A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [30]
Located some fifteen miles from the ocean, Julia’s Vineyard sits on the Santa Maria Bench, which, along with the Santa Rita Hills to the south, has proved to be the coolest and choicest Pinot Noir real estate in Santa Barbara County. The bulk of the fruit from Julia’s Vineyard goes into Cambria’s Pinot Noir, making it the answer to the question “Is there such a thing as a good, nationally distributed twenty dollar Pinot?” The Jacksons also sell fruit from these prized old vines to smaller, artisanal producers, including Foxen, Silver, Hartley-Ostini (Hitching Post), and Lane Tanner. Tasting all these wines side by side at the Jackson family’s estate just across the road from the vineyard, in the company of the winemakers, provided me with a number of lessons in winemaking, terroir, and wine writing, as well as a surfeit of social and sensual stimulation.
Seated to my right was hostess Barbara Banke, the guiding force behind Cambria; she reminds me much more of a first-growth Bordeaux—Château Margaux, specifically—than of a Pinot. A former lawyer who once argued in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, Banke is regal and intellectual, but also extremely warm and approachable (unlike, say, Latour). The Cambria Julia’s Vineyard, served with a pumpkin risotto, seemed to me the most delicate and lacy of the 2002 Julia’s Pinots, an observation that I have since confirmed in a blind tasting, although I might have been influenced that night by the soft-spoken aspect and gamine appearance of wine-maker Denise Shurtleff, who kept reminding me of a thirty-something Mia Farrow. By comparing Shurtleff to her wine, I realized, I was committing the crudest form of the imitative fallacy that afflicts wine writers: the tendency to equate wine-makers with their wines.
But, hell, my dinner companion Lane Tanner made it all but impossible to resist these easy analogies between wine and winemaker. “My wine is basically the other woman,” said the earthy, outspoken forty-something Tanner, whose Web site features a picture of her lying naked in a fermentation tank. “It’s definitely not the wife.” Although I listened dutifully while Tanner explained that she picks earlier than the other Julia’s vintners—this would account for the bright tingle of acidity—her description of her wine as “the perfect mistress, someone you’d pick up in a bar,” made a stronger impression than the technical stuff, and I know that when I drink her Pinots in the future, early picking and 23-point Brix sugar levels aren’t what I will be thinking about.
The vintners of Foxen (Bill Wathen) and Hitching Post (Gray Hartley and Frank Ostini) were unable to attend the dinner, so my tasting of their wines was untainted by personal impressions. Yet I’m almost embarrassed to say, looking back on my notes, that I found both wines more “masculine” (in the stereotypical sense of the word) and structured than the Cambria and Tanner: a strong note of bacon in the former and a very leathery bouquet to the latter. Tanner, meanwhile, explained that she once lived with Dick Doré, the coproprietor of Foxen Vineyard, who is now married to Jenny Williamson Doré, seated on my right that night, who is Foxen’s marketing director and who used to work for Cambria. And Tanner was once the winemaker for the Hitching Post, the restaurant that features so prominently in Alexander Payne’s Sideways, about which everyone was talking that night. Hitching Post also buys grapes from Julia’s Vineyard. Got that?
As I listened to Tanner run through the professional and amorous partnerships and breakups of the Santa Maria and Santa Ynez valleys, my head was spinning. I sympathized with Benjamin Silver, the only male winemaker