I tasted this today with winemaker John Olney (VP of winemaking at Lytton Springs), and Gerald Stone (Director of Quality Control/Chemist at Lytton Springs):
And for those who can’t, for whatever reason, see the pic of my Remington Noiseless notes:
2011 Ridge Vineyards Lytton Estate Rose
Lovely aromatics, as they should be for a wine of this style; generous tangerine, sprightly ruby grapefruit, and most appealing of all, fine layers of subtle watermelon and mouth-watering watermelon rind. Don’t look for overtly cloying strawberry notes or oodles of sweet fruit though; this is clear, crisp, just a tad leafy, and a lot refreshing. Palate-weight is appropriately light and playful, and the finish is surprisingly long for a wine of this style. Good acidity, though not as citrus-driven as some iterations of type; more languid than biting, more structural than citric. Overall, an exceedingly pleasant and refreshing wine that will be sheer bliss on a warm summer day.
And she was fair as is the rose in May
-Samuel Coleridge
And she was fair as is a Rosé in May
-Christopher Watkins
What do you think of when you think of elegance?
And what do you think of when you think of beauty?
And what do you think of when you think of the unquestioning perfection of true undying love?
Your mother, of course.
Accordingly, Ridge Vineyards is very happy to announce the following two items:
1. The VERY LIMITED release of our first-ever Lytton Estate Rosé. So limited, in fact, that it will ONLY be available for sale on-site AT Lytton Springs. Starting this weekend. Which happens to be Mother’s Day Weekend.
2. The opening of our beautiful Vineyard Terrace at Lytton Springs this weekend. Starting this weekend. Which happens to be Mother’s Day Weekend.
You may contact me directly if you need any clarification as to your itinerary this weekend.
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For more information about visiting our Lytton Springs Estate, please click the following link:
For a thorough refresher on Part I, please click here.
As to a summary, it was the 3rd anniversary of our blog going live. And it was the birthday of the late, great jazz bassist Paul Chambers.
To celebrate, a tasting construct was born: 4 “classic” Ridge wines, 4 “classic” Paul Chambers performances. Paul Draper, Paul Chambers. The Gospels of Pauls.
The challenge? Pair them.
Our guests for the tasting were eleven wine bloggers.
A more eclectically driven, passionate bunch would be hard to come by.
But had they the moxie to go on camera in defense of their pairings?
Of course!
Because they’re wine bloggers. They do what they do because they love it. Nothing more, nothing less. They have no fear.
I wish to thank them all, for making a lunatic proposition not only enactable, but magic.
Each at their own pace embraced. Each in their own way believed.
And with them, through them, by them, we had a tasting in which new ways to understand both wine and music were revealed.
Revealed.
I encourage you to read them, follow them, know them. And you will know them by their blogs. They are:
Barton Orchard
There are few who know Ridge better than him. I learn something new every time we taste together.
Corkzilla
A writer after my own heart; someone who truly understands wine & music … and accordingly, who understands art.
Food Porn
One of the smartest, funniest, most cleverly and wisely written and constructed blogs out there …
Luscious Lushes
The beating heart of the wine bloggers world …
SF Wine Blog
Impossibly comprehensive, impossibly humble, impossibly talented.
Stay Rad
The best new wine blog I’ve yet encountered, hands down. Read this. It’s tremendous.
Wine As$*&le
Nose in glass, tongue in cheek. The Oeno Bunker-Buster.
Yumivore
One eye to the heavens, one eye to the earth. One of the best visualists out there. Makes you want to eat and drink and eat. Yum indeed.
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THE BIG REVEAL!
The Big Reveal begins with my “pairings.” Which were as follows:
2001 Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello
Such a round, voluptuous tone, such a beguiling reconciliation of seriousness and play. A decadence of timbre that makes you want it so bad, but a complexity that makes you force yourself to stop and pay attention. You want to swing with this, move with this, love with this, you want its girth to sprawl out on your tongue and lay its fruits out for your own hip-twisting intake. This is no shaking bag of bones, this is meat, this is flesh, this something to hold onto. This is surely the wet tenor tone of Sonny Rollins.
