Choose your Chardonnay.

It's a tough job, but somebody has to do it.  Another staff blind-tasting at TWWIAGE this time squared off the 2016 Chardonnay (CH) against five other 2016s.  Once again, the TWWIAGE contender happened to be my favourite of the bunch.  For me, the second best wine turned out to be a 2016 Gary Farrell, Russian River Selection (Russian River Valley AVA).  My tasting notes were thus; candy, caramel apple, toast, nice mouthfeel.  A rather lovely little wine.
My least favourite wine, and the lowest rank amongst the majority of my fellow co-workers (great taste buds taste alike?), was a 2016 Mer Soleil Reserve (Santa Lucia Highlands AVA).  In my opinion, this wine was absolutely undrinkable.  And, surprise, surprise, or not, this wine hails from the cellars of the Wagner Family of Wines (Caymus...titter, titter).  Who drinks this stuff?  Apparently someone does because the Wagners make 59,000 cases of this plonk.
I'm so glad that there are alternative winemaking styles being employed with Chardonnay nowadays.  I personally never bought into the California style of this the most impressionable of grape varieties.  More choice is always good for the consumer, just don't choose the Mer Soleil.

It is still a conundrum.

Another blind wine tasting in tonight's wine marketing class.  My classmates and I were told to simply rate the mystery wines, 1 through 6, in our order of preference.  Now, none of the wines were anything I'd personally want to swallow, but two stood out as particularly undesirable to me.  The first was a Meiomi, 2013 Pinot noir - with a really funky nose, I didn't even want to taste it, but I did.  As an aside, this brand just sold to Constellation Brands for $315 million making Joe Wagner, at 33 years old, a very rich young man.  The second wine was a Conundrum, 2012 California Red Wine - it had a nonspecific red-fruit nose and, upon tasting, it was cloyingly sweet.  I had actually commented to the person sitting next to me, who happens to be a co-worker at TWWIAGE, that the wine was disturbingly reminiscent of Conundrum.  I nailed it!  I am guessing that I just don't like Wagner Family wines.
After the unveiling, the entire class acted as a mini-focus group and we discussed the merits and demerits of the labels.  I don't know if I need to visit an optician, or if I need to take a design class, but my idea of what constitutes 'shelf appeal' in a wine label was quite different from the majority of the class.  We all did, however, agree that the label on the Napa Valley College wine left something to be desired.  Someone commented that the pale blue, circular label looked like it had been printed at home for a baby shower.  My favourite label was the Parducci, 2012 True Grit Reserve Red (Mendocino AVA).  Clean and unfussy, with a sort of Wild West-meets-Bordelais-charm, the True Grit label was to the point; proprietary name, wine type, origin, vintage and producer. Besides, I'm a sucker for anything with cowboys boots on it.

It is a conundrum.

I consider myself a fairly intelligent person, so it is with some consternation that I find myself struggling to get my grey matter around the fact that anyone in the Napa Valley would want to make a wine like this particular wine from the Wagner Family (Caymus).  The Conundrum, 2012 California Red Wine, is to me simply undrinkable: it has so much residual sugar that I think I now have diabetes from attempting to drink it. The variety of grapes that go into Conundrum Red (and the vineyards, and the AVAs in which the grapes were grown) are a mystery.
I know Caymus sell a butt load (technical term) of this wine, but it is a puzzle to me as to how they do it.  Obviously, there are a lot more folks around America that like to imbibe in sweet red wine than I imagined. Thankfully, I was given this wine by the owner of TWWIAGE (I think she likes me), otherwise I would be really distressed at the thought that I'd spent my hard earned money on it.  Of the Conundrum Red, Charlie Wagner II says, it "beckons a second sip."  I could barely get the first, and only, one down.

Recon Day: 2015.

