Franciscan Chardonnays Duke It Out
Posted 05/05/2008 at 09:58 PM by Cathy
This week I'm taking a Mastering Wine course, taught by Karen MacNeil at the Culinary Institute of America in the Napa Valley. Each morning the class visits a different winery. Each winery arranges a carefully orchestrated tasting in order to highlight one particular learning goal of the course.
Franciscan was our first stop, and the focus was Chardonnay. What was extraordinary about this tasting was the opportunity Franciscan gave us to compare unblended wine samples, that is, samples taken directly from barrels. Since the samples are unfinished and unblended, they would never be released commercially.
But there we had them: eight glasses of different wine samples, drawn straight from the barrel, meant solely for educational purposes. The only consistent variable was that they were all 2007 Franciscan Chardonnay.
The first two glasses were Chardonnay grapes from Carneros; one sample was drawn from seasoned (or previously used) oak barrels, the other from new oak barrels. (My impression: the new oak Chardonnay was milder and "sat back" a bit, whereas the seasoned Chardonnay was more complete on its own.)
The next comparison pitted seasoned Chardonnays against each other, but one sample was grown in cooler-climate Carneros and the other was grown in warmer-climate Napa. (My impression: the cooler climate seemed to give the Carneros Chardonnay more structure, whereas the Napa Chardonnay was softer even though it seemed hotter and higher in alcohol.)
The next two tastings compared Franciscan Chardonnays from American oak barrels and Franciscan Chardonnays from French oak barrels. In one case, in the American vs. American comparison, the only variable was the cooper who made the two different barrels. Yet the wine from one cooper's barrel had a vibrant, lighting-bolt, refreshing quality to it, while the other cooper's barrel was also refreshing but in a more mild, summer-storm kind of way.
By the time I finished comparing the various sets of wines I was, first of all, overwhelmingly impressed by the subtle nuances a wine embraces as it adapts to the myriad of decisions winemakers make on its behalf.
I may have already been able to recognize the smell of baked pears, or bread dough, or buttered toast. But now I am more comprehensively aware of what journalists call the backstory, or the context. After today I can appreciate much better the winery's context that enabled that clarity of aroma (or personality in general) to emerge.
Tomorrow: Sauvignon Blanc at Rudd Vineyards & Winery
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