2000 Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello
The beckon and the dodge. The hint and the withdrawal. Provocation and denial, the slightly evil mitigation of desire. You want it, you feel it, it’s implied, then it’s promised, then it’s gone, then it returns. What is this strange seductive mantra, this hallucinogenic Om? It is humility at altar, as you meditate your way into the deep elusivity on offer. It bends, it twists, it takes off layers at a pace your singing palate cannot manage without trembling. But you look, and all is simple, all is pure, all is everything and nothing, all is nothing more than what you thought it should be, all the parts are in their place, there’s nothing clever, not a trick in sight at all, it’s just so simple, it’s the truth that can’t be had until the soul is past exhausted; only then, only then, does the mystical make sense. Surely this must be the taste of Miles Davis.
1999 Ridge Vineyards Lytton Springs
Conception. An Orion of fireflies beading a smear of trees in a breeze slow like river grasses. Cutting your left hand’s outline out of dark construction paper is the sky alight tonight, as if the trees were not between us and the moon, but cut away. Searching is the word to name the sound of John Coltrane. Not exuberant, furious, impassioned, thundering, but SEARCHING—how to climb the keening staircase of the notes, up through a cut-out in the sky— And when you don’t believe that fireflies reflect the constellations, then your lashes go down wishless. Millions produced, only one required for conception. Ascension. Surely this is the taste of Lytton Springs.
1997 Ridge Vineyards Geyserville
Surely Monk. The Haiku of Jazz. The Jazz of Wine. The Wine of Monk.
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THE BIG REVEAL!
The Big Reveal concludes with seeing how we all matched up. Who thought what went with which. Who thought which went where.
–Two were with me on Wine #1. Luscious Lushes and Stay Rad felt the Rollins.
–Three were with me on Wine #2. SF Wine Blog and Santa Cruz Mountains dug the Miles connection, and Luscious was with me again.
–I was all alone on Wine #3. Coltrane and Lytton? No one but me.
–Wine Asshole said it right from the start, the one OBVIOUS pairing with this wine was Monk. I agreed. So did Santa Cruz Mountains, SF Wine Blog, and Barton Orchard.
The following summary of our recent and very special Wine Bloggers Tasting is broken up into two parts: in Part I, I run down a description of how the tasting was constructed, and in Part II, I reveal my notes and pairings, and how they matched up with our guests.
A short film was running on a loop as our bloggers arrived (publishing controls prevent my running the video here, but you can see it in the background during the blogger videos at the end of this post); over a soundtrack featuring the Miles Davis composition “So What,” from the album “Kind of Blue,” (a track famous for its immortal bass line, created and performed by the great Paul Chambers, one of our two Pauls for the day) and a compendium of images of Paul Draper (Ridge Vineyards winemaker) and Paul Chambers (bassist on an astonishing array of canonical Jazz albums) the following paired quotes ran:
“Everyone is influenced by everybody, but you bring it down home the way you feel it.”
-Thelonious Monk
”We’ve always made wines that we loved to drink.”
-Paul Draper
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“When you have great vineyards that produce high quality grapes of distinctive individual character, this is not only an environmentally and socially responsible approach, it’s also the best way to consistently make fine wine.”
-Paul Draper
It’s all about creation and surprise. It just needs to be appreciated and watered like flowers. You have to water flowers. These peaks will come again.
-Sonny Rollins
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“Overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things that he knows of and senses in the universe.”
-John Coltrane
“My aim is to take these pieces of ground, and allow them to express themselves.What I demand of a great wine is that it reflects nature,not the hand of the winemaker; it has to have that connection to the earth.”
-Paul Draper
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“I had finally realized that you didn’t need a degree in oenology to make great wine.”