Yesterday, was the annual TWWIAGE Recon Day, a day when staff and owners go out and about in the Napa Valley to visit neighbours - and drink a little wine.  Oh, and throw in a little lunch along the way (this year the wonderful Mustards Grill).  We convened in the TWWIAGE tasting room at 9.30 a.m., then we were off and running.
First stop was Caymus Vineyards.  Boy, how Caymus has changed!  Fresh off their $1,000,000 fine, the Rutherford winery, in my opinion, has been turned into a zoo (they now see 400 plus people on a Saturday).  Or as Mrs. TWWIAGE quipped, "...a patio furniture showroom."  There is indeed an awful lot of garden furniture in which folks can lounge and sip wine.  I can't even be bothered to comment on their wines, except for a beautiful late harvest Viognier.
Next stop, Paradigm Winery.  A great Oakville location, with wonderful wines made by Heidi Barrett (of note, a 2011 Cabernet franc), our host was none other than owner Ren Harris.  Of particular interest to me was Paradigm's modified vineyard trellising which is made out of the frames of US Army cots from the Viet Nam war.  True!
Last stop, (three winery tours is quite enough for one day), was Silver Oak Cellars.  I hadn't visited Silver Oak since they rebuilt the property in 2008 (the iconic water tower is still there).  The facility is gorgeous with modern winemaking equipment.  And our tour guide was great.  But Silver Oak wines have always been just okay for me, a 2004 Napa Cabernet sauvignon in the tasting lineup being the stand out.
Fun day, good company, glorious weather, but I was glad to get home, walk Vinodog 2 and then put my feet up.

If I had a hammer.

So I was thinking further on how the folks at Mer Soleil produce their Silver Chardonnay.  Much is made of how Silver is fermented in "small Nomblot cement tanks" (they've even gone to the trouble of screen printing an egg on the back of the bottle to illustrate this fact).  And Silver is packaged in a ceramic bottle that they say, "continues to preserve the bright, fresh fruit characters" of the wine, I was curious as to whether or not the inside of the bottle was glazed.  Would an unglazed interior continue the whole cement/ceramic/oxygen-aging thingy?  One way to find out...enter Vinomaker with a hammer, (but not before the Vinodogs donned their safety glasses, of course).  One good whack later and the bottle's insides were laid bare.  The inside of the bottle was glazed (with extra glazing in the neck area, no doubt to ensure a cork slips in and out with ease).  There you have it: make of it what you will because I am done thinking about this wine.
Disclaimer:  No normal glass bottles were harmed in the smashing open of this ceramic one.

...And silver fountains mud.

Until Caymus Vineyards were sued by Napa County, and the amount of wine they actually produce was revealed, most folks, that I have at least spoken to about wine over the years, considered Caymus to be a premium, family owned winery. (For family owned here, read exclusive and small production, that's the common perception).  The details of the lawsuit, made public this past August, revealed that Caymus bottled 830,000 cases of wine in 2012: some 788,000 cases in excess of their use permit which allows for a mere 42,000 cases to be bottle per annum.  Talk about having your cover blown!  I was shocked upon hearing this, after all Caymus is the winery that gave us Special Selection, a wine that frequently scores high with wine critics (don't get me started on scoring).  Really just how special is Special Selection?  In all fairness, under the Wagner Family of Wine, the makers of Special Selection also produce several other wine labels.  Which brings me to a particular Chardonnay I tried recently.
The Mer Soleil, 2011 Silver Chardonnay (Santa Lucia Highlands), is an unoaked Chardonnay.  In fact it is fermented, and aged, in stainless steel and small Nomblot cement tanks.  Then it is bottled in a stone bottle, or as the winery's website puts it, "...unique ceramic bottle is reminiscent of the cement fermenters."  Okay.  Overall, the producers have a very lofty opinion of this wine.  "We believe that the Santa Lucia Highlands appellation in Monterey County is the best appellation in the world for producing Chardonnay."  Of course they would say that, wouldn't they?  But I'm thinking they'd lose an argument, and badly, with the growers of, oh I dunno, let's say Corton-Charlemagne.  Just saying.
Anyway, back to the wine.  I can't began to describe my experience with this wine.  The nose had something a little tropical going on, but it was sort of a clumsy jumble of over ripe fruit.  On the palate I got a sweet-mystery-fruit, hay-baley, briny-flabbiness that sort of flapped around my mouth like a floundering fish.  Briny?  Floundering fish?  Maybe thoughts of la mer were muddying my tasting experience because, in the end, my poor palate was just so confused.  However, I am going to give this wine the benefit of the doubt and I'm going to say that perhaps this was just a bad bottle...because I can't for the life of me believe that the folks at Caymus/Mer Soleil intended the wine to taste this way.  At least I hope not. 
The moral of this tasting?  Not every bottle has a silver lining - and this bottle isn't even recyclable.  Utterly confounding!