Going her own way

At a seminar on biodynamic winemaking in San Francisco recently, Marimar Torres, owner and winemaker of Marimar Estate in Sonoma’s Russian River region, ricocheted with determination around the tasting room. Pulling her cellar master, Tony Britton, first this way then that, she sampled wines and pelted winemakers with questions.

Many vintners would have a hard time wrapping their minds around New Age-y practices such as burying cow horns full of manure in vineyards, but Torres is a woman with a mission.

Daughter of the legendary vintner Don Miguel Torres, she’s a member of one of Spain’s foremost wine families. But today, Torres is focused on the future, not the past -- specifically the future of her Sonoma County winery. So when it comes to whatever doubts she might have about biodynamic winemaking, she’s utterly pragmatic. “What if it works?” she says.

Torres is ready to do anything -- except what she refers to as the “cheap tricks” commonly used by other wineries -- and to spend whatever it takes on costly adjustments such as a recent changeover to organic farming to get “back in the game.”

She’s tired of being ignored by wine critics. Since her 1990 vintage, for which powerful wine critic Robert Parker gave her Chardonnay 88 points, he hasn’t written a word about Torres’ wines. Without a mention from Parker, Marimar wines have no buzz. No buzz, slow sales.

Rather than continue to watch her wines be shipped to a European market less influenced by American critics or, worse, have them pile up in inventory, Torres is shaking things up in her vineyards: In addition to considering making the move to biodynamics, she’s just gone organic, rethought vine management and has overhauled her lineup of wines.

Torres came to California on a wine sales trip with her father in the late 1970s and decided to stay. After a brief marriage to an American, she persuaded her father to help her stake a claim in the then-emerging, cool-climate Sonoma Coast region. “Everything I’ve ever wanted to do, my family has supported me,” she says during a recent interview at Marimar Estate.

What Torres wanted was to produce one Chardonnay and one Pinot Noir. For the Pinot, she planted six clonal varieties to be blended into a single food-friendly wine. And for nearly two decades, she has cultivated her vineyards and blended her wines accordingly, only deviating to make a second Chardonnay, the robust Dobles Lias (so named for its extended contact with the lees).

Now she’s changing that philosophy to release three single-clone wines from small vineyard blocks, and a fourth wine that is a blend of two clonal varieties. Another new release is designed to be a “super Pinot Noir,” labeled Cristina Selection. It’s a blend of four clonal varieties that she hopes will demonstrate characteristics favored by Parker and California’s other influential wine critic, James Laube of Wine Spectator.

“People had been asking for the single vineyard wines, but I said, ‘No, it’s not my philosophy.’ But, why not? The vineyard is in its full maturity now. Particularly with the organics, it has never been this good,” says Torres.

Siphoning off her estate’s most expressive component wines from the signature Marimar Pinot blend, which she’ll continue to release, is not without risk. But while Torres says she is being careful not to allow production of new wines to diminish the quality of the existing label, it’s a risk she is willing to accept. “It’s a tricky thing: taking away from the master blend to get the most out of the stand-alone wines,” she says. “I’m trying to find the balance between finesse and extraction. We taste it with and without, and if we think it hurts the blend, we won’t do it.”

Lean and clean

Marimar fans are used to ignoring the critics. They like the leaner European style they have come to expect in her estate Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs.

Steve Heimoff, West Coast editor of Wine Enthusiast Magazine, considers Marimar Estate wines to be among the Russian River’s finest. “She’s done it right,” he says of Torres.

“I really like her wines,” says Chris Meeske, owner of Mission Wines in South Pasadena, formerly an influential sommelier at Patina. “Marimar Chardonnay is restrained and elegant with a lightness that allows the grape to express itself. They aren’t flashy. Her Pinot Noir is the same way -- a focused, pure expression of the grape. They are food wines, no question about it.”

The problem, says Meeske, and the reason he doesn’t stock Marimar wines in his store, is that people who like that style of wine and can pay the $30 to $45 that Marimar costs, typically reach for European wines. When people buy California wines, he says, “they want that opulence and generosity of fruit that you get with the California sunshine,” particularly at these prices.

