Amazon.com: A Vintner's Guide to Red Wine: What to Buy and What to Drink in the Year 2000 (9780671011437): Joy Sterling: Books

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1999

Respected Sonoma County vintner Joy Sterling brings wine lovers an up-to-the-minute guide to the best wines to buy and drink in 2000. Applying her expertise to the gamut of wine issues -- including her favorite vineyards, choice vintages, what to drink now, what foods and wines make the best combinations, and why red wine is considered a hip and healthy drink right now -- Sterling goes a step beyond traditional wine writers in an informative guide that is also a celebration of drinking, eating, and living well.

#outer_postBodyPS { display: none; } #psGradient { display: none; } #psPlaceHolder { display: none; } #psExpand { display: none; } Respected Sonoma County vintner Joy Sterling brings wine lovers an up-to-the-minute guide to the best wines to buy and drink in 2000. Applying her expertise to the gamut of wine issues -- including her favorite vineyards, choice vintages, what to drink now, what foods and wines make the best combinations, and why red wine is considered a hip and healthy drink right now -- Sterling goes a step beyond traditional wine writers in an informative guide that is also a celebration of drinking, eating, and living well.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"I hope this book makes you thirsty." With these words, Joy Sterling, director of sales, marketing, and public relations at the family business, Sonoma County's Iron Horse Vineyards--concludes her introduction to A Vintner's Guide to Red Wine, her unabashedly opinionated, gossipy, not-even-close-to-all-inclusive, Sonoma-centric celebration of vin rouge. If you've ever seen her work the room at an Iron Horse winemaker's dinner, you'll see how her spirit translates to the pages of this purse-sized volume. It's like a package bus tour through New World claret country with chapters on Cabernet, Pinot, Merlot, Zinfandel, Syrah, with a Cal-Ital catch-all, and--as close as she comes to white wine--a few pages on Rosé and Blanc de Noir sparkling (which both require red grapes). The book has the unfortunate subtitle What to Buy and What to Drink in the Year 2000, making it sound like one of those Y2K panic inducers.

But fear not: it's no guide to the booths at the Pinot Preparedness Expo. With a family belief that "the simpler the meal, the better the wine" should be, Sterling guides you through her 'hood, where you'll meet the neighbors--folks like Justin Meyer at Silver Oak. He makes one of California's most expensive Cabernets; he's also a former monk who once took a vow of poverty. You'll meet Burt Williams and Ed Selyem, makers of arguably the most sought-after Pinot Noir of the 1990s. In 1998, with no vineyards and only a corrugated shed with a plug-in radio, they cashed out for $9 million. Each varietal chapter ends with personal (and wonderfully biased) recommendations, a vintage chart (though some, like that for syrah, are woefully incomplete), and suggestions for food and wine pairings that are sometimes less than useful ("Complex Merlots are a flop with Asian cuisine"). Most wines--red or white--are. Pacific Northwest readers might feel a little besieged by the misspellings of Quilceda Creek and McMinnville, Oregon. But for anybody who has tasted their way through Sonoma, Napa, or the Central Coast, there's a lot to like in A Vintner's Guide to Red Wine. As Sterling says early on, "Winemakers are like novelists--individual voices telling a story." Thirsty or not, you'll find her story deliciously quaffable. --Tony Mason

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

California Cabernet

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

Cabernet Sauvignon is California's best red grape. It's what we're known for, it's the most widely planted, and it fetches the highest dollar. Cabernet is still king; I don't think Merlot or Zinfandel, though highly fashionable, are in any position to knock Cabernet off its pedestal just yet.

Reputations may nudge forward or drop back periodically, but there are at least 50 -- maybe even 100 -- genius, highly individualistic, opinionated California Cabernet producers, all vying to do the same thing -- make great wine.

The one category that's difficult to fill is the $10 and under. For that, you have to turn to Chile, Australia, Italy, and southern France. Fifteen dollars will buy "pretty good" California Cabernet, which in the context of the history of wine is an exceedingly high standard. But you can walk into a wine store and, for $20 and over, see an entire wall of choices, which are not just good but very good to outstanding. The difference is that each of these will have something -- some distinguishing characteristic, story, or personality -- that makes it special.

Cabernet is a young grape compared with an ancient variety like Syrah, as it dates back to only the seventeenth century. The scientists, using DNA analysis, say it's a surprising, but lucky, natural cross between Cabernet Franc -- a red-wine grape, and Sauvignon Blanc, which is white. The eighteenth century was its heyday in Bordeaux -- remember, Thomas Jefferson's favorite Château was Lafite, or "la Fite," as he spelled it. It remained dominant in Bordeaux until the end of the nineteenth century, when it was supplanted by Merlot because Merlot is less susceptible to shatter, a serious practical problem in a region prone to humidity and spring rain.

