I was flabbergasted with
the press’s reaction to this wine. Early on I think I developed
a bit of winemakers’ bias against it. First off, it wasn’t easy
to make. After getting over the difficulties of making it, I found
this wine so obvious and delicious from the barrel that I assumed
it didn’t have the stuffing to turn into something really special.
It was only a few weeks
ago, when I had a conversation with a wacko Belgian wine guy I
know, that I began to take this wine seriously. He is the kind
of person who is altogether too happy to tell me how bad a wine
I have made and or how un-price worthy it is compared to what
you can find in (the old) Europe (or even in the new Europe, which
is, as far as I can tell, Bulgaria and Spain). He is certainly
not one to give idle compliments. Therefore, at first I thought
he was teasing me when he said he had served this wine to a group
of serious French winemakers who had raved about the wine, but
he wasn’t. Our 1999 and 2001, which I had him taste along with
the 2000, are rather bigger, more tannic wines that--for him--are
out of balance. (I think they are even better, though in need
of some more bottle age.) However, I can now see the beauty of
the 2000. The wine is definitely easy to enjoy today, but what
it possesses is harmony that is uncommon for new world pinot noir.
The aromas are of pretty, beguiling pinot fruit and not of oak,
and the flavors are silky and rich, yet have the proper bite in
the finish to give the wine length.
This experience of having
someone whose palate I respect tell me something new about a wine
I crafted made me realize once more that wine tasting is not about
objective analysis. It is emotional and subjective. It is as easy
to fool yourself into believing a bad wine is good as it is to
imagine the opposite.