The Sound of Wine

Fruit's coming in everyday now, and some - which came previously - is doing its wine thing.

Our 2010 Steven Kent Chardonnay - Livermore Valley is fermenting away in barrels...making quite a mess of it as you can see in these photos. And to hear what fermentation sounds like, click the link here. 

Premier Cabernet Collection Preview - Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 337

We had a wonderful turnout last week for the release of our Premier Cabernet Collection - Clone 30 offering. This wine, fewer than 100 cases of which were produced, was one of two releases we felt was of great enough quality to be accorded our highest quality designation.

In conjunction with this release, we previewed the first of the 2008 Premier Cabernet wines...the Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 337. For this wine fewer than 50 cases will be available. Consistently producing a wine with very rich red and dark fruit notes, the 2008 Clone 337 was the first vintage that this clone stepped it up a notch and yielded a wine, not only with the richness we prize, but also with a structure that portends ageability.

This is a wine that Cabernet lovers should have in their collection. Elegant, complex, and delicious, this wine is extremely limited and will not be around long. Click here to be among the first to reserve your three-pack of Clone 337. Tasting notes are below:

In the nose, aromas of black cherry and cassis liqueur dominate while underpinnings of licorice, cocoa powder, and subtle tobacco enhance the wine's aromatic complexity. On entry, lush dark fruit flavors come to the fore first, but as the wine aerates, fruit gives way to licorice and caramel and the subtle oak and tobacco aromatics become more forceful flavors. Wines of this distinction tend to show their true quality after time in bottle or glass. So too with this wine. After several hours in the decanter, all aspects of this wine blossom: fruit gains more intensity, mid-pa;ate shows more depth, and the chewy finishing tannins presage the capacity to age. This Cabernet will benefit from several years of bottle age, beginning to show all of its grandeur in 2014. With care, this wine should age effortlessly through 2020. Fewer than 150 three-packs and a small number of magnums were produced in this vintage.

Hen of the Woods - 2007 Petite Sirah - Release Celebration Saturday

One of Livermore Valley's superstar varieties will be on display at Steven Kent Winery on Saturday when we release the newest offering for members of the Collector's Circle wine club...Hen of the Woods...a 2007 100% Petite Sirah from the Ghielmetti Vineyard.

Label photograph by Tracey Hoff

Tracing an origin back to the Rhone Valley, where it was mistaken for a small-berried clone of Syrah (hence the name Petite Sirah), this variety has been grown in the Livermore Valley to great acclaim for decades. I chose the finest 6 barrels from a larger lot of PS for this release.
In the nose, one get abundant notes of characteristic lavender and violet floral essences, licorice and black fruits. Supporting the fruit and flowers is a nice toasty American oak underlayment. The wood is carried into the mouth where it turns from toasty to subtle caramel and cinnamon. As the wine gets some air the varietally correct chalky tannins and undifferentiated black fruit become a silkily structured wine highlighted by blackberry and black cherry flavors.
This wine will age beautifully for the next 5 years and could use another 6-12 months before you start drinking it. Hen of the Woods was made exclusively for members of the Collector's Circle.

What a Day Was #Cabernet Day

Even this Chicken showed up for Cab Day

Celebrated around the world on September 2nd was the first "Cabernet Day." The brainchild of Rick Bakas of St. Supery Winery, Cabernet Day was created to celebrate both the noblest of red grapes and the rapidly growing community of folks who take to the various social media outlets to share their wine experiences.

From what I've heard, Cab Day was the largest on-line tasting ever, with tens of thousands of people all around the world joining in the fun. If you google #Cabernet Day, you get over 1.8 MILLION hits...a pretty good indication of the number of people participating.

At Steven Kent we turned over the Barrel Room to four new extremely-limited Cabernet Releases and welcomed more than 4 times the average number of guests for a Thursday.

What Cabernet Day meant for us was a chance to show off what we think is a gloriously good Cabernet growing area, and the breadth and depth of our offerings was indication that the Livermore Valley is not only capable of making a great Cabernet; it's capable of making many of them.