-Paul Draper
“If they act too hip, you know they can’t play shit.”
-Miles Davis
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Our guests were seated. The theme was then revealed.
As past readers of this blog may recall, the “theme” of the tasting is rarely, if ever, announced ahead of time. In a previous post I had made clear the tasting would be a celebration of jazz and wine, in honor of the event coming on both the 3rd anniversary of this blog going live, and the anniversary of Paul Chamber’s birth, but I hadn’t explained what we were actually going to do, or taste. I did let slip one hint; I had intimated filming would be involved, due to my intention of sharing details about this event during my panel talk at this year’s Wine Bloggers Conference.
Anyhow, the theme.
Classics: The Gospels of Pauls
Meaning what?
Meaning that we would blind-taste four ”classic” Ridge wines, while listing to four “classic” Paul Chambers performances. Attendees would then “pair” the songs to the wines, based on their tasting and listening notes. Then, attendees were to go on camera, and explain their choices. After all attendees had their turns, I would then reveal my “pairings” and justifications, and we would then cross-check all the results to see how we’d all matched up.
My goals in constructing the tasting in this fashion were two-fold:
1) I wanted to take advantage of the calendrical confluence (this blog’s 3rd anniversary & Paul Chambers’ birthday) as an opportunity to discuss the procedural and philosophical parallels between the production of great jazz and great wine, and ideally then take this out to the larger realm of how all great art is produced; emerging, as I believe it does, from that peculiar and wonderful intersection where mojo meets craft, knowledge meets instinct, juju meets technology, passion meets knowledge.
-and-
2) I wanted this event to be a living enactment of the greater possibilities inherent in the winery-wine blogger relationship; per my goals for the panel talk at the conference (“The Winery View of Bloggers”), I wanted to be able to show how this unique relationship allows for something more than the conventional producer-reviewer paradigm to rule the aesthetic day.
As to the selection of wines and performances, this was of course a tad tricky, because my biases are fairly obvious.
So, for the wines, I elected to rely instead on “external” assessments of just what exactly constitutes a “classic” Ridge wine.
Here is what I chose, with a very brief explanation of why after each:
2001 Monte Bello – recent 99 point rating from Robert Parker
2000 Monte Bello- winner of the “Young Cabernet” competition at the Judgment of Paris 30-year re-enactment
1999 Lytton Springs- Winemaker Eric Baugher’s choice for a “classic” zinfandel
1997 Geyserville - Winemaker Paul Draper’s choice for a “classic” zinfandel
And as to the songs, I selected four indisputably canonical recordings from four indisputably canonical artists, as follows:
So What- Miles Davis (from “Kind of Blue,” probably the greatest jazz album ever recorded)
Bemsha Swing- Thelonious Monk (from Monk’s “Brilliant Corners” album, rightly regarded as one of the most important and influential recordings of the modern jazz era)
Paul’s Pal- Sonny Rollins (from “Tenor Madness”; inarguably one of the greatest saxophone-centric jazz albums ever recorded, and an early milestone in the career of this recent Kennedy Center honoree; incidentally, the song is named for Paul Chambers)
Mr. P.C. – John Coltrane (from “Giant Steps”; one of a few significant albums that firmly established John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz players ever to stalk the earth; this song is also named for Paul Chambers)
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As noted above, I asked each guest to go on camera to explain their pairings. And while I won’t unveil the full video versions until the conference in August, I invite you to please enjoy the following compendium of short clips in the meantime (for best playback results, please select the “YouTube” link in the lower right corner of the video screen, to watch the clips directly on YouTube):
This concludes Part I of our post. Stay tuned for Part II!
–Appendix I–
Three of our guest wine bloggers have already put up wonderful posts about this very special tasting event; to enjoy their perspectives, please click the following links:
That’s the tagline, and no producer enacts its promise quite like Lytton Springs.
