Sara Fowler at Peju, Part One

Posted 03/27/2008 at 03:55 AM by Cathy

Sara Fowler, winemaker at Peju in Napa, blends wines the way Jackson Pollack blended liquid paint – methodically, intimately, organically – with an end result that leaves you grateful for the brave artistic souls among us.

Blending wines is Fowler’s thing, so to speak. Experimentation may be at the heart of blending, but at Peju it’s a very methodical experimentation. Every clone that comes into the winery is kept separate in vineyard blocks and later in barrel types. “It’s like something from the farmer’s market,” Fowler said. “You bring it in, and you want to keep it pure and separate.”

You want, in other words, for a Sauvignon Blanc to be a Sauvignon Blanc and a Petit Verdot to be a Petit Verdot. That way, with the varietals most purely themselves, Fowler’s experiments with blends tend to be identifiable. That is, you can almost lift an individual component up out of the bottle, examine its particular characteristics, and then integrate it back into the bottle’s other components.

But that, the integration process, is where it gets very complex. It’s like two chefs who have the same ingredients, Fowler said, but who use a different recipe. “There are so many small shifts to making a bottle of wine. A little bit of everything can really balance it out.”

I have three bottles of Peju wines, a 2007 Estate Bottled Sauvignon Blanc (Napa Valley), a 2005 Fifty/Fifty that is 50% Merlot and 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, and something called Provence, which is made from half white grapes and half red grapes. Tonight, in Peju Part One, I’ll focus on the Sauvignon Blanc. I’ll test Fowler’s winemaking first in an area – a non-blended wine – that is not her specialty per se, but I’m curious to kick the tires, so to speak, to see whether the foundation for Fowler’s blends are sturdy enough.

In the bottle, and in the glass, the wine is tinged the very palest color of straw yellow. It’s ghostly, luminescent almost. The aroma has something of the otherworldly about it too: it wafts from the glass like a genie from a bottle. It’s tough not to get stereotypical about the aroma of a Sauvignon Blanc, that is, it’s tough not to smell what you’re expecting to smell, like grapefruit and citrus and grass. With the Peju Sauvignon Blanc, perhaps because of Fowler’s practice of keeping clones separate in vineyard and barrel, I don’t get the predictable mix of those predictable aromas. Instead, the smell of pears is prominent for me, except the pears aren’t your usual Anjou off the tree. The wine smells of pears that have somehow been fermented, the way an imaginative cook ferments apples to pair with cugelhopf. For the eater – and the drinker – it’s a happy, unusual surprise.

An extraordinary thing happens with the texture of the wine when it hits my mouth. The wine is both limpid and substantial, but it’s both of those things in discrete layers, like a clear brook running over an undercurrent of mineral deposit.

This isn’t a wine I’d drink cases of, but only because I’d want to savor every sip so long I would never get to drink anything else. It’s a quality, quality wine. Through and through.

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