Marsanne - Victoria, Australia and Paso Robles, California

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Cortese grape and was promptly called out on Twitter by my friend Tom whose blog you can read here.   His good-natured charge against me was that Cortese wasn't an unusual enough grape and Gavi wasn't a Fringe enough wine for me to be writing about.  Since this is pretty much the only limiting criteria that I have for content on my site, it's a question that I take very seriously and one that I struggle with on a regular basis.  Just what grapes and wines are unusual enough to write about here?  It's pretty obvious for the most part whether a certain grape or wine is suitable for inclusion, but there are some gray areas that are difficult to navigate.  My general rule of thumb is that I try to feature wines and grapes that the average American wine drinker (not out of any kind of pro-USA chauvinism but rather out of a kind of lack of international imagination on my part) would find unusual, but "the average wine drinker" is a difficult entity to pin down.  The farther I go down the unusual wine rabbit-hole, the farther away I find myself from the "average" wine drinker and the harder it gets for me to imagine what someone labeled as such might think about a given topic.  

It's a question that I've struggled with since day one and my notebooks are littered with entries on grapes like Silvaner, Müller-Thurgau, Roussanne and Marsanne which fall right into the grey zone for me between common grapes and unusual ones.  I've obviously decided to throw caution to the wind today and write about the Marsanne grape, and there are a few things that helped to tip the scales in this particular case.  The first thing is that the two wines I'm taking a look at are pure varietal wines made from 100% Marsanne grapes.  Marsanne is generally used as a blending grape not only in its original home in the northern Rhone Valley but also in many of the new world areas where it has established itself to a limited extent.  It is usually partnered with Roussane and Viognier in the white wines of the northern Rhone, though up to 15% Marsanne is allowed in the red wines of the Hermitage region.  Some varietal wines are made from Marsanne in the Rhone Valley, but they can be difficult to find since most wines are labeled by appellation and not by grape there, and not all producers indicate the varietal breakdown on the back label.

The second thing is that neither of the wines that I'll be writing about are actually from the Rhone Valley, or France for that matter.  France has about 1200 hectares planted to Marsanne (very close, incidentally, to the 1100 that Italy has planted to Cortese), and the overwhelming majority of the plantings are in the Rhone Valley (the rest are scattered in limited quantites among Savoie, Languedoc and Provence).  Marsanne is actually the most widely planted white grape in the Hermitage region and takes up a significant amount of land in the nearby regions of Crozes-Hermitage, St. Joseph and St. Péray.  Today's wines, though, come from the new world areas of Australia and California whose vinous reputations are definitely built on the backs of other grapes.  Before getting to those wines, though, I'd like to take a closer look at the Marsanne grape itself.

As mentioned above, in its native Rhone Valley, Marsanne is typically blended with Roussanne and Viognier for white wine production.  Given the similarity in their names, I wondered whether Roussanne and Marsanne were somehow related, but apart from a few off-hand references to the grapes as "siblings," I can't find anything definitive on the matter.  I took a look at the DNA profiles on file at the VIVC database and there's an awful lot of overlap between not only Marsanne and Roussanne, but also with Viognier.  The grapes all have at least one match at each of the six loci shown which would seem to suggest some kind of relationship, but it's difficult to say exactly what the relationship might be without more data.

Marsanne is a relatively high yielding vine which has caused many growers to devote more acreage to it than to its companion Roussanne, which yields less generously and more erratically, in the northern Rhone Valley.  It is prized for its rich body and heady perfume but can suffer from a lack of acidity if grown carelessly or in excessively warm areas.  Outside of France (but still within Europe) Marsanne can be found in limited quantities in Switzerland, where it is sometimes known as Ermitage, and northeastern Spain, where it is known as Marsana.  The explosion of interest in Rhone varieties in the 1980s led to limited plantings of the grape in California as well, but it is probably in Australia where Marsanne finds its truest expression outside of the Rhone Valley.  Though there are less than 250 hectares devoted to it in Australia, some of the vines there are thought to be among the oldest Marsanne vines on earth.

Tahbilk Winery, who made the first wine I'd like to take a look at, can trace some of their Marsanne vines back as far as 1927.  I was able to find a bottle of the 2006 "Museum Release" Marsanne from my friends at Curtis Liquors for about $15.  In the glass this wine was a medium greenish-gold color.  The nose was fairly intense with ripe apple, honeysuckle flower, ripe pear and nutty vanilla with a biscuitty, pastry-like aroma as well.  This wine had obviously spent some time in oak and was wearing it pretty loudly.  On the palate the wine was full bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of lemon, apple and pear fruit along with some honeysuckle, creamy vanilla and pie crust.  Again, the oak was apparent, but it was much more thoroughly integrated into the flavor of the wine than into its aroma.  Despite the wine's heft on the palate and Marsanne's propensity towards flabbiness, this wine was very deft and balanced with a lovely vein of acidity that really held it together.  At $15, this wine is an absolute steal that I could see developing even more in the bottle for another decade or so.

The second wine that I tried was the 2010 Ambyth Estate Marsