• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 333 0

deeply tanned; and he’s wearing a flannel shirt that doesn’t appear to have been washed in recent decades. Some of the machinery scattered about the property looks as if it was designed by Rube Goldberg. For a while I imagine that he and his brother have been hiding out here since the Vietnam era, living off the land, a fantasy that is punctured only when he refers to his family in St. Helena, at the base of the mountain. Still, there’s no question that the Smith brothers, who arrived just a few years after Mondavi set up shop on the valley floor, are pioneers, and that they have a very distinctive terroir.

“There is no actual Spring Mountain,” Matt Kramer tells us in his New California Wine. “Instead it’s a colloquial term used in Napa Valley to refer to a section of the Mayacamas range at the midpoint of the valley just west and north of St. Helena. The name derives from the numerous springs and creeks on the mountainside.” Stuart says that vines were first planted here in the 1880s—they found old wooden stakes among the redwoods and the madrone trees. California’s first great Chardonnay estate, Stony Hill, was established here in the 1950s, just below the property that is now Smith-Madrone. Nearby Pride, a relative newcomer to the ridgetop, is producing massive, high-scoring Cabs and Merlots. Meanwhile, the Smith brothers have built a loyal following with distinctive, modestly priced reds and whites without attracting a whole lot of wine media attention.

If Riesling were more fashionable, this estate would be famous. Smith-Madrone’s comes from a six-acre dry-farmed vineyard. (“If you irrigate the vines they don’t ripen as nature intended,” Stuart says.) While it is delicious on release, bursting with green apple and peach flavors, it develops tremendous depth and complexity with age. The ′97 is still youthful, stony and vibrant, while the ′93, which Stuart opened for me with his Swiss Army knife after rummaging around the ramshackle barn that serves as a winery, tastes like deep-dish apple pie with an enlivening splash of lemon juice, a dusting of sugar, and an underlying minerality. “Riesling’s for aging,” Stuart says, “and Chardonnay for drinking.” Smith-Madrone makes a fine Chardonnay as well; it has more fruit up front but is better balanced with acidity than most Napa Chardonnays.

Spring Mountain is best known for its Cabernet, and Smith-Madrone’s are fine examples, with the area’s massive depth and tannin along with a hint of dill, the signature of the American oak barrels. Stuart says they started with American oak barrels for reasons of economy, French oak being much more expensive. I point out that fans of Silver Oak Cabernet happily pay sixty to a hundred bucks a bottle for the taste of American oak. Stuart shakes his head censoriously, dislodging a few drops of the Cabernet from the mustache covering his upper lip. “We think thirty-five bucks is a lot to pay for a bottle of wine,” he says. “Maybe we’re crazy. People were stopping my son Sam on the street in St. Helena and saying, ‘You’ve got to charge more for your wines.’ But then, after 9/11, when everyone was having trouble selling wine, we had our best year.”

When I woke up the next morning in my hotel room in Yountville I actually wondered if I had dreamed the whole Smith-Madrone experience—the grizzly brothers, the wild mountaintop, the hypertrophied olive trees, the unreal prices, the anamolous and ambrosial Riesling. I have since confirmed that it was all real and wrestled with the question of whether or not to share this information with my readers. I advise you to get on their mailing list before the Smith brothers realize it’s the twenty-first century.

DO THE BRITS TASTE DIFFERENTLY?

Michael Broadbent and Jancis Robinson

So far as I know, none of the online wine chat rooms has ever hosted a spirited debate about whether Michael Broadbent is a babe. That’s just one of the ways in which he differs from his fellow Master of Wine Jancis Robinson, although they are both extremely snappy dressers: Broadbent favors Savile Row tailoring, while