursault-light” might be a more apt descriptor.
The beautiful Chardonnays once made by Kerry Damskey from the Gauer Ranch plantings high in the mountains near Geyser Peak in northern Sonoma County were also quite refined. The 5,100-acre ranch was sold to Jess Jackson in 1995 and recently renamed the Alexander Mountain Estate. It is currently planted to 235 individual vineyard blocks totaling 900 acres sited at heights between 400 and 2,400 feet with multiple exposures.
The wines grown here are crafted by the estimable Graham Weerts and marketed under the Stonestreet label. A tour of the property conducted by Weerts over rutted dirt roads reveals that most of this mountain estate is kept in virgin open space with ancient oaks, towering redwoods, streambeds and meadows, essential habitats that are home to animals such as cougar and wild boar. The views afforded from the mountaintops are spectacular; when facing west, most of Sonoma County unfolds below. It's a thrilling perspective. Equally thrilling are the Chardonnays produced up here.
After gaining a sense of the place, we sit down to taste through Stonestreet's 2007 Chardonnays. As a whole, the vintage was exceptional, with cool, steady temperatures and no blazing heat spikes until late in the season when harvest was commencing.
“The vines have super-low yields because of the poor soil, and smaller crops intensify everything,” Weerts says. “There's a purity of sunlight up here — some call it actinic. It acts not only on the leaves, but also on the flavor components of the skins. You get thick skins up here, and they can be high in phenolics,” he continues. “If we pressed the grapes hard, we'd get too much phenolic compounds, such as tannin, and the wines would be out of balance. So we take the free-run juice and press very, very lightly. That gives us the freshest juice, which makes the nicest wines.”
Weerts notes that only the 2007 Alexander Mountain Estate Chardonnay is fermented partially in barrel (80 percent) and partially in tanks with a mixture of wild and commercial yeast strains. The single vineyard Chards, however, see wild yeast and barrels exclusively. They all go through 100 percent malolactic fermentation.
We tune up with the Alexander Mountain Estate, blended from eight lots made from many vineyard blocks. It is firm and focused with a crisp, mountain-grown Chardonnay acidity that is immediately evident on the palate along with a strong minerality, yet the fruit flavors are also fleshy with notes of pear and honeysuckle. Much of its complexity can be attributed to the multiple exposures and elevations the various blocks enjoy from all points of the Alexander Mountain compass.
Next up are four mountain vineyard designates: Red Point, Broken Road, Gravel Bench and Upper Barn, in that order. The four-acre Red Point is sited below the fog line between 850 and 1,000 feet, which allows overnight and morning fogs to cool the vines and promote slow ripening. The result is a juicy, fruity balanced Chardonnay.
More flinty is the Broken Road bottling, named for a place where seismic activity — of which there is a lot in the Mayacamas — has literally broken the road. The vineyard is sited on six acres at 1,800 feet with a southwest aspect that keeps the sunlight pouring in all day and into early evening, and the wine minerally with lively acidity and a long finish.
Comprised of two acres at 1,500 feet, Gravel Bench yields a superbly textured Chardonnay with a big mouth-feel, yet its fruit is elegantly subdued with a refined mineral core.
Upper Barn's seven acres, planted 27 years ago at 1,800 feet on a rocky ridgetop with shallow clay loam soil, produces Chardonnay of outstanding purity and integration. It offers light, clean aromas of citrus blossom and flavors of lemon and nectarine. The vines are in the prime of their bearing years, but because of the stressful site and wide spacing (454 vines per acre) only 385 cases of Upper Barn are made annually. Some of the fruit also goes into the Alexander Mountain Estate, and some is sold to Peter Michael for its distinguished Mon Plaisir bottling.
Weerts does not claim that mountain-grown Chardonnay is better than those grown at lower elevations. “Both can be good,” he hedges. “But our wines from up here are very individualistic. Because of the elevation, the acidity stays high and the wines stay fresher and brighter.”
Of course, the higher the site, the more unconventional the growing conditions. Manchester Ridge Vineyard sits at 2,000 feet, which La Follette notes, is above the fog line. “We get early bud break — [sometimes] as early as late February. But it's cool because we're just three miles inland from the ocean, [so] the shoots grow very, very slowly.” At these heights, not as much leaf area is produced, either, when compared with vines grown in warmer, less elevated locations.
“Less leaf area [promotes] sugar storage in the berries because the leaves are much more efficient [and] the vine makes less photosynthate.” This means the vines focus their energy on reproduction, and their reproductive organs are grapes.
Supercharged chardonnay grapes such as these have more to give. “With the 2006, the first thing that hits you is the floral perfume [of] exotic flowers and Asian spice, white peach, pear and fresh Gravenstein apple, and apricots. We got some botrytis that year. [Botrytis, the noble rot, concentrates the juice and imparts flavors of apricot to grapes it affects.] In the mouth, it's more Gravenstein apple, pear — but Anjou pear. It has a long finish. The late, lingering, retronasal components are all floral,” he notes.
Now I know all the reasons why La Follette's Tandem 2006 Manchester Ridge Chardonnay is such a knock-out, and why trekking up the less-traveled Chardonnay road practically guarantees one will strike mountain paydirt.
Sonoma-based Contributing Editor Jeff Cox is the author of From Vines to Wines, Cellaring Wine and The Organic Cook's Bible.
