Even at 127-years-old, Beringer Vineyards continues to figure
out new ways to reinvigorate itself.
Beringer, now the oldest continuously operating winery in Napa
Valley, was actually the first wine company here to offer public
tours. That was 1934, before the invention of TV, space ships
or white Zinfandel.
This summer, trying to attract visitors in a tight tourist market,
the winery has created five new public tours, each designed
to satisfy wine consumers with different wine-appreciation,
or taste-threshold, levels.
I opted to take two of the tours to see what all the noise is
about. Both tours, it turns out, were fun, informative and each
has a silver financial lining for visitors; along with the paid
tour, guests receive a 20 per cent discount, good the same day
only, on any wines sold at the winery, which is just about everything
Ed Sbragia and Laurie Hook make, or bless.
Here’s a chance to learn how grapes are grown and wine
is made, and in the deal, you can save big dough on Beringer’s
top-of-line, Private Reserve wines.
Vintage
Legacy Tour
This tour is offered daily at 11 am and 3.30 pm. “Shawna”
led my 1-1/2-hour tour, a pleasant, knowledgeable visitor guide
who is eight-and-a-half months pregnant. We had to ask Shawna
to promise not to go into labor in the vineyards; not a one
of the guys on the tour could remember how to do that Lamaze
effleurage thing.
Shawna had a good grasp of the winemaking process and was able
to answer most questions; having worked six years at Disneyland
obviously paid off. Her professional PR and hosting skills are
impeccable.
Outside, under a 175-year-old, moss-covered oak, where brothers
Frederick and Jacob Beringer used to entertain guests, surrounded
by sweet smelling oleander trees (these are trees, NOT bushes…
they are BIG and are 75-years-old!), we had our first taste
of five wines.
2000 Beringer Private Reserve, Napa
Valley Chardonnay
It is California friendly, stylish, full of floral notes, and
spicy good. An easy 90-pointer and $35. Shawna pointed out that
this wine has been on the Wine Spectator’s Annual Top
100 Wine List for six out of the last seven years. Now that’s
something.
(For that matter, Beringer has had more of its wines make the
Wine Spectator Annual Top 100 Wine List than any other winery,
according to Megan Greene, Manager of Public Relations. Now
that’s even somethinger!)
We asked Shawna what are the Top Three Questions she gets asked
on her tour.
“How many bottles of wine do you
get from a vine?”
“How old are the vines in
general?”
“Do you hire a lot of migrant workers?”
The answers respectively:
One vine produces between four and six bottles… and the
sidebar answer is that there are 2.8 pounds of grapes in each
bottle.
Next: The vines start producing fruit after three years and
vines typically run to their late teens or early 20s before
Beringer thinks of replanting.
As for migrant workers, we’ll let Shawna answer herself:
“Because of Beringer’s size, the majority of
our field hands are fulltime staff with full benefits. In fact,
in many cases, their children also work here in other areas
of the winery, like the gift shop.”
The winery was founded in 1876 by the brothers Beringer, who
were from Mainz, Germany. They constructed a three-storey, gravity-feed
winery in the side of a mountain, then dug caves out below to
store the wine and up-top, to be au courrant
for their era, they harnessed a steam engine to help crush the
grapes!
Inside the cave, our tour was led to a small room where we sampled
four wines, one out of barrel.
2001 Beringer Knight’s
Valley, Cabernet Sauvignon
Tasted out of barrel. This wine has been aging in French oak
14 months and still has about five to go. It is lovely, round,
loaded with chocolate, has blackberry top notes and soft youthful
tannins. Amazingly supple for a wine of this age. Winemaster
Ed Sbragia told ilovenapa.com that he thinks 2001 may be one
of the best vintages he’s ever seen at Beringer and he’s
been there for 26 vintages. It certainly shows in this wine.
91 points.
1999 Beringer Knight’s Valley, Cabernet Sauvignon
Lots of cassis on the nose. Well balanced but dry tannins on
the finish. At least at this stage of bottle evolution. 89 points.