Modern? Yes. By way of tradition. An Ecologically Friendly Building Made of Straw — Straw Bales, Earthen Plaster, Recycled Lumber, Passive Solar Design & Night Air Cooling, Solar Panels — in short, Lytton Springs …
Lytton Springs. Where you enjoy Old Vine Wines here …
While gazing out on Old Vines there …
Dry Creek Valley is an extraordinary portion of the wine landscape. And this event is a tremendous opportunity to sample its wares.
And you know this.
And we know you have a great array of choices when you visit, particularly when it’s the Passport To Dry Creek Valley event. Everyone pulls out the stops; it’s an oenophiles dream. If the maxim runs that the customer is always right, then Passport ups the ante; this weekend, the customer is always ELATED.
If it’s the pulling out of stops that you wish, then pulling out the stops is what we’ll do. Dig this …
The Wines:
2010 ESTATE CHARDONNAY, $40
Varietals: 100% chardonnay
Location: Monte Bello Ridge, Santa Cruz Mountains
Elevation: 1,400-1,900 feet
Soils: Decomposing Franciscan green stone, clay, fractured limestone
2009 LYTTON SPRINGS, $37
Varietals: 64% zinfandel, 20% carignane, 12% petite sirah, 2% alicante bouschet,
2% mataro (mourvèdre)
Location: Lytton Estate, Dry Creek Valley
Soils: Gravelly clay loam
2010 EAST BENCH, $28
Varietals: 100% zinfandel
Location: Lytton West, Dry Creek Valley
Soils: Gravelly clay and loam
2005 Lytton Estate
Grenache, $28
Varietals: 88% grenache, 6% petite sirah, 6% zinfandel
Location: Lytton Estate, Dry Creek Valley
Soils: Gravelly clay loam
2007 LYTTON ESTATE
SYRAH/Grenache, $30
Varietals: 50% syrah, 50% grenache
Location: Lytton West, Dry Creek Valley
Soils: Gravelly clay and loam
The Food:
Boneless Lamb
Osso Bucco
with Green Garlic Gremolata
& Silky Mascarpone Polenta
(Prepared with locally sourced ingredients by Feast Catering of Santa Rosa)
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The hard facts of the event can be found here. We hope you bought tickets, because I believe the event is now sold out. For those of you who do have tickets, we hope you visit us. We’d love to see you.
Can’t let you know -just yet- the where, why, what, when, how of why we were tasting iterations of BBQ today -with companionated iterations of Zinfandel- but if you can just get yer 2-flap Sherlock lid on, you might just grok the rock.
In the meantime, let the pictures speak their thousand words …
The Band is the greatest musical group this country has ever produced, and I’ll stand on your coffee table and say it again. And I’ll be wearing boots when I do so.
Levon Helm is dead.
I am not a patriot by any conventional definition, but I believe in so very much of what America has given to the world, and so very much of what America has meant to the world.
American Music.
This is our gift to the world. Blues, Jazz, Rockabilly, Bluegrass, Country, Swing, Ragtime, Folk. It was all in the music of The Band.
And it was all in the voice of Levon Helm.
And it was all in the life of Levon Helm.
And it was all in the stories of Levon Helm.
Townes Van Zandt may have been our poet. Woody Guthrie may have been our conscience. Billie Holiday may have been our soul. James Brown may have been our body. But Levon Helm was our voice.
Levon Helm is dead.
And I ask you, who is rising to replace our lost prophets?
Who will sing us our own history now that Levon Helm is dead?
Who will tell us the stories that tell us who we are?
Levon Helm is dead.
I feel The Weight.
Levon, I can’t believe it. Please don’t go.
Baby, please don’t go.
You’re gone.
Levon Helm is dead.
Ashes of laughter The ghost is clear Why do the best things always disappear?
We’ve just a couple of seats left available for our very special anniversary edition Wine Bloggers Tasting this Sunday, so if you’re still interested in attending, let us know as soon as you can!
