2019 WineSmith Cellars Tempranillo, Tejada Vineyard, Lake County
Divvy-Up
80 Points
Tasting Notes
Top Pick, Slow Wine Guide 2021-
Everything about this wine shouts “I’m alive!” Color is brilliant, almost luminescent ruby. The nose presents intense spiced cherries and complex droughty mountain herbs: sage, rosemary and bay laurel, the signature “air-oir” of a place where nature thrives. The texture is wonderfully silky and elegant, with plump, medium-bodied tannins and a vibrant mineral energy in the finish that testifies to the vineyard’s living soil.
This wine is from fruit grown on the Tejada Ranch in Lake County, just north of Napa. Ibo Tejada is a sort of buddha – fun to be around. His deep roots in the culture of his native Spain inform his choices as a man of the Earth. It requires great attention to detail to grow grapes of this quality organically, and he is committed to fine-tuning his few acres nestled in a mountain glen. He employs no herbicides or pesticides, and his vines’ deep roots and the living soil he nurtures allow him to avoid irrigation.
Comments
the slow wine ethos is defined as respect for the environment combined with a will to produce wines that express the places, people, and history of the land where they are grown, raised, and bottled
Emerging out of Italy and the Slow Food initiative, which was founded in the 1980s - they say as a reaction to the proposed introduction of a MacDonalds at the base of the Spanish Steps in Rome - the Slow Wine Guide has been published since 2010.
The Slow Food movement and for that matter Slow Wine revolves around three basic tenants: good, clean and fair. Good, as exemplified by quality, flavor and healthful aspects. Clean as related to a production approach that does not hurt the environment. And fair as it pertains to accessibility for consumers, and also fair return and conditions for producers and their employees.
Each year the Slow Wine editors visit every winery they consider not only to taste the wines, but to see and understand how the winery reflects and integrates with the land - it's place. They meet the people, understand the operations, their vineyards and the winery's impact on the land and community around them. There is no one criteria for inclusion in the guide, such as strict requirements for organic certification, but rather the guide considers the winery and winemaker in situ as to how they reflect the overall Slow Wine principles.
The Slow Wine guide is about telling the stories that make the wineries and the wines unique, and you could consider it as much a travel guide as a guide to discovering wines.
The 2019 WineSmith Tejada Vineyards Tempranillo was included as a Top Pick in the 2021 Slow Wine Guide attesting to the quality of the wine and the close connection to the wonderful fruit from the Tejada Vineyard.
Winemaker Clark Smith authored an article for Wine Searcher titled "Removing the manipulation stigma from wine making" which got me thinking that it would be fun to have Clark talk, as a Slow Wine award winner, about how he views Slow Wine principles in the context of the winemaker's ability to manipulate the wines they make.
You can join us live on Aug 24th at 6pm pacific time for this Virtual Meet The Winemaker. And we'll be tasting Clark's 2019 Tempranillo as well
Here's a link
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMoc--hrDotEtJTIEB-F717HGt_FdK7RwyW
Want to see the Slow Wine Manifesto:
https://slowinecoalition.slowfood.it/wp-content/uploads/EN_slow_food_wine_coalition_manifesto-1.pdf
Hi everybody. I'm delighted to be featured on Divvy-Up. Apart from Casemates.com, it's the only site I know that has a comments section where I can discuss my peculiar winemaking style choices openly. I hope you will pepper me with questions.
I don't run with the traffic. Most California winemakers want to knock your socks off with the first taste. I would rather have you be sorry when it's all gone. I don't make impact wines. I'm dedicated to a balanced Eurocentric style with restrained alcohol, refined tannins and substantial longevity potential.
I am also in the business of candor. You willl never know how hard winemakers work to please you. This doesn't happen through the benign neglect so highly praised by Natural Wine advocates who know nothing about winemaking. Unfortunately, many winemakers are cowed into mumbling "I do the minimum" while secretly sweating bullets 24/7 to make competitive wines.
I think winemakers deserve a better listening. I'm experimenting with telling you the absolute truth about what I do. This particular wine is largely a product of the labors and commitment to quality of its grower, Ibo Tejada, a gentle, industrious Spaniard who eschews irrigtion, herbicides and pesticides to produce a wine full of life.
To present these features in their best light, I pick when the grapes are fully ripe but not overripe, long before they turn to raisins and lose their unique flavors. I employ a specially air-seasoned oak chip from the French forest of untoasted Alliers in the fermenter to aid color and flavor extraction without imparting any oakiness. After fermentation, I use a cooking trick the Azteks taught the Spanish who passed it on to the Belgians for refining cocoa into chocolate, converting the harsh into the deliciously profound using tiny quantities of oxygen. This refines the tannins and gives the wine a rich, plush mouthfeel, integrates the aromas and enhances ageworthiness.
I love to talk abut these details and hope you will quiz me. I also invite you to join in Tuesday at 6:00PM Pacific Time for a Virtual Tasting where you'll get to meet Ibo, learn about the Slow Wine Guide, and hear me rant about the inconvenient truths nobody talks about in wine production.
Thanks for offering me the chance to talk about my work and beliefs.
Clark Smith
Winemaker, WineSmith
www.WhoIsClarkSmith.com
Sounds great Clark, looking forward to the zoom event!
