Bob and I met up with four other couples to do some wine tasting and kibbutzing in the beautiful El Dorado Hills of California. Things have changed enormously since I was there 8-10 years ago. Where I recall a small handful of wineries, there are now dozens and small vineyards are on just about every south facing hillside. Some brief notes on a few of our stops follow.
But first it bears mentioning that the night before we met up with our friends, Bob and I dined at a little restaurant in Auburn where we ordered the three zins they had on offer by the glass as a palate calibration exercise of sorts. They were the 05 Rombauer (Napa), 06 Pezzi King (Sonoma) and 06 Sobon Old Vines (local/Amador). For those unfamiliar with California, El Dorado and it's neighboring county to the warmer south, Amador, are several hours southeast of California's larger, more famous Napa-Sonoma region in what is California's gold country. We were staying less than 20 miles from the site of the very gold discovery that set off California's gold rush of 1849. Zinfandel has historically been this area's most successful grape, but almost every winery also produces syrah, petite sirah, and some Cal-Ital varietals. Anyway, back to the little restaurant in Auburn, we found the Rombauer undrinkably sweet and dense with heavy oak, too little acid and a hot vodka finish; the Pezzi King somewhat better but still a bit leaden especially compared with the third wine, the local offering Sobon, which was lighter in all the right ways with well-delineated fruit and great acidity. Yup, we were in the RIGHT place.
Miraflores
The winemaker is Napa transplant Marco Capelli who spent a long career at Swanson, IIRC. Disappointments were a 2007 Pinot Grigio which tasted of pears, toasted barrel and too much RS, a 2006 Barbera that combined a Duboeufy grape-banana nose and rounded malolactic flavors, and a 2007 Muscat Canelli with too little acidity. Just okay were the 2007 Herbert Vineyard zin (owned by Capelli), and a 2004 syrah that was fairly fat and sweet. The good to very good wines were a bright and spicy 05 Zin, an 03 Syrah (from purchased grapes) that had the smokey nose and roasted meat thing we get too little of in American syrahs, an 05 Syrah with excellent fruit and minerality, a mentholated 05 Petite Sirah and a softer 06 Petite Sirah. The standouts, and the wines I purchased, were the complex and european styled 05 and 06 Methode Ancienne syrahs made from estate grapes and left to develop wild yeasts, and the 2006 Meritage made of 50% merlot, 35% cabernet and 15% Petite Verdot.
Holly's Hill
The best wine at this winery only netted a C+ letter grade from me, and it was their 2007 Patriarch Blanc made from mostly roussane with a little viognier and grenache blanc. It was crisp and dry with good acidity, but it was also overpriced at $25. The other five wines I tasted all garnered C-/D's and adjectives like sweaty, stale, sweet, undistinguished, and simple. No need to bore anyone with further details.
Sierra Vista
I gave a B to a 2006 Viognier which was crisp and not perfumed, but after Holly Hill, what wouldn't taste good? Unfortunately, the compliments stop there. An 06 Roussanne was skunky like Heinekkin beer, and a 06 viognier-roussanne blend was too sweet with red apple and white peach flavors. A rose had a vinyl nose, and three reds, all 05's, were savagely green in a raw jalapeno kind of way--and this from someone who loves raw green peppers and doesn't mind a little green in her wine.
Madrona
We tasted two chards and a roussanne melange here which were all quite pleasant but also quite simple (not that there's not a market for that). An 04 nebbiolo was tart and light bodied, and and an 04 Cab was a lighter style but pleasant, if a little green. Their best wine of the few we tasted from their large list was an 05 Zin which was very fresh and full of zinberry flavors, but that wasn't enough to erase the overall amateurish impression the rest of the line made.
Lava Cap
Here we liked the 07 Reserve Chard at $18 and also an 06 Reserve Viognier ($28), but the wines were served ice cold which, we suspected, might have been to disguise low acidity, and for the area we thought the prices high. An 05 Reserve Zin seemed too reserved, and an 04 Reserve Cab had big tannins and good cabernet character with dust and mint. I thought it would be better "when it grows into its shoes", if it can. An 04 Rocky Draw zin was quite to my liking with the same kind of mint and dust the cabernet had, but the group favorite was the budget-friendly, well-balanced and perfect for drinking right now 04 American River Blend, a tasty little $15 blend of zin, syrah and merlot. It would be fair to add that having to fight for pours at a counter double deep with Apple Festival tourists didn't make enjoying the wines easy, and it's likely that Ines and I who often find austerity attractive would have found more to like under better circumstances.