For those who didn't get a chance to join us, small quantities of the single-vineyard Cabernets are available. Click the Home Ranch, Smith Ranch, Ghielmetti Vineyard, and "Estate Grown" links to be taken to the on-line store to order before the wines are gone.

For video tasting notes click Home Ranch, Smith Ranch, Ghielmetti Vineyard, and "Estate Grown."

Sometimes the Claims are True

When I started back in the business in 1996, I though I knew what I was doing (so wrong!) and thought I had the "magic bullets" figured out.

A wine glass that make your wine taste better...? and even more...a different shaped glass for each major variety? Come on..."I was born at night..." etc. All it took was one taste from a Riedel glass and we switched all of the old glasses out of the tasting room. We've been using Riedel exclusively since 1999.

In the next few weeks you'll see major changes in Steven Kent (more on that later!) including an upgrade to the Riedel Vinum Extreme glass pictured on the far right above. With its huge bowl this glass allows our Cabernets to taste more "open" at a younger age and showcases the structure of the wines much more dramatically than the smaller Ouverture glass did.

Though not a cheap proposition, providing our guests with a great glass to taste out of can only improve the wine drinking experience.

After all, if the experience and the wines aren't extraordinary, what's the sense in doing it?

2006 Cabernet Rounds Into Form

The last wine of the 2006 vintage has finally taken shape. With a renewed emphasis on our Cabernet heritage our small-production wines such as the Premier Cabernet Collection and Single Vineyard Series take precedence. Our largest production wine, the Cabernet Sauvignon - Livermore Valley, had to wait.

Numbering now at about 1,000 cases, the 2006 vintage of Cabernet will be released in April or May of this year. What began in my head as an 80%+ Cabernet blend (a little bit of Cab Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot in there to get to 100%) ended up in my glass as a 100% Cab comprised of six different clones from four different vineyards.

I drew samples from nine different barrel groups, taking wine from 2-4 barrels from each group depending upon how barrels are available. I then taste each grouping separately making notes about the wines. Next, I put together a representative blend of just the Cabernets as that wine would be the foundation for whatever other Bordeaux varieties might make the cut.

First impressions are important but hardly conclusive. I have made blends that I loved and got them home to taste them later and couldn't imagine what I liked in the wine. The same on the other pole. After making the Cab blends, I made a blend with the other varieties and let them sit while I went to get my son lunch.

Under the best of circumstances, I will have more than one blend that I like a lot. Then the questions become those of volume and the fate of the barrels that don't make this blend. Some of the folks on our hospitality team tasted the two wines that came out of this session, and the 100% Cabernet ended up being the unanimous favorite.

Right around the beginning of Spring, you'll be able to taste the 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Livermore Valley and tell me whether I got it right.

Liquid Amber - 2006 Barbera

Guess which wine was being produced in the northwest corner of Italy 400 years before the first Cabernet...go ahead, guess.

The grape, from which this wine is produced, is more widely planted in the old country than Sangiovese. It also makes up about 12% of the red wine produced in California. Know what it is yet?

When grown right, allowed to hang long enough to take the edge off its considerable acidity, it produces a wine with the wonderful aromatic mix of ripe plum, dark cherry, leather, and brown spice.

In the mouth, rich fruit abounds, and its silky mid-palate is framed by both balancing acid and fine-grained tannin.

Planted originally in the San Joaquin Valley, the grape's abundant acid was only employed to add a little bit of zing to otherwise flabby, overheated red wine. It is in the Livermore Valley on Block 3 of the Home Ranch Vineyard, though, that this often over-looked, under-appreciated variety shows true delicious character, presence of mind viz. a whole variety of foods, and courage in the face of mid-term aging.

Well??

One more clue...it also makes up 100% of Liquid Amber, the first release of 2009 for the Collector's Circle wine program. You got it now? Huh, do ya?

Oh, wait. This is embarassing. You see, I was giving all these clues: mostly a blending grape, high acid, not many 100% versions of the wine made, etc. etc. And it was right there in the title of this post all along...wow...really embarassing.

