A new reign of Riesling
Pat Wirz’s vineyard tells the complete story of California Riesling.
It’s a story, first of all, set against a long timeline. In California wine’s early days, Riesling was widely considered one of the state’s most promising white varieties — hard to fathom now in the kingdom of Chardonnay. The grape endured varying periods of favor and near-extinction. In 1921, California had about 1,980 acres of Riesling; by 1960, fewer than 285; by 1976, it had boomed again, to 8,650.
The Wirz Vineyard in Hollister (San Benito County) harks back to that mid-60s swinging pendulum: planted to Riesling in 1964, at a time when the grape looked, once again, like California’s next great white wine.
Like California Riesling at large, the Wirz Vineyard is underappreciated, misunderstood. Its half-century-old Riesling vines are own-rooted, headtrained, dry farmed; some of them sit directly on the San Andreas Fault. Says Pat Wirz: “The Cienega Valley doesn’t get a lot of press, but I think it’s one of the best places for growing grapes in California.” Don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t heard of it.
Yes, the site is hot (107 degrees last week), but it gets a welcome coastal influence through the Gabilan mountain range. If you’re standing in it, with mountains towering on all sides, the vineyard can feel like a flat, low valley, but it actually stands at 1,000 feet above sea level.
The logic isn’t obvious. If you taste the wines, you’ll see: The charge that Wirz Vineyard — that California in general — is too hot for Riesling, famously a lover of cool climates, is a fallacy.
And the arc of the Wirz Vineyard metonymically reflects the shifting demands imposed on California Riesling over time, from commercial cash cow to artisanal obsession. Subjected in the 1970s and ’80s to the mass-market treatment — a certain cerulean nun comes to mind — this noble grape has long connoted to Americans a wine that is saccharine, cloying, insipid. Large, value-oriented companies found huge success with Riesling, including Pacific Rim, whose founder Randall Grahm bought the entirety of the Wirz Vineyard crop for 16 years. After Grahm sold Pacific Rim, Wirz’s main client was the mega-conglomerate Diageo, and then Constellation. By 2011, both had lost interest in Wirz’s Riesling and moved on to another aromatic white — Moscato.
“That’s when I started selling to the little guys,” Wirz says. First, he sold grapes to the excellent Santa Cruz Mountains producers Big Basin and Thomas Fogarty. Quality-focused wineries like Bedrock, Precedent, Stirm, Ser and Waxwing have since followed, all bottling vineyard designates. There is a waiting list for Wirz’s fruit. That’s a good sign. “Right now, we’re in an era of smallproduction Riesling in California,” says Graham Tatomer, who makes Riesling and other Austrian-inspired wines for his (tiny) Tatomer label in Santa Barbara. “When I started (in 2008), there was no one else doing it.” (To see who else is,
now, consult my tasting notes.)
It can get lonely staking a wine business on an obscure concept. Initially, Tatomer had trouble finding good vineyards that had any Riesling, and what Riesling he found in Santa Barbara County was planted all to the same clone. The available clones of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, by comparison, are in the dozens. “It’s not the clone that would be my first choice,” Tatomer says. “It’s definitely more in the citrus-margarita spectrum of flavor,” as opposed to the “better-known, intensely rich stone-fruit flavors that you get in Germany.”
Tatomer compensates for the lack of diverse plant material by making Rieslings in different styles, to emphasize the grape’s versatility. For example, for his Kick-On Ranch bottling, from Los Alamos Valley, he selects only the grapes with the most physiologically ripe skins; the juice then undergoes 24 hours of skin contact, emulating the more-tannic style of Austria’s Wachau Valley. For a wine he calls Vandenberg, Tatomer picks the grapes riper and welcomes the presence of the often-beneficial fungus botrytis, which produces a rich, floral, honeysuckle-inflected wine.
Like the Wirz Vineyard, some of Tatomer’s Riesling sources in Santa Barbara (Lafond Vineyard, planted in 1972; Rancho Sisquoc, 1968) are accidental survivors of a sort — old vines planted in a more Riesling-optimistic era that have managed to endure despite changing tides. “A lot of Riesling here has been here for 40 years,” says David deLaski, owner of Santa Barbara’s Solminer winery. “It was very in fashion in the ’70s, and then it became incredibly out of fashion.”
“After those plantings in the ’70s,” Tatomer says, “they almost immediately started grafting the Riesling over to things that were heartier. And no one would drink Riesling.”
Which is a shame, because to the initiated, Riesling offers pleasures that no other varietal can. It’s a fetish among the wine cognoscenti — though Californian examples are rarely mentioned in the same conversation as the German, Austrian or Alsatian standards.
When it’s good, Riesling is explosively expressive — exotic and floral, rich and fruity, persistently mineral. Great Riesling often emits a petroleum- or kerosene-like aroma (you can thank a class of compounds called terpenes), which may, to my nose, be the most knee-weakening scent in the world. (In a good way, if that wasn’t clear.)
“Riesling is the most intellectual grape,” says James Wasson, who makes a small amount of Riesling from Mendocino’s Greenwood Ridge Vineyard for his Rein label. “The complexity I don’t think can be outdone. No other variety showcases place and time like it does.”
Riesling’s naturally sky-high acidity means it can age longer than most other white wines, and makes it one of the most versatile food wines. So high is this acidity that it often requires tempering — which is where the issue of sweetness comes in. Here we encounter the most pervasive misconception of all: “I don’t like Riesling because it’s too sweet.” Sweetness in Riesling can be necessary. If a fermentation stops short of bonedryness, retaining a little bit of sugar, that’s often a welcome foil to an acid content that could otherwise present as unpleasantly tart.
In many cases, Riesling cannot achieve its fullest expression at absolute dryness. “We made dry Riesling until 1973 — everybody did,” says Peter McCrea, owner of Stony Hill Vineyard in St. Helena, where the Riesling vines date back to 1948. “The problem with making it really dry is that you don’t get any bouquet until it’s 6 or 8 years old.” Despite its nine grams per liter of residual sugar, Stony Hill’s Riesling today by no means presents as sweet — and is still better with a few years of age on it — but rather as intensely fruity, often marked by lemon curd and passion fruit.
The most compelling case for Riesling in California, according to Santa Cruz winemaker Ryan Stirm, may be its potential to perform in the face of climate change. “We’re talking about a grape with a different physiology,” the Riesling specialist explains. If an increasingly warmer growing season shifts harvest dates permanently earlier, early-ripening grape varieties — ahem, Pinot and Chardonnay — may not get the hang time on the vine required to develop flavors. Late-ripeners like Riesling, Stirm explains, could fare better. “Riesling does have a resistance to heat,” he says. “It still has a more normal, oldschool ripening curve — you can wait for these cooler, more moderate days in fall before you pick.”
So, in this moment of renewed interest, in the face of so much history, can California get Riesling right — and keep it in the ground?
“We’re still in the trial-and-error phase,” Tatomer says. Of course, a number of wineries have been making highquality Riesling without error for decades, including Stony Hill, Smith-Madrone and Trefethen in Napa. Their vineyards, like the Wirz Vineyard, offer a hopeful glimpse of Riesling’s promise here. Nevertheless, as Tatomer points out, the lack of clonal diversity, of plantings in all the right places, of knowledge, of willingness to invest — puts California Riesling, on the whole, in something of an infancy stage.
Its defenders insist that’s a fluke. “It’s just funny that Riesling was ever out of favor, because historically, if you go for periods of hundreds of years, it’s the jam,” Tatomer says. “It just happened to be out of favor for the last few decades. But it’s just a matter of time before it comes back.”