New Home for a Noble Grape

Los Angeles Times
By James Ricci
Staff Writer
April 9, 2003

California winemakers have been envious of Italy's Piedmont region for a very long time. It's there that the Nebbiolo grape produces the majestic Barolo and Barbaresco. Those austere, tannic red wines -- redolent of tar and roses, reverberating with echoes of rich, dark fruit -- scale such heights nowhere else in the world.

But that has not kept persistent Californians from trying. Here, historically, winemakers have made pallid wines with little of the earthiness you find in Piedmont. "Nebbiolo's been in California a hundred years, and it just hasn't made the grade in those hundred years," says grape breeder M. Andrew Walker, a professor at UC Davis' department of viticulture and enology.

Nevertheless, the effort goes on, as the winemakers gain courage from a greater understanding of the grape and of the growing sites and vineyard techniques that nurture it. They believe they've set foot on what's likely to be a long road to proving that the noble grape can abide royally in California.

An L.A. Times panel last week sampled 15 California Nebbiolos, and found five of them worthy of consideration (see accompanying box). The five are recommended not because they've achieved the quality of Barolo or Barbaresco -- far from it -- but because they're well-made and may point to the future of California Nebbiolo-making. As a group, the wines tended to be highly acidic, unusual among California wines and characteristic also of Piedmontese Nebbiolo. They're not balanced, however, by the smooth richness typically found in the Italian wines. They tended to be "on the shrill end of the spectrum," as one taster put it.

Nonetheless, a comparative tasting of one producer's wine from 1998 and a barrel sample of the same producer's 2001 vintage hinted at how fairly new Nebbiolo vines may produce remarkably better wines as they age.

It's about the weather

Nebbiolo, which takes its name from "nebbia," the Italian word for "fog," is difficult to grow well, even in Piedmont. Californians face an even greater difficulty, one suggested in the grape's very name. Piedmont is a place of frequent fog, as well as rain, cool temperatures, and miserly soils at the feet of the soaring Alps.

California, meanwhile, is sunny, loamy and semi-arid. Here, too much sun bleaches unprotected Nebbiolo of color, and rich soils and warm temperatures cause the vines to produce extravagant vegetation and overabundant (therefore lower-quality) fruit.

"It is a nightmare variety," says Craig Reed, winemaker at Martin & Weyrich, a Paso Robles winery that has been making Nebbiolo wines for 20 years and has the country's largest planting of the variety, 17 producing acres. "You hear the Pinot Noir folks complaining about getting color and balance, but they don't have anything on us."

The Italians have had a couple of thousand years to figure out where various wine grapes grow best. The Nebbiolo situation demonstrates how new that process is in California, which began focusing on dry table wines only in the last couple of generations. Nebbiolo is grown in locales as diverse as Santa Barbara County, Paso Robles, the Sierra Nevada foothills, the Santa Cruz Mountains and Mendocino County.

Carneros-based wine consultant Michael Jones believes Nebbiolo is particularly "site specific." He says the Nebbiolo growers' quest is a more recent reflection of what the state's Pinot Noir growers experienced. In the 1960s and 1970s, growers tried every technique, in vineyard and winery, to make high-quality Pinot Noir in Napa Valley, and failed miserably. It was only after they began planting in relatively cool Carneros that the battle was won. "I don't think we've found that place yet, that Carneros, with Nebbiolo," he says.

Nebbiolo ripens very slowly and requires a long, relatively cool growing season. Jim Clendenen of Il Podere dell' Olivos (and Au Bon Climat) believes his Santa Maria Valley vineyard meets the requirement. "We often harvest Nebbiolo in December," he says, "and the grapes are just coming into balance."

Jeff Newton, who grows 10 acres of Nebbiolo for Stolpman Vineyards in the Santa Ynez Valley, says that to try to minimize the grape's tannins, which are found primarily in the seeds and skins, he doesn't pick "until the seeds are brown and when you chew the skins, they're no longer bitter."

Only relatively recently have superior clones of Nebbiolo been available in California and that, says Jones, has been a principal barrier to the production of higher-caliber wines. A clone is a family of vines propagated from a single vine considered to have particularly desirable characteristics. Clendenen planted his two acres of Nebbiolo in 1994, using two of the newer clones, which have the potential to produce more dense and interesting wines than the clone traditionally planted here.

Finding proper sites and planting proper clones, however, are only the beginning. A Nebbiolo producer must ruthlessly prune vegetation and prevent or remove excess grape clusters to keep yields low so that a given vine's energies are concentrated on a small amount of fruit. Clendenen and Newton, for example, rigorously restrict the amount of grapes their vines produce, the former to 2.5 tons per acre and the latter to 2 tons -- significantly lower than, say, typical yields of high-quality Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.

In addition, growers must be extra vigilant about managing the vines' canopies to ensure that ripening grapes are shaded from the color-robbing sun. Later, in the winery, care must be taken to rein in Nebbiolo's boisterous acidity and tannins. Some producers have taken to aging their wines in oak for two years or longer, then in bottles another two years before releasing it, in hopes of getting the acids to behave. "Cabernet Sauvignon you could make in your sleep," Newton says. "With Nebbiolo, we have to work four times as hard."

Those who wait

Patience is a required virtue too, given the long growing season, the long aging process and the long time it can take for the vines themselves to mature to where their fruit begins delivering some of the more charming aspects of Nebbiolo.

A case in point was Clendenen's 1998 Bricco Buon Natale Nebbiolo and a barrel sample of the same wine from the 2001 vintage. L.A. Times tasters found the 1998 to be highly acidic and possessed of rough tannins and nondescript red wine flavors. The 2001, however, was remarkably more evolved, with bright fruit and more depth, yet good acidity and tannins nicely integrated into the whole -- the best of all the wines tasted (it won't be released until 2005). "At seven years of age, the vineyard had turned the corner a little bit," Clendenen says.

Clendenen's experience may augur well for other California producers who have the devotion to stick with the variety over the long haul, experimenting, playing a waiting game, refusing to be deterred by the current indifference of a market that still doesn't gladly embrace California's Italian varieties.

"We're just scratching the surface with some of these varieties," says Newton. "I mean, Pinot Noir was a disaster in California in the '60s and '70s, but you taste the ones we make now and it's, 'Whoa, baby!' I think in 20 years you'll taste California Sangiovese and Nebbiolo and say the same thing."

Californians worthy of your consideration

An L.A. Times panel of tasters sampled 15 California Nebbiolos and found five good examples of California's state of the art in producing the notoriously difficulty variety. With one exception, they are readily available through the wineries.

1998 Arciero Nebbiolo, Paso Robles, (805) 239-2562, www.arcierowinery .com. $10

NV Clos LaChance Nebbiolo, Santa Cruz Mountains, (800) 487-9463, www.closlachance.com. $20

1997 Enotria Nebbiolo, Mendocino County, (707) 744-8466, www.domaine saintgregory.com/enotria. $18

1999 L'Uvaggio di Giacomo Nebbiolo "Il Leopardo," California; available at the Wine House in West L.A. $17

1999 Viansa Nebbiolo "La Nebbia," California, (800) 995-4740, www.viansa.com. $24

-- James Ricci

Overcoming Barolo envy
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