Saturday evening was a busy one in my wine world. Not only was it the last Saturday of February and therefore this year’s Open That Bottle Night - the ninth annual - but it was also the night my friend Vindu brought me a case of Juice Crew Red.

Vindu wasn’t due to arrive until much later and, deciding not to wait, I broke out a wine I had been storing conveniently out of sight. If you’ve never heard of Open That Bottle Night, sometimes seen as OTBN, it is billed by its originators, Wall Street Journal columnists Dorothy J. Gaiter and John Brecher, as a call to wine enthusiasts to not wait for that one special occasion to open a special bottle of wine you’ve been saving. Instead, these two suggest, create your own occasion and highlight the wine as a part of the event. And who am I to say no to such a suggestion? After all, opening a bottle of wine is, to me, its own event. But I can be rather biased that way.

Being close to 4:30 p.m. and the day’s chores all done - all that were going to get done - I figured I’d save a taste or two for Vindu but celebrate while making dinner. I reached deep into my trusty wine rack and, after blowing off a little dust, sure enough, I held a bottle of Sarah’s Vineyard Estate Pinot Noir, vintage 2003.

And, after a moment, I beheld it: a shimmering yet dark ruby spectacle, medium purple-pink at the edges, luscious legs, faint aroma of freckle fruit and Milk Duds. I sipped, eyebrows lifting, mouth corners rising. I sipped again, and immediately logged on to Twitter.

Strawberries and tiramisu in this Sarahs Vineyard PN. A little coffee, too. With cream! Rich mouthfeel, lurking backbone hit all palate pts.

In other words, it is a wine I’m glad I saved. I would have added other words, too, but Twitter only allows 140 characters! Speaking of characters, I soon received a very apt reply from Sonadora, author of the Wannabe Wino blog. Sonadora lives in Washington D.C. and was celebrating with her special OTBN wine, a 2000 Cyrus from Alexander Valley Vineyards, Sonoma County, which she and her husband purchased on their honeymoon. Sonadora asked, simply,

Dessert in a glass?

Oh, Sonadora, indeed it is. And I don’t need a fork or spoon! With a complex and lovingly intense assemblage of berry fruit, mocha and vanilla flavors and a touch of forest floor underlaid by a near-perfect balance of acid, tannin, and just a dainty dollop of dessert-like sweetness, this Pinot is overtly pleasing, very food-friendly, even quite drinkable on its own, i.e., whether dessert is on the menu or not. But be careful. Despite its very reasonable bottle price, there could be a price to pay for this wine’s palate-pleasing creaminess: it contains 15.9% alcohol.

It is surprising to me that this exceptional Pinot Noir hails from the Santa Clara Valley. More precisely, it is made from grapes grown a few short miles uphill and west of the southern reaches of Santa Clara Valley. It is a fertile area bordering the southern tip of the Santa Cruz Mountain Range that experiences cool ocean fog, blazing hot summer sun, and therefore dynamic daily swings in temperature potentially unsuitable to the cool-climate-loving Pinot grape. Despite the valley’s rich agricultural history, it is not particularly easy to create consistently good wines in this area, much less the finicky Pinot Noir grape; perhaps that is why the Santa Clara Valley is not particularly known for its Pinots.

Despite these uncertainties, the wines of Sarah’s Vineyard have, to my mind, few area competitors; along with their Pinot, their Chardonnays and Syrahs* stand out like white swans on a pond of mallard ducks. That’s rather remarkable considering that there are a handful of other producers in the immediate local vicinity that experience similar growing conditions. Slope and elevation account for some of this, to be sure, yet so does the soil itself as well as carefully-chosen Pinot Noir clones planted in 1989.

Depending on the vintage and which side of the summit the grapes are grown - ocean side or valley side - this pocket of relatively unexplored territory called Santa Clara Valley can be hit or miss with its wine production. Yet it is a splendid area worth exploring whether by car, by bicycle, on foot, or simply by the glass.

Varietal: 100% estate-grown Pinot Noir
Production: 189 cases
Alcohol: 15.9%
Where purchased: Sarah’s Vineyard
Price: $25

For more about Open That Bottle Night, see the Gaiter and Brecher article, An Evening to Uncork Memories. For more about Juice Crew Red, please see my follow-up post-to-come this week.

~winehiker

*The Syrah grapes are not estate-grown; however Sarah’s Vineyard is currently testing additional plots of Pinot Noir, Viognier, Grenache and Roussanne on the estate (from the Sarah’s Vineyard website).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am and is filed under grape squeezins, wine reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.