This week, we interrupt ongoing coverage of the wildfires and the pandemic to bring you a good, old-fashioned wine story.
Specifically, a story about Petite Sirah. My most recent column is about Mountain Tides Wine Co., a young wine label that makes Petite Sirah exclusively, interpreting this unpopular grape variety through a fresh, original perspective. Winemaker Scott Kirkpatrick told me that he’d always seen Petite Sirah as pigeonholed into a “take everything as big as it can go” corner: a wine with a dense mouthfeel, tooth-staining color and belligerent tannins. The Mountain Tides wines, on the other hand, take a gentler approach. Think of it as Petite meets Pinot Noir.
Working on that piece got me thinking about the concept of “varietal correctness” or “typicity” — the idea that a wine ought to express the standard characteristics of its grape variety. Like many wine concepts, it’s a French import, known as typicité there. Typicité is an important construct for France’s wine appellation system, which dictates which types of wines can be made in which geographic areas. Chablis should taste like Chablis, Cote-Rotie like Cote-Rotie.
Typicity may sound like a philosophical concept — a “how should a wine be?” kind of thing — but it has very practical applications, too. Jennifer Fiedler put it well in a 2014 article for Punch: “Typicity is sort of like genres in music, such as country, metal or R&B — semi-artificial, yet commercially useful definitions that sketch out what a consumer should expect from the product.” Ideally, typicity helps people buy wines with some degree of confidence.
Lately, though, it’s become fashionable in California to throw varietal typicity to the wind. I’ve written extensively about the new wave of California winemakers who are fashioning all sorts of red grape varieties, like Mourvedre and Grenache, into something that more closely resembles Gamay. Sonoma County winemaker Martha Stoumen has gone so far as to name one of her wines “Varietally Incorrect Zinfandel”; it’s fermented with whole grape clusters, and is lower in alcohol than a “typical” Zin.
Under this new archetype, style trumps typicity. A winemaker makes a wine that falls into line with a specific vision they have, willfully bending the widely held notions about what the grape variety should express.
Mountain Tides’ Petite Sirahs present an interesting case study here. On the one hand, these are wines that fly in the face of “typical” Petite Sirah, because they’re lighter-bodied than most. On the other hand, I still found within them some of the classic Petite Sirah markers, like a distinctive aroma of violets and flavor of blackberries.
I’m often excited to taste new takes on familiar grape varieties, and it’s easy, as a writer, to give the revolutionaries top billing. I love many of the examples of incorrect varietals I’ve drunk in the last few years.
But these days I am also reengaging with the thrill of the typical. I’m brought back to the big, brazen Petite Sirahs that have stained my teeth in the past, including from wineries like Robert Biale, Preston, Carlisle, Halcon, Ridge and Theopolis. Maybe it’s all the chaos in the world right now, driving us toward comfort and nostalgia, but I appreciate how these wines pull at my taste memories, sparking the excitement of recognition.
In other news
• I wrote about the “cowboy” firefighting efforts of vintners and residents in Napa County, who helped fend off the LNU Lightning Complex fires by bulldozing their own fire lines.
• Food businesses keep adapting in new ways to life under the COVID-19 shutdown, and 20th Century Café in San Francisco is no exception. The Central European-inspired bakery has opened a wine shop inside, and now I’m dying to get over there to buy some bottles and one of its unbelievable Russian honey cakes.
Also ...
By popular demand, we’re bringing you another edition of Drinking at Home with Esther! Get ready to raid your pantry and open some bottles with me on Sept. 9 over Zoom. Chronicle subscribers can register here for the wine-and-food pairing party.
Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob
September 03, 2020 at 06:00PM
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What does it mean for a wine to taste like it's 'supposed to'? - San Francisco Chronicle
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