So it follows that if you're looking for extraordinary wine, you'd better find some extraordinary grapes. And you'll find them in the world's greatest vineyards, growing in each of the 25 legendary sites on the pages that follow. We selected these 25 great vineyards with a specific idea in mind: Each presents a direct connection between the distinction of the site and the character of the wine. These are vineyards where the terroir - the French term that roughly translates as the total environment of a place, including soil, climate, aspect, vine, even history Ñ is most clearly perceptible in the wine.
To that end, we scoured our own tastings, contemplated the vineyards we'd visited throughout the world, and got recommendations from experts in every corner of the wine business: sommeliers, journalists, winemakers, vineyard owners, collectors. And we came up with the list you see here.
Admittedly, these are not bargain basement wines. Duplicating these tastings can be an investment, but it's a worthwhile one; and if you gather a group of six or seven friends who all contribute, that investment suddenly becomes much more affordable. Also, while some of the older wines may be difficult to track down, they do turn up at auctions, or you can avail yourself of websites like www.wine-searcher.com to hunt through the wineshops of the US with a few quick keystrokes. Nor will it ruin the purpose of a tasting to substitute a different vintage Ñ do a little research, find out what the vintage was like, and then see what the bottle holds.
And who knows. After tasting these wines from some of the world's greatest vineyards, you may find a desire kindled inside you to jump on a plane and head off to the Wachau, or Burgundy, or the foothills of the Andes, to walk the vineyard rows in the summer sun, or feel a fistful of cool, stony soil crumble in your hands.
> If the words "wine country" conjure images of Napa or Sonoma, valleys laid thick with vines, a trip out to Red Mountain, Washington's newest viticultural area, will be a little disorienting. This is Eastern Washington, desert country, hot and wide open, with apple orchards, few roads, and vast stretches of nothing to meet the eye. You have to know where to look to find a vineyard like Klipsun, a 120-acre plot of primarily merlot and cabernet, planted on a southwest-facing slope overlooking the Yakima River.
Back in 1982 land was cheap and available, and David and Patricia Gelles knew Jim Holmes, a guy who'd bought a similar stretch of nothing five hundred yards away and was having luck growing grapes. Washington is a younger wine-growing area than Napa or Sonoma, and owes much of its success to unscientific guesswork and lucky breaks like the Gelles'. Klipsun has attracted attention for its concentrated reds, but why the vineyard packs such power into its fruit remains a mystery. Chris Camarda, who's been making his Andrew Will Klipsun Vineyard Merlot since 1995, doesn't really know. "I've gone over this, and I can't come up with good answers," he says. Is it the soil, the shallow sandy loam? The hot dry winds that sweep through the area? The extremes of hot and cold? (Red Mountain temperatures can shift 30û F. between day and night.) The lack of rain? Klipsun and Red Mountain's other vineyards are some of Washington's warmest, driest spots and generally get harvested earlier than Walla Walla or other Columbia Valley sites. But within this small area, there is plenty of variation. Holmes's nearby Ciel du Cheval produces a more austere, elegant merlot. Camarda makes separate merlots from both vineyards, and he relies on Klipsun to provide the power-merlot each year. "Klipsun at its best has terrific concentration and depth," he says. "There's no one in the state with that power and structure."
Red Mountain provides a nice contrast to Napa Valley, where every inch of soil has been parsed, probed and measured for its microclimate. When Camarda chose his allocated merlot from Klipsun, he wasn't particular about where it came from in the vineyard. He just asked for the fruit from a few rows in the middle. Such has been, and to some degree still is, the spirit of Washington winegrowing: Choose a spot, plant some grapes, see what happens.
Merlot from Andrew Will is unique in Washington. Chris Camarda is intent on revealing the state's terroir vineyard-by-vineyard, so he makes only single-vineyard bottlings, and he uses less oak than many other winemakers here. W&S tasted three vintages of Andrew Will Klipsun Vineyard Merlot, the 1995 (Camarda's first effort with the vineyard), the 1997 and the 2000, providing a contrast between an older vintage made from young vines, a frost-recovery year, in which the yields were low, and a "classic" Washington year with some high temperatures and typical crop loads.
All three vintages display Washington merlot at its finest: balanced, complex, more transparent somehow than the big-fruit blocks of California. The '95 shows Klipsun ageing into an appealing, laid-back maturity, with cigar box and smoky bacon flavors running over a smooth, hedonistic, blackberry wash of fruit. There's not much tannin here, rather a brightness lifting the flavors of the wine through the finish. It's ready to drink now, silky and even, an easy wine to love.
The '97 is riper, its sweet berry flavors blacker and denser than the '95. The yields were low this year, as the vines were recovering from a traumatic frost in 1996, and that may explain why this is the most simply fruit-oriented wine, the least distinctively Klipsun.
The 2000 is the most impressive wine of the three, showing why Washington leads the way with American merlot. There is plenty of pure, concentrated blackberry fruit here, while floral notes, black flecks of dark chocolate and hints of spice complicate the picture. This is merlot as it should be grown, something more than a simple, soft red. It's bright, less structured and more delicate than cabernet, but just as complex.