Vintage Notes: "Go, Bears," Go Tree

Here's the second installment in an anticipated series of postings based on stacks of notebooks I haven't looked at in ages, but which I'm scanning for jottings that may or may not have made it into column or story when I first put the pen to their pages:

Three Palms Vineyard: Why one is shorter 

- In flipping through my notes from a retrospective tasting of the wines of Duckhorn Vineyards two years ago, I realize that in my report posted here I'd left out a couple of good quotes. Margaret Duckhorn, who with her husband founded the Napa Valley winery in 1976, was recalling their inaugural harvest in 1978. It was a wonderful year for growing grapes in Napa Valley, helping give the couple a firm footing in the wine trade right at the outset. "It was a great vintage," she said, "you could have made wine with walnuts that year." She also recalled that they had stored cases of their first merlot from that harvest in a barn on their property. Later, they had a somewhat difficult time finding the wine: "Banana slugs had eaten the labels off the boxes." Early on, and ever since, Duckhorn Vineyards has been celebrated in large part for the breadth and depth of its Three Palms Vineyard Merlot, the fruit for which comes from vines which share rocky soil with three towering palm trees. Two of the trees are more than a century old. The third ancient palm was killed by a hard freeze a couple of decades ago, then replaced. That's the official line. To this day, Margaret Duckhorn frets that she and her former husband hastened the tree's demise around 1990 when as graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, they hung a "Go Bears" banner from the trees on the eve of Cal's game with Stanford. "That banner killed that palm," she says, noting that a spike had been used to help hold it to the tree.

- A trip to Hudson Valley n 2008 to judge at the annual New York commercial wine competition gave me a chance to catch up with grape growers and winemakers from throughout the state, some on hand as fellow judges, some as volunteers to help run the judging. One Finger Lakes vintner complained about a continuing soft market for the cabernet franc he'd planted. "I should have planted more pinot grigio and less cabernet franc," he said, recognizing the nascent rise in popularity of the Italian grape. "But it's all part of the deal, it's agriculture," he was quick to add with the shrug of a longtime farmer. "It's not for the faint of wallet," he further said of farming.

- Another judge at that competition was Kevin Zraly, founder of the Windows on the World Wine School (which has graduated 20,000 students over the past 36 years), author of the frequently updated "Windows on the World Complete Wine Course" (the country's most popular wine book with 3 million copies sold), and director of the wine program at Windows on the World Restaurant from its opening in 1976 until Sept. 11, 2001. He seemed like a guy who might have some thoughts about how wine competitions could be improved, and he did. Among other things, he suggested that judgings station a wine authority with broad experience in the back room to assure that wines of each flight are arranged more or less by color (lighter to darker) and anticipated tannin density (less to more). This would help give more delicate wines a fairer shake at winning a medal; most competitions arrange flights rather randomly, or at best by increasing levels of residual sugar or alcohol or both. Zraly was recommending additional refinement to maybe prevent wines of relative delicacy from being sandwiched between wines of power and weight. He also suggested that each panel have one member new to judging, thereby helping expand the community of judges while also providing that person with tutoring from seasoned members of the circuit. He also noted that he limits himself to evaluating no more than 50 wines a day. He indicated that that could be a standard worth emulating by competitions, which routinely assign judges 80 to 100 or more wines per day; no more than 50 wines a day would go far toward avoiding palate fatigue, which jeopardizes the credibility and consistency of competitions. Zraly doesn't judge often at commercial wine competitions, perhaps because he takes them seriously and recognizes the concentration and stamina they demand. At least, that's what he seemed to be saying in one final remark as we ended our chat: "You have to prepare physically, emotionally and spiritually for this."