The Good and the Bad of Sonoma: 400-Plus Wines Rated
James and Jack Suckling taste in Knights Valley Sonoma at Verite.
I took our tasting team’s search for wines of balance, purity and distinction to California’s Sonoma County recently and tasted predominantly pinot noir and chardonnay from a host of leading and newer producers, as well as a handful of other styles encompassing chenin, sauvignon, cabernet and syrah. Overall, news is once again good, especially for Sonoma pinot noir lovers, but first a look at the most recent vintages we cover here.
Our last report on this region posted mostly about the 2015 and 2014 vintages but this time around we tasted more than 400 wines predominantly from the 2016 and 2017 vintages. The 2016 vintage started out with the coolest spring since 2012, a decent fruit set and then a late increase in cluster size with some mid-summer fog that brought some disease pressure to bear in the vineyard. Picking was spread out in many cases for more than a month. This made wines more balanced and refined than 2015 with a hot and short grape growing season.
The story of 2017 is that of intense heat, to the point of intensity and mayhem, not to mention the terrible fires of October. On the one hand, winemakers were forced to pick when the heat won the battle and parcels in lower vigor sites simply could not survive, on the other hand there were parcels that could be left out to recover when the change in weather appeared on the horizon not counting the wildfires. It is clearly the most difficult vintage ever for Sonoma and happily there are many good outcomes in the face of all this adversity.
The early impression of 2018 looks to be a vintage delivering good yields of healthy fruit and those that shaped their quality with astute crop dropping will be well placed to deliver exciting wines. Healthy skins will underpin depth and concentration in pinot noir and a slow and even path to harvest has offered the potential to deliver noble tannins. “Sorting losses were almost nothing,” said Ted Lemon of Littorai, “and the health seen in the vineyard translated into the winery. The vintage will end up being about how serious people were about dropping fruit.”
Nick Stock & Ted Lemon checking out the vineyard in October.
Now to the wines. If pinot is the hero for Sonoma, then chardonnay at times plays the role of villain due to the abundance of boring market-driven wines. Thankfully, pinot noir defines the region’s success and this is largely going to be a good story for the foreseeable future. The diversity of pinot styles seen across Sonoma’s various appellations generally align in a high water mark of high quality. A range of pinot styles, from fuller and fleshy to more elegant and finessed pinot noir, can still deliver largely consistent quality.
Cabernet rocks in Knights Valley as always with Peter Michel and Verite (some older wines James tasted in February are listed in the report) leading the way but parts of Alexander Valley are delivering some solid reds from the grape as well as others including even malbec. We are excited about the prospects of more top reds from non-pinot grapes from Sonoma in the future.
Chardonnay is a different story, swaying much wider in terms of both style and direction Blind tasting through line-ups of chardonnay is a wild ride in Sonoma. Indeed many producers here continue to celebrate the potential to take chardonnay to golden heights of buttery (and at times oily) richness. I wonder about these wines. Are they the vintage hot rods of the wine world with big wheels and loud paint jobs, wildly thrilling to a dedicated audience and a passing amusement to many others?
These super-sized chardonnay wines don’t really exist outside of the United States and fly in direct contrast to the characters that define great white Burgundy, the slew of modern and sleek Australian chardonnays and even those of remote New Zealand. This boldly ripe style is a unique stylistic choice of California winemaking culture, and it clearly has its audience. But ultra-rich, butter-ball chardonnay can be made anywhere the sun will shine and it says little about location or terroir. There’s no unique moment, no connection to place.
Richness in chardonnay can be thrilling, as long as it delivers balance and distinctiveness. It can be impressive, expressive and artfully interpreted but, just as a great gymnast will demonstrate, the dismount or finish must be precise and on point. The chardonnays of Aubert are the best at harnessing richness whilst executing balance and focus where many others blur the lines of definition and miss the mark of harmony. Aubert’s chardonnays are wines with irresistible appeal and show that, with an experienced and astute approach, richer chardonnay can be delivered in Sonoma with the same thrilling balance seen in Grand Cru White Burgundy.
A very different wine tasted from Peter Michael also showed that the same double act of richness, weight and refinement is indeed possible with sauvignon blanc as the lead varietal here in Sonoma. The 2017 l’Aprés Midi, a blend of 90percent sauvignon blanc and 10percent semillon. is described by James as “a dead-ringer for top white Bordeaux such as Smith Haut Lafite.” I talked to their winemaker Nicolas Morlet and he explained that feathering the edge of balance whilst delivering deeply flavorful white wines is what he really rejoices in as a winemaker here, “exploring the potential for thrilling white wines with uplifting character.”
Pinot Noir ready for tasting at Littorai.
The top wines in this report read like a title bout between Littorai and Aubert. Just as James reported last year, the most consistent show of pinot noir came from the cellar of Ted Lemon at Littorai and the most impressive heights of chardonnay’s double act of grandeur and balance came from Mark Aubert. Lemon’s radar is firmly fixed to that of site and terroir and his ability to tune in close to the signal, whether via chardonnay or pinot noir, is unmatched. His style of chardonnay differs from Aubert though, delivering a more steely resolve and dialled back fruit presence.
“Aubert’s chardonnays are wines with irresistible appeal and show that, with an experienced and astute approach, richer chardonnay can be delivered in Sonoma with the same thrilling balance seen in Grand Cru White Burgundy.”
The 2017 Aubert UV-SL Chardonnay was tasted by James from barrel and looks set to be a super star of the harvest with “extraordinary depth and power” whilst the 2017 Aubert Powder House Estate Chardonnay he describes as “a very flashy white … with so much intensity at the end.” The 2017 Aubert CIX Estate Chardonnay is the richest of Aubert’s stellar offerings and a wine that James described as “very deep … with fabulous depth and power.”
Littorai’s 2016 chardonnays strike the same heights of quality with very differently engineered structure and style. The Tributary Vineyard bottling from 2016 is “super restrained with concentration and elegance,” and delivers “delicate yet powerful style.” The 2016 B.A. Thieriot Vineyard Chardonnay has a “compact palate that has a scintillatingly focused, chiseled and vibrant fruit core.” It is a chardonnay that needs time where so many others are full of immediately appealing hedonistic fruit. This is “restrained and tightly coiled.”
The top pinot slot in this report belongs to Littorai’s complex, sophisticated 2016 The Haven Vineyard bottling. Where the very essence of site characters are faithfully traced in more singular and highly distinguished style, The Haven Vineyard delivers a thrillingly symphonic, layered and richly assembled impression. It surmises a vast array of pinot characters seen across the various Littorai bottlings in much the same way that Romanée-Conti does for DRC. I describe the 2016 Haven as “sheer pinot perfection” in that it is so luxuriantly rich and yet precisely composed.
Sonoma Coast pinots are clustered at the top band of quality and scores. Littorai’s 2016 The Pivot Vineyard Pinot Noir has a regal feel to it and delivers in the kind of “effortlessly powerful” style that truly defines great pinot noir. Similarly the 2017 Aubert CIX is a pinot that commands in beautifully muscular style, delivering a tight and compact palate. It is a wine of considerable cellaring potential as much as it impresses now.
Pinot really rises to the challenge of expressiveness in Sonoma and delivers a very convincing level of baseline quality. The styles slide along a the spectrum of effortless richness to brightly appealing fruit purity and accommodate the thirst for simple drinkability as much as they seduce those with more alluringly complex preferences. Pinot lovers can look deep into this report and be spoiled for choice.— Nick Stock, Senior Editor