San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A milestone for California wines
Tablas Creek just planted a grape you’ve never heard of
The California Rhone movement has reached a new milestone. Recently, Tablas Creek grafted 250 Muscardin vines at its Paso Robles (San Luis Obispo County) vineyard, which means that California now officially has all 14* of Chateauneuf du Pape’s permitted grape varieties.
“I don’t believe that there is a varietal Muscardin being made anywhere in the world,” says Tablas Creek managing partner Jason Haas. In two years’ time, when those vines begin producing their first fruit, he hopes to make the first one.
The wines of Chateauneuf du Pape, the famous winegrowing region in France’s southern Rhone Valley, are usually based on Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre — if you know the term “GSM” blend, this is the antecedent — but a host of other grape varieties are permitted by the appellation and often used as minor blending components. Many are obscure: Ever heard of Bourbelenc? The renowned winery Chateau de Beaucastel has always used all 14 grapes in its Mourvedrebased CdP. When the Perrin family — which owns Beaucastel — cofounded Tablas Creek with the Haas family 30 years ago, their first move was to import grapevines from the Rhone, to supplement the scarcity of vine material available domestically. (The importance of that program can’t be overstated: Since then, Tablas Creek has provided budwood to about 600 West Coast wineries.)
Obviously, the GSM heavy hitters were top priorities for import, but some of the obscure Chateauneuf grapes, like Picpoul and Counoise, proved surprisingly successful in Paso. So in 2003, the Haas family worked with UC Davis to bring in cuttings of the final seven Chateauneuf grapes. “My dad thought we should at least try them,” Haas says of his father, Robert, who died last year. “He thought that was one of our responsibilities as one of the torchbearers of the Rhone movement.”
The grape varieties Cinsault, Clairette Blanche, Terret Noir, Vaccarese, Bourbelenc, Picardan and Muscardin comprised the class of 2003. (The only of these with much clout stateside is Cinsault, which I wrote about recently.) After Tablas brought the cuttings stateside, UC Davis put all of the imported plant material through its extensive quarantine process. All were virused. It took varying amounts of time to render each variety virusfree; Muscardin just took the longest.
Tablas Creek always makes a standalone wine from its experimental grape varieties for at least a couple of years, just to see what they’re like. Some end up as components of the winery’s blends, but others have been successful as varietals. I particularly love Tablas’ dusty strawberry-forward Terret Noir, which has heftier tannins than its limpidity would suggest, and their Picardan, which has the viscosity and whiteflower notes of the more familiar white Rhone grape Picpoul.
So what’s Muscardin like? Since no Muscardinonly wine exists, we don’t know yet. “According to the Perrins, Muscardin is a largeberry, palecolored red grape,” says Haas, “a bit like a more floral Cinsault or a lesstannic Terret Noir.”
That description sounds pretty great to me — and seems like it could be poised to meet the demand for the translucent reds that are on the rise in California right now. In fact, many of the minor Chateauneuf blending grapes seem to fit this profile. “Most of these are of the lighterbodied, lightercolored, higheracid profile, which is something a lot of the newerwave California producers are really looking for,” Haas says.
“That may be one reason they became trace varieties to start with,” Haas continues. “In the early 20th century you were looking for grapes that could provide richness and substance to establish the identity of a wine region, and the fashion was against these lighter, paler, more elegant red varieties.”
Now, that’s most definitely changing. *Wait a second. Fourteen? I, too, was always taught that Chateauneuf du Pape permitted 13 different grape varieties in its wines. But that figure didn’t distinguish between Grenache Blanc and Grenache Noir. “Actually, some sources now enumerate 19,” explains Jason Haas. OK, so somewhere between 13 and 19.