Saintsbury in Perspective
Seminal Carneros winery shows 25 years of Pinot Noir

By Jim Gordon

Saintsbury wasn't the first California winery to specialize in Pinot Noir. That was Chalone. Saintsbury wasn't the first modern winery in the Carneros district. That was Carneros Creek. Saintsbury wasn't the first Napa winery to ferment its reserve Chardonnay with native yeasts. Franciscan makes that claim. Saintsbury wasn't even the first winery to play "Bowling for Pinot," a game in which expendable bottles from bad vintages substitute for bowling pins. That was Acacia.

Yet, Saintsbury, founded 25 years ago by then-twenty-something winemakers David Graves (above, left) and Richard Ward, adopted all the above innovations early in its history and stuck so doggedly to its goal of making high-quality wine from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that today it's an icon in California winemaking. Hundreds of good wine lists around the country carry Saintsbury wines. American and British critics tend to rave about them and a generation of wine drinkers considers Saintsbury a benchmark. Graves and Ward are now in their 50s and firmly part of the wine establishment, with a total production of 60,000 cases.

The pair apparently finds that status somewhat frightening, however, so they frequently stir things up, most recently with the addition of a new line of vineyard-designated wines, the retirement of the word "reserve" for their most expensive bottles and the staging of tastings for wine writers in San Francisco and New York recently to test how well their wines have held up to aging.

They poured verticals of their Pinot Noir from 1986 to 2005, and revisited the 1995 Chardonnay Reserve that placed first in a blind tasting versus a stellar lineup of white Burgundies and other renowned California wines in a Wine Spectator magazine "Chardonnay Challenge" back in 1997. Mature but still lively and appetizing, the wines from the 1980s and 1990s seem to prove the pair’s early beliefs were well founded. (Please see the tasting notes that follow.)

A little-known grape variety called Pinot Noir

It was 1981 when the two young Napa Valley winemakers with experience at Joseph Phelps and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars quit their jobs and put all their money and energy into a new winery specializing not in the Cabernet Sauvignon for which Napa was just becoming famous but in a little-known grape variety called Pinot Noir. They named it after George Saintsbury, the British author of  "Notes on a Cellar Book," a work that helped inspire the pair.

Graves recently resigned from the Napa County Planning Commission after several years civic duty. Both he and Ward are still known for the sense of humor and love of innovation that helped them get started. Both have scientific backgrounds that apparently fed their curiosity—Graves in biology at the University of California Santa Cruz and Ward in structural engineering at Tufts University in Boston. They met while attending graduate classes in enology at the University of California Davis in 1977, and became house mates in Napa Valley soon after.

While helping make Cabernet Sauvignon and other wines in their day jobs, they experimented with making their own wines, including a 1979 dry Riesling from Santa Barbara County grapes and a home-brewed Cabernet Sauvignon from the noted Fay vineyard in the Stags Leap district of Napa. "That was too easy," jokes Graves, "so we decided to take up something more difficult like Pinot Noir. Soon they focused on making wine from the historic and aristocratic grape varieties of the Burgundy region of France, Pinot Noir for red and Chardonnay for white. Neither variety was new to California, but Chardonnay was still an insider's wine, far from the mass-market commodity that it's become today, and not enough good Pinot Noir had yet been made in the state to prove that it could really succeed here.

A number of wineries in the upper Napa Valley who had begun making excellent Cabernet Sauvignon, including Caymus and Robert Mondavi, also made Pinot Noir, but the wines generally lacked distinction. They tended to taste like generic red wines without the qualities of a truly good Pinot Noir: aromatic charm, light but penetrating flavors and velvety texture. Graves and Ward decided that a few pioneer growers in Carneros like Rene di Rosa of Winery Lake Vineyard and Ira Lee had the right place for Pinot, because the climate was cooler there adjacent to San Pablo Bay than in the upper valley and had a longer, more slow-paced growing season, similar in overall effect to Burgundy in northern France than the warmer parts of Napa or Sonoma counties.

Beaulieu Vineyard, Louis M. Martini winery and a few others had also occasionally done well with Pinot grown in Carneros where persistent breezes prevailed and summertime temperatures were often 10 degrees cooler than Rutherford.  Acacia winery beat Saintsbury to the punch by a couple of years, and was already getting wine consumers excited with its vineyard-designated Pinots from Carneros.

Garnet is an elegant bargain

Saintsbury produced its first 1,000 cases of Chardonnay and 2,000 cases of Pinot Noir in borrowed space at Pine Ridge Winery in 1981, and in 1982 released its first 1,000 cases of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. In 1984 Saintsbury introduced the value-priced Garnet Pinot Noir, which remains one of California's best bargains in elegant red wines. In 1989, Saintsbury was at the forefront of the new rose revolution, making a pink wine called Vincent Vin Gris from Pinot Noir juice that was "bled" out of vats of red Pinot Noir to make the remaining red wine from a difficult vintage more concentrated.