Boeger
This winery gets the Best El Dorado Winery I Never Heard Of award. After the averageness of most of the wines we'd tasted since Miraflores, the overall consistency and quality of the Boeger wines was a major and welcome surprise. Among the standouts were the 06 cab franc with spot-on pretty berry fruit punctuated with celery root, the 05 Meritage (CF/CS/PV) even though it's a lighter style than one usually associates with that combination, and an 04 Magliore. Mostly refosco with nebbiolo and cab sauv, the latter wine had unusual, love-it-or-hate-it flavors of burnt rubber, a sweet finish and big, grippy tannins. But my two favorites were the stylish 04 Milagro blend of mostly tempranillo with a little graciano and cab sauv--fabulous nose, very pretty, medium-full, unusual and distinctive--and the 04 Majeure, a CdP blend. Everybody in our group bought one or both of these wines. The only loser (of the wines we tasted) at this winery was an 06 Walker Vineyard Zinfandel which was jammy, strong and port-like.
Latcham and Granite Springs
My notes for this winery's efforts use these words over and over: huge, heavy, big oak, extracted. No need to go into details except for the one exception, which deserves a big thumbs up: the 05 Cab Franc. It's robust, ripe and not the least bit shy, but it manages somehow to not go entirely over-the-top and what's more it reigns in the alcohol at an admirable $13.8%.
Sobon
The winery cat prevented me from taking much in the way of notes during my visit, but I gave B+'s/A-'s to the 06 Old Vine Zin, 06 Fiddletown Zin, 06 ReZerve (TM) Zin and the 06 ReZerve Primitivo. All were bright, clear expressions of their fruit with a strong sense of place and house-style, and all kept the alcohol in the 14% range which is low for the area. I bought the Old Vine (which remained my favorite zin of the trip) and Primitivo.
Cedarville
You have to love this winery: two graduates of the U.C. Davis program meet, marry and open a winery together, combining the best of current technology and sustainable farming practices to manage every aspect of growing and making wine from 20 acres all by themselves. And what they produce is some of the best if not THE best wines in the area. We tasted with owner Jonathan Lachs (by appointment), and my notes are peppered with A grades and highly positive terms like sensual, serious, spicey, structured and character. We tasted the grenache, viognier and zin from 2006 and the Petite Sirah and Cabernet from 2005. The Syrah wasn't open, and none of us being syrah-heads in particular we let that go. The wines were so good and so fairly priced that I would have been happy to buy everything they make and sell, but having a space issue (we were flying home) settled for the (sensual) viognier, grenache and their cabernet whose perfect blackberry fruit sports a beguiling and irresistable Haut Medoc-like chalky minerality that one rarely encounters in California wine.
Dobra Zelmja
Here we tasted a honey-sweet viognier and then a ridiculous almost 17% syrah before deciding we were wasting both their wine and our time (the pourer was actually proud of the alcohols). Not worth mentioning except to warn others.
Terre Rouge
Since this Amador legend didn't have a tasting room last time I visited about eight-nine years ago, that they now have one and that it was open weekdays was a welcome surprise. Until we tasted the wine. Two 03's, an 01 and an 00 were among the six wines poured for us--it's as if they were doing a giant cellar cull, and these were the wines that had to go. Wouldn't have been a problem if the wines weren't tired, but several were. My notes include unfortunate adjectives like: overripe, bug spray, and 'campfire ash'. Quite a disappointment from a winery whose wines I've tasted and always liked over the years. Enough said.
Young's
I liked and purchased a bottle of the 06 Barbera, and my notes are complimentary of the 07 Roussanene (crisp, floral, stone fruit, complex), but all the other wines (zin, sangiovese, syrah and cabernet) note concern about jammy flavors and hot finishes. Most of the wines were 16%ish. That said, there was a lot of style and consistency evident here and at 14%, these could have been eyepopping.
Perry Creek
Odd little winery, though at 14,000 cases maybe not so little for the area. Some of the wines were very good and some were very bad, and it was hard to tell where the fault lay. A winemaker change about three years apparently accounted for some of it, and several of the wines had been open for two days and showed oxidation (new bottles were immediately produced), but neither of those quite explains all the problems we found. The wines were erratic as if they had no estate vineyards and/or no control over purchased fruit. What we did like, in fact love, was a what-tasted-to-me-unoaked 2007 Viognier that had an almost Texier-like delicacy, though in a lighter style than Eric would make--multi-faceted and refreshing. An 06 Syrah "Alt 2401" was also quite good--or do I mean wasn't so bad? When the wines are so hit and miss, it's hard to be sure. At the very least, it was balanced and didn't reek of American oak like their zins.