Anyway, the 2006 Barbera, one of the Collector's Circle's favorite wines, will be released at the Winery on January 10th. Only 192 cases were produced exclusively for members of the program. There are a few cases extra and a few spots left if you want to get this wonderful wine.

Finding a New Direction in the Old

Steven Kent began life with one mission and one wine.

Our mission to create world-class wine hasn't changed since the first day, but our lineup of wines has grown dramatically. 2009 will mark a return to our first love: Cabernet.

With three distinct, potentially world-class vineyard sites now in full production, we have the vinous pieces in place to match our mission to reality. We will be offering seven different Cabernets in the coming year; wines separated by relative quality and production levels. Each of these wonderful wines is complete unto itself and reflects the best of site, clone, and vintage.

Our top tier of Cabernet, the Premier Cabernet Collection is composed of two 2009 release wines: 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 30 and 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 191. Each of these wines is available in 3-pack boxes and will be released in March and September respectively. Only 192 3-packs of each wine were produced. The Clone 30 wine is one of the finest wines we have yet made and is a beautiful example of classic Cabernet flavors and structure.

Three wines make up the 2009 Single Vineyard Series lineup: 2006 Cabernet Sauvigon - HRV; 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Smith Ranch; and 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Ghielmetti Vineyard. These wines are made in extremely small supply, and each represents the finest few barrels chosen from the larger lot of wine. Only 125, 50, and 75 cases of these wines were produced.

Our 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon - Livermore Valley is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon from three different vineyards and is the only wine we produce that is available, at this time, in stores and restaurants. This wine displays great richness of texture and complexity of aromas and flavors and will be released in April 2009.

The 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon made exclusively for members of our Future Release Program rounds out our 2009 releases.

2009 marks a year of renewal for the Steven Kent Winery. For those who love Cabernet as much as I do, it is going to be a great year.

Re-visiting an Old Friend

For those who graciously spend some of their time reading my blog, I apologize for the scarcity of posts lately. We are in the midst of harvest time from our estate vineyard (finally!) and my attention has been focused praying to the gods of warm weather and ripe fruit. More on the progress at Ghielmetti Vineyard soon, but while I was writing tasting notes on a couple of new releases, I had the occasion to re-taste (for the first time in a long while) our 2002 Livermore Valley Cabernet.

This wine was a blend of Cabernet and Petit Verdot and is only the second vintage in which the wine was not 100% Cab. I always liked the wine and was very curious to see how it was holding up.

In a word, delicious! The wine has beautiful chocolately, black fruit notes, wonderfully viscous mid-palate mouthfeel and a long sufficiently-tannic finish to reward 5-7 more years of aging.

It is nice to see an old friend in fine health.

New Premier Cabernet Collection Debut

Our Mission at the Steven Kent Winery has always been to make Cabernet Sauvignon that equals in quality Cabernet made in any other appellation. Hailing from the too-little-esteemed Livermore Valley, we have had to work harder to prove that we belong.

After 10 years of making Cabernet here, I am even more sure now than I was back in the beginning (with that first blush of youthful excitement) that the Livermore Valley is capable of growing the kind of fruit we need to see our Mission through. And with the release of our first Premier Cabernet Collection wines, I think we are beginning to show the promise of the Valley.

On November 1st we will debut the third wine in the series (the first two having sold out quickly), the Cabernet Sauvignon - Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 30.

This wine is a study in the tension and balance between power and elegance. Displaying very intense dark berry, cassis, cigar box, and toasty oaks aromas, the wine is wonderfully big and defined in the nose. While some wines have very broad tannins that bleed off quickly, this Cabernet has very focused, substantial tannins from entry all the way through a long finish. Though the elements of ageability are present in abundance, the wine has a hefty silkiness in the mid-palate that sets up well in opposition to the tannins so that overall, the feeling is one of elegance and restraint.

This wine is perhaps the greatest that we have yet made. Only 180 three-packs (fewer than 50 cases!) were produced. It is available only in three-packs and the limit is 2 packs per person. The price is $300 per pack.