Other steps toward high quality in Saintsbury's history included planting the then-rare Pommard clone of Pinot Noir along with other clones at their winery estate in 1986, training their estate vineyard on a trellis with vertical shoot positioning when most vineyards were head-trained or California sprawl, planting the Brown Ranch property, which they acquired in 1990, with the then-new Dijon clones 115, 667 and 777 in addition to Pommard in 1992, and switching to non-filtration of all their Pinot Noir in 1989.

No more Reserve

An area in which Saintsbury lagged was vineyard designation. For many years while Pinot makers in Carneros, Oregon, and elsewhere spotlighted individual terroirs as in Burgundy, Saintsbury offered only a Carneros Reserve Pinot Noir and a Carneros Reserve Chardonnay as their most expensive releases. Saintsbury stuck with the “reserve” term long after its extensive use on mass-market wines rendered the term meaningless to many consumers, but has finally abandoned it.

In 1996 Graves and Ward produced the first vineyard-designated Brown Ranch Pinot Noir, and this $60 bottling now replaces the former Reserve Pinot Noir. In 2002 the first Brown Ranch Chardonnay was made, which at $40 now replaces the Chardonnay Reserve.

In addition, Saintsbury added three other vineyard-designated Carneros Pinot Noirs in the 2004 vintage, which are now available at $45: Lee, Stanly and Toyon. They represent the first efforts of current winemaker Jerome Chery, who grew up in Burgundy and attended enology school in Dijon, before coming to Napa Valley to work in 1997.

Graves and Ward get the spotlight as founders, but they didn’t do it alone. They credit the work of winemakers before Chery, including Byron Kosuge and William Knuttel, as well as their director of viticulture, Randy Heinzen. They had and still have financial partners, including their parents and growers Ira and Shirley Lee. Investment banker William Hambrecht was their biggest financial backer for a time until the others bought him out in 2003.

If there was any doubt that Saintsbury would continue innovating, a new Pinot Noir from outside Carneros will make its debut next year – a 2005 Cerise Vineyard from Anderson Valley in Mendocino County.

“We continue to experiment, in a very Saintsburyan way,” says Ward. “But we do that with the balance of 25 years experience." Graves adds,  "I think of us today as Saintsbury 4.0. Since Carneros came out more than 20 years ago, we’re not a discovery anymore. We have to continue to innovate and to communicate our innovations to people.”

Tasting Three Decades of Saintsbury Pinot Noir

In California, Cabernet is the varietal wine that is supposed to improve with age, not Pinot Noir. But in Burgundy, Pinot Noir wines like those of the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti age well for 40 years. David Graves and Richard Ward of Saintsbury winery hosted a vertical tasting in September for wine writers to see how well their own Pinot Noir wines have aged. Unfortunately, the big wine warehouse fire in 2005 at Mare Island destroyed 3,000 cases of their wine, including a large part of their wine "library" from early vintages.  

The Pinots ranged from 1986 to 2005. In general they show Saintbury's now traditional style that blends bright, pure fruit flavors with restraint in texture and body. While a lot of other Pinot makers strive for the darkest colors and highest ripeness (and alcohol) levels, Saintsbury seems to choose lively acidity over extra ripeness by harvesting earlier than some. The result is a legacy of well-balanced wines that have aged very well. Few bottles of these older wines are sold today at retail or auction, so prices were not readily available.

The oldest wines had evolved dramatically over the years, developing an exotic, new-leather bottle bouquet that totally sets them apart from newly released Pinot Noir. This transformation is the payoff for those few wine collectors who buy this varietal and save it for five, ten or twenty years before drinking it.

I was fascinated by the oldest, most mature wines because they're just so unusual, distinctive and complex in aroma, and wonderfully smooth and mellow in texture. You could find fault in them if you tried -- a little madeirization here, a little Brettanomyces "barnyard" smell there -- but to me these nuances add to the overall mystique of an aged wine, like the pungency of a blue cheese or gamy taste of wild venison: unique and distinctive sensory experiences that you don't get to enjoy every day.

The tasting reinforced that Pinot Noir doesn't necessarily shine in the same years that are best for Cabernet Sauvignon. And since many California vintage charts weigh Cabernet heavily, some of the results below are a bit surprising.

The tasting was also Saintsbury's opportunity to introduce its latest innovations, a series of new vineyard-designated Pinots, all from Carneros, that make their debut with the 2004 vintage.