$27.
1998 Beringer St. Helena, Home Vineyard, Cabernet
Sauvignon.
Before you get all squirrelly about this being a 1998 vintage,
let me restate what we’ve said elsewhere on our site:
NOT ALL 98’S IN NAPA VALLEY WERE , BAD, LOUSY OR POORLY
MADE, AS SOME WINEWRITERS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK. This was a winemaker’s
year – the great ones made fabulous wines and anyone who
tars and feathers the whole vintage as being a dud, is DEAD
WRONG. Take this gorgeous wine, for example. It’s one
of the 1998 Myth Busters; this all-Cab beaut was aged 21 months
in barrel and an additional two years in bottle before being
released. On the nose alone you can sense the balance and harmony
of the wine; on the palate, there is ample flavor, generous
mouthfeel, sensual pleasure; a beautiful wine. $75 a bottle.
91 points.
2000 Beringer Nightingale
If you don’t know this succulent, sweet dessert wine,
you need to make a trip to Beringer to get a bottle or two.
I have been drinking, and enjoying, this American version of
Sauternes for years. It’s sold in splits (375 mL), and
at $30 is a bargain.
The wine is named after Myron Nightingale, former winemaker
here, who with his biologist wife Alice figured out how to replicate
the effects of botrytis cinerea on Napa Valley grapes; botrytis
is the naturally occurring fungus, called “noble rot,”
that attacks Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon grapes in Bordeaux
in late fall, causing the grapes to lose moisture and gain a
je ne sais quoi sweet, complex flavor.
As it is difficult, if not impossible, to plan wine production
around a fungus that may or may not show up in our valley, Myron
and Alice figured out a way to inoculate already picked
Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapes with botrytis spores.
Myron and Alice succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams,
including their own, I should imagine.
This bottle screams out Drink Me! and has pronounced flavors
of acacia honey. The finish lasts a good 30 seconds. Maybe 40.
Decadently good. 92 points.
The tour winds up in a new gift shop and tasting room in the
old winery building where the enthusiastic tourist-taster can
further indulge him/herself.
Reservations are recommended for the Vintage Legacy Tour. $30
per person with a 20 percent discount, good for the day-of-visit
on all wines sold at the winery. 707-963-8989 x 2222.
Wine & Cheese Seminar
While not really a “tour,” this is one of the
neat new Beringer activities that you might consider signing
up for, certainly if you have a free, midday hour during your
visit to Napa Valley.
The wine & cheese tasting is given in the Rhine House
daily at 1.30 pm and is limited to a dozen people.
“Karen, ” a veteran of 14 years at Beringer, was
our host/guide/agent provocateur, leading us down
a tasting path that was filled with great tastes, awful tastes,
and a few in between. But that’s exactly what Beringer
Culinary Director, Jerry Comfort, had in mind when he devised
the tasting. He wanted to make wine drinkers aware that not
all wines go with all foods; and certainly that not all red
wines go with cheese, contrary to myth.
“The rules have changed!” says Jerry. “The
primary components in food change the way a wine will taste,
making it appear milder or stronger. A sweet food, or cheese
(fresh ricotta), is likely to make your wine taste stronger
and make it appear that all the fruit notes have dropped out.”
Jerry says that salty foods (blue cheese, soy sauce, fish
sauce) will make wine taste milder or fruitier.
Karen led us through a tasting of four wines, which we tasted
neat to start. Included was the 2001 Beringer Learning Oak
Sauvignon Blanc, which on its own has lovely grassy, floral
notes, a rich, oily texture and a layered, complex finish.
Quite a wonderful wine, especially for $14.
But take a bite of a fresh Red Delicious apple, then take
a sip of the Sauvignon Blanc again and BLAM! The wine is definitely
more acidic. The fruit appears to have been neutralized, maybe
even neutered. The fruit and middle palate flavors have dropped
out, accentuating the wine’s core acid. “Ugh,
don’t like it. Waiter, bring me another bottle.”