California became famous for its Cabernets in the 1890s. We were the up-and-coming wine-producing area of the world, as highly regarded internationally then as we are today. One of the most famous wineries of the time was La Questa, known especially for Cabernet Sauvignon, which naturally wowed the rest of the wine-drinking world with its gorgeous, vibrant, exuberant California fruit. Now, almost everyone in California makes at least one -- if not two or three -- different labels each year -- counting special bottlings, reserve wines, and second labels, amounting to at least 1,000 different labels in the state.

It seems absurd to me to have to pick any one favorite. Why not try them all? I'm very fickle. My recommendations show a clear bias for a particular style, but my favorites today won't be my favorites next month.

Nonetheless, there's something macho about Cabernet that seems to bring out the competitive streak in most people, making them less concerned about nuance, as with, say, Pinot Noir, and more interested in just who's the best.

One standard is the now famous 1976 Paris tasting, which woke the whole world to California wine when a panel of distinguished French tasters, to their everlasting embarrassment, preferred 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars over 1970 Château Mouton-Rothschild, forever dispelling the dogma of French superiority and showing rather publicly that even the most sophisticated palates can confuse Bordeaux and California in blind tastings.

Another hierarchy is set at the rare-wine auctions. The three dominant wines are Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Caymus Vineyards Special Selection, and Heitz Martha's Vineyard. Only one Sonoma wine does well in this arena -- Silver Oak Cellars' bottling from the Alexander Valley.

You can't talk about California Cabernet without acknowledging Mondavi. There's a tendency to think Mondavi has become too corporate to be good anymore. They now produce over 6 million cases of wine a year, most of which is made at their Woodbridge winery in Lodi. But the Mondavi and Mondavi Reserve Cabernets are Napa Valley classics and hold up very well with the times.

Jordan Vineyard & Winery staked its claim in the metamorphosis of California Cabernet as the progenitor of soft, pleasing, easy-to-drink reds. The philosophy behind this wine was to be as comfortable as an old sweater. This is one of the reasons why it dominated the market for so long. Now almost everyone is making wonderfully delicious Cabernet to drink the day it is purchased, though Jordan still has "the name."

In the realm of current releases, the most expensive are Caymus Special Selection at $135 a bottle, followed by Groth Reserve at $130, Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Cask 23 at $120, Diamond Creek Vineyards, $100, and Opus One, $100.

Diamond Creek is perhaps the polar opposite of "my" style of Cabernet. I describe it as orthodox Napa-style Cabernet, which comes across as a clenched fist with biting tannins that taste like a green persimmon. The fascination of Diamond Creek is the intensity of fruit with all that tannin, which eventually yields a remarkable wine, albeit in the big, old-fashioned style -- if you are willing to wait for perhaps 10 years. Most winemakers have taken the opposite track, trying to create Cabernets that are more approachable in their youth, but not proprietor Al Brounstein. And as much as his three distinct vineyards -- Red Rock Terrace, Gravelly Meadows, and Volcanic Hill -- show through in the wine, I think that part of what you're tasting in the wine is in fact his sheer willpower, represented in the tannins.

My pick of all the really famous names is Silver Oak Cellars -- partially because it is owned by Justin Meyer, who was a Christian Brothers monk who had taken a vow of poverty and left the order with absolutely nothing to make his own wine, disproving the myth that wineries are all owned by people who earned their money doing something else.

A second distinguishing feature of Silver Oak Cabernet is that it is aged in 100 percent American oak. Justin feels that the value of French oak at twice the price of American is purely public relations. I happen to disagree. I think American oak imparts a strong, distinct, sweet flavor, but it's fascinating to hear an opposite view. Justin also makes a Napa Cabernet in the same luscious, full style but with a bit more earthiness.

I know the most about the Alexander Valley because that's where T-bar-T, Forrest's vineyard, is located. It lies one ridge over from Napa and is slightly cooler than Napa because it's on the ocean side of the mountains, catching a cool breeze off the Pacific, producing elegant wines with a distinctive bright fruit character -- like blackberries, black cherries, and plums -- not heavy, but vivacious and delicious for early drinking, with what we call soft tannins, which practically melt on your tongue.

The best Cabernet vineyards in the Alexander Valley dot the rocky, poor, well-drained benchlands in the northeast corner of the valley in the neighborhood of Geyser Peak Winery and Murphy-Goode. Kendall-Jackson Vineyards and Winery, Ferrari-Carano Vineyards & Winery, and E & J Gallo have recently planted hillside vineyards in this part of the valley. Jess Jackson bought the old Gauer Ranch, which my husband, Forrest, used to ride across when he was a kid. These vineyards are young but will produce great wines in the years to come.

Jordan Vineyard & Winery lies to the west, Alexander Valley Vineyards is on the eastern rim, and most of Simi Winery's holdings are in the south, on the cusp of Chalk Hill.

I have always had a strong feeling for Simi because of its history. It has a tradition of being run by women, from Mrs. Haig, who held on during the tough times of the 1940s and '50s, to Zelma Long, considered a winemaker's winemaker because of all the experimentation especially in the vineyards, which she spearheaded in the 1980s. Now the winemaking is evolving under winemaker Nick Goldschmidt to become suppler and more focused.

I'm also very in