08 J. Christopher, Oregon Croft Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc

I got a sage piece of advice the other day from a fellow wine writer: don't be afraid to make enemies. Be as honest and objective as you can--I guess the rest will basically take care of itself. And I am. But the longer you do this, the more people you inevitably get to know, and your biases bloom like mold in April. I find myself refusing samples. Or taking them with the caveat that I'll only ever write about them if I get enough friends together to do a brown-bagged blind tasting. At some point, it becomes impossible. Fortunately, I don't know these guys. And I hope they don't read this. You're going to make enemies and you're going to have to forge ahead. I couldn't care less. And I'm at an advantage because I'm rarely recommending or cautioning any wine. You have no idea how much I appreciate that any winemaker would bother to do this. It's not their jobs to impress us. It's our work to find a reason for most of these wines. A ball to wear that gown to. The problem is, I'm starting to look good in a dress. Nevermind, I mean I'm starting to make friends. That might be why I've been so reluctant to write about this Croft Vineyard sauvignon blanc, which I first tried in the 2001 vintage and fell in love with a few months into the 2004. That's when I made it my house wine. But four years later, as more of us become neighbors in this business--and I'm honored to share a fence with any of you--the house has gotten bigger, and if we all had to meet somewhere, some amalgamation of all our favorite bars with Chefs Paul Kahan (or anyone he gives his nametag to) and Dan Mondock out back, this is what we're drinking once everyone gets inside. J. Christopher's 2008 Croft Vineyard sauvignon blanc is America's house wine. Take off your socks and put on your PJs. I've had it every week this year. Where I like to wax eloquently about the ether of old white Bordeaux, the Sudoku-like mindfuck of Loire, or the explicitly Cinemax-like pleasure of all Champagne, Croft makes me just want to keep my mouth shut. I don't want to make this winery happy. Don't want to run into them at a tasting and say, yeah, hey, it's my pleasure, but you're the one doing the work! I don't want to be full of myself. And time will tell if I delete this post. Make it something short and sweet about the Kaffir lime, smoky Silex (!) minerality (okay, now I've gone too far, it's not as ethereal, but at least far better than every New Zealand wine), gooseberry, raw quince, grapefruit, grapefruit, and grapefruit. So maybe it says something that I can't. That I can't shut up. That all I want to do is open a bottle, pour a few glasses, make a few new friends.

09 J. Christopher, Oregon Croft Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc

The thing is, you have to listen to women. I'm learning that either the older I get, or the more sauvignon blanc I drink. The science says they have better nostrils, or tastebuds. The line is they're more likely to be "supertasters," sensitive to the nuances of bitter, sour, sweet, and salty. Then again, about a fourth of us are supertasters. And, odds are, this is the first time you've read the word "supertaster." Because it's not at all about the pointillist stroke of genes on your palate. You taste as well as you taste, and unless you waste time kooked up in white rooms with a separate glass and plate for every item of food and drink in your house, you don't know any different. And yet, it's true. Women do taste better. At least in this case, where my fiancee unwittingly picked up my glass and exclaimed, "Huia!" the wonderfully bright, minerally, and classic sauvignon blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand. I told her she was right. That this 2009 J. Christopher sauvignon blanc, from what I consider to be one of the best sites for this grape north of the equator, is indeed Huia. For me to understand what that means, I had to listen. Huia, for us (she and I specifically, not the royal blogger "us"), means much more than it would to others. It's the first wine we really got into together, she waiting outside the store while I hurried in, chatted up one of the associates, and came out with that bottle. I don't remember where we were hurrying to, or why she waited outside. But I remember that pungent, gooseberry-laden white that we've only had one other time since. So hearing her access that name from the deep recesses of her mind, I learned exactly why my married friends always say what they say. It's not about avoiding fights, picking your battles, or "trying to make things work." It's--odds are--that she's seen this somewhere before, already knows the answer. She's quiet, and when she talks, she's about to slap you silly. That's what it means to be a supertaster. Because, honestly, the new Croft is actually quite a different wine than Huia. But what it evokes--this sense of excitement, and maybe a little wonder, the sense of anticipation you get standing next to a hot girl who's still with you, the not knowing and not caring--that's what this wine tastes like. That's what makes it fit, like a memory you'll never know was real or cobbled together from a story your dad used to read you and a decade's worth of dreams. Jay thinks this is his best sauvignon blanc yet. I'm not so sure I agree, but I do think it's his most complex, driven by sharp aromatics, that unique feline pungency, pink grapefruit, pickled ginger, cantaloupe rind, bitter quinine, and a base of dry, eraser-dust minerality. The wine begs for food to smooth out some edges, though I do think that will mellow over the next few months. I remember first trying these wines years ago. Fruity and dull--the sort of recommendation you'd find in the back of some "learn to taste!" book or on the list of a nouveau Thai fusion joint beside the lemongrass pumpkin oysters. As the years have gone on, his wines too have started to come out a little more austere, maturing at pace with the increasing respect this grape has earned. Collectively, they're the only empirical study of what sauvignon blanc can do in the United States--UC Davis be damned. As if someone's been talking to him all these years. As if he's been listening.

