Castor Membership April 2023: Blow Away, Dandelion and Know Thyself
The vineyards of the Eden Valley, South Australia’s home for Riesling since the mid-19th century.
“Blow Away, Dandelion”
Dandelion Riesling “Enchanted Garden”, Eden Valley, Australia 2021
Riesling. The grape varietal that sends sommeliers and their clients running, although often in opposite directions-the somms salivating as they rush towards the bottle, the laypeople out of breath as they beat it to the nearest pouring of Pinot Grigio or other seemingly harmless wine. Whether it’s the disconnect that still has us decrying wines with any sugar in them while simultaneously sporting the most saccharine-laden diet on the planet, or the seeming snobbishness with which the sommelier community flaunts its unabashed love of this wonderful grape, Riesling still somehow has a stigma on the US wine scene, which is unfortunate on many levels because, in theory, there are buckets of reasons why everyone should love Riesling. I think as sommeliers/wine professionals, we honestly only have ourselves to blame-for not importing more high-quality examples from Germany, Austria, Australia, and other countries, for trying to overcorrect the sweetness fear factor by championing harshly-made dry examples that have all the textural affinity of a good mouthwash, and last but certainly not least, trying to make everyone feel as if they should in fact be loving Riesling. As the playwright David Mamet once wrote, you can’t direct an actor to not think about a hippopotamus-the power of suggestion, and our equal and opposite reaction to being told what to believe is cool, are indeed strong polarities. I think if we as wine pros would just stop trying so hard, Riesling would actually be better off, because if the pressure wasn’t constantly placed on the buyer to forget their misconceptions through thinly veiled, arrogant invitations to “become a better taster”, Riesling wouldn’t have to be presented so hesitantly, chock-full of caveats.
Domaine Pique-Basse owner and winemaker Olivier Trapet.
The reason to not give up on Riesling, and indeed my advice to clients that express reservations about the grape, is akin to the old cliche about weather in temperamental climates: “If you don’t like it, wait 5 minutes”. Quite simply, the wine world is hard-pressed to find a grape that expresses itself so differently depending on where it is grown, so if you find yourself not enjoying that bone-dry Austrian bottle or second-guessing your purchase of a German Spatlese’s green apple and residual sugar, there’s bound to be another place on the globe that makes Riesling you’ll love. The United States has shown the ability to produce amazing Riesling, particularly in New York State and Michigan, where the wines show the brightness and acidity of their Old-World counterparts but with noticeably less of the petrol-scented earth. The northeast France region of Alsace takes its predilection for Riesling from its close historic ties to Germany, but the wines produced there are a whole different animal, full of more tropical fruit, fuller-bodied textures, and increased alcohol levels. One thing all Riesling regions sport is the grape’s profound ability to age: the higher acidity (one of the highest in the white wine lexicon, along with Chenin Blanc) and lower alcohol levels mean that even modestly priced bottlings can last decades. My favorite regions for Riesling? I do love the Mosel and Pfalz areas of Germany, for their stunning examples of off-dry and dry, respectively, but I must confess that my current favorite place to drink Riesling from is nearly a world apart, in a country long-known for its sumptuously huge red wines, but whose history with Riesling goes back nearly 175 years-Australia.
The story of Riesling in Australia begins in 1847, when grapevine cuttings from Germany’s Rheingau were planted in the Pewsey Vale winery in the nation’s Eden Valley region. Located in the Barossa Zone just south of Barossa Valley, Captain John Gilbert’s Pewsey Vale has records of a celebrated bottled vintage of Riesling as early as 1854, and the winery (revitalized by the Hill-Smith family in the 1960s) still exists. There are amazing examples of Riesling being bottled all over Australia; the Clare Valley in South Australia’s Mount Lofty Ranges zone, Hunter Valley in New South Wales, and Margaret River in Western Australia are but a few examples of bottles to look for, but the mother region is surely the Eden Valley, where it all began, and where Riesling continues to be the most important white wine produced. A windswept area that features prominently exposed hillsides, the Eden Valley’s varied soil types and variations in elevation (the Riesling grape features particularly in the designated subzone High Eden at the appellation’s southern tip) contribute to a range of stylistic choices, but these high pockets of vines above 400 meters altitude, coupled with a relatively cooler climate compared to its Shiraz-heavy neighbor Barossa, give most of High Eden’s Rieslings a beautiful combination of racy acidity and texture, honeycomb secondary notes, and most importantly (for me), the distinctive character of fresh lime in the fruit profile, which in my experience tasting is nearly exclusive to Aussie Riesling, and sets it apart from its global relatives in terms of refreshment. To help me drill down further on this specific expression of the Riesling varietal, I chose a wine that encompasses these attributes but on a far more artisanal scale than many others-winemaker Elena Brooks and her Riesling from a special vineyard in Eden Valley, Enchanted Garden.