“I’m sorry, sir, it’s not the wine,
it’s what you’re tasting it with.”
Karen instructs: “Take a bite of the Brie and then sip
the S.B. again.” Now the wine tastes more floral, is
brighter in the mouth, tastes more like a Viognier, or Rousanne/Marsanne
combination.
Tasting salt, umami, lemon and apple, each of the four wines
we try is altered substantially. (Umami is a relatively new
concept in the west; it has been proved that glutamate molecules
in protein affect the way we taste; to get “umami,”
Karen has dissolved some Accent meat tenderizer in water.
This solution mimics the molecules that you might detect in
meat proteins.)
The other wines are the 2000 Beringer Carneros Pinot Noir,
the 1999 Beringer Napa Valley Merlot and the 1998 Beringer
Port, made from Cabernet Sauvignon.
“There is no right or wrong answer in this seminar,”
says Karen. “Everyone has a different taste perception
and all we are trying to show is that at various times, wines
that we like or find in balance, can be thrown off balance
by association with other foods.
Basically, we learn that our sense of taste is NOT like other
senses, certainly not like our visual sense. In the world
of design and color, there is a color matching system called
PMS (Pantone Matching System); when a designer in Denmark
picks up the phone and talks to a colleague in New York and
says, “we want to use the Coke red, PMS 485,”
the colleague in New York has the IDENTICAL swatch in front
of him/her. They have a common, identical, mechanical way
to identify color.
The same is NOT true for taste. What I think I taste in wine
I can only express subjectively to you. We don’t have
an objective measuring stick called TMS (Taste Matching System)
that enables me to know that what I taste, you taste.
Here’s another rub; colors can be made and duplicated.
But foods and wine differ by the minute. If you work in the
wine trade, you know that every bottle is slightly different
from the next. No two wines are alike. They come from different
barrels, or they have been stored differently.
“Our objective is to show, as closely as possible, how
our winemaker intended our wine to taste,” summarizes
Karen. “And we also want to show how different foods
can affect your perception of these wines.”
‘Nuf said. If you like cheese, or want to learn how
you can make your wines taste better (or worse), then this
course is for you. It’s $30 per person and you get the
20 percent discount for wines purchased same-day only at the
winery. Reservations are recommended for the Wine & Cheese
Seminar. 707-963-8989 x 2222.
Beringer is hosting three other new tours this summer. All
tours will operate through the end of October. The other tours
are:
Historic District Tour
Beringer Vineyards’ estate was placed on the National
Register of Historic Places as an Historic District. Which
means that each building on the estate is considered an Historic
Site. Guests on this tour visit the Hudson House, built in
1850, the wine-aging caves and gravity-flow winery built in
1876 and the Rhine House, completed in 1881. The tour is followed
by a tasting of three wines only available at the winery.
The tour is given daily at 10.30, 12.30, and 4 pm with NO
12.30 tour on Saturdays. The tour is about 1-1/2 hours. Reservations
are recommended. $18 per person.
Picnic at Beringer
Guests are given an in-depth look at how wine is made, followed
by a three-course luncheon served al fresco in the
beautiful Redwood Grove. Beringer’s resident executive
chef, David Frakes, prepares your gourmet fare and helps illustrate
the compatibility of wine and various foods. The Picnic is
offered Saturdays only at 12.30 (Aha! This accounts for the
NO Historic Tour at this time on Saturday). Reservations required.
14 people max. $65 per person. With this tour, you also receive
the 20 percent discount on wines (not merchandise) purchased
the same day you picnic.
Introducing Beringer
This tour is given hourly, every day from 10 am to 5 pm. It’s
a 30- minute tour of the old winery and caves, and ends with
a tasting of two Beringer wines. 35 person max. Visitors are
added to the next tour on a first-come, first-served basis.
$5 per person.
Beringer Vineyards , for details about
wine tours, go to www.beringer.com.
The winery is located on Highway 29 just north of St. Helena.
707-963-8989. |
