Awash in Pinot Noir

Greg POPOVICH has a passion for Pinot Noir. The elegant red wine known to reach its peak of expression in the centuries-old domains in France’s Burgundy region spoke to him like no other. So when he launched his California wine company in 1994, Popovich wanted Pinot Noir to be his signature wine.

Too bad he couldn’t find any grapes. Most smart California wine grape growers had long avoided the notoriously low-yielding and finicky grape with its wild gyrations in quality. Without the capital -- much less the inclination -- to expand beyond reliance on wine made by other producers, Popovich had to content himself with the abundant Cabernet, Merlot and Chardonnay wines that were readily available to be blended for his $10-a-bottle brand.

Turns out, Popovich had to wait only a few years.

Suddenly California is awash in Pinot Noir, so much so that a decent bottle can be found for $3 at Trader Joe’s. That’s the low end of a previously unheard-of price category of $15-and-under Pinot Noirs that Popovich helped inaugurate when he released his first $10 Castle Rock Pinot Noir in September 2002. Popovich expects to sell a whopping 85,000 cases of his Pinot Noir this year, 50% more than he sold last year when it accounted for $3.8 million of his $8.5-million business.

Confusing mosh pit

California’s Pinot Noir phenomenon springs from the critical and commercial success of standard-bearers such as Williams Selyem, Marcassin and Rochioli, limited-scale producers who established themselves in the early 1990s. After a couple of decades of less-than-wonderful Pinots coming from regions like Napa that turned out to be unsuitable for the grape (which does better in cooler coastal climes), these Pinot-savvy winemakers had learned that the Sonoma Coast and Russian River Valley were the places for producing mouthwatering Pinots that are more refined and complex. And there was no shortage of wine lovers who were willing to pay as much as $100 a bottle for them.

But since the mid-1990s, a rush of new vintners chasing their lead has created a confusing mosh pit of Pinot Noirs from regions as far north as Mendocino all the way down to Santa Barbara.

In the past two years, more than 100 new California Pinot Noir labels have been launched, representing wine at every price point, including some at $75 and more. It’s a phenomenal increase in new brands or extensions of old names to include new Pinot Noir labels.

Amid the current frenzy, prices frequently have little or no relationship to quality, which has been worse than spotty.

“It’s extremely expensive but not yet delivering on the promise,” says wine critic Steve Tanzer. “It’s a cynical attempt to make early drinking wine that is an enjoyable soft red wine, which is not what I consider Pinot Noir.”

“There was too much planting of Pinot Noir without knowing what to do with it,” says Glen Knight, a buyer at the Wine House in West Los Angeles. “There have been a lot of garage wines where people are grabbing whatever wine they can get and sticking a label on it.”

Bob Golbahar, president of Twenty/Twenty Wine Merchants, says he’s seeing a new Pinot Noir producer every week pushing a new wine. “Williams Selyem had the market cornered for 10 years. I could sell it for $300 a bottle,” Golbahar says, noting that the competition has taken the wind out of that market. “Now, I don’t carry it. You can get all you want. Everyone is in search of the new great one. DuMol is hot now.”

They’re new, and that’s enough, according to one of California’s major wine distributors, who says “everyone is sick and tired of the same flavors. California Cabernet, Merlot and Chardonnay have all been formulized to a specific taste.”

Still, the new wines have been a dramatic improvement over an earlier Pinot Noir wave in the 1970s that died quickly when consumers rejected the weedy, thin wines, according to wine industry insiders.

“We’ve spent a long time in the U.S. trying to make good Pinot Noir and only recently made advances,” says Vic Motto, wine industry consultant, noting that the new regions are still sorting themselves out. Santa Barbara County’s Santa Rita Hills is one of the most promising.

“Pinot Noir is about the excitement of discovery. Now that it has a sophisticated, consistent style, it’s safer” to try the California wines, Motto says.

Pinot Noir is a terroir wine, meaning that the best examples express the particular mineral and climatic attributes of a property more than other varieties might. To create the illusion of exclusivity in the midst of a glut, ambitious vintners are subdividing their labels into dozens of vineyard-specific secondary labels. Some growers -- notably Gary Pisoni of the Santa Lucia Highlands in Monterey County -- have become as marketable as the vintners they supply, adding their names to the dozens of wine labels that include their grapes.

Never mind that many of the latest Pinots are of disappointing quality and are overpriced: Wine drinkers are buying them, doubling sales of the varietal over the last decade.

