Wednesday 2/21
6-8 pm no reservations needed
$15 + 10% off any wine tasted

This week’s tasting focuses on cabernet franc, mostly from the homeland of the grape, France’s Loire Valley, where a handful of appellations make monovarietal cabernet franc and it arguably reaches its apotheosis. One way to look at cabernet franc is to consider it as cabernet sauvignon’s uncouth mother, a bit rustic and unrefined—not for everyone, it turns out, but for those for whom it is for, it is for. In its homeland of the Loire, cabernet franc does often show earthy aromas of graphite (aka pencil shavings, which I do not understand, as I cannot even get my pencils to grow a beard), or the smell of stones freshly washed by the rain. Our recent deluges give us an appropriate context within which to present a group of wines from over there.

Petrichor, or “rock blood” in ancient Greek, is the poetic name for this stony aroma, and I once assumed that this must be a function of the stony terroir within which the grapes grow. I once imagined that minerals in the vineyard must work their way into wine but was later disabused of this bit of naïve empiricism: petrichor is not a function of minerals in the soil, but rather a biological process that occurs when plant oils seep into the soil and are then volatilized by rain (there’s also a bacterial origin, as well). Sadly, the minerals in the soil contribute very little, at least directly, to the aromas we experience in wine (that hasn’t stopped me from quietly picking up a piece of basalt on Mt. Etna and
smelling and licking it when no one was looking), and yet the stony aromas of petrichor are unmistakable.

In Loire cabernet franc, the rock blood is often garnished by grassy aromas. Grassy aromas are a function of pyrazines, found in underripe wine grapes, bell peppers, and in an exaggerated form in New Zealand sauvignon blanc. Pyrazines are part of the sensibility of the Loire, but a hundred kilometers to the west in Bordeaux or a few thousand kilometers further west in California, we spurn pyrazines as a flaw, making for ugly, undesirable wines, made by clueless folk to sell to unsuspecting rubes. Here in the States, the buttoned-up sentinels of serious winemaking for serious wine drinkers deem a grassy smelling wine a sign of untutored or simply lousy, misguided winemaking. In California, we tend to combat pyrazines by picking our cabernet franc very ripe and perform aggressive canopy management to expose the grape clusters to more sunlight, which has the effect of cooking off the pyrazine aromas. Add in plenty of toasty new oak barrels and in the end and out of context, cabernet franc begins to resemble increasingly its genetic child, cabernet sauvignon. We’re tasting several exemplary wines in which pyrazines are front and center. One woman’s flaw is another woman’s desiderata. It is difficult and scary to step outside of our cognitive and organoleptic frameworks for even one moment, but do not worry, we’re here for you.