I spent last week wearing a white lab coat and spitting into a red Solo cup.
That’s another way of saying I spent the week as a judge at The San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the event that the Cloverdale Citrus Fair has been running since 1983. The event, which The Chronicle has been the title sponsor of since 2000, managed to continue this year (though without the big annual public tasting), and collectively 48 judges assessed more than 5,700 wines from all over North America — everything from California Cabernet to Idaho Albarino to Vidal Blanc from Pennsylvania — while sitting at safe social distances.
Wine competitions are strange enterprises even in normal times, and judging can be a grueling, physically intense sport. Before you take out the world’s smallest violin for me, you should try tasting — and thoughtfully evaluating — 150 wines over the span of a few hours sometime. Your mouth will feel uncomfortable, I promise.
As my three-person panel proceeded through our assigned categories — white blends $21.99 and under! Pinot Noir $58-$66.99! — I was struck, first of all, by how out of practice I’ve grown at this sort of marathon tasting during COVID. I haven’t attended any sort of big-volume tastings in more than a year. I used to taste big batches of wine all at once in The Chronicle office, as part of my research for stories, but since I’ve been working from home I tend to taste much more leisurely, a few at a time, returning to each bottle over the course of a few days. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I love seeing them evolve.
Given how shockingly new it all felt to me this year, I have a few observations to share about the experience of judging. First, it is really difficult for a wine to stand out when it’s tasted in this way, quickly and alongside so many similar specimens. When you’re going through 48 Grenaches all at once, the ones that really pop tend to be the bigger, weightier, fruitier wines. The subtler, quieter wines, if a judge isn’t paying close attention, can easily get lose in the shuffle. Those are the types of wines I love; I hope we gave them their due.
Second, one might assume that the coveted categories of wines at a competition would be the expensive, ageworthy, showstopper reds, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Red wines are much more punishing to taste in quick succession than whites, sparkling wines or rosés, because they have tannins that leave your mouth feeling dry. (This is why many judges snack on roast beef: Red meat can absorb some of the tannins.) After my first day of judging, which culminated in red blends $23-$34.99, my mouth was so parched that it was in pain. I texted a friend that I never wanted to want to drink a glass of red wine again. Thankfully, that has turned out not to be true.
But the most powerful observation of the week was that there is a lot of really good wine being made out there. Most of the wines entered in the Chronicle Wine Competition do not come from elite, high-profile wineries — many come from states rarely associated with winemaking, like Georgia or New Jersey. Although a majority of the wines I tasted last week were made from vitis vinifera, the wine-grape species that’s grown in California, I also tasted many non-vinifera wines from grape varieties I’m largely unfamiliar with, like La Crescent and Cayuga.
When you live in the Bay Area, surrounded by some of the greatest wine regions in the world, it’s easy to turn your nose up at winemaking efforts from some of these faraway places. And, for the record, I’m not willing to say that some of these other states are producing wines at California’s level. But for the most part it’s hard to find a truly bad wine out there these days — one riddled with chemical flaws. Most wines are sound and drinkable. That’s impressive, and wouldn’t have been true a decade or two ago. Inevitably, the tide can only rise from here.
Wine of the Week
Wine geeks know that Aligote, the second-fiddle white grape of Burgundy, is a much more rewarding wine than history has often made it out to be. I’ve always adored Aligote, and have often ordered it at restaurants as an affordable alternative to Burgundy Chardonnays. This week I wrote about the Clendenen Family Vineyards Aligote ($18, 12.5%) from Santa Barbara County, whose owner Jim Clendenen has been a champion of this afterthought wine for decades.
What else I’m writing
• The big news of the week is that Steven Spurrier, whose main (but not only) claim to fame is the 1976 Judgment of Paris tasting, has died at age 79. I wrote about Spurrier’s crucial role in elevating the reputation of California wine.
• Currently, small-scale vineyards in Napa County (like Elkhorn Peak Cellars, pictured above) can’t host wine tastings if they haven’t built a winery facility — which some farmers say is prohibitively expensive for them. That may change soon, now that the county government has agreed to explore the idea of a new “micro-winery” classification.
• Kimchi sour? Galangal witbier? A Bay Area brewery, Dokkaebier, is turning out highly original beers inspired by the flavors of Korean food. I wrote about the venture and its creative owner, Youngwon Lee.
What I’m reading
• Actress Elizabeth Olson likes to go wine tasting, and she told Conde Nast Traveler that her favorite place to visit is Ryme in Sonoma County. (A fine choice!) She also had some shade to throw on Napa Valley, which she calls “old and too fancy and too serious.”
• Apparently, wine influencers on social media are sometimes called “vinfluencers,” which I find very cringey. Here’s Adam Lechmere’s warning to the wine-industry establishment — which had similarly negative reactions to the arrival of bloggers, in the early aughts — that social-media influencers in the realm of wine are here to stay.
• In Whetstone, Nam Cheah offers a glimpse into the wines made in southern Vietnam. Though the emergence of the wine industry was largely due to French colonization, many of the wineries and vineyards are still in business today.
Drinking with Esther is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s wine critic. Follow along on Twitter: @Esther_Mobley and Instagram: @esthermob
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