With so many wines to choose from and an onslaught of new Pinot Noir labels, American wine drinkers have developed short attention spans as they chase one fad after another. Right now, they are enamored of the high-octane Central Coast Pinot Noirs made famous by Hollywood in “Sideways.” Next month, it likely will be something else. A vintner can become old news fast, says Meeske.

If Torres is bending over backward to generate excitement for her wines, it’s a new approach for the fiercely independent vintner, better known for her unconventional thinking and imperious manner.

Torres pioneered high-density vineyards in the region when she planted 2,000 vines per acre along the hillsides of the chilly Green Valley in the mid-1980s. When few vintners in Sonoma County were employing the European style of training vines to branch a mere 18 inches above the ground, Torres planted all 72 acres of her estate that way.

And as other vintners popularized releasing multiple, single-vineyard bottlings under one umbrella label, Torres stubbornly stuck to the idea of making just one Pinot Noir and one Chardonnay.

Financially, it didn’t matter. Marimar Estate in Sonoma County is a tiny asterisk to the Torres family wine empire, which now produces 250 million cases annually worldwide. Marimar Torres’ brother, Miguel, who became president after their father died in 1991, has always acted as an advisor to Torres. But if the single row of spindly Albarino vines she recently planted at his insistence is any indication, Torres does what she likes.

“The key thing about Pinot Noir,” says Torres, “is that it can assemble the characteristics of richness and concentration with softness and silkiness without becoming an over-the-top fruit bomb. You won’t want a second or third glass if it’s too much.” Clearly, her European palate informs her wines. Marimar Estate blends emphasize consistency and finesse over drama.

Still, Torres is well aware that many Pinot lovers want more flavor than they can get from her estate blend. After vineyard experiments indicated that organic viticulture improved both the intensity and the smoothness of her wines, she switched the entire estate to organic farming, completing the changeover this year. An even more costly adjustment, she says, has been her decision to switch from cordon pruning to cane pruning, a labor-intensive practice that enables the fruit to ripen more consistently.

Widespread techniques used to pump up flavor -- more time in contact with the grape skins, more time in new oak barrels -- are cheap tricks, says Torres. “We’re not giving the wines a lot of skin contact or a lot of heavy-duty oak. That’s how you get the heavy extractions, those Pinots that taste like Syrah,” she says, wrinkling her nose in disgust.

By adjusting her blending strategy, she hopes to accomplish the same result. “I thought the trend toward releasing all the different vineyard-designate labels was a phony pretense,” says Torres. “But it’s what the people want.”

Organics have made it possible. Three or four years ago, she says, “the ‘earthquake’ block (a Pommard clone) was over the top. It had too much concentration.” Now, with organic viticulture, the wine is balanced, the obvious defects are gone, and she says it makes sense to release it as a single vineyard bottling.

A new path

And, if going biodynamic would further those advances, Torres says she would make the investment. Until Wine Spectator releases scores of her 2002 releases, it isn’t clear if Torres has found the formula for gaming the critics’ 100-point system.

For most of the last decade, Wine Spectator has been judging Marimar a ho-hum B with scores in the mid-80s. Wine Enthusiast has consistently scored Marimar wines a couple of points higher with every vintage.

For his part, Parker says if Torres wants to impress him with her Chardonnay, she should forget the extended contact with the lees and long months of oak barrel aging she uses with her Dobles Lias wine and start making stainless-steel fermented Chardonnay in the style of a classic Chablis. That’s the next big thing, according to Parker, and not enough people are doing it in California.

But adjusting winemaking to please the critics is, in general, a bad idea, Parker says. Torres would be better off making the wines she likes to make.

“I taste her wines every year,” he says, noting that his comments haven’t appeared in print because he has scored the wines in the low 80s, below the 85-point cutoff for publication in the Wine Advocate. “I’m looking for character and personality and I’m not finding it in her wines.”

Being ignored, on the other hand, may have its advantages.