Tasting Notes: Drinking with the Pros
A continued conversation with Mike Dashe of Dashe Cellars
We recently published a conversation between Collin Casey, sommelier of San Francisco’s Namu Gaji and Mike Dashe of Dashe Cellars. What we left out: during the conversation they tasted through five different wines. Here’s what happens when two seasoned wine pros get together.
Bottles opened:
Mike:
Dashe McFadden Riesling 2012
Dashe McFadden Zinfandel 2010
Ridge Montebello 1991
Collin:
Huet Vouvray “Le Mont” demi-sec 1981
Aldo Conterno Barolo “Bussia” 2001
CPC: So, Let’s talk about the bottles that you brought.
MD: Yeah! The first one is one of my favorite vineyards, the McFadden Vineyard, in Mendocino. It’s organically farmed by one of the best-named guys in the wine business. Guinness McFadden is the guy’s name. He’s got this gorgeous place in the Potter Valley, planted mostly to white grapes… Gewertztraminer, Pinot Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay. I happen to get a great slug of a Zinfandel vineyard there, but this wine is a Riesling from the ’12 vintage. It’s native yeast fermented in stainless steel, made sur-lie, which is kind of unusual, from 30 year old vines in this great chalky soil. To my way of tasting this, it’s got beautiful minerality, acidity and balance. It’s from this cool micro-climate in Potter Valley and the grapes really show this unique, almost slate terroir. I’d been looking for years for a place wherein the grapes grown in interesting soil that were unaffected by the California heat and the fruit from here is just gorgeous. I usually harvest this at the end of October, which is incredibly late.
CPC: Whoa. That really, really is late. I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.
MD: Yeah, you almost never see white grapes harvested that late in California, which gives you an idea about just how special this site is.
CPC: It definitely takes my sense memory back to this last trip to Germany this spring. It’s right in line with the driest stuff you get in the Mosel. Let’s move onto the other wines.
MD: Let’s stay with the same vineyard. This is the 2010 McFadden Zinfandel. 100% Zin, from the very top of this farm. It’s close to 2000 ft. elevation. I first saw these grapes in 2004. I was looking at Riesling, looked on top of the hill and thought “My God, that looks like Zinfandel up there.” What a crazy place for Zinfandel. McFadden said they’d been there since he bought the farm, but that he couldn’t get the grapes completely ripe and couldn’t get a lot of color out of the grapes. I went home and thought about it and got a call from my friend Mark Ellenbogen from Slanted Door. He wanted to know if I knew of an organic vineyard where I could make an interesting wine with not so much alcohol or oak influence, and I realized this place was perfect. It’s a little off the beaten path and a little avant-guarde, but it was perfect. Mark and I are both big fans of Cru Beaujolais and he told me that if I could ever make a wine like that, he would “just roll over and bark”. I had just bought these great, enormous 900 liter barrels from Burgundy and I thought these would be perfect. So I made it in this Cru Beaujolais style. I took away the rollers form the crusher and let the whole berries just fall into the tank and let the whole fermentation just happen inside the berries and I got this lovely fruit, complexity and spiciness. And Mark just loved the wine. He actually sold almost 400 cases of the wine in just 9 months.
CPC: This wine was essentially the origin of the style of wine that you’ve become known for, yes?
MD: Mark kind of encouraged me and pushed me over the edge and gave me the confidence that I could sell it. I was used to making fairly big, dark-colored Zinfandel and when I looked at this wine, it was absolutely beautiful. It was light, and it had all this spice and complexity. It’s not a normal beast out there, I must admit, but it got the attention of some great people. Not just Mark, but guys like Eric Asimov from the New York Times, who is one of the critics who I appreciate the most in this country, really looked at it and enjoyed it.
CPC: If you’re going to have two guys support your wine, I’d say those are two of the more solid palates to trust. Moving onto the next bottle…
MD: A fairly esoteric wine. A Zinfandel from the Heart Arrow Ranch, which is a biodynamic vineyard in Mendocino.
CPC: This is the one, as a San Francisco sommelier, that I always think of as the “Ellenbogen wine” just since none of us could get any of it for years. It was all at Slanted Door.
MD: This is one of the wines I’m most proud of and one of the wines that I most often open at the end of a day when I get home. I love the balance, fruit, complexity of these wines and that they’re never over the top, alcoholic and monochromatic. When I am making this wine, I always think about Cru Beaujolais. Some of the great wines at made in Beaujolais and I try and reach that way as a stylistic model. This is a very young vineyard, probably 8 or 9 year old vines, in Redwood Valley. Quite steep and at about 8-900 foot elevation. They have animals and grow all manner of plants up there. It’s this whole ecosystem. The animals fertilize all the plants and it’s this whole microcosm unto itself. We do a native fermentation on these and you get a really beautiful earthy, mineral, spicy character on the wine. And you get this great texture. It just flows like silk on the tongue.
CPC: We always gravitate toward the Heart Arrow. There’s something so special about it. Ah! And there’s another wine!
MD: There is? Where?
CPC: Here!
MD: Oh!
(Howling laughter)
CPC: Let’s maybe not forget about the ’91 Ridge Montebello, shall we?
MD: This was a really special wine. I started working at Ridge at the very end of 1989. I’d done an internship in France and was so excited about Bordeaux wines. 1990 was the first year I worked at Ridge. After the ’90 vintage I really started talking with Paul Draper about Cabernet. In my opinion, he had some of the greatest Cabernet grapes and had made some of the best Cabernet based wines in California.
CPC: That goes without saying!
MD: We started a program, based on Paul’s desire to make a really world-class Cabernet-based wine and did some things that were a little more common in Bordeaux. It turned out that ’91 was the perfect year to begin doing this. I think that 1991 was one of the best Montebello vintages that Ridge ever made and when I was digging around in the cellar, I just thought it would be fun for us to try.
CPC: Making our way to my bottles, I kind of went outside the box today. Normally when meeting with friends, it’s kind of rude to show up with crazy/rare bottles, but since we were hanging out and I know you love these wines, I kind of just let ‘er rip. brought an ’81 Huet Vouvray “Le Mont” demi-sec.
MD: A spectacular wine.
CPC: … And then an ’01 Aldo Conterno Barolo “Bussia”, which is the standard bottling. ’01 was kind of a fleshy, friendly vintage and the wines are really happening now. I thought I’d throw you a curve in bringing an Italian bottle, since those usually aren’t what I bring out.
MD: Both of these wines are tasting great and have really evolved in the hours since we’ve opened them. The Huet is so luscious and complex. It’s alittle older and has oxidation, but also all this gorgeous fruit. It has this tropical mango character and this great acidity. It’s just so together.
CPC: ’81 is cool. I love the wines from when Gaston (Huet) was still there and yeah… this one is pretty bananas.
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