Peaking in Sonoma and a Fresh Turn in Beaujolais: Weekly Tasting Report (Feb 28-March 5)

We rated 776 wines over the past week, with Argentina, Chile, California, Beaujolais and Australia figuring prominently. Senior Editor Zekun Shuai will have his annual reports on Chile and Argentina ready in the coming weeks, but this week many of our top scorers came from California, where Executive Editor Jim Gordon tasted wines from two unique vineyards, one at high elevation in the Mayacamas Mountains and one next door to the San Pablo Bay.

Jim visited Cornell Estate in the highest part of Sonoma County’s Fountaingrove District, which abuts Napa Valley’s Spring Mountain appellation at 1,800 feet (550 meters) above sea level. Winemaker Elizabeth Tangney poured the current releases and an eight-vintage vertical of cabernet sauvignon (about which there will be a separate report) that culminated in the 2021. Jim called it “a fabulous young wine with a long career ahead,” and advised those with patience to cellar it until at least 2030.

Hyde Vineyard in Carneros, whose vines date to 1979, is the source for virtually all of the wines made by Hyde de Villaine, which is a partnership between the Larry Hyde family of Napa and the Aubert de Villaine family of Burgundy, noted for its share of ownership in Domaine de la Romanee Conti. Hyde-grown chardonnays are among the most celebrated in California, and the new offerings from HdV are especially worthy of the notoriety.

Winemaker Guillaume Boudet served the Hyde de Villaine Chardonnay Napa Valley Carneros Comandante Hyde Vineyard 2021 and its sibling wine, the Chardonnay Napa Valley Carneros Hyde Vineyard 2021. The two received equally rave ratings but contrasted stylistically. The Comandante is made from six barrels of Wente clone vines planted in 1979 and fermented in 30 percent new oak that lends a toasty, spicy hazelnut expression. Jim said it is “not overly bold, but confident, intricate and detailed.” The “regular” Hyde Vineyard chardonnay is a mix of 70 percent Wente clone and 30 percent Calera clone grapes from 30- to 42-year-old vines that brings a wonderful intensity, piling on the fruit and mineral characters, Jim said.

There will be plenty more to come from Napa and Sonoma in the weeks to come, but check out the notes below for more consistently outstanding offerings from both Cornell and Hyde de Villaine.

A FRESH TURN FROM BEAUJOLAIS

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott headed to Beaujolais to visit the region’s top producers and find out how they coped with the hot and dry 2022 vintage. At his very first appointment - with Chateau des Bachelards in Fleurie – Stuart discovered the key to mastering the extreme situation.

“The crucial thing was to look for freshness, which meant getting the harvest date right,“ said Simon Blanchard of Derenoncourt Consultants in Bordeaux, the consultant winemaker for Chateau des Bachelards. During the following days winemakers repeated this sentiment again and again. 

Chateau des Bachelards was one of the producers for whom this strategy brought rich rewards. Their Château des Bachelards Fleurie 2022 has great concentration and vitality, and is one of the stars of the vintage. 2022 is the first vintage for the new team after this property became part of the Terre de Nature group, but the wines won’t be released until late this year.

Meanwhile, Jean-Marc Burgaud in Morgon has a couple of dozen vintages under his belt, but 2022 may be his best ever.

“For me 2022 is better than 2020 because it also has the exceptional ripeness, but better balance,“ he told Stuart. Nowhere is that on better display than in his magnificent Jean-Marc Burgaud Morgon Côte du Py 2022, which is like a vast chasm filled with blackberries. It also has enormous structure.

2022 is also an exceptional vintage for Korean-French winemaker Mee Godard. Beaujolais is often presumed to be a wine for early drinking, but the tannin structure is impressive in every one of her wines, and their aging potential is enormous. She, too, expressed surprise that after the hot dry summer it was possible to make wines that were so fresh.

“The 2022s have a very different style to 2020, and that’s a bit crazy, because the conditions were quite similar,” she said.

Her Domaine Mee Godard Côte du Py Cuvée Passerelle 577 2022 is a crazy good expression of this great site, with deep minerality and a wealth of savory and earthy nuances at the very long finish.

