Sostevinobile wants wines that taste good.
I was just turning off I-280 last night when the radio station announced Budd Schulberg had died. Best known for his Academy Award-winning screenplay for On the Waterfront (“I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender.”), Schulberg was a proud veteran of the Dartmouth Jack-O-Lantern, a publication that also spawned such luminaries as Dr. Seuss and Animal House writer Chris Miller. Not to mention Your West Coast Oenophile and my compatriot for the evening, Jim Lattin, the Robert A. Magowan Professor of Marketing at Stanford Business School.
For those who have heard me rail over the years against the myopia of MBAs (“Mind Becomes Atrophied”) and inveigh against the damage they have inflicted on the true creative spirit, this may seem like the most unholy of alliances, on par with seeing yours truly happily washing down a Big Mac with a glass of Fat Bastard while cranking out a manuscript in Microsoft Word on a Dell laptop. All jest aside, it may well turn out that some of Jim’s young protégés provide the impetus to turn Sostevinobile a brick & mortar reality. It was one of the most opportune meetings I have held in quite some time.
It so happened that we caught up at a quaint wine bar I occasionally frequent on treks to destinations between San Francisco and Legoland (an epithet guaranteed to cull me no favor with Carl Guardino). It so happened that last night, they were holding a special tasting from a small vintner from one of the less-heralded local AVAs. Familiar story. Husband & wife team. Hands-on management. Hand-picked fruit. Sustainable growing practices. Sincere. In short, all the qualities Sostevinobile looks for in a winery.
The wines could not have been more bland.
It does pain me to reject a winery’s efforts outright, although there have been several I have declined to extol among the more than 800 wineries from whom I’ve sampled product over the past 9 months. In keeping with my practice, I simply eschew mentioning these ventures in this blog and relegate them to a Do Not Consider category in my database. Still, it’s important for this readership and for our future clientele to realize that Sostevinobile is highly selective and judicious in the wines we identify for inclusion in our program.
Readers of this blog know that my approach has been simply to identify wines that I find meritorious and include them without delving into extensive descriptions of their character and flavor. I don’t presuppose that how something tastes to me will be how it tastes to someone else. I prefer that people sample the wines I recommend and evaluate them by their own criteria, without the influence of my specifications. Moreover, as a writer, I reject the notion that I can verbalize or assimilate any kind of sensory experience through the deft application of florid prose. But, in deference to Jim’s wish that I expound my insights into my selections, let me try to detail why these wines failed to garner my approval.
We sampled six pourings from the winery in question: four basic varietals, a late harvest dessert wine and a fortified port-style interpretation of one of their varietals. Each could best be categorized as monodimensional, an unambitious expression of the grape with scant vinification employed. It seemed little effort was incorporated to encourage a distinctive expression of the varietal; a rudimentary grow-harvest-crush-ferment-age-bottle approach that precluded the artistry a skilled winemaker to educe a wine that has been memorably crafted. In this case, it seemed the wines had barely evolved from the very pedestrian approach winemakers in the early 1980s slid by on.
To be more specific, we first sampled this winery’s version of Viognier. No oak, stainless steel fermentation, an unadorned expression of this varietal that was almost cloying. Most wineries, of course, are still struggling to define exactly how they want to produce Viognier, and, as a result, there have been enormous vicissitudes in how it has been approached here in California. The heavily-oaked, Chardonnay version rapidly fell out of favor, but it has been apparent for quite some time, that a wholly unmanipulated interpretation of the grape holds little charm, either. The result is that many of the local Viogniers, like the aforementioned vintage satisfy neither as a refreshing, cocktail-style wine nor as a complement to food.
In contrast, this wine bar’s owner offered us a blind sampling of a white from a well-respected, nearby vintner that tasted exquisite —so much so, that I withdrew my initial guess of Viognier and hazardly suggested that it might be a Pinot Grigio. The initial aromas bespoke a fruitiness that I’ve long identified with this grape, but the finish was uncommonly dry—the deft manipulation of a highly -skilled winemaker abundantly evident. Indeed, this particular Viognier echoed the marvelous wines Alban Vineyards produced at the beginning of this millennium, a limited-quality release that became my staple every time I partook of Alex Ong’s Green Papaya Salad at Betelnut. By comparison, the unremarkable Viognier from the visiting winery didn’t stand a chance.
To employ a bit of street vernacular, it is not the function of this blog to dis a particular wine or vintner. I draft these entries in order to lay a foundation for the richness of the wine program Sostevinobile is assembling. In truth, I applaud the efforts of the winery I have been dissecting here. On the surface, at least, they are attempting everything that we vigorously endorse in our winemaking community. But, in the end, it has to come down how the appeal of the wine itself; in other words, how it tastes.
To paraphrase the iconic StarKist tuna commercial, “Sorry, Charlie.”