A Sense of Place – Bodega Chacra, Pinot Noir & Rio Negro, Argentina

Argentine Malbec from Mendoza.  Perhaps no other grape has recently been paired with a region so successfully than the Bordeaux export.  Countless examples fill shelves and wine lists – many of them quite good, exuding not only typicity and sense of place but also embracing an emerging winemaking tradition in Argentina.  However, Malbec from Mendoza did not interest me over the weekend – Pinot Noir from Rio Negro is what captured my attention.

Rio Negro is the southernmost winemaking area within Argentina.  Home to more apple crops than vineyards, the region is still off of the radar for most wine drinkers.  Though it’s quite some distance away from the equator, the region is not in fact overly cool for its latitude (after reading up on the Rio Negro, I must correct a statement I recently made on Twitter – the region is in fact not a cool climate region – it’s fairly warm with a long growing season).  With a climate more dry than rainy and more dessert than lush, the vineyards of the Rio Negro Valley are often irrigated with melt from Andean snow, though some winemakers in the area dry farm.  And compared to other Argentine wine regions, the Rio Negro is situated at a fairly low altitude with the best vineyards planted at around 750 feet above sea level.  Some of the vineyards up north can be located at up to 3,000 feet.

Though it’s a fairly arid region, the Rio Negro does experience large diurnal temperature changes as the temperature at night can drop 25-40 degrees from daytime highs.  And as the folks as Bodega Chacra note on their website, there are consistent and clearly defined seasons in the Rio Negro.  This reliability on the weather patterns to remain true enables winemakers to produce wines that realize their potential in capturing a sense of place.

Like many winemakers in Argentina and Chile, Piero Incisa della Rochetta, is a transplant from Europe.  You might recognize his family’s Tuscan label – Tenuta San Guido.  Now at home in Rio Negro, della Rochetta sources grapes from vineyards that are up to 80 years in age – with the oldest vines still planted on their own rootstock.  The wine I alluded to above was the 2009 Pinot Noir bottled under the Barda label.  As is the practice with winemakers across the globe, della Rochetta uses the Barda as a second label which is bottled with grapes not used in their higher end, more precise cuvees.  An incredibly aromatic and weighty wine, the ’09 Barda was not too richly textured or dark in color.  It had an abundant amount of acidity and had the weight of a Pinot that can be best described as Pommard-esque.  Too fruit forward to be confused with Burgundy it certainly had a flavor and textural profile that confused me a bit – not New Zealand, not California but with a couple of toes in a warmer vintage from the Cote d’Or.  For me, it’s a wonderful gateway wine to the rest of the lineup produced at Chacra and I hope the single vineyard cuvees soon find their way onto my dinner table.

Label Photo Courtesy of Bodega Chacra

Teaching Sense of Place – Associating Wine with Colors

Recently I found myself pushing Riesling and various offerings from the Rhone on the mean streets of Staten Island.  Well, not really that mean, but certainly crowded with potholes and traffic jams.  As I visited my friends Deb and Alex at Mission Fine Wines, Deb mentioned that she was beginning an introductory course on wine tasting in January.  She mentioned that she often compares the components of wine to music.  The better the wine, the more the components – acid, sugar, oak, fruit, tannin and earth – harmonize together to produce a balanced and approachable wine.  I offered, and Deb agreed, that a great piece or song is produced in a similar manner.  Whether it’s Mozart, Ella Fitzgerald, Black Flag or Blind Melon, their greatest works, though they are quite distinctive from each other, are balanced, expressive and a delight for the ears.  We concluded that great wines, no matter the price point, offer similar satisfaction for the drinker.

As we tasted through a few wines, I explained to Deb that I often use colors in helping novice wine drinkers understand flavor profiles.  Perhaps the biggest obstacle in teaching newbies about getting their heads around what’s in the glass is building their vocabulary and frame of reference.  For those who often drink Pinot Noir, cherry is a descriptor that pops into their heads because of their tasting experience.  And advanced tasters can identify which region their Pinot Noir comes from by breaking down cherry into sour cherry, bing cherry, red cherry, fresh, dried, stewed, under- ripe and so on and so forth.  How can we get the novice drink to that point?  Perhaps we can teach wine drinkers to differentiate among a group of wines made with the same grape (or similar blends) by associating their places of origins with colors.  This first technique of associating wine with place was introduced to me by my original wine mentor, Francis Schott, proprietor and wine director at Stage Left Restaurant in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Most Pinot Noir (excluding sparkling, sweet or white versions) should have some sort a cherry of some sort in their flavor profile.  Now, let’s think of cherries in terms of the color red – burgundy red more specifically.  We can choose any color for our purposes – blue, yellow, green or even pink.  However, for our purposes today, we will use red  For instance, a bright, fresh and young California Pinot – from the Russian River say, could be associated with purplish maroon.  An Oregon Pinot Noir, with a little less forward fruit, more earth and brighter acidity can be seen as more maroon than purple.  And then a Burgundy of the same age would fall more solidly into the maroon camp.

Is Your Pinot Violet Red or Red Violet?

And in describing the age and winemaking style of these wines, we can apply textural descriptors.  For instance, the wine drinker can associate younger, fresher styles of the above wines in a semi-gloss kind of way.  If Old World wines are made in an overly traditional manner, the maroon color you associate wines from the Cote d’Or in Burgundy would be matted.  As for the super modern and flashy styles out there, associate them with a higher gloss or shinier purple.  And let us not forget wines that have some bottle age – simply remember them with the same color profile as their younger counterparts, but with more faded texture – depending on their age.

Perhaps this is an incredibly complicated way of understanding wine, but I think it makes sense.  As we attempt to instill confidence in wine drinkers by developing their frame of reference and vocabulary, we need to be creative in finding ways to get descriptors to stick.  Remembering how certain wines identify with their region can be a daunting exercise, but once the light goes off in a wine drinker’s head, it normally stays on.  And the more a wine drinker gains confidence in purchasing wines in wine shops and restaurants the greater the chance that they will begin to drink – and understand – wines that are less ordinary while also capturing a sense of place.