Stuart will be spending the rest of this week in Beaujolais, so watch out for a lot more about the new wines of this beautiful and dynamic region next week.

Before leaving on his Beaujolais trip, Stuart tasted the new releases of the Dautel winery in the region of Wurttemberg, Germany, which is better known as the home of Mercedes Benz. Stuart first got to know winemaker Christian Dautel in 2009, when Dautel was completing his studies at the Geisenheim wine university.

Since he returned home, his wines have steadily gained in both character and finesse. Those are exactly the qualities that the region’s primarily red wines most often lacked. Back then they were too often robust, but rough at the edges.

For Stuart, the Dautel Spätburgunder Württemberg Forstberg  GG 2020 is the most complex and exciting pinot noir made to date in this region, and it conclusively proves that the grape has a great future here. With its notes of violets and gunpowder, it is totally distinctive, and they are packed into a sleek and super-focused package that reflects this high-altitude site.

The Dautel Riesling Württemberg Wurmberg EL 2022 is also very expressive, with a racy brilliance that's something new for the dry whites of this region. It combines extravagant stone fruit aromas with an intense chalky minerality and is easily worth GG or Grosses Gewachs status (Germany’s equivalent of grand cru), although on paper it belongs to the category below that, with EL standing for Erste Lage, or premier cru.

THE QUEST FOR REFINEMENT

Speaking about a newfound elegance in wines from warmer regions has become a cliché. Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW suggests that wines from places like southern Rhone, Napa, Priorat and Barossa are better suited to sumptuous fruit welded to an undercarriage of power. Generosity is, after all, what their respective terroirs convey. Of course, there are many other variables that define regional cultures, including winemaking traditions, demographics, vine age and the grape varieties at hand. There are certain mesoclimates, too, that deliver wines of greater freshness and exactitude than others.

With this in mind, Ned’s tasting of recent releases from the exalted Barossa producer Torbreck got him thinking that rather than elegance, producers in warmer regions are best served by a quest for refinement – a universal badge of honor irrespective of climate and geology. Torbreck’s The Struie 2022 is a perfect example. Ned tasted The Struie, which comes from a cooler, attenuated vintage better served by the elevation of Eden Valley over the lower ebbs of Barossa, where late rain resulted in dilution of fruit, with Torbreck sales manager James Young, a former sommelier.

“If refinement is a construct in a region known for power, this is among the most refined wines of the region,” Ned said of the wine, while Young suggested that its floral lift and freshness almost feign a viognier addition.

For those after an older-school bruiser, The Torbreck Shiraz Barossa Valley The Factor 2021 is a crowd-pleaser from a bulletproof vintage “among the finest in recent memory,” according to winemaker Ian Hongell.

Most exciting, though, is the new addition to the suite, The Forebear Shiraz 2019. This inaugural release is comprised of fruit from a proprietary property in Lyndoch, documented as the second winery built in the Barossa, replete with a vineyard planted in the 1850s, all on its own root system and “in vibrant health,” according to Young. Despite the typical Barossan weight, there is ample freshness, detail and thrust in this wine, with baking spice, licorice strap, saturated dark fruits, forestry accents and iodine. It’s grippy and chewy and nourishing, with plenty to get your teeth into.

Finally, there is the stellar new release of the Vanguardist Wines Grenache McLaren Vale 2022, which is among the most exciting wines in the New World and among the greatest expressions of grenache, period. Vanguardist is sourced from the Silver Sands vineyard in McLaren Vale’s Blewitt Springs, a site planted by Robert Rende and his father in the early 60s that remains dry-grown, replete with Maslin sands over alluvial sandstone, ironstone and clay. Here, on elevated sands cooled by sea breezes, elegance becomes possible! Ned suggests that while winemaker Michael Corbett may have nudged the ripeness envelope in the past to extremes, he and his wines are “hitting an apogee of elegance, poise and exquisite detail, meshed with apposite ripeness.”

– Jim Gordon, Stuart Pigott and Ned Goodwin MW 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.