06 J. Christopher, Willamette Valley Sauvignon Blanc

This wine is so dry and austere that the corked bottle I opened first actually had a richer aroma. Granted, the smell of wet, moldy rug isn't really what you're ever looking for in a wine, but it says something that the clean bottle is so muted. Yet you can sense how sharp it really is--all that great grapefruit acidity, like sucking right on the pith, and white pepper. Once the wine comes up to temp, the aromatics get more intense, the flavors more crisp and delineated. It's no surprise that this is J. Christopher--the same winery whose 2004 Croft Vineyard I said was America's greatest sauvignon blanc. It was. And this compares, depending on how much ripeness you want in your whites. The finish is slightly sweet, the way a decent Cali sauv blanc can finish with a touch of powdered sugar. But you shouldn't really care. This is one wine, the 2004 (now just about dead) another. And in this generation, I'm excited by how much great juice the Northwest is producing. All this from only 66 total acres of the grape (in all of Oregon!). I love the green citrus and pungency. I guess it's en vogue to call it "cat pee," but really it's very much like key lime topped with a bit of meringue. Green mangoes topped with salt. The salt of the earth. Whatever the rest of the world filters through.

Francis-Tannahill, Jackass (beta)

I just found out today that Oregon's Francis-Tannahill winery has released the Jackass, a wine I first wrote about in The Short Pour over a year ago. Apparently, I'm a little slow on picking this up, as a few wine stores have already started selling it under the "Jack White" name (who knew Sam was such a White Stripes fan?). My shipment arrives soon. And as an aperitif to that review, here is a write-up of my first encounter with that mystic, mirage-like entity that I've thought about almost every day since... and his wine.

INTRODUCING THE JACKASS (May 11, 2006)
Of course the wine I love is the wine that no one can have. But I got some. And, chances are, we all might someday.

"It's that rose thing at Sam's table," whispered the Cream Wine Co. rep who helped put this whole Small Batch tasting together last month in Chicago.

Great; a freaking rose. As if the lean 04 pinot noirs and the buckets of pinot gris, stainless chard, and late-harvest riesling weren't enough to make my teeth bleed. Now to find out what underripe strawberries taste like when you put them in a bottle.

"Jackass," said Sam, as if he knew how bad I thought this wine was going to be. Winemaker Sam, the suffixed Sam of Francis-Tannahill, wearing a casual checked shirt, square frames, and incredulously blue jeans. His clothes made my teeth hurt. I was afraid the word "Burgundian" might come up soon.

"Well, call it Balalaika," technically, "not Jackass." That's what I should call it in the newsletter, he said. I promised I would--especially if he was going to sell it someday.

He said he wouldn't, though. This pristine, unusual, enervatingly complex rose... thing. This cloudy pink blend of pinot blanc, chard, and 30% et cetera. I numbingly blurted "Gravner," as if the weird Italian Breg--similarly made in obscurity--really had anything whatsoever to do with this wine. And Sam actually nodded, as if my reference could possibly be right.

We were in the oft-encountered limbo of wine cognoscenti and sheer ineptitude. The former got you free dinners at Avec. The latter made you happy.

What could he say? What could he ever do with a wine like this. It would never sell. There is no market for wine that smells like fresh persimmons, looks like ruby red grapefruit juice, and tastes like tangelos, kumquats, and blood orange pith.

His wife called him a jackass for making it in the first place. I was going up against his wife. And her name came first on the label.

Among the few hundred brilliant American wines that the Cream team showed at Small Batch, Sam's Balalaika was the best. It's the wine we all look for and hope to find before anyone else (truthfully, I was third)--the wine that no one else will ever like, to borrow Doug Frost, or even ever know how to like, for that matter.

As Jay Somers did with the 04 Croft sauvignon blanc, as Charlie Smith did with the 02 The Beautiful, Sam has done with Balalaika.

Don't you love my catharsis? My absolutely embarrassing, unabashed lust for a wine that hardly suits any normal palate. When I drank this wine, it felt like my first rock show, my first cigarette (I quit years ago), my first night on a cliff overlooking the sea in Luc sur Mer.

It is everything new, lovely, and pure that no one but you--us--will ever appreciate, ever know, and ever get to tell our friends about. We'll make them like it. We'll make them rock, smoke, and dream.

Or maybe Sam will just put it in a box, serve it with turkey next fall, and forget anyone but him ever understood. Jackass.

04 J. Christopher, Croft Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc

This is America's greatest sauvignon blanc. May it inspire a new trend in what we can do with this varietal. The steely bouquet of singed grass and smoky white stone is classically New Zealand. The picturesque flavors develop from kiwi and grapefruit to papaya, lime zest, green apple, and a long minerally finish of peaches and cream. Here are my notes on 2001.

01 J. Christopher, Croft Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc

Red grapefruit and a mild, honeyed oak lends an outstanding balance of acid and fruit. Orange, tangerine, and pear. Hints of residual sugar. Zingy and refreshing, but also medium bodied and supportive. Almost sensuous, with light phenols and some PacNW pinot gris tendencies. Here are my notes on the 2004.