Regular Pinot Noir Flight

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1986
A lively, nervy but fully mature wine that starts out quietly with subdued plum and soft cherry aromas, slight cinnamon and cherry flavors and beefy nuances.  Later it turns more earthy and striking in aroma, but remains lively and appetizing to drink.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1989
Aromas of new leather, damp earth and beautiful baking spices lead to mouth-filling fruit flavors of cherry and raspberry that ride on a slightly tangy texture and linger on the finish. An excellent Pinot for 17 years old, wonderfully enjoyable to drink. Ironically, it's from "the vintage from hell" for Chardonnay and a mediocre one for Cabernet.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1990
Rather big and slightly heavy for a Saintsbury wine. It has a deep brownish red color, meaty, smoky, slightly tired aromas, almost-sweet plummy flavors and a toasty note on the finish. From an outstanding year for Cabernet, this is very good yet not exceptional.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1991
Exceptional to drink now or age through 2011,and my favorite of the "regular" Pinot flight. It has gorgeously mature aromas that mingle baking spices and cherry with beefy, brothy nuances. Has great verve, appetizing acidity and a long finish. Shows what a balanced Pinot from a non-great Cabernet year can turn into.  

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1995
Tastes young and vibrant for an 11-year-old wine. It has full aromas of dark cherry and ripe raspberry, a rounded, smooth texture, and lively finish. Has a long life ahead; just starting to develop bottle bouquet. Drink this exceptional wine now through 2011.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 1996
Aromas of tea and leather, flavors of cherry and strawberry, a lively texture and nervy finish. Not powerful, but nicely lean and balanced to a T. This very good wine should continue evolving nicely like the 1989.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 2000
I loved this ultra-smooth Pinot for its haunting but fruit-driven aromas and flavors, plush but lively texture, and overall sense of elegance and finesse. Tastes nearly mature now, but should drink nicely through 2010 at least.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros 2002
An exceptional wine with a bit of baby fat still there. It has sweet-seeming cinnamon and nutmeg aromas, Generous flavors of ripe cherry and sweet plum and a smooth texture--almost full-bodied. On the second and third sips vivid acidity comes out and contributes to a long finish. Drink now through 2015.


Reserve Pinot Noir Flight

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 1990
Atypical for Saintsbury and similar to the regular 1990, only more so. Has a deep, slightly muddy red color, earth and barnyard aromas, lots of cherry and strawberry on the palate and full-body. My least favorite of the eight wines in the reserve flight.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 1995
This exceptional vintage starts to show the influence of Brown Ranch fruit (60 percent of this blend) with more concentrated black fruit nuances. It has spicy cinnamon and nutmeg aromas, bright cherry, rich plum and juicy beef flavors and a long finish.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 1996
An especially smooth, elegant vintage that's full of mellow cherry flavors and  has a polished texture. Very good to drink now, and getting mature.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 1999
My favorite wine out of 20 Saintsbury Pinots tasted, it's world-class in quality, absolutely delicious and will get even more interesting through at least 2015. Has generous floral aromas, ripe red cherry and spice flavors, buoyant acidity and a long finish. It's elegant in texture, complex in flavor and pure enjoyment to drink.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 2000
It's rich, smooth, ripe-tasting and rounded in texture. Has generous Bing cherry flavors, and a lush, soft mouth feel. Exceptional in quality and easy to enjoy now through 2010.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Brown Ranch 2000
Seems closed at first whiff, but soon red cherry and raspberry aromas peek through, leading to rich strawberry and ripe cherry flavors that seem individually articulated and vibrant. Just an impressive and beautifully balanced wine to drink through 2012. A notch better than the reserve.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Reserve 2002
Bold and bright in character. It has vivid Bing cherry aromas, tangy flavors, great acidity, and a long finish that echoes vanilla. Very tasty now, but will only get better and more complex if you can wait. Exceptional quality. Drink through 2015.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Brown Ranch 2002
Rich, smooth and fairly full-bodied, this exceptional wine ties the 2002 Reserve in my book, but has a different style, seemingly more generous in fruit flavors and more rich in texture, showing a touch of buttery oak influence. Enjoy through 2015.


The New Vintages

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Lee Vineyard 2004
Has bright cherry aromas, concentrated but not heavy raspberry flavors that reminded me of the Saintsbury 1980s wines. It's vibrant, tasty and exceptional in quality. $45.

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Stanly Ranch 2004
Bing cherry and strawberry aromas, rich, ripe fruit flavors and a smooth, full texture make it a wine of substance. Exceptional quality and possibly better than the Lee 2004. $45

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Toyon Farm 2004
Sleek, sophisticated, rich but elegant, this beautiful Pinot could be the best of all four Saintsbury vineyard-designated 2004s. $45

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Brown Ranch 2004
Perfumed in aroma, rich with fruit flavors and velvety in texture. Very tasty and high in quality. $60

Saintsbury Pinot Noir Carneros Brown Ranch 2005
This recently bottled Pinot won't be released until 2007. Should be a notch better than the 2004, and it represents the second vintage of winemaker Jerome Chery, in which he had a chance to improve on what he learned in his first year. It has a distinctive hint of rosemary in the aroma, and bright, complex fruit flavors that linger on the finish.



December 5, 2006