A Chardonnay worth coveting

The first time my wife tasted Marcassin Chardonnay, her eyes glowed and she began smiling as if she’d won the lottery -- or signed a big movie deal.

I wasn’t writing about wine then and had never heard of Marcassin -- the Chardonnay we tasted was a ‘91, only Marcassin’s second vintage -- so I asked the man who brought the bottle to dinner how I could get some. He explained that you had to get on the winemaker’s private mailing list and since he’d gotten to know the couple that runs Marcassin, he was able to get us on that list.

I’ve been buying Marcassin Chardonnay -- known around our house as “Lucy’s wine” -- ever since, going on 11 years now. I loved the wine instantly. It’s the best American white wine I’ve ever tasted, and I’ve organized several blind tastings in which it’s beaten top white Burgundies from France as well. I now think of the day just about every spring (and just about every fall) when my Marcassin allocation arrives as my personal Christmas Day.

Marcassin Chardonnay has the intensity and richness that one associates with California wines, but it also has the elegance and finesse of those great white Burgundies -- Batard-Montrachet, Chevalier-Montrachet and Corton-Charlemagne from the best producers -- so it’s not overpowering, over-oaked or overly alcoholic. It’s the ideal food wine, a perfect match for salmon and shellfish in particular. It’s full-bodied, with a bit of toasted hazelnuts on the nose and a long finish that stays on the palate -- and in my palate memory -- long after I’ve left the table.

Marcassin wines are my one vinous luxury. Limited production, high consumer demand and Parker scores that are consistently in the mid- to high 90s, accompanied by such words and phrases as “near-perfect,” “magnificent,” and -- referring to Helen Turley, Marcassin’s brilliant winemaker and co-proprietor -- “genius,” “wine goddess” and “North America’s finest winemaker,” have driven prices ever higher.

The tabs for the last Chardonnays released -- the 2000 -- were $60, $75 and $90 a bottle, depending on which vineyard the wine came from. The same pricing holds for Pinot Noirs, which Marcassin began producing in 1996 and which are also sensational. These prices are the highest I pay for any wine -- certainly any wine that I buy in quantity and with any frequency.

Nevertheless, this spring is especially festive for me. Two weeks ago, I received my allocation of 18 bottles of 2000 Marcassin Pinot Noir, and at the end of next month, I expect to receive my allocation (number as yet unknown) of the 2001 Chardonnay. In late May, I should get my 2001 Pinot (ditto).

It’s unusual -- unprecedented -- for Marcassin to release three wines in one season.

“Ideally, we like to release our Chardonnays in the spring and our Pinots in the fall, but we fell a little behind, so we’re trying to catch up,” John Wetlaufer, Turley’s husband and partner, who’s in charge of viticulture and marketing at Marcassin, told me when I visited them in their Sonoma Coast vineyards.

Marcassin is a small-production winery -- fewer than 2,000 cases per vintage, about evenly divided between Chardonnay and Pinot. Wetlaufer says 75% of the wine is sold through the Marcassin mailing list. About 5,000 people are on the waiting list to get on the mailing list; some have been waiting 10 years.

Allocations are small and decided unilaterally by Wetlaufer, based on the size of the harvest, how long a customer has been on the mailing list and how much of his allocation he’s historically purchased. (I’ve always bought every bottle I’ve been offered.)

For each release, Wetlaufer writes a letter talking about the vintage and about viticulture and winemaking in general and telling each customer how much wine he’ll be allowed to buy. Although Wetlaufer says the French Laundry in Yountville can “basically buy as much as [chef] Thomas [Keller] wants,” no individual customer gets more than two cases in any vintage -- and often much less.

Marcassin Chardonnay is our special-occasion and/or special-guest wine. This year, for Valentine’s Day dinner, we stayed home and drank a bottle of the ’97 Marcassin Vineyard Chardonnay with steamed lobsters. I can’t imagine a more pleasurable or more exciting food-wine pairing.

Although I like Marcassin at virtually any time of the year, it seems especially well-suited to springtime drinking, after the cool, red wine months of winter and before the warm, any- thing-lighter-than-Chardonnay months of summer.

Turley and Wetlaufer are Burgundians at heart and in their winemaking style. The great white Burgundies of Coche-Dury and Michel Niellon and the reds of Henri Jayer, rather than anything from Sonoma or Napa or anywhere else in California, are their reference points -- the wines they love to drink and want to be compared to.

As much as their wines are admired, Wetlaufer and Turley are personally very controversial in California winemaking circles -- and not just because they can be dismissive of many of their California competitors. It’s more their single-minded determination to do everything their own way, even when they are consulting for and being paid by other wineries, as they often have done to augment their income from their own wines.

Not all these consulting relationships have ended happily.

Turley and Wetlaufer sued Bryant Family Vineyard for breach of contract and fraud after owner Don Bryant terminated their consulting contact in October 2002. They won a $255,000 judgment after a heated, much-watched trial last spring.

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Making wine their way

Wetlaufer acknowledges that he and his 6-foot-tall wife are “known to be difficult” and can be intimidating and that her nickname in some quarters is “My way or the highway.”

Some of her reputation no doubt derives from sexist attitudes in our society. It’s OK for a man to be a meticulous, demanding, hardheaded perfectionist. But when a woman evidences those traits, the epithets begin flying.

And Turley is a famously meticulous, demanding, hardheaded perfectionist.

“There’s no sense in working with Helen if you’re not going to do what she says, when and how she says it,” Wetlaufer says.

The same can be said of Wetlaufer -- as it can be said of high achievers in any field.

Turley and Wetlaufer grow about half the grapes they use in Marcassin wines and buy half from other growers. They know exactly how they want vineyards planted, grapes grown and wines made, and they accept no compromises, deviations or excuses.

Wetlaufer and Turley plant their vines far more densely than is customary in California, with each vine carrying a low to moderate crop load, which they believe consistently leads to “optimum and uniform fruit maturity and intensely flavored wines.” Their Chardonnay and their Pinot are picked ripe, in cool, morning temperatures, then fermented with indigenous, wild yeasts. They undergo malolactic fermentation in barrels, are settled naturally with minimal racking and they’re bottled unfined and unfiltered.

Their vineyards lie on the second coastal ridge in western Sonoma County, about two and a half miles from the Pacific Ocean. At 700 to 1,200 feet above sea level, they are “above the fog,” Wetlaufer says, “so we benefit from its cooling but don’t suffer from its wetness. All the vineyards are on east-facing slopes so they warm up early and benefit from extended photosynthesis but avoid the baking afternoon sun.”

They make their wine at Martinelli Winery -- where they also consult -- about 90 minutes from their vineyards.

Turley and Wetlaufer have very different personalities. She tends to be quiet, private and somewhat enigmatic when she does speak. He is outgoing, eager to speak and was responsive, voluble and precise when I peppered him with questions during the 5 1/2 hours the three of us spent together last week. But as a wine-producing team, their skills perfectly complement each other. He’s the viticulturalist, the man in the vineyard (although he acknowledges that he learned a lot about growing grapes from his wife, who studied it at Cornell). She’s the winemaker (although she acknowledges that she trusts his palate more than anyone else’s, so he plays a crucial role in winemaking decisions).

Turley and Wetlaufer met as undergraduates at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., then moved to Southern California, where Wetlaufer pursued graduate studies in philosophy at Claremont College.

Having fallen in love with wine as college students, they decided that before heading back East, so she could go to Cornell and he could study at the New School for Social Research in New York, they would drive to San Francisco and the wine country. When they had wild boar and a bottle of Pinot Noir one night at a French restaurant in San Francisco, they found the combination “an apotheosis in food-wine synergy,” as Wetlaufer now puts it.

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A first-rate second choice

That experience would resonate for years to come. Pinot became what he calls their “first love” -- and their personal favorite among the wines they make -- and marcassin, French for “wild boar,” became the name of their wines.

Turley wanted to work in a winery after leaving Cornell and returning to California in 1977, “But no one wanted to hire a woman to make wine in those days,” she says.

She worked as a lab technician and barrel washer at Mondavi, then went to a winery in Kentucky -- Kentucky?!?! -- that would hire a woman winemaker. That experience enabled her to land a job as assistant winemaker at Stonegate in 1981. Three years later, she became the winemaker at B.R. Cohn, where her Cabernet Sauvignons first brought her critical acclaim and public attention. In 1987, she started making Chardonnay for Peter Michael, then struck out on her own, with Wetlaufer, in 1990.

If Pinot was their first love, why did they make Chardonnay first?

“We couldn’t afford to buy our own vineyard, and I couldn’t find any Pinot grapes that I thought were worth buying and vinifying,” Turley says. “But I had found some good Chardonnay grapes for Peter Michael, and I knew I could buy them for us.”

Although Lucy and I generally drink far more red than white wine, we prefer Marcassin’s Chardonnay to its Pinot. But we love the Pinot too, and when I took a bottle of the ’96 Marcassin Vineyard Pinot to a wine-tasting dinner last year, several guests said it was the best wine they had tried all night, even though many of the other wines were genuine legends from Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Turley and Wetlaufer -- and Marcassin -- are on their way to becoming legends themselves. Certainly when one mentions “Helen and John” in California wine country, it’s like saying “Elvis” or “Frank” in Las Vegas or “Madonna” in Hollywood. Everyone knows exactly who you’re talking about.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.