A promising future for Napa Pinot Noir

The St Helena Star and Napa Vintner Tasting Panel find 2009 and 2010 Napa Valley Pinot Noirs show more consistency than previous vintages.

It is almost as if Pinot Noir should be included along with politics, religion and sex as subjects to avoid in dinner conversation. People can get a little heated when talking about their favourite style of Pinot Noir.

Burgundy followers consistently pitch for the three great E’s: ethereal, elegant and earthy. New Zealand Otago fans give great claim to deeper colour and denser wines, and their close kin, who love all things Cabernet Sauvignon, cry out for Pinot Noir with more fruit, more richness, more colour, just more.

Napa Valley has for long been a melting pot of Pinot Noir styles, creating everything from opaque and super extracted to pale ruby and earthy wines.

While the varied styles still exist in Napa Valley, a recent tasting of the 2009 and 2010 vintages by the St Helena Star and Napa Vintner Tasting Panel showed more consistency than in the past several vintages.

A noticeable number of the wines were deeper coloured, concentrated, full of intense ripe red fruits, medium acid at best, and medium to heavy oak influence. Four flights of six wines were tasted blind, with the first two flights being 2009, and the final two, 2010s.

While panelists found several they would want to take home and enjoy with dinner, numerous panelists admitted a preference for more elegant Pinot Noirs – those with lively and refreshing acidity and a gentler hand with extraction and oak use.

Three of the top four wines of the tasting were from the Carneros region, which sits just north of the San Pablo Bay and is cooled by ocean breezes and fog. Many of Napa Valley’s best Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyards are here.

Look through the following pages to find the preferred wines from the many that the panel tasted.

The top wine of the first flight, the Artesa Vineyards & Winery Estate Reserve Pinot Noir 2009 Napa Valley (Carneros, $40) stood out as having fresh acidity along with its other components.

Winemaker Mark Beringer let the grapes cold soak in stainless steel for five days, extracting colour and flavour, and then aged the wine for 10 months in French oak, 40% of that new.

This Carneros winery has long Spanish roots. Its owners put cava on the map in the 16th century with the Codorniu brand. There were back and forth name changes from Codorniu to Raventos when Anna Codorniu married Miguel Raventos, but this family-owned business became the exclusive supplier to Spanish royalty.

When the family decided to add operations in the Napa Valley, they opened Codorniu Napa. The name was later changed to Artesa, which means “handcrafted” in the Catalan dialect.

The top wines of the three other flights were:

The Domaine Chandon Pinot Noir 2009 Carneros ($35) which was aged for 17 months in all-French oak, 33% of that new.

France’s Moët family also ran with the big fish, as the Raventos did in Spain. The Moëts supplied sparkling wine to the likes of Napoleon, Tsar Alexander II of Russia and Francis the II of Austria.

M. Chandon joined the company, and when roots were set in Napa, the sparkling house was named Domaine Chandon.

Originally, Chandon produced still wines as an educational tool only. The wine making team used them to learn about the individual varieties. (We can assume they liked what they tasted with the Pinot Noir.)

Trefethen Family Vineyards Pinot Noir 2010 Oak Knoll ($48). The Oak Knoll district is at the southern—and purportedly cooler-end of Napa. The Trefethen Pinot Noir is aged for nine months in French oak.

The wine shows lots of oak spices, plenty of red cherry, herb and dried rose flavours. The winery generally has a lighter hand with extraction than other Napa Valley wineries, given the families’ affinity for food pairings.

They are real foodies. After finding no fine restaurants in Napa when they moved to the region in the 1960s, Janet Trefethen started the area’s first cooking school.

Chefs were invited to cook dishes that paired with the wines of numerous local vintners.

The final wine is noticeably more concentrated: the Robert Mondavi Winery Reserve Pinot Noir 2010 Carneros ($60). A cold soak of several days took place (30% of the grapes were whole cluster fermented) and then the wine was put into 100% new French oak and matured for 12 months.

Eighty-two percent of the grapes come from Rancho Carneros which was planted back in 1970.

The rest comes from Hyde Vineyards which was planted in 1979. These older vines are said to be one of the reasons for the complexity found in this Pinot Noir.

It was good to see a Robert Mondavi among the top wines. With Robert Mondavi’s stature as a Napa Valley hero – the one-man marketing army that won the war for California wine – the man sometimes outshines the wine.

Watching future vintages will be interesting. Will Napa Valley’s Pinot Noir wines remain in this generously extracted and oaked style?