Cultivating Wine & Music at Bouchaine

What is so lovely as a day in July in the Carneros, as the morning fog lifts and sunshine splashes across the vine-covered hills that comprise this cool viticultural area that shares its boundaries with Napa Valley, Sonoma County and San Pablo Bay?

A small group of wine writers were recently guests there of Tatiana and Gerret Copeland, owners of the Burgundian-styled Bouchaine Vineyards, which lays claim to being the oldest continuously operated winery in the Carneros. The facility was resurrected 27 years ago as a partnership, and the Copelands have owned Bouchaine as sole proprietors since 1991.

Although Bouchaine makes a variety of small-lot wines from purchased grapes for sale at the winery tasting room and through its wine club, Bouchaine is best known for its delicious estate-grown Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs, in recent years made under the guidance of Michael Richmond. During the days we were at Bouchaine, my fellow writers and I spent many hours in the back of a flat-bed truck, which served as both a forward observation point and a lecture hall as Richmond, the Copelands, and wine production & sales VP Greg Gauthier discussed the fine points of Carneros history, grape growing and wine production. We also tasted Bouchaine wines by the gallons (no spitting, please), including the 2007 Bouchaine "Copeland" Estate Pinot Noir, possibly the best Pinot that Richmond has yet made. Unfortunately, there are only a few hundred bottles of it, and it has not yet been released. Great food? Yes, there was that, too.

But the Copelands are also patrons of the arts, both in Napa Valley and at their primary home in Delaware, so we were invited to attend daily musical performances which were part of the rapidly growing Napa Valley Festival del Sole. Bouchaine is a founding sponsor of the festival, with a special interest in its Bouchaine Young Artist Concert program.

Of course, this is just the icing on the cake. I will be writing more about Bouchaine, Festival del Sole, Carneros and the Copelands in various publications and will keep you posted.

"Darioush, Darioush, will you do the fandago?" (Apologies to Queen.) At a lovely performance of Iranian music at the amphiteater abutting Darioush Winery, proprietor Darioush Khaledi dances with his grandaughter (right) while mezzo-soprano Raeeka Shehabi-Yaghmai (lower right) accompanies the work of piano virtuoso Anoushirvan Rohani. Below, Tatiana and Gerret Copeland with young cellist Clark Pang after his performance at the Napa Opera House. Upper left, winemaker virtuoso Mike Richmond is satisfied putting grapes to music.

Until next time...

Roger Morris

Thinking Outside the Boxwood

"I like a challenge," Rachel Martin says, and she has one. We should all be so fortunate.

Martin is director of the (relatively) new Boxwood Winery in Middleburg, Virginia, and she is in New York City on this July midday with the humidity rising on 53rd Street outside The Modern, that delightful - if painfully punctual in not letting anyone in before precisely 11:30 - restaurant that is an adjunct to The Museum, or perhaps the other way around, debuting her wines to large group of writers. With her are her father and mother, John Kent and Rita Cooke, who own Boxwood, and Stephane Derenoncourt, the Bordelaise wine consultant well-known for very carefully choosing his clients. If the name "Cooke" sounds familiar, John's father, Jack, was a sports and communications impressario best known for honcho-ing the Washington Redskins during their heyday.

Rachel's challenge is that she wants to make Boxwood not just a good regional winery, but a great one sold in key U.S. markets and in France, where she studied winemaking in Bordeaux after a hitch in Napa Valley. With a small winery (maximum cases: 5000; vineyard: 16 acres) and what is currently not considered prime-time cru real estate, that is a challenge that other East Coast wineries have attempted, notably Kluge in Charlottesville, with limited success.

There are three Boxwood wines, all Bordeaux in style and grape contents. Topiary is a Right Bank blend, Boxwood is a Left Bank blend, and a Rose is all Cab Franc. Price for the serious wines is $25, and $12 for the Rose. All are certainly worth their prices.

The first vintages of Topiary and Boxwood were from the 2006 vintage, which the group of assembled wine writers taste, along with the bottled 2007 and the 2008 barrel samples. The 2007s are quite nice, but we are not blown away nor do we expect to be. Derenoncourt, who believes in following the terroir and not leading it, cautions that, while the clay-based Virginia soil is very good for wine, it is not suitable for making big wines, so he settled on elegant ones. The two are certainly that, and their charms rise the longer they are swirled and sipped in large- bowled stemware over plates of rare Colorado lamb. But in addition to their understated, well-balanced fruit, they also have substantial tannins, more sensed than tasted, that bodes well for long aging. And we have to remind ourselves that the vines were not planted until 2004, so it may be another year or two before the wine will justify a price increase.

In short, I taste a very good present and a better future for the Boxwood reds - no white wines allowed - as long as Martin, the Cookes and Derenoncourt stay the course.

One of the best lines of the day - well-honed on previous occasions, no doubt - is Cooke's recounting of the family's lack of financial success with prior forays into farming. "My father lost his shirt with race horses," he says above the chuckling, "and I lost my pants raising purebred Angus." He admits that he would not be the first investor to be completely disrobed in trying to make a great wine that returns a profit.

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New Publications: What do winemakers groove on (can I still say that?) when they are making wine, and does it change depending on whether they are crushing or racking? The musical answers are in my front-of-the-book piece in the August issue of The Wine Enthusiast (give me a note, and I'll shoot you a scanned copy)... Appellation America recently uploaded to its site two articles of mine on Long Island wineries - one on the lack of vineyard land mass in The Hamptons, and another on the North Fork's potential engagement to Merlot (photos by Ella Morris)... there is a cameo appearance in Amtrak's Arrive magazine that I wrote about their Acela-grade menu... and The Hunt magazine has features of mine on the Spice Guys (local chefs who dare to go beyond oregano) and one on people who collect fine art.

Follow my columns each Wednesday at http://www.delawareonline.com/, click Life, click Food. Tweet? @Battonage.

Until next time....

Roger Morris