Sonoma’s Sterling 2021, Plus Living Up to the Hunter Valley Coda: Weekly Tasting Report (June 14-20)

The 2021 vintage is an excellent year for Sonoma pinot noir and chardonnay, which is why James made a special trip to visit some of the top names in the region: Paul Hobbs, Littorai and Williams Selyem. He also tasted pinots from Napa’s Joseph Phelps Vineyards, which is better known for its top cabernet sauvignons but makes excellent pinot noir on Sonoma Coast in the Occidental subregion.

“It was an Alice in Wonderland season,” said Ted Lemon, one of Sonoma's great winemakers who made fantastic wines in 2021 at his winery, Littorai. He explained that they had plenty of grapes in 2021 even though it was the third year in a row of drought. “We didn’t understand why we had more crop. They should not have been like that with the third year of drought, lack of water and vine stress.”

And Lemon’s wines are stunning, especially his single-vineyard chardonnay from Charles Heintz Vineyard and pinot noir from The Haven Vineyard, which is one of the highest vineyards in Sonoma Coast. However, James’ best pinot from the 2021 vintage so far is the Joseph Phelps Pinot Noir Sonoma County Freestone Estate Proem No.2. It’s a tiny production of some of the best parcels of Phelps coastal vineyard near the town of Bodega Bay.

“2021 was a good year and we were on par with our five-year average with everything,” said Justin Ennis, the winemaker for Joseph Phelps. “We didn’t have heat spikes on the Sonoma Coast. It was such a nice, refreshing feeling to have a vintage go over without a problem. We had lots of hang time. We could pick when we wanted.”

James also rated a couple of notable mountain cabernets: the Pym-Rae Napa Valley Tesseron Estate 2019 and Cornell Cabernet Sauvignon Sonoma County Commitment 2019. The former is the wine from the same family that owns the esteemed Bordeaux estate of Pontet Canet, while the latter is the tiny-production pure cab from financial magnate Henry Cornell on his Spring Mountain estate on the Sonoma side of the subregion.

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott, meanwhile, was tasting some surprising dry white and red wines from Pennsylvania and New Jersey, states that most Americans don’t associate with winemaking at all.

The most exciting of these wines was the Galen Glen Grüner Veltliner Lehigh Valley Stone Cellar 2022, which Stuart said might well be the best wine from Austria’s signature grape variety that has ever been made in the United States. Still really youthful, it is brimming with pepper aromas plus notes of Reine Claude (green) plum and mirabelle. It also has excellent concentration and structure, with a huge spicy finish. Stuart also recently drank a bottle of the 2014 vintage of this wine and was amazed by how well it had matured, finding it more expressive 24 hours after he first opened it. That’s a sure sign that a wine has further aging potential.

The Stone Cellar is made by the family team of winemaker Sarah Troxell, her daughter, Erin, who is the vineyard manager, and her husband, Galen, a former mechanical engineer. They were among the first producers in the United States to plant gruner veltliner back in 2003 and it is now the most important variety in their eight hectares of vineyards in the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania. Riesling comes second, and Stuart was also impressed by the Galen Glen Riesling Lehigh Valley Fossil Vineyard 2021.

The other wine that stood out for Stuart was the Beneduce Vineyards Blaufränkisch Hunterdon County 2021. It, too, had a remarkable spiciness, along with a wide spectrum of red berry aromas, Stuart said. It is warm and fleshy in spite of 2021 being a challenging vintage for winemakers in the northeast of the United States. Clearly, this grape has excellent potential in New Jersey, where Mike Beneduce is one of the leading winemakers. Look out for his excellent pet-nats and consistently good dry whites.

Both Galen Glen and Beneduce Vineyards were unable to show some of their most important wines because they are still in cask. Galen Glen will present their dry rieslings from the 2022 vintage in a couple of months, but for Beneduce reds from the some vintage, we’ll have to wait almost a year. Watch this space!

RECAPTURING AN IDYLL

Senior Editor Ned Goodwin MW was tasting wines in Hunter Valley, Australia, where he found inspiration from one of the region’s iconic wineries, Mount Pleasant.

“What we think to be a luminous vision can turn into a mirage, an idyll that slips from a lustrous reality to an aspiration turned fallow. On the rare occasion, brilliance emerges from whatever remains, and I was reminded of a parable along these lines when I tasted Mount Pleasant’s latest suite of wines,” Ned said.

Mount Pleasant had been the Hunter Valley stable of McWilliams, a company that bound six generations to 141 years of history before it went under due to Covid-related pressures and punitive Chinese tariffs. The period of administration was messy before new buyers – the Medich Family investment group – came to the fore. "Even then, the future was indecipherable," Ned said. "While I expected consolidation, repackaging and anodyne wines, the opposite has happened. Under the aesthetic guise of winemaker Adrian Sparks, Mount Pleasant wines have returned to a hearth of savory restraint, tannic exactitude, prodigious capacity for cellaring and mid-weighted drinkability – the Hunter Valley coda. An injection of capital and the prescience of the new owners has helped."

“Great vineyards have been salvaged, centurion plots protected, oak winnowed back to a mere six to 20 percent on even the top wines, and optometrical sorting introduced so that not a single leaf makes it into the ferment,” Ned said. “Seldom does a range proclaim such brilliance!”

According to Ned, fidelity to the creed of Maurice O’Shea, a gifted winemaker at Mount Pleasant in the 1940s, is something that drew Sparks to the same role. “I moved to the Hunter to work at Mount Pleasant, such is the legend,” he told Ned.

"O’Shea, like Sparks, listened to these great vineyards, infusing the Hunter with a unique style that remains antithetical to the robust wines that came to define other parts of the Australian landscape. The style was sadly neglected, but by a few," Ned said.

The flagship of the range is the Maurice O’Shea Shiraz, a blend of the best cuves [a segment of wine before it is blended with others, be they varieties, parcels and such, to make a cuvee] across the top sites.

“The 2021 is proclaimed by some to be the finest iteration to date,” Ned said. “While my experience does not warrant such a call, I can say that the wine is arguably the finest I have tasted this year – from Australia or otherwise. More dangerous, at least when drinking solo, is the Mountain A Medium Bodied Dry Red 2022, so delicious because of its long, giddy finish, that spitting became a challenge.”

In our Hong Kong office, we tasted a lineup of chardonnays and merlots from Canada’s Checkmate Winery. These were all from 2020, a mild and moderate vintage in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley.

Checkmate has some of the oldest plantings of chardonnay in the country, and the wines are concentrated yet balanced with bright acidity. Their single-vineyard wines offer excellent complexity: compare the buttery, ripe Sunset Vineyard Knight’s Challenge and the creamy, generous Jagged Rock Vineyard Little Pawn with the more toasty and phenolic chardonnays Border Vista Vineyard Capture and Golden Mile Bench Combret Vineyard Queen’s Advantage. We also liked the unique spiciness and tension of the Attack, with notes of pears and pineapples evolving to ginger and cardamom.

But the highest-scoring wine from Checkmate was a merlot – the Checkmate Merlot Okanagan Valley Opening Gambit 2020, which is firm and well-framed, with persistent spice and crushed walnut notes. The grapes are grown on Osoyoos East Bench, a warmer vineyard site near the U.S. border moderated by Osoyoos Lake. As with all their wines, the fruit undergoes wild fermentation and gradual malolactic conversion during maturation in oak barrels. It’s firm and sturdy, best approached after another two or three years, so lay this one down.

– James Suckling, Stuart Pigott, Ned Goodwin MW and Claire Nesbitt 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.

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