25 and Counting: The Next Day Part 1

Part of a continuing travelogue of our recent vacation, which involved an inordinate amount of wine drinking and cost us our life savings.

I thought of the next day like this: Today, we're running up Napa's gut, hitting a couple of big name wineries that I can't afford in real life. The day had two goals: cadge a taste of Heitz Martha's Vineyard cab, which retails for something over $100 a bottle, and clear a few hours mid-day for my wife to get rubbed and scrubbed at a spa in Calistoga. Which means that we'd spend the day moving up valley, as they say, hitting targets of opportunity.

We started at Grgich Hills. Mike Grgich is a wonderful success story. He arrived in California a penniless immigrant from Croatia, and worked for nearly nothing at what were then the best wineries in California -- Souverain, Robert Mondavi, Beaulieu. He got a winemaker job at Chateau Montelena, where he produced the Chardonnay that won the now-legendary Judgment of Paris tasting, about which the movie Bottle Shock was made.

Grgich left Montelena to start -- with partner Austin Hills (of Hills Brothers Coffee) -- Grgich Hills Winery. He built a tasting room out close to Highway 29 where drive-bys can't miss it. As a piece of architecture is is...well, actually, exactly typical. It's perfectly indistinguishable from every other tasting room we visited: high ceiling, long bar, dark wood, large format bottles on display up near the clerestory windows. It's only a week and a half after we visited and I can't tell one winery from the other, in my memory.

Anyway, out front Grgich has some vines you can steal grapes off of, which is nice, and around back they were loading grapes into a crusher/destemmer at something less than a frenzied pace. (People talk about how busy the crush is. Every winery worker I saw in Napa and Sonoma was standing around either waiting for something to happen or waiting for someone to tell them what should be happening. I saw no one moving at even a brisk pace.) In the gift shop, they sold black berets -- black berets being something of a trademark for Mike Grgich -- in an act of charming self-parody. 

What I remember most about Grgich is the kid pouring the wine. He was tall, dark, and handsome, all of 24 years old with the look of a triathlete. My wife latched onto him immediately, smiling and laughing at his little jokes, oohing and ahhing at his vast knowledge and doing everything she could to elbow me out of the picture.

She brought up the Judgment of Paris movie; he said that people at the winery considered it a slap in the face, since Mike Grgich was barely seen in the film and he'd made the wine. My wife nodded sympathetically. He poured her another taste of oaky Chardonnay, something she normally abhors.

"This is really good," she said, licking her lips. "Whats' next?"

I think she was hoping for sexually ambiguous banter, but instead he pulled out a Fume Blanc. I normally avoid Fume Blanc because "Fume Blanc" is California code for "Sauvignon Blanc whose lack of quality is disguised by the heavy application of oak," and I don't go for that. As a matter of fact, I have a couple of bottles of Grgich Hills Fume Blanc down in the basement that I haven't opened because I just know I'm going to hate them as much as I was starting to hate our host at the Grgich winery.

"I'm sure you'll like this," he said, leaning unnecessarily close to my wife and, if my memory is to be believed, somehow growing a pencil-thin mustache before my very eyes.

I interrupted their moment, pointing out that I needed a taste, too. He grudgingly poured me what seemed like an undersized taste and I even more grudgingly sniffed at it. The wine was startlingly good. Grgich's touch with oak is incredibly light and I no longer cared whether the host pulled my wife over the bar and took her there on the winery floor. Actually, it might have been kind of fun to watch, so long as he reached up once in a while to pour me another taste.

But they limited their involvement to goo-goo eyes and guttural expressions of pleasure, ostensibly over the wine, as he worked his way down the list through a tasting-toom-only Merlot and then a tasting-room-only Yountville Cab. We bought three bottles of the Cab, wine we wouldn't normally consider and spot-on at the marketing department's separate-the-tourists-from-their-money $70 price point. My wife also bought a t-shirt, I think primarily so she could drape it across her chest and ask the kid, "How does this look?" The answer to which he provided only after an extra long consideration of her breasts.

"Good," he said. "Really good." 

I made her pay for the damned thing herself.

The next stop was Heitz Cellars. My whole goal at Heitz was to get a taste of their Martha's Vineyard Cab, which I can't afford (or find) back home in Kentucky. The Heitz tasting room is small, as much like the living room of a country lodge as it is a retail center. They had a few gift items around, but most of the precious shelf space was taken up by racks of older vintages for sale. Our host was a lawyer who chose the wine business over the law, and he tasted us through five wines. (I had vowed to take notes, but somehow pulling out my little moleskin notebook seemed obnoxious.) The goal, remember, was a taste of the rare and expensive Martha's Vineyard cab. I had done my homework. I knew how I was going to approach the problem and, if my experience at previous wineries was any measure, felt I had a pretty good lock on a couple of ounces of the legendary, eucalyptis flavored juice.

The host started with a rose, made from a weirdo Italian grape (Grignolino), that tasted just like every other rose I've ever tasted. I pretended to like it. Then he moved us to a pretty good Napa cab, where I started a learned discussion aimed entirely at getting him to pull out some Martha's.

We talked about the Rutherford Bench, which is the alluvial outwash of the Mayacamas Mountains and is said to have a highly salutary effect on grapes grown to the west of Highway 29. I asked about vineyard practices and maceration and extraction and subtlety -- subtlety being a big topic of conversation among makers of un-subtle Napa cabs. I talked little and listened much, hanging on his every word, most of which I already knew and all of which he got absolutely right. (This is actually rare in tasting rooms, where it sometimes seems people just make stuff up for their own entertainment.) He was talking about the characteristics of grapes grown in different vineyard as he poured the next Cab, a 2004 Bella Oaks, as I recall, that was spectacular. Really a serious wine, but I persisted.

"So," I asked, "what's the substantial difference between this and the Martha's Vineyard? If we were to put them side-by-side, what would be the difference?"

He considered me for a moment and said: "Oh, Martha's has a minty quality. People attribute it to the eucalyptus groves that grow around the vineyard. It's quite distinct. You should taste it some time."

I knew the bastard was sitting on a bottle back there somewhere. I knew he could pull it out and pour. If he had assessed me as the kind of deep pocket wine bore who'd step up for a case, he'd have done it. But he looked at me and decided I was a three-pack dilettante -- which I am. But still.

"Eucalyptus," I parried. "So it somehow permeates the grapes?"

"Yes," he said. "It's really quite extraordinary."

The bastard stood his ground.

My wife, sitting a few feet away and petting the miniature doberman she'd found warming himself by the fireplace, chuckled. She'd gone as far as she'd wanted in the seduction of the kid over at Grgich, and I was going down in flames in my attempt to seduce the host at Heitz.

He poured the next sample, a port also made from Grignolino. It was good. My wife strolled over and remarked that she didn't like port, but that this one might change her mind.

"If you like that," the host said, reaching under the counter, "you're going to love this."

He pulled out another bottle of port, older and inky black. He poured, glancing at me and smiling. He knows, I thought. He knows what I wanted and he's deliberately humiliating me. My wife sipped and smacked and cooed over the port. I considered killing the dog just to spite her. But i didn't. Instead, I confirmed everything the host assumed about me by buying a three pack that included two Bella Oaks and -- yes, I admit it -- a bottle of Martha's. I couldn't help it. I'd promised myself a taste of Martha's, and I wasn't going to be denied. I felt like the guy who went to Spring Break and ended up with a hooker.

"Dude," I can hear my friends taunting me. "You had to pay for it? Whoa. That's sad."

We drove up valley toward Calistoga. I think my wife snickered the whole away. If there was a place on our agenda we approached with trepidation, it was Chateau Montelena. It was, in effect, the star of Bottle Shock, and just as Sideways boosted sales of Pinot Noir, Bottle Shock has turned the previously out-of-the-way Chateau Montelena into nearly mandatory stop for Napa visitors. I imagined tour buses outside and tourists more touristy than even me inside. And Montelena is famous for Chardonnay, which I don't really like that much.

So why did we go? Well, there's really no reasonable explanation. We needed a place near the spa my wife had chosen in Calistoga. And we needed a place you could just walk into, since there was no telling whether we'd be there pre- or post-spa, which made appointment-only runners-up (e.g., Storybook Mountain) impractical. And, to be honest, it was in the movie and all and we wanted pictures for the Chritmas card letter... 

The tasting room was packed. The host barely had time for us, and what time he did have he spent talking not about the wine but about the movie. If Grgich thought Bottle Shock a slap in the face, Montelena viewed it as nearly a documentary. It was, our host told us, an only slightly fictionalized account of how Chateau Montelena became the recognized best wine in the world. We would be fools to not buy all we could get our hands on and sign up for the wine club so we could get even more, automatically.

I, personally, wasn't that impressed. The wine was good, but after maybe 60 samples in four days we were getting kind of picky. Besides, they were sold out of everything even remotely interesting. We passed on the opportunity to order futures deliverable in 2010. Though I've lived in the same house (and, basically, the same position on the couch) for eight years, I find it impossible to commit to buying wine futures that won't be deliverable for years. In the back of my mind, I'm always one day from getting fired and three days from hitting the road as a hobo. I know it's not rational, but I feel like two years from now I'm as likely to be a forklift driver in Houston as I am to be living where I live now, and I don't want the guy who buys my house out of foreclosure to get my wine when it's delivered.

So we wandered outside to take pictures of the Chateau Montelana facade, which the host assured us had actually been used in the film, and I peeked into the basement where a couple of cellar rats were doing what cellar rats do during the high-intensity harvest: they were standing around, about as active as a couple of cops contemplating a donut. I watched them for about 10 minutes, and the only things they did was talk and shift their weight from one foot to the other.

While my wife went to the spa (where I imagined her being rubbed by the kid who worked in the Grgich tasting room) I drove up over some pass or another to the Alexander Valley where they grow -- you will not be surprised to know -- grapes.

I picked up my wife, who post-spa melted into the seat of the rental car as we drove down the Silverado Trail to Clos du Val. We were introduced to Clos du Val at a restaurant that ran out of Alma Rosa, the only Pinot Noir I've ever bonded with. The wine guy offered us a bottle of Clos du Val Carneros Pinot as a substitute, and it was terrific.

The Clos du Val tasting room is, again, pretty typical: vine-covered exterior, high ceiling, long bar. The glasses were a little bigger and nicer, and the hosts seemed to have a certain amount of latitude in what they poured. We chose the higher-priced tasting, and what we got was the regular progression: light to full-bodied, ending with the show-stopper $70 Cabernet -- in this case, the 2004 Stags Leap District, tasting-room-and-mailing-list-only Cab. We were pretty wined out by then, just kind of going through the motions on the way back to the hotel, but the Cab jumped out at us. Fried taste buds and all, it was something. Predictably big, yeah, a fruit bomb even. But more than that: earthy and rich and -- if I may use a technical term drawn from my vast education in wine -- yummy good. 

I was too tired to try to act educated and impressive in hopes that they'd pull out something special, but apparently we fawned enough over the wine that the hostess concluded we'd never actually had wine before and deserved a treat. She pulled out a 10 year old vintage of the Stags Leap Cab, poured a dollop into a decanter, and rolled it around to aerate as we sipped a second sample of the 2004. She set up glasses so we could taste the two side-by-side, and had the good grace to drift away and let us concentrate. 

I'm sorry I didn't take notes. The older wine was sleeker but still vivid, softened slightly, I suppose, but the new wine was pretty soft to begin with. We made the tiny pours -- two sips each, really -- last ten minutes, sniffing and sipping and enjoying the long, long finish.

I don't know if it was the best wine of the trip, but we bought a bottle to drink back at the hotel and, when the time came, we couldn't bring ourselves to open it. It was, clearly, the most beautiful bottle we'd seen, big and shiny with gold trim on the label. For the next few nights, I took it out of my suitcase and set it up in whatever hotel we were staying in and just stared at. I'm going to stare at it for the next 10 years, and when we finally crack it open for our 35th anniversary I'm confident it will have been worth the wait.

Comments

[fish]

I no longer cared whether the host pulled my wife over the bar and took her there on the winery floor. Actually, it might have been kind of fun to watch, so long as he reached up once in a while to pour me another taste.

As a patron of this blog for a few years now I can say that in my estimation you seem to be chap of above average taste....for a Kentuckian! Given this I am now compelled to say I will get in the car today drive up to Napa/Calistoga (which is only about an hour away) buy a case of this Fume Blanc (which actually was my preferred starter wine a way back) if this offer is extended to the Functional Ambivalent audience at large.

[Adam]

Fish, that is without doubt the most daring reply post I have yet read on this site - and only just passable since Tom himself introduced the subject.

Congratulations, Sir. :)

[fish]

Thank you Adam! I exist only to serve.