Dandelion co-owner and winemaker Elena Brooks.
Elena’s story is of the ilk that I’ve come to love in both the wine world and beyond; born in Bulgaria, Elena’s mother worked in a winery, and the collapse of the USSR brought both renewed investment and enthusiasm in wine production there. From her early teens, Elena worked in wineries; as she was often the only English speaker, she was translating barrel tastings for winemakers and assisting them with their work by the time she was 12, ultimately producing her first batch of wine (a Chardonnay) at the tender age of 16. After traveling and working in multiple wine regions around the world, Elena met her husband, Zar, and ultimately settled in Australia’s McLaren Vale. Elena and Zar created the Dandelion brand, and much like its eponymous flower, they have blown their vinous ligules throughout Australia’s wine areas, as Elena has shown skill working with small vineyard owners crafting boutique productions of wines that are non-interventionist and absolutely true to their terroir.
“Enchanted Garden” is one of these vineyards that spoke to Elena’s lifelong love for Riesling as she first fleshed out Dandelion’s mission; the small 7-acre plot at 410 meters of elevation that she chose was planted in 1910 and is owned and tended by farmers Sue and Stuart Woodman, and it was a connection they had with Elena’s husband Zar that allowed this partnership to coalesce. When I tasted her 2021 “Enchanted Garden”, I saw immediately what had attracted Elena to this vineyard, and her hands-off use of free run juice, fermented in a small tank at low temperature, allows the natural acidity and low PH to really shine. This is indeed a Riesling for the skeptics, coming from a rising star on the Australian wine scene, one that is beautiful at this moment and will cellar well also. Being able to feature this quality of wine for the Castor Membership was equal parts excitement and humility, a wine that I hope will axe your Riesling apprehension from the first sip and, well, blow you away (you know I had to)-D.
Dandelion Riesling “Enchanted Garden’, Eden Valley 2021
Country of Origin: Australia.
Places and People: The “Enchanted Garden” vineyard is a small 7 acre site in Australia’s Eden Valley. Part of the Barossa Zone but south of its neighbor the Barossa Valley, Eden Valley is windy, cool, and includes vineyards with much higher elevations than Barossa (up to 550 meters), making it a perfect bedfellow for Riesling, which has a history in the zone dating back to 1847. Dandelion is a partnership between winemaker Elena Brooks and her husband Zar; they have put Elena’s superb winemaking skills to use in small production bottlings spread across six Australian wine zones. The “Enchanted Garden” Riesling vines are located in the southern part of Eden Valley at an altitude of 416 meters.
Soil: Loamy soil of both clay and sand, with very rocky subsoil.
Grape Varieties: 100% Riesling.
Winemaking: Whole bunches hand-picked in the second week of March and then de-stemmed without crushing the grapes; this allowed for both the free-run juice and wine from a full press of grapes to be collected and fermented in a small tank at temperature control.
Aging: The wine is aged in the same tank for a period of 4 months and then bottled directly with a vegan fining, and very light filtration.
