Wine 3

I'll admit, I was a little afraid. Chardonnays often turn evil in their dotage, as I have discovered. The genesis of this project involved two bottles of the same which disgusted myself and a friend whom I intend to inflict upon this publication any week now. Those wines had a flavor which I can only describe as rancid. It was, then, with trepidation that I began upon the current voyage into the dusty recesses of my wine closet.

This wine comes from the Beringer vineyard. I find that their wines tend to be solid entries into the category but have never been as impressed with them as with some other wineries. Indeed, the Fess Parker Viognier, when it was but a jaunty nouveau, was one of those which particularly impressed me, just as an example.

The Beringer Brothers winery is in Napa Valley, between St. Helena and Calistoga on Highway 29, as their web page will happily tell you. Also gleaned from their page is the fact that the institution was founded in 1976. I thought this fact omitted from the label itself, but found it to indeed have been printed in letters of the height of mustard seeds on a tiny seal near the bottom. The vintner has either become proud of its age in the meantime, or were cashing in on the love of Fresh Wines which characterized the California Wine Boom of the 90s.

The label on this wine suggests this to be a “slightly drier” wine, the blended combination of 80% North Coast White Zinfandel and 20% barrel-fermented Chardonnay, and perhaps, a decade ago, that was the case. Today, however, the body has entirely gone out of this previously viscous wine. I suppose that's a trend in older wines. This just looks like pink water in my glass.

The aroma of this wine is a little overpowering at first, but it certainly has grown on me. It has a pretty solid raspberry quality, but it's only an undercurrent and it evaporates under scrutiny. What it has, though, and very distinctly, is the wild quality one tends to find in local home-brews of mustang and other feral grapes. The sugars have developed pleasantly into a wild and musty whole. The alcohol has come forward, but as it drifts away, it leaves wild grape afternotes.

The flavor is very mild, although the dryness is certainly detectable. It is not ugly or crass, though, the overall effect being more like a thin red than a beefy white. This wine has made the leap from acceptable rosé, one which would hold its own against chicken or perhaps a watery lamb to a pleasant desert wine, a fine tail end to a good meal.