Hey Clark, we're super excited to have you join us here on Divvy-Up and for the Virtual Meet The Winemaker. Based on our conversations so far, I expect a fun and provocative conversation. I'll try not to get you going too much! Here's the link to join again
Aug 24th 6pm pacific https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJMoc--hrDotEtJTIEB-F717HGt_FdK7RwyW
Doing my homework for the event I tasted your Tempranillo. Wow, I get what you mean by being alive. I was wondering about the use of the oak chips during fermentation. Isn't it true that in some cases this is the way certain wines get their oak characteristics? You also barrel aged, but why do these chips not impart more oakiness during the process?
For the sake of sharing, here are my impressions of the wine as I was doing my homework ... slurp....
I'm presented with deep color and uber pronounced aromas as I approach this wine. It practically reaches out to grab you with dark plum and cherry cola aromas that are nearly intoxicating in their freshness. Secondary aromas of vanilla join the cola to create a sort of swirling creaminess in the bouquet. Clark said the wine is alive, and you'll know what he means when you taste it. It really is hard to stop swirling long enough to take a sip.
With all that fruit on the nose, the palate is nicely balanced. The fruit flavors don't overwhelm. It seems a cooler style Tempranillo with bright, not jammy or cooked fruit. Tannins have a nice grip to them, but consistent with the medium body of the wine. There's a bit of a zing after the fruit with a touch of flint and a pleasant, lingering finish. With time in the glass, I was getting the slightest hint of cured meat or leather.
This is really worth trying if you like dark reds with bold fruit aromas. What's nice here is that it's not a fruit bomb on the palate. You're getting those beautiful aromas in a wine that's not overly extracted. It's a nicely balanced wine with an interesting minerality. I tried this both on it's own and with food, and enjoyed it equally.
Cheers 🍷
Good question about the use of chips. To begin with, I'm ethically opposed to the common practice of cycling through French oak like Kleenex. Those are 200-year-old trees planted by Napoleon to build future navies. Today we cut them down, cut out perfect staves to make a piece of fine oak furniture while discarding 75% of the good wood. By fine oak furniture, I mean a barrel, which is watertight without a nail in it and which costs about $1,200 for a 60-gallon vessel, or $10 per gallon.
These barrels have two functions. One is to flavor the wine. The other is to provide tiny amounts of oxygen that permeate through the barrel skin and also off-gas youthful funk. In my system, I've uncoupled these functions.
The flavors of clove, vanilla, coconut, toasted almond and espresso are created when the wood is toasted. A fire built inside the barrel heats and softens the wood so the staves can be bent together to form the oblong shape we all admire, and coincidentally leave the wood full of fire aromas. Since the cooper is trying to do two things at once, the flavors that result are variable and random.
Paleontologists tell us that the human jaw got weaker 1.8 million years ago, so we know that's when we learned to control fire to cook food. Controlled fire has been our friend for a long time, and we're addicted to its sensory properties. This explains why we're mezmerized by TV screens even if we don't like what's on, because we've been staring at fire's meaningless images for countless millenia. It explains why we love bacon, coffee, fresh baked goods, barbecue, fireworks and cigarettes.
These aromas are leached out after two or three years. Many wineries then discard their barrels, which end up cut in half as planters at KMart. I think this is reprehensible.
While I understand this psychology, I want to make wines that speak of the place they come from, so I want any such aromas to be in the background as supporting characters, sort of like when make-up is applied carefully, you can't tell she's wearing any.
I am able to ontrol these nuances by using chips made from the 75% of French wood that used to be discarded. These are air-cured for two or three years just like staves, then broken into pieces that can be uniformly roasted like coffee beans to light, medium and dark roasts with different flavor characteristics. The curing is essential to eliminate the plankiness, that lumber yard smell that can ruin wine. Chip toasting has become a highly developed skill that takes years to master, just like coffee or malt roasting.
I work with a French company, Boisé France, founded by my guru, Patrick Ducournau, whom you can read about in Postmodern Winemaking. I can use tiny amounts of different roasting levels to make small aromatic enhancements. They also make a product called Bois Frais, the untoasted Alliers chip I spoke of before. It has none of the flavors people describe as "oaky." It contains ellagitannin, which in must breaks down and releases gallic acid, a powerful co-extraction aid and anti-oxidant that helps extract from the skins the building blocks I can then assemble post-fermentation into into a rich, dense, light, stable structure -- sort of a tannin soufflé.
I love my barrels, but only when they are thoroughly leached out. I don't own any barrels less than 20 years old, and I want them to outlive me. I can leave wines to develop in barrels for many years without them getting oaky or picking up that pithy, parching oak tannin so common in reds today.
Here's a link about my book, Postmodern Winemaking, which was Wine & Spirits Magazine's 2013 Book of the Year: http://www.postmodernwinemaking.com/books
I had a chance to try this a while back as part of a virtual tasting event and quite enjoyed it then. I wish I'd taken more detailed notes but when my SO recalls a specific wine and asks for it again I know it's good stuff. Now I just need to figure out if I have any place to store more wine. (Maybe I need to drink faster?)
We muscled through a few technical issues and had a fun hour with Clark Smith talking wine and tasting the 2019 Tempranillo. Here's an quick take from the tasting portion. We had three tasters share their thoughts.
I was one of the tasters and I really enjoyed the wine. It has a lovely aroma that will hit you as soon as you begin to pour the wine even before you have the opportunity to breath it in the glass. It has an aroma of cherries and some spice. The taste is very similar, again, with cherries and some spice. It leaves something on the tongue as you swallow that I couldn't identify. The winemaker described it as a "minerality" which is the perfect explanation. I would consider this a medium-bodied wine. I am picking up a few bottles for myself. It's that good.