The Santa Lucia Highlands Winegrowers hosted a trade and press tasting of SLH wines on Monday, February 8 in San Francisco. Twenty-seven wineries participated. Most of them are located in the Santa Lucia Highlands but a few, such as Siduri and Testarossa, are located elsewhere and source Santa Lucia Highlands fruit to make AVA-specific wines. Only wines made from Santa Lucia Highlands grapes were allowed at the tasting.
The vast majority of wines offered were Chardonnay or Pinot Noir. There were also several Syrah, two Rieslings, two Pinot Gris and a Roussanne/ Viognier. In all, 92 wines were available to taste. I sampled all of them except for a couple of Syrah that had run out.
All in all, it was a good tasting. Different styles of winemaking were evident, even within a single varietal. While there were a few wines that I thought were disappointing, the majority were good and some were excellent. I a couple of wines that I thought to be very good values too.

Top Wineries
It’s well known that you can’t make great wine without great fruit. However, great fruit alone doesn’t guarantee great wine. Producing wines of the highest quality on a consistent basis requires very skilled winemakers who pay attention to detail, maintain very clean wineries, have the discipline to let the fruit speak for itself in good years and the skill to get the most out of off years. It is those wineries and winemakers that you can really trust and from whom you can buy year in and year out. And you can order their wines in restaurants with confidence.
Three of the wineries at Monday’s tasting fall into that category and they earned their stripes again by offering the highest overall levels of quality there. In alphabetical order they are:
August West Wine, Ed Kurtzman
Pisoni Vineyards, Jeff Pisoni
Siduri/Novy Family, Adam and Dianna Lee
While each of these wineries are at the very top qualitatively, their wines differ in style. The August West wines, and I absolutely mean this as a compliment, remind me of Jessica Rabbit. They are vivacious and sensual with some of the most attractive elements accentuated to a point you might not have thought possible. Yet the wines are always varietally correct, evocative of place and don't cross the line into tacky hedonism. They are plushly textured, beautiful wines that you could take home to mother. And the alcohol doesn’t hit you like a cartoon hammer.
The wines from Pisoni Vineyards, including the Lucia line, tend to be leaner than those from August West. But what they sacrifice in viscousity they make up for with acidity and complexity. Jeff Pisoni’s wines offer a strong core of fruit surrounded by a broad spectrum of delightful and balanced flavors. It’s a bit like listening to a symphony orchestra with a guest musician sitting in. You can listen to the star as he's complemented by the orchestra, or relax and let the music wash over you like one integrated wave of sound, or sequentially pick out different secondary instruments to focus on, letting them draw you deeper into the complexity of the music.
To me, the Siduri wines are the most terroir-focused. It’s as if the winemaking team of Adam and Dianna Lee put the vineyard manager in each bottle. Smell and taste the wine. It carries on a conversation about the soil, the weather, the slope, and how the vines are trained. If some Euro-wine snob tells you California wines can’t exhibit terroir, pour them five or six Siduri Pinots. End of argument.

Adam Lee of Siduri and Novy Family Winery taking a break to chat during the 2009 crush.

You may already be very familiar with August West, Pisoni and Siduri though. Here are two less well-known wineries that you might want to keep an eye on: Boekenoogen and La Rochelle. Boekenoogen makes wine from grapes grown on their estate vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The vines were planted in 1997. In the latest issue of Wine Enthusiast, Steve Heimoff gave the Boekenoogen a jaw-dropping 96 points for their 2007 Santa Lucia Highlands Chardonnay. That wine wasn’t available at this tasting (and I hadn’t seen the WE report prior to the tasting either), but they did have two 2008 Chardonnay available. Both were quite good, though not up to the level Mr. Heimoff ascribes to the '07.

La Rochelle, Steven Mirassou's Livermore-based winery, focuses on making Pinot from a variety of vineyards in California and Oregon. They were pouring four Pinot Noirs. The first was a Santa Lucia Highlands blend. The other three were single- barrel, single-vineyard productions from the three vineyards that went into the blend. All were very good. Tasting through them though highlighted the fact that while single vineyard wines can be very interesting with their distinct terroir-based personalities, blending allows the winemaker to produce a well-rounded wine that might be a better dinner companion.

Very Highly Recommended
August West 2008 Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir, $30
August West 2008 Rosella’s Vineyard Chardonnay, $NA
August West 2008 Rosella’s Vineyard Pinot Noir, $42
La Rochelle 2007 Sleepy Hollow Martini Clone Pinot Noir, $52
Lucia 2007 Chardonnay, Santa Lucia Highlands, $40
Lucia 2008 Garys’ Vineyard Pinot Noir, $50
Paraiso 2007 West Terrace Pinot Noir, $40
Pisoni 2007 Estate Pinot Noir, $65
Siduri 2008 Garys’ Vineyard Pinot Noir, $54

Highly Recommended
La Rochelle 2007 Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir, $38
Sequana 2007 Sarmento Vineyard Pinot Noir, $32
Siduri 2007 Rosella’s Vineyard Pinot Noir, $45

Recommended
August West 2007 Rosella’s Vineyard Syrah, $36
Boekenoogen 2008 Stainless Steel-fermented SLH Chardonnay, $28
Boekenoogen 2008 Oak-fermented SLH Chardonnay, $32
Hahn 2007 Estate Pinot Noir, $29
La Rochelle 2007 Sleepy Hollow Clone 113 Pinot Noir, $52
La Rochelle 2007 Paraiso Vineyard Pinot Noir, $50
Manzoni 2007 Estate Pinot Noir, $26
Martin Alfaro 2007 Garys’ Vineyard Pinot Noir, $42
Morgan 2007 Double L Vineyard Chardonnay, $36
Pelerin 2007 Rosella’s Vineyard Pinot Noir, $48
Pey-Lucia Vineyards 2007 Frisquet Pinot Noir, $39
Lucia 2006 Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir, $40
Novy 2007 Rosella's Vineyard Syrah, $32
Roar 2008 Garys’ Vineyard Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir, $50
Sequana 2008 Sarmento Vineyard Pinot Noir, $32
Testarossa 2008 Sleepy Hollow Vineyard Chardonnay, $32
Tudor 2006 Sarmento Vineyard Pinot Noir, $60
Wrath 2008 McIntyre Vineyard Chardonnay, $TBA

Top Values
August West 2008 SLH Pinot Noir, $30
Sequana 2007 Sarmento Vineyard Pinot Noir, $32

Smart Buys
Boekenoogen 2008 Stainless Steel-fermented SLH Chardonnay, $28
Hahn 2007 Estate Pinot Noir, $29
Manzoni 2007 Estate Pinot Noir, $26 
Paraiso 2008 Estate Pinot Noir, $25
Novy 2007 Santa Lucia Highlands Syrah, $27 
Novy 2008 Rosella's Vineyard Chardonnay, $25

This article is original to NorCalWine.com. Copyright 2010 NorCal Wine. All rights reserved.

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