The good news for Pinot Noir drinkers: Supply quadrupled during the same period. Prices are going nowhere but down for all but the most sought-after wines. (Although the mailing list prices remain stable for the top producers, retail stores that were reselling these wines for hundreds of dollars have been dropping their prices to as low as $70 to $90 for the same vintages.)

The number of vineyard acres now planted to Pinot Noir has exploded. There are now 17,000 acres producing Pinot grapes in California compared with 6,000 acres in 1994. Another 7,000 acres will come into production over the next two years, at least a 40% increase in production. Considering existing acreage has been producing lower than expected yields due to less than perfect weather, stores are going to have Pinot Noir cases stacked to the ceiling.

Bring it on, says the 44-year-old Popovich. “I’ve been amazed at the popularity,” he says, believing that Pinot Noir will drive Castle Rock’s future growth.

Working out of three rented rooms on the second floor of a Palos Verdes Estates shopping center with a staff of five part-timers and a college intern, Popovich buys wine on the spot market, paying a consulting winemaker a per-case fee to blend and bottle it in rented space in Napa Valley’s Calistoga. He then ships it to almost every state in the country through a network of independent distributors.

Popovich owns no vineyards or winemaking facilities, obligations that would make it hard to take advantage of the falling prices for bulk wine.

‘Cult wines’ before their time

This is dot-com wine, according to Popovich. In the mid-1990s, flush with their winnings from the dot-com revolution, newcomers rushed into the wine industry, eager to instantly establish themselves as world-class winemakers. Young, rich and full of the bravura necessary to tackle the world’s toughest viticultural challenge, they chose to plant Pinot Noir. Part of the appeal was financial: They found relatively inexpensive cool-climate vineyard land outside of the well-established regions in Napa and Sonoma, pioneering regions in Mendocino, Monterey and Santa Barbara counties.

Newcomer Roger Scommegna took the earnings from selling his Milwaukee-based Internet start-up and planted Signal Ridge Vineyards along the Mendocino Ridge. But when the realities of the wine industry settled in, he started selling vineyards. Lowering his expectations, he joined the rush to buy bulk Pinot Noir and blended Three Thieves, yet another $10 Pinot Noir. Guys like Scommegna banked on making small lots of hard-to-get wines, arrogantly vying for “cult wine” status before they had their first vintage in the bottle, says John Enquist, executive director of Mendocino Wine Growers. “These are the guys who made their money elsewhere, younger vintners in their 40s and 50s who have not yet made their names in wine,” says Enquist. “The old-timers don’t fool around with Pinot Noir. It’s too risky, temperamental with low yields.”

Perhaps. But the profile of the new Pinot Noir vintner misses a big factor in the craze: the wine industry giants who also jumped in and planted the bulk of the new Pinot Noir acreage. Gallo, Beringer and Kendall-Jackson have each made huge Pinot Noir commitments.

“When you fall in love with wine, you end up loving Pinot Noir,” says Gina Gallo, winemaker for her family’s Gallo Sonoma brand and the force behind the planting of more than 600 acres of Pinot Noir. “The powerful flavors and silky texture make it one of the best wines for food. That’s how I fell in love with it. I tasted one of the top Burgundies at dinner and wanted to see what we could do with it in California.”

Gallo is intent on competing with the cult wines of Russian River Valley. “Succeeding with Pinot means more than success with other wines. It’s the hardest grape to grow. The hardest wine to make,” she says.

“Pinot Noir is very particular. Even if there is a lot more Pinot Noir, it will always be limited,” Gallo says, noting that only a trickle will ever come out of New Zealand. There will be limited quantities from Oregon and the established vineyards of Burgundy already are producing as much as they ever will.

“We’ve developed good regions. Many will develop stellar wines,” says Bill Turrentine, one of the state’s largest bulk wine grape brokers. “California has the prospect of consistency with a notoriously inconsistent grape. It’s the most exciting thing in the wine business right now.”

And of the new brands, Popovich’s is among the fastest growing. “Castle Rock has promise,” says the otherwise unimpressed wine critic, Tanzer.

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Pinot Noir by the numbers

*--* California U.S Pinot Noir acres planted consumption, in in Pinot Noir Year millions of cases vines 1994 0.5 6,400 1995 0.6 6,740 1996 0.7 8,258 1997 0.7 11,221 1998 0.6 13,886 1999 0.7 16,816 2000 0.8 20,644 2001 0.8 23,217 2002 0.9 23,879

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Sources: Impact Databank, California Department of Agriculture