 Wine & Spirits Magazine April, 2000
Excerpt form the article, "Napa Valley's Chardonnay" by Rod Smith
... It is increasingly rare to find chardonnay from Oakville north, but the exceptions are notable. Because the valley's extremely variable topography and strong marine influence create a wide range of site-specific climates (or mesoclimates), chardonnay does have suitable locations in the upper valley - and it's increasingly clear that the chardonnay vineyards that have survived the massive replanting of the late twentieth century are the ones in those locations. The roster of chardonnay survivors includes Stony Hill, Long, Chappellet, Mayacamas, Newton, Smith-Madrone, El Molino, Woltner, Forman, Freemark Abbey, Sequoia Grove and a handful of others.
The salient example is Stony Hill, on Spring Mountain some 600 feet and more above St. Helena. Stony Hill has been producing white wines only, primarily chardonnay (along with small amounts of riesling, gewurztraminer, and late-harvest semillon), on this remarkable mountainside estate for half a century.
Much is made of long-running Napa Valley red wines such as Georges d Latour Private Reserve, Freemark Abbey Cabernet Bosche, Heitz Martha's Vineyard. Stony Hill chardonnay beats all of them except for BV. It comes from vineyards first planted in 1948 by winery founders Eleanor and Fred McCrea; their son and daughter-in-law, Peter and Willinda McCrea, continue to run the estate. The winery, built in 1952, was the first new winery in Napa Valley since Prohibition.
Although it is consistently one of California's finest wines, red or white, Stony Hill chardonnay does not conform to the established California style of pedal-to-the-oak chardonnay. It is typically a crisp, lean, concentrated wine that ages beautifully for ten years or more. At its best (and '97 is a good example) it seems like a mouthful of golden light that glows long after the actual liquid slips down one's throat. With age it reveals a delicate perfume that is not quite floral and note quite minerally, and yet is of the earth and things that grow in the earth, somehow evoking the giant redwoods and Douglas firs and madrones that frame the estate's various vine blocks.
Fermentation in neutral oak puncheons (some of which have been used in every vintage since 1963, according to winemaker Mike Chelini) serves to round and temper the deceptively gentile power of this chardonnay fruit -- but there is no flavor of wood, certainly none of the overt oak flavor that a generation of consumers has come to identify as the flavor of chardonnay itself. Mike Chelini states that his intention is to make wine that tastes like chardonnay grapes grown in a particular place on Spring Mountain. "I try to make the wines to remind people of what our vineyards are like, and we won't change styles," he said.
In fact, he probably couldn't change the Stony Hill style if he wanted to; his constituency wouldn't stand for it. "In nineteen-eighty I bought about ten new barrels, and longtime customers complained about the taste of oak," he told me. "We could make wine with more oak and do a little better in ratings - we've actually been told that if we want better ratings we should make them fatter with more oak - but the wines wouldn't age as long, and our customers wouldn't like it. Anyway, I think people are getting sick and tired of that oaky, buttery character."
The thing that makes Stony Hill Chardonnay work is simply that it's a relatively cool spot in a generally warm area, and therefore a good site for chardonnay. Abundant ground water (the pioneers didn't call it Spring Mountain for nothing) allows dry farming, which enhances the fruit's capacity for expressing both terroir and vintage. The northeast exposure is open to morning and midday sun, while the high peaks west of the vineyard block the late afternoon inferno. And the altitude, approximately 600 feet off the valley floor, provides relief from the heat spikes that forge some of the valley's best cabernets lower down. |
