Like earthquake tremors more gentle nudge than jolting shove, vintners along the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains are elevating their game and more assertively speaking up.
One group dispatched a crew to hold a consumer tasting on planet Napa Valley. Another is laying the groundwork for a screening to assure customers of the quality of their wines via a sticker that would be applied to sanctioned bottles, akin to the black rooster of Chianti Classico.
And then there is the El Dorado 8, the most advanced and open representative of this wave of fresh marketing.
The eight wineries to constitute the El Dorado 8 are scattered across the higher elevations of the El Dorado American Viticultural Area, from Camino to Fair Play. Their winemakers are convinced that the topography, elevation and soils of the terrain that plays host to their vineyards yield wines of uncommon character, diversity and value. They refer to their belt of the AVA as “Sierra Highlands,” which in time may or may not evolve into its own AVA.
The eight are Boeger Winery, Edio Vineyards, Gwinllan Estate Winery, Element 79 Vineyards, Lava Cap Winery, Madroña Vineyards, Miraflores Winery and Starfield Vineyards. Some have been lontime pioneers of the modern wine trade in El Dorado County – Boeger, Madroña, Lava Cap – while others are relative newcomers – Gwinllan, Starfield, Element 79.
To help raise the region’s profile, the group yesterday conducted a “Mountain Wine Summit” that drew around 30 restaurateurs, retailers and educators from the greater Sacramento area eager to learn more about what sets apart the area.
Justin Boeger with original grape press dating from the 1870s.
The day began at Boeger Winery with breakfast and a tour of the estate’s original century-old rock-walled cellar and ended with lunch and a tasting at Element 79, where the group was introduced to one of the more original and sprightly wines of the day, a sparkling, dry-hopped Viognier in cans under the label “Color,” a sly reference to shouts of “color!” by Gold Rush prospectors when they saw flakes of the 79th element in pan or sluice box.
Between meals, participants gathered for a two-hour presentation and tasting of 16 wines chosen both to showcase the influence of the region’s topography, elevation and soils on wine expression and to deliver the message that the foothills produce wines other than Zinfandel. Not a single Zinfandel was poured, though its genetic cousin, Primitivo, did make an appearance.
The El Dorado AVA sits in the middle of the Sierra Foothills AVA, which stretches 170 miles from Yuba County south to Mariposa County. Only about 30 miles wide, it more or less overlaps the Mother Lode and its veins of gold, which drew the first wave of hopeful immigrants to the region, now succeeded by farmers and vintners whose nuggets are clustered in bunches on vines.
The El Dorado AVA plays host to about 2800 acres in wine grapes and around 40 wineries, all of them comparably small and family owned and operated. In a good year, which means a year without drought and wildland fire, the value of El Dorado’s wine-grape crop is close to $10 million.
As the day’s wines were poured and tasted, winemakers representing the eight wineries spoke to the environmental factors that affected each wine. There was much talk of topography. El Dorado vineyards begin at 1200 feet and continue to about 3500 feet elevation. The land buckles and folds as its climbs east into increasingly mountainous territory, sculpted into river canyons, rocky ridges, shadowy hollows and hills that range from low and bald to high and sharp, with all sorts of vegetation. Participants were introduced graphically to that range as they caravanned the nearly 20 miles from Boeger Winery to Element 79 Vineyards. This variation in landscape provides grape growers with all sorts of considerations concerning slopes, pitches, exposures and levels at which to cultivate fruit. It also helps explain why El Dorado is planted with around 80 kinds of grapes, from Aglianico to Zinfandel, and yields so many styles of wine, from dry sparkling wines to luscious dessert wines.
Les Heinsen introduces the group to his family’s Elevation 79 Vineyards.
Elevation provides its own benefits. For one, while the foothills can be torrid by day during the growing season, grapes benefit by the cooling gained in elevation – a drop in temperature of about 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit for each 1000 feet realized in going uphill. There’s also the region’s proximity to the flanking peaks of the Sierra and their cooling nighttime breezes. The diurnal swing from daytime high to nighttime low can be as much as 40 degrees, a combo that helps assure that grapes develop plenty of sugar while also retaining acidity.
The soils of El Dorado generally run to decomposed granite and volcanic debris, but they are more intricate and varied than that, including strata and pockets of serpentine, limestone, quartz and shale, among others, occasionally overlapping and interlocking. More than 5400 mining claims remain on file in El Dorado County, though only 345 are active. Half of them are for gold, but others are for copper, tungsten, zinc and 21 other minerals.
The most surprising wines of the day? To this palate:
The Boeger Winery 2020 Barbera ($21), the winery’s signature varietal wine, popped with fresh beckoning fragrance, lively suggestions of berries and cherries in flavor, and the grape’s telltale pointed acidity. The wine’s delivery wasn’t so much a surprise as the meticulousness that winemaker Justin Boeger brought to the wine, assembling it from seven separate plots of vineyard ranging from 1150 feet elevation to 2850 feet elevation, fermenting the juice with just as many different strains of yeast.
The Miraflores 2019 Estate Syrah ($32) demonstrated with its brash suggestions of dark fruit and its generous and salient vein of black pepper that Syrah does indeed have a welcoming home in the foothills.
The Edio 2022 Estate Albariño ($28) had all the animation, freshness and joy of conscientious and happy bakers creating apple crisps and apple pies, an image no doubt prompted in part by the winery’s setting, which includes Delfino Farms and its landmark bake shop, a popular destination for people with sweet tooths each fall.
The Madroña 2020 Hillside Collection Gewurztraminer ($20) demonstrated that El Dorado does indeed possess sites cool enough not only to do well by such cool-climate grape varieties as Gewurztraminer but to do them exceptionally well. This take was dry, lyrical, spunky with suggestions of apples and limes, and not at all bitter, a not-uncommon knock on the variety.
The Gwinllan Estate 2017 Blanc de Noirs ($40) was another wine to show that with meticulous stewardship a grape variety seen as too fragile for the heat and aridity of the foothills – Pinot Noir – can be pampered in the vineyard to produce the foundation for a traditionally shaped sparkling wine. By its structure, authority, complexity and elegance, the Gwinllan could pass for Champagne in a blind tasting.
The Lava Cap 2022 Estate Sauvignon Blanc ($22) was exceptionally aromatic, coming down on the fresh-cut-grass side of the variety with clarity and spunk, and possessing both structure and accessibility. For decades, Lava Cap has been identified with a hefty style of Chardonnay, but this Sauvignon Blanc shows that it also can turn out a white wine with plenty of bounce. Great debut for the latest member of the founding Jones family to assume winemaking at the estate, Nolan Jones.
(Footnote: I was the paid moderator for the group’s panel presentation.)
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