Unpredictable Pinot Noir

One of wine’s unanswered questions is: Does Pinot Noir make winemakers crazy? Or must you already be crazy before you decide to make Pinot Noir?

Some day a psychologist may propose an answer to this puzzlement, but regardless of what answer is proposed, the phrase “Pinot Noir winemaker” will always be defined as a person (a) obsessed, (b) adventuresome, and (c) trying to drive the car from the back seat. Blindfolded.

Clear-headed winemakers (i.e., those who don’t make Pinot Noir) would never try to do something Mother Nature has said was a long shot, something with payoff odds equal to winning the lottery.

I know Pinot Noir winemakers. They don’t think of themselves as particularly batty. They say they are merely pursuing a dream. Never mind that they often wake up screaming.

Even the late Andre Tchelistcheff, California’s greatest winemaker, once acknowledged the malady. “Anybody can make great Cabernet,” he said, “even a fool. But only a fool would try to make Pinot Noir.”

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The object of all this passion, as well as hatred, derision and aggravation, is a recalcitrant grape variety that would rather be anything but wine. It’s the most temperamental variety on any vine, susceptible to a wider range of vineyard pests and diseases than any other, and requiring extreme care in the way it is grown and picked.

It needs specific kinds of soil in which to grow and then needs special care in tending; it ripens more erratically than it ought to, and if you should stop for a hamburger on the way back to the winery with your load of Pinot Noir grapes in the truck, you might as well kiss your crop goodby.

Moreover, the process of converting great Pinot Noir grapes to wine harbors more pitfalls. One misstep and the winemaker gets an aroma not of strawberries but of the stuff strawberries grow in. And even if the fermentation goes without a hitch, even the best of Pinots, after the wine is bottled, usually go into a funk that can last a few weeks, a few months, or forever.

Welcome to the world of Pinot Noir, a grape whose only point of predictability is that you can count on it to be unpredictable.

Why do these people do it? Because, like the little girl with the curl right in the middle of her forehead, when it is good, it is very, very good--never mind that when it is bad it is horrid.

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When it is good, Pinot Noir can be sublime. At its best it is sensually alive, silky and tender on the tongue. With food it is far better than Cabernet Sauvignon, because it is lower in tannin and offers more fruit. And when it ages well, it elicits comments that sound better in poetry journals than newspapers.

Pinot Noir at its best is from Burgundy, in central France. But California and Oregon are developing reputations for making fine Pinot Noir.

When speaking of Pinot Noir, winemakers rarely are specific. Romance, allegory and metaphor are the vocabulary here. To prove it, I called five Pinot Noir winemakers. Their comments reveal more about them and their passion than about the grape.

David Graves of Saintsbury likens his constant search for great Pinot Noir to a laboratory experiment from a college psych course.

“It’s a well-known psychological principle,” says Graves. “If the rat gets the pellet every time it pushes the button, after a while it loses interest. However, if it gets disappointed every now and then but gets rewarded often enough, then it’s there pushing the button all the time.” He says that he is rewarded just enough to continue the quest.

“For me, Pinot Noir, more than any other red grape variety, has an incredible richness of aroma. If I’ve made a good one, the tip-off is a kind of, well, ‘Wow,’ when I smell it.”

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Ken Burnap of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyards says he was nearly scared off his dream of making great Pinot Noir even before he started his winery in 1974.

“Before I opened the winery, I was visiting Alexis Lichine at his chateau in Bordeaux,” says Burnap, “and he asked me what I was planning to do. I told him I was going to make Pinot Noir, and he said, ‘I hope you have a big heart, because Pinot will break it.’ ”

Words about Pinot fail Bryan Babcock of Babcock Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, who prefers allusions to sculpture: “You hear people talk about Michelangelo’s David, but until you see it in person in Florence, you can’t know what people are talking about. We can dissect Pinot academically, but at some point you taste a great bottle of Burgundy and it becomes an experience, and then you know what people are talking about. It’s that elusive.

“When you’re lucky enough to capture some profound concentration without it being too ripe, Pinot can have mesmerizing aromatics. But it’s an unstable grape--so maybe that’s why all of us are a little unstable.”

Josh Jensen of Calera Wine Co. in Hollister agrees with the emotional analysis and says that’s the difference between great Bordeaux and great Burgundy.

“Before I started Calera, back when I was just nuts about wine,” said Jensen, “when I was speaking to other wine lovers about Bordeaux, I would be very rational and logical. But when I would talk about a great Burgundy, I would just say, ‘Wow, this wine just knocked me out. I’m in love with it.’ Confronted with a great Burgundy, I react emotionally. I have a more visceral response to it.”

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Adds Jensen: “I’ve been around a lot of people who are the other way around, who think Bordeaux is great and Burgundy is just OK. George Selleck, whom we named a vineyard after, told me when I was a teen-ager that the world is divided between the ‘Bordelaisians’ and the Burgundians, and never the twain shall meet.”

Jensen has another observation about Pinot Noir: “It’s cyclical. It’s always going in and out of phases. You’ll taste one and think it’s great and come back in six months and it’s at the bottom of a trough, in a ‘dumb’ phase. Right now, that’s happening to the 1990 Burgundies--they’re all locked up tight as a drum. But give them time, they’ll be great.”

Rick Sayre of Rodney Strong Vineyards in Sonoma County waxes poetic describing his relationship to Pinot Noir. “Making Pinot is like a marriage,” he says. “You have to live with it daily and love it unconditionally. And just like a woman, it can be unforgiving, but also complex and teasing to the senses, arousing a great passion--for some people.”

Burnap sums up his long quest to conquer Pinot with a resigned comment on why he is so driven:

“I’ve been a wine lover for 40-some years and my love of Burgundy is without bounds. I want so badly to make a really great wine, and I start with the assumption that the best wine will come from Pinot, so there’s nothing else I can do. I have to keep doing this. Maybe we all ought to be put into a padded room somewhere, but I gotta keep trying.”

Wine of the Week

1993 Olivet Lane Estate Pinot Noir ($13)-- This wine is made in one of my favorite styles: lighter in weight, more like a Beaune than a heavier Cote-de-Nuits. The aroma has fresh strawberries and cherries with a trace of clove. The taste is loaded with fruit, there is a sensual silkiness in the texture, and the aftertaste is long, fresh and creamy.

The Olivet Lane Vineyard is in the cool Russian River area of Sonoma County, north of Santa Rosa. Winemaker Merry Edwards first used the fruit from Bob Pellegrini’s 70-acre ranch in 1986. In 1991, Pellegrini asked Edwards to upgrade his four brands--Pellegrini Bros., Cloverdale Ranch, Cotes de Sonoma and Olivet Lane. “I was especially happy to do the Pinot because I had already worked with the fruit,” she said.

Williams & Selyem Winery makes a deeper, richer Olivet Lane Pinot Noir (about $28), but Edwards doesn’t have access to the kind of equipment Burt Williams and Ed Selyem use. “So our wine is a little more delicate,” she says. “I think Bob Pellegrini’s [Pinot Noir] fruit is easily overwhelmed by oak. I find that oak tends to wipe the wine out, so I age it only partly in new French oak barrels.”

About 2,500 cases of the Olivet Lane Estate were made. It exhibits the sensuality that defines Pinot Noir. All Pellegrini wines are made by Edwards at Kunde Winery in Kenwood.

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