The Cabernet Sauvignon - Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 30 will be available for purchase starting November 1, 2008 and will be released in March 2009. Join our Interest List to have the opportunity of ordering this wine and for more information.

We will do our best to fully fill your order; please accept our apologies if we are unable to do so due to demand.

Wine and Charity

For the third year in a row, we have developed a small-lot wine a portion of whose price goes toward breast cancer research.

Barnburner, is a blend of Syrah, Barbera, Petite Sirah, and Mourvedre that was put together by members of our Tasting Room staff. The winning team, Jane Randolph, Catie Nielson, Patty Ising, and Cindy Hawken, have achieved eternal glory, bragging rights (Craig, first loser is better than nothing, I guess!), and their proud likenesses carved from week-old ricotta cheese. Breast cancer research will gain $2 from every bottle sold.

Patty Ising, one of the winning team, talks about Barnburner in this video.

When to Screwcap

Our first priority is always to produce the highest quality wine we can. The most frustrating production issue we face is when we do everything right in the cellar, but the finished product has this skunky, mildewy aroma when the cork is pulled.

Screwcaps in place of corks solves this very real problem with TCA (a molecule that is created in 5-8% of corks by the interaction of bacteria and chlorine used in their processing), but history is still short when we think about using screwcaps for those wines that are meant to age.

We are at an interesting juncture in the history and stylistic preferences of American winedrinkers. Most wine purchased in America is drunk almost immediately. Producers recognize this and have been making wine that emphasizes fruit-forwardness and softer tannins. Whether the style came before the purchase, or the other way around, the growing popularity of a closure that helps to reinforce the fruit and structure prevalent in many of today's wines has made it a truly viable alternative to corks.

The chief advantage of cork is its ability to let air pass through into the wine and from the bottle outward. The wine's dance with oxygen is one of the many chemical reactions that occur in wine, and it is very important in the wine's long-term maturation. One can modify the plastic liner that sits between the metal and glass of the bottle to allow more air in but the effects are not those, yet, of cork. So, for those wines (such as our bigger Cabernets) that benefit by slow aging, we'll stick use the humble bark plug.

For more on screwcaps, take a look at this video.

Are There Cracks in Napa's Glass...And Can We Make Them Bigger?

There was an interesting article in the Napa Valley Register yesterday, warning Napa Valley producers that they are not the only game in town anymore. If Napa is to continue its hegemonic position in the wine world, the article's author writes, it needs to refocus its attention on what it does best.

The author points to a new high-end restaurant in Oakland that doesn't have a single Napa Valley wine on its list as proof that Napa is beginning to take for granted its place in the wine world. And while I don't think that there will ever be a time when Napa isn't the dominant wine region in the US, other regions, like the Livermore Valley, need to do more to bring their wines to a larger restaurant and wine shop audience.

I am deeply conflicted about selling wine through the three-tier system. First, the system only benefits the smallest subset of participants: namely the large distributors, mega brands, and the politicians who receive enormous contributions from the distributors. Small brands are not going to succeed long term presenting their wines this way. They do not have the marketing muscle, case volume, profit potential, or visibility that the mega-brands do. Most distributor sales reps are paid on commission, and when it comes to putting bread on the table, it is the order and not the brand building that takes priority. Secondly, I prefer to know what those who consume my wine think of it. Through direct sale at the winery and through our wine clubs, I have the honor of talking with a great many people who tell me exactly what they think. The gratification and responsibility is immediate.

The conflict comes, though, from the fact that looking askance at an opportunity to tell my story, to pour my wine for someone who hasn't tasted yet, is too important to pass up, no matter how it comes about. If a wine region, like Napa did starting in the 1970s, bands together to show the larger world what it can do, and it continually produces better and better wine, it has a chance
to succeed as a group in this incredibly competitive business.

What do you think? Do you search wine lists for Livermore Valley wines? Are you seeing more good wines coming from Livermore today than 5 years ago? What can we do better?