How to read a wine barrel: YAPNDN060= Yafa Pinot Noir DuNah lot 060. If you could see the head, it would read MT, or Medium Toast, along with the name of the cooper—Seguin Moreau—and the vintage year. It would tell you as well if the barrel heads as well as the sides are toasted. For many winemakers, head-toasting imparts too much oak. Usually Pinot Noir, unlike Cabernet -family grapes, stays in new oak for 11-14 months, not 22 months or more. The barrels do their work for 2 years, then become neutral.
One of the things I’ve discovered as I prepare for the second release of my Segue Russian River Pinot Noir this coming fall Is that there are no formulas for directing Pinot Noir to where you want it to go.
Sooner or later the wine develops its own willful character, and you have to accept that human logic and cunning take you only so far. Like a domestic pet, or your own offspring, it can be solicited to obey, wheedled to conform to the rules you’ve established—but in the end Pinot Noir will always behave according to some unpredictable genetic code you can never fully unravel or decipher.
I suspect those same unfathomable mysteries help explain the popularity of astrology—which, by the way, somebody could get rich applying to wines. Why does this Pinot smell as musky as a forest floor today when last week it smelled like a bowlful of cherries? Well, why not? It’s a Gemini with a split personality. Too much tannic grip? Hey, that’s easy, the wine’s a control-freak Virgo.
And the real losers, the grapes that go south in the barrel for no rational reason, those can be explained away in three simple words: Mercury’s in retrograde.
So far, the planets have been in perfect alignment for the ’06 Segue Russian River blend, I’m pleased to report. Over the past ten days, sniff by sniff and sip by sip my partner-in crime, Greg LaFollette, and I have been creating it from half a dozen Russian River and neighboring vineyards. The process is exciting, because the ’06 wine-growing season in West Sonoma , a difficult one , promises to pay off in richly textured wines with plenty of structure and depth.
All the sniffing and sipping accounts for that sea of semi-filled glasses in the left photograph, and for the serious concentration. Each glass holds a different blend—a staggering seventy or more possible combinations of one part this to two parts that, or two parts this to three parts that for more silky mouthfeel and so on, tasting forwards and backwards and even, yes, sideways to arrive at just the right proportion of the three finalist vineyards.
The base of my ’06, as in my ’05, is from a vineyard block I purchase with the help of DeLoach winery—whose owner, Jean-Charles Boisset has been a generous ally and champion of Segue from its inception, as has Greg LaFollette, one of our country’s best Pinot Noir winemakers.
If you sat and tasted with us, you’d pick up these tidbits from our conversation :
Me: It’s getting there, but like Ginny says, it’s still too polite.
Greg: Yeah, we need to add something slutty to this—or slutty lees for yeast stress aroma, sulfides.
Me: To get the feral thing into it, yup, but not so much it’s over the top.
Greg: For sure. We don’t want it to get arrested for indecent exposure.
If you taste a slight smokiness and mushroom woodsiness in the’06, along with raspberry and dark blueberry, that’s more or less what we’re talking about. Just the sort of wine a Leo with a moon in Taurus would love—or a Pinot buff who’s addicted to discovering new layers of aroma and taste as the wine opens up to reveal its beguiling secrets. To pre-order, please visit Segue Cellars.
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