Flavors and Foods: The “Enchanted Garden” 2021 beckons you with an uncharacteristically full, round nose for Riesling-there is a whiff of the grape’s trademark petrol at the outset, but then it quickly moves to scents of raw honey, acacia and orange blossoms, and a deeper version of the Aussie Riesling’s telltale lime than expected-almost moving to Rangpur, or even preserved lime. The palate demonstrates the Dandelion’s ability to please a variety of tastes-the lime juice is deepened almost to a confit and there are hints of preserved lemon as well. The wild, raw honey note is still unmistakable, and Riesling’s characteristically higher acid is there in the center of the palate, but it is the round, textural juiciness of the “Enchanted Garden” that sets it apart, not allowing the acidity to become too sharp or fatiguing. The finish is mild and reflective of the Dandelion’s 11% abv, and this combination of flavorful complexity with mild structure makes the wine compelling with a variety of foods-think fish tacos, oilier fish such as salmon (confited in oil and lime juice with fennel would be stellar) and trout, grilled Spanish mackerel, Thai papaya salads, or roasted vegetables such as eggplant.
Service and Cellar: The Dandelion “Enchanted Garden” is best enjoyed (in a slight departure for me) at cooler temperatures in the white wine cellar spectrum (think 45-48 degrees F). Pulling this wine straight from an extended stay in the refrigerator dulls its fruit profile, while serving it on the higher side of the white wine spectrum causes the acidity to be more perceptible-stick to the sweet spot here if possible.
Chateau la Tour de By is a microcosmic picture of Bordeaux-an iconic tower, stately chateau, the ever-present Gironde estuary, and, of course, block after block of vineyards.
“‘All Along the Winetower”
Chateau La Tour de By Medoc Red, Bordeaux, France 2016
I’ve always been an “against the crowd” type of person. For as long as I can remember, if something was the next big thing, I was against it-I just couldn’t deal with the whole of society telling me that I HAD to rush to a newly opened restaurant, HAD to watch a certain film, HAD to accept that the newest musical fad was here to stay. Looking back now I do see some merit in this; it has helped me stay wary of trends and embrace that which can withstand the ever-changing whims of fashion. Being blessed with some humility, however, I also have to acknowledge that sometimes my inability to cozy up to the newest or next “big thing” amounted to nothing more than obstinate contrarianism, which in turn cost me years of enjoying something or someone that I came to know later in life, promptly wondering how on earth I’d ever gone without.
When I began my wine career in earnest, this yearning to find something uncovered or underappreciated continued, but was tempered (thankfully, I believe) by my mentors, who had classically-trained palates and encouraged my belief that the constant use of qualifiers in wine, also known as The “This Wine is a Baby (Insert More Famous and Expensive Bottle)” style of writing/selecting/serving, was a tired practice that had been mined to the point of cliche. Rather than always searching for a comparative, I think it’s more important to truly appreciate the DIFFERENCES between grape varietals, regions, sub-regions, producers, winemaking, etc. We can in fact honor a bottle’s unique qualities and acknowledge its stellar context within the galaxy of wine as a whole without lazily attempting to equate it with something we view as common knowledge, or even simply common. With that in mind, I had a great visit earlier this year with the Commercial Director of a producer who proudly identifies with its region and wine culture, yet due to its location and style really does find a niche within a well-documented aesthetic: Benjamin Richer de Forges of his family’s Medoc estate, La Tour de By.
Vines at Chateau la Tour de By in the early days of spring.
I can’t explain it, but when it comes to Bordeaux, and specifically the mostly Cabernet-dominant blends produced on the left bank of the Gironde estuary, I have always been attracted to the northern Medoc. Although the Medoc name applies to this entire tongue-shaped patch of land, the north is where you’ll find the appellation name most often used, as the towns below have starry designations of their own. Here, distanced from the famous appellations of St. Estephe, Paulliac, St. Julien, and Margaux, this subregion that commences at the end of the Gironde’s flow into the Atlantic (the Gironde itself, 47 miles long, is an estuary formed by the confluence of both the Garonne and Dordogne rivers) provides Bordeaux fans with tremendous value, if sacrificing some structure and longevity. Soil here in the northern Medoc is generally heavier and more clay-based as opposed to the famed gravelly soils of its southern neighbors (more on that in a moment), and this fact along with the flatter terrain and cooler-still climate, mean that the ambition level for the Northern Medoc has a lower bar: there are no classified growths situated here. However, the producers who don’t fight against the characteristics mentioned above and make wines within the scope of what their properties offer, can produce exceptional wines of both quality and relative value, full of savory fullness and a restrained, noble fruit profile that is quintessentially Bordelaise, which explains why the Northern Medoc has a high concentration of chateaux that can be considered “the best of the rest”, many of which go by the oft-debated, oft-reclassified Cru Bourgeois moniker.
. East of the town of Begadan are two of my favorite Medoc producers, whose styles contrast nicely-the Merlot-based, silkier reds of Chateau Rollan de By, and the more classically Cabernet-centered wines of La Tour de By. Historically, La Tour de By was known as La Roque de By, and has records that date its ownership and wine production back to 1599. The current chateau, facing the Gironde and built in the same 19th century fashion as many Bordeaux properties (a style of architecture known as “Girondines”), was constructed in 1876. By 1965, the estate was in need of restoration and revitalization; help arrived in the form of three repatriates from Tunisia, Messrs. Pages, Lapalu, and Cailloux. Marc Pages was a decorated army officer during the Second World War and set to the task of restoring La Tour de By to its former quality and beyond. A year after his arrival, he met the famous French oenologist and consultant Emile Peynaud, who worked with Pages on turning the estate into one that produced more modern-style wines. Peynaud and Pages recognized that, in contrast with most of their neighbors, La Tour de By sits on a microclimactic soil bed comprised of two gravel ridges that face the Gironde, rendering my generalization above regarding murky, clay-based land moot, and allowing the wines to more closely approach what was being made further south, but with an airy density of their own that sees the traditional black fruit descriptors of Cabernet Sauvignon turn more towards red.
By 1977, La Tour de By had been invited into the Union de Grand Crus de Bordeaux, and when Robert Parker published the second edition of his exhaustive tome “Bordeaux” in 1991, La Tour de By was described therein as “a well-known and consistently good Cru Bourgeois.” The chateau had plentiful holdings (part of the reason it had such renown) of 170 hectares and produced 40,000 cases of wine annually at the time, but its two subsidiary labels that lesser fruit could be dropped into meant that the quality of the first cuvee didn’t suffer.
Cousins in wine: Benjamin Riches de Forges and Frederic LeClerc of Chateau La Tour de By.
In 1999, Marc Pages became the sole owner of La Tour de By, and in the years following he continued to evolve the Chateau, along with his children and grandchildren. Today, cousins Frederic LeClerc and Benjamin Riches de Forges, grandsons of Marc Pages and the 3rd generation of Pages family in Bordeaux, run the estate as winemaker and commercial director, respectively. It was at the beginning of the year, as I spoke with Benjamin about his family’s history and tasted his wines at the GWC office, that I really took to this gentle and jovial man who exhibited two things I love about winemakers: a sense of collegial respect for his contemporaries (when I brought up their neighbors Rollan de By and how I used to pour the wines to great acclaim as a sommelier, Benjamin had nothing but praise and was quick to contrast their style with his family’s in a complimentary manner) and a keen self-awareness of his estate’s capabilities and strengths. This latter trait is crucial in my mind to making delicious wine. From the outset, Benjamin acknowledged that Chateau la Tour de By is not designed to try to mimic the traits of its more famous, and more famously expensive, neighbors to the south. He spoke of his family’s environmental efforts (the estate is certified by France’s Ministry of Agriculture with the Haute Valeur Environmentale, a prestigious designation that speaks to all aspects of a winery’s operation), and about how La Tour de By drinks wonderfully in a 5-15 year window while being unapologetic that the blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, and Merlot would never reach a 30+year cellaring trajectory-in fact, Benjamin took pride in the estate’s work in fruit selection that allows Tour de By to drink very well in its youth, not requiring decades to refine itself. Tasting the 2016 vintage, the quality of the estate’s fruit and processes was evident: the blend of 60% Cabernet, 35% Merlot, and 5% Petit Verdot from 45-year old vines possessed classic Bordeaux traits of blackberries and cassis, roasted meats, and pleasing smokiness while burning with a uniquely red-fruit dominant glow and retaining an elegant, understated structure-in La Tour de By’s case, this is accomplished with an elongated fermentation of nearly five weeks, depending on the vintage, as well as judicious use of oak aging (the wines are aged for one year in a mix of new, 1st year, and 2nd year barrels), that ensures the wine’s tasting notes aren’t soaked in descriptors from the barriques. The price of La Tour de By, also, is astonishingly approachable, but rather than try and convince you that this is Chateau LaTour or Lafite-Rothschild at a Castor member price, an oft-used sales pitch that in my opinion habitually rings hollow and insults the intelligence of one’s customer base, I will simply say that the northern Medoc wines have a singular quality that separates them from the rest of the Left Bank, and in the hands of a talented team these wines can shed their reputation for rusticity and showcase a sophistication all their own which, in reality, is all we should be wanting from wine. The Tour de By 2016 is a glass of wine that, to borrow from Socrates, truly knows itself-D.
Chateau la Tour de By Medoc Red Blend, Bordeaux 2016
Country of Origin: France.
Places and People: Chateau La Tour de By is located east of the town of Begadan in Bordeaux’s northern Medoc, directly adjacent to the Gironde estuary and feeling the climactic influences of the Atlantic Ocean just to its west (the tower referenced by the chateau’s name is in fact a lighthouse, built amongst the vines to guide ships along the Gironde). The property has roots dating back to the 16th century, and the current chateau was built in 1876. Owned by the Pages family since 1965, first with as a trio of partners and since 1999 solely, La Tour de By has a well-earned reputation for consistently delicious wines of excellent value. The estate is currently run by the grandsons of Marc Pages, cousins Frederic LeClerc and Benjamin Richer de Forges. The vines are 45 years of age and tended to in a manner that allowed the Chateau to be awarded the French Ministry of Agriculture’s “Haute Valeur Environmentale”.
Soil: Chateau La Tour de By occupies a unique patch of gravel soil with alios subsoil that contrasts with the predominantly cooler, heavier clay soils elsewhere in the northern Medoc.
Grape Varieties: 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 35% Merlot, 5% Petit Verdot.
Winemaking: The Tour de By grapevines are tilled in a traditional manner with natural compost. The wines are fermented in both stainless steel and french barriques at controlled temperatures which allow a long vinification period of 3-5 weeks depending on vintage.
Aging: La Tour de By 2016 is aged in a mix of new and used oak barrels; each year, 1/3 of the barrel regimen is replaced with new barriques, while the remainder ages in 1st year and 2nd year wood. This combination helps the wine retain its sense of understated sophistication without oak notes dominating the flavor profile.
Flavors and Foods: The nose of the 2016 Tour de By begins subtly, with more secondary savory sources than outright fruit (fresh sage and thyme, a stony note from the gravelly soils, and a pleasing smokiness). For a Cabernet-based blend, the palate features a surprising amount of red fruits (red cassis, fresh red plum, pomegranate), especially on the attack; the mid-palate and finish are more blackberry/black cassis. The herbaceous notes run repeat in the mouthfeel, and the textural note is one of twofold earthiness: both stony chalk and warmed potting soil are present, along with a mushroom/black truffle element. To pair the 2016 Tour de By, run don’t walk to your nearest cut of marbleized meat-this wine is excellent on its own but I can’t express enough how delicious it becomes with fattier steak pieces; the tannins become silky and the red fruits brighten to a fresher version of themselves. Wood-fired vegetables (the sweetness of zucchini does nicely), pan-roasted shitakes in red wine with chopped fresh garlic, onion, and chives, and fresh pasta in an herb sauce are all potential hits, as well.
Service and Cellar: During my meeting with him this January, Benjamin Richer de Forges thought that the 2016 was in a great place and had a total life span of 15 years. I agree completely; the 2016 Tour de By is drinking well now with the aid of a 30-60 minute decanting (or the aforementioned richer piece of cow as a substitute for aeration), and should continue to show excellently until 2030-2031. I think as this wine ages you will see the need for decanting diminish, but the Tour de By won’t necessarily develop additional complexity. Service temperature in the 58-60 degree F range is recommended.