Could Sonoma’s 2021 Outshine Napa? Plus Artful Aussie Timepieces: Weekly Tasting Report (Nov 15-21)

All the excitement about the quality of the 2021 vintage in Napa Valley sent James earlier than normal to Northern California, and he is just about done with his two-week visit. He will be back in mid-January.

He thinks the vintage produced some exceptional wines that may outshine those from the outstanding 2018 and 2019 vintages. This is both for whites, meaning mostly chardonnay, and reds such as cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot and malbec as well as various blends of all of them in different degrees.

“And don’t forget pinot noir!” James emphasized this week.

Check the pinot noirs in this weekly report, especially from Sonoma County. James spent time tasting many of the top names that he didn’t taste earlier in the year, and there are some sensational wines from such revered wineries as Flowers, Hirsch Vineyards, Kosta Browne, Paul Hobbs, Wayfarer and Williams Selyem.  Plus, there are a number of smaller producers in this report to be discovered, including Chateau Boswell, Freeman Vineyard & Winery, Marimar Estate and Senses.

“I am quite impressed with the 2021,” said Williams Selyem winemaker Jeff Mangahas. “They have the fruit, the tannins, the concentration, and they are as indicative of the place more than ever, which is really cool, rather than marked by the vintage.”

Added Jasmine Hirsch of Hirsch Vineyards, “You have concentration, structure, detail, expression-ness, and terroir. The wines express themselves. That makes it so special to us.”

Indeed, she made a single-vineyard, 100-point wine: the Hirsch Vineyards Pinot Noir Sonoma County Sonoma Coast Raschen Ridge 2021. It is a superlative wine at all levels, with fantastic precision and depth. There’s a real sense of umami from the proximity to the sea. Check out all her wines in this report.

James spent a day with Hirsch and about a dozen other winemakers from the West Sonoma Coast Vintners association (WSCV) and focused on 2021 pinot noirs and chardonnays, including wines from Ernest Vineyards, Red Car, Flowers, Senses, Wayfarer, Freeman, Stressed Vines Cellars, Gros Ventre Cellars, Balletto, Small Vines, Black Kite Cellars, Marine Layer and Whistler. The tasting was held at Flowers Winery.

“It’s all about being precise,” Flowers winemaker Chantal Forthun said of the 2021 vintage. “It is a level up over 2019. There is more precision and purity. There is more of everything!”

A few days before the WSCV tasting, James met with Allison Nunnikhoven from Chateau Boswell Winery, who made some formidable old-vine chardonnays from Sonoma. And he was extremely enthusiastic about the wines made mostly from old derivatives of the Wente clone. Some vineyards date back to the 1960s. Boswell is better known for Napa cabs, but its Sonoma chards should be sought out even though their production may be as small as a few dozen cases.

“2021s are such structured wines,” Nunnikhoven said. “They are going to need more time. I think it will be better than 2013. They have much more structure and they are more sophisticated and much more interesting to taste. They are going to be long lived. But in the end, we are making wine that we like to drink.”

TRANSCENDENT LAKE'S FOLLY 

Australia’s iconic wines are well known. The likes of Mount Mary, Leeuwin Estate, Cullen and Yarra Yering are firmly entrenched within the pantheon of classics, while producers of contemporary styles of grenache are beginning to take top rank among the country’s most exciting expressions. However, distant from the hullabaloo, Lake’s Folly transcends the shuffle for fashionability. The estate is responsible for artful timepieces that shatter preconceptions of a humid region renowned for tensile semillon and earthen shiraz, over detailed cabernet blends that rival even the finest Pauillac in terms of longevity, grace and complexity.

Lake’s Folly is situated in Pokolbin, around 168 kilometers northwest of Sydney.  The estate, an inauspicious A-frame winery set in relief against ochre volcanic loams, was founded in 1963 by Max Lake. Lake was a food scientist who strove to craft age-worthy wines of class and restraint, more European of mien than obviously New World and fruity.

Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW visited the estate recently to celebrate its 60th anniversary and tasted a judicious selection of new and aged wines with winemaker Rodney Kempe, a Hunter Valley local who plies his craft with an understated groove, producing a suite of thoroughly compelling wines.

Kempe crafts two chardonnay, one from heavier soils that abut the entrance to the winery and the other, the Hill Block, from a better draining site higher up. Neither is necessarily superior to the other, although the regular cuvee may benefit from the lower site’s water retention faculties in drier vintages. The Hill Block Chardonnay 2011 is a stunning wine, with Kempe calling it “the finest white I’ve crafted.”

Without the benefit of bottle age, the Hill Block Chardonnay 2021 goes head-to-head, with its aromas of  pistachio, sea salt and nectarine making for real intrigue. When Ned suggested that the regular Chardonnay 2011 bared a strong resemblance to aged Hunter semillon, Kempe commented that “in time, white wines from the Hunter become resoundingly ‘Hunter’ rather than representative, necessarily, of their variety.”

However, it was the blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, petit verdot and shiraz, known for whatever idiosyncratic reason as ‘The Cabernets,” that was the real drawcard at Lake’s Folly. Ned tasted a barrel sample of 2023, a vintage with a warm, dry flourish after ample rainfall through the winter and into spring. While adolescent, the fruit is subtle and on point, while the structural latticework is a typically taut, chiffon weave of refined tannins and salty freshness.

However, it was The Cabernets 1997 that stole the show, going beyond even Pauillacs in terms of its iodine quotient, and brimming with marine essences and dried kelp. It was like being belted by rain and wash on a seashore.

While umami is unquantifiable, this brilliant wine is surely full of it. A few cork-afflicted bottles, however, proved the adage that there is no such as good wine, but only good bottles. The one served at lunch was a ripper!

READ MORE MCLAREN VALE AND BAROSSA: PURSUING THE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

BUCKING TRADITION

The Wachau in Austria's Danube Valley is an extremely traditional wine region where new wineries and new wines are a rarity. That makes the wines from the Grabenwerkstatt winery, founded in 2014, all the more impressive.

All six of the Grabenwerkstatt wines Senior Editor Stuart Pigott tasted were excellent examples of their respective categories, the standout being the strikingly original Grabenwerkstatt Riesling Wachau Ried Bruck 2022, with its cool herbal, pineapple and white peach aromas and a very long, wet stone finish, beautifully supported by fine tannins. The steep, terraced Ried Bruck is one of the top sites of the  Spitzer Graben, a side valley of the Danube with a cool climate.

These wines are the work of Franz Hofbauer, a native of the Wachau, and Michael Linke from the Pfalz wine region in Germany. They met while working at Pyramid Valley Vineyards in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. Their passion for organic viticulture was nurtured by the late Pyramid Valley winemaker Mike Weersing, who died in 2020.

– James Suckling, Ned Goodwin MW and Stuart Pigott contributed reporting.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.