California Chardonnays Getting Benefit of Technology

More experimentation has been undertaken in California with the Chardonnay grape in the last decade and a half than all other grape varieties combined.

Using trial and error and some modern technology, wine makers have tried one procedure after another to extract the most from this Burgundian variety, and some have improved their technique significantly. Among the beneficiaries of this tinkering are such old hands as Chateau St. Jean and Louis Martini.

The 1987 Chardonnays from St. Jean and Martini are impressive, and structured quite differently from past efforts. Both Dick Arrowood, wine maker at St. Jean in Sonoma, and Mike Martini, wine maker for his family-owned Napa winery, admit that they didn’t make particularly great Chardonnays until recently.

To hear that admission from Martini is no shock: the Martini Winery has, for the last half century, been known largely for its age-worthy red wines. (I have loved a lot of Martini’s white wines, notably the Gewurztraminer and Chenin Blanc, but others were less successful.)

Known for Chardonnays

But for Arrowood to admit that his latest releases are significantly better than his wines of just a few years ago is quite something. Through the 1970s, Chateau St. Jean was considered the foremost producer of exceptional Chardonnays. Yet tasting the latest St. Jean wines, from the 1987 vintage, it’s clear that Arrowood has changed for the better.

“If you don’t keep an open mind in this business, you’re dead,” said the bearded Arrowood at lunch at Kenwood Bar and Grill, just down the road from his Sonoma Valley winery.

He said that as he tasted some of his older vintages, he noticed that some of them weren’t aging particularly gracefully. The wines of the late 1970s, for example, were falling apart.

I had also experienced that within the last two years. I found a number of perfectly stored bottles of 1978 and 1979 St. Jean Chardonnays overwhelmingly disappointing. They were all but undrinkable at eight years of age.

Knew ‘Something Was Wrong’

Arrowood explained the apparent paradox of being considered a great Chardonnay producer but one who knew something was wrong: “Our wines (Chardonnays) were very flattering up front, right after release,” he said, and he acknowledged that because some fermentations never fully finished, some wines actually had traces of residual sugar, “and that made them very likeable.”

Yet as he tasted his older wines, he saw changes that only someone who works for the winery can see, for only they have the opportunity to taste perfectly stored bottles of the same wine often.

The wines were fading faster than anticipated.

For one thing, the overt buttery components that were so attractive when the wines were young gave way to a slightly plastic aroma as the wines aged. And oxidation was more rapid.

One culprit was skin contact--the act of giving the grape juice contact with the grape skins for 12 hours or more right after crushing.

Avoid Premature Aging

“By 1982, we realized we had to change things, to get away from the premature aging we were beginning to see,” Arrowood continued. But the early years were hard ones financially for St. Jean, even though it was considered one of California’s top producers. The equipment Arrowood wanted, to make better wine, was simply too expensive.

It was then not known for sure what factors were at play, but work done by Zelma Long at Simi Winery and others showed that if a winery wanted to leave the must--the fermenting grape juice--in contact with the skins for added flavor, it had to be done at very cool temperatures.

To do this required a “must chiller,” a piece of equipment that costs roughly a quarter of a million dollars. St. Jean didn’t have that kind of money until the founding Merzoian family sold the company to Suntory of Japan in 1984.

Purchased by Suntory

Suntory provided the funds for the must chiller in 1985, and that was the first year Arrowood had the luxury of making better wine. It gave him the flexibility to try other techniques too.

Today, his 1987 Belle Terre Vineyard Chardonnay ($16) offers more fruit than oak, more citrus than pineapple, and is simply a more complete wine. It may not be as rich or obvious a wine as in the past, but it’s clearly better balanced.

Arrowood credits Henry Dick and his son, Ron, who run the Belle Terre Ranch in Alexander Valley. Arrowood says they rank with the best growers in the state for delivery of clean, bright fruit.

Also better than past vintages is St. Jean’s 1987 Chardonnay from the Robert Young Vineyard ($20), a more forceful, apple/peach sort of wine with a load of depth. Again, the wine is marked by better balance than in the past.

Martini never has done as much to extract deep concentrated flavors from his Chardonnay, but when I tasted his 1987 (released six months ago), I was intrigued enough to call Mike and ask him, “What did you do differently?”

“Oh, all we did was change eight or nine different things that we used to do,” said the tall, mustachioed grandson of the founder.

Techniques Differ Greatly

The Martini style of Chardonnay is worlds apart from the St. Jean, and two days after meeting with Arrowood, I chatted with Martini over lunch at Tra Vigne, a mile north of his winery.

Mike said he has never used skin contact and doesn’t push his Chardonnay through a malolactic fermentation, which can broaden and make the wine more buttery.

“We had to counter the coarseness we had been getting in our wines, so we began to harvest the fruit at night,” to bring the grapes to the winery cold, reducing the oxidation potential. Also, he said, “I switched from one yeast to another, and that gave us a tremendous fruity quality.”

Moreover, during barrel fermentation, he said he stopped stirring the wine in the barrel (some wine makers feel they get more complexity this way).

But one major decision came to Martini two years ago as he was sipping one of his as-yet unreleased Chardonnays and noticed a faint (almost imperceptible) moldiness.

“I had smelled that before,” said Martini, noting that it often was in older bottles of Martini Chardonnay. And that irritated him: “Where did it come from? I kept asking myself.”

Wooden-Tank Culprits

Then it hit him. He dashed out into the winery and took out his pen knife, and scraped at some of the residue on one of the old upright wooden tanks the winery often uses to stabilize the wine before bottling. He put the knife blade with its sticky residue into a glass of wine, swirled it around, and there it was.

Over the years, the old wooden tanks had developed a faint mold-like aroma that couldn’t be detected while the wine was young. But if left alone to develop in the bottle, he said, the wines suffered.

Martini replaced the old tanks with new ones, “which offered better oxygen protection.”

One last nuance: Martini used to clean the wine up by fining--adding clarifying agents such as diatomaceous earth to remove sediment. It’s a common practice in the wine business, but Martini said he felt the procedure robbed the wine of something.

Now, after aging in small oak casks for five months and gaining a measure of the smokiness from the barrels, he merely transfers the wine to another barrel (the technical term is called racking), leaving the wine cloudy, and then doing one, rough filtration before bottling to make the wine bright.

The result is a clean and delicate 1988 Martini Chardonnay with lively fruit that is a delightful bargain at $9 (the wine is often seen discounted).

This is not a wine that will compete with the rather potent and well-crafted 1987 Mondavi Reserve ($25), which offers toasty scents and a rich, buttery and smoky depth. And although the Mondavi wine is, to some people, what great Chardonnay ought to be, the Martini approach is now more along the line of what most people will want in a Chardonnay, and it’s offered at a price that won’t tax the wallet.

Wine of the Week: 1988 Duxoup Napa Gamay ($7.50)--Not for the faint of heart, this wine is not at all reminiscent of Gamay Beaujolais. In fact, if anything it’s more like a Rhone. Duxoup uses grapes from an ancient northern Sonoma County vineyard and makes a hearty, cold-weather type of wine that ages beautifully. (Previous vintages are a treat, if you can find any.) Available in Southern California only at Fireside Liquors in Santa Monica and the Bouzy Rouge cafe in Newport Beach, but it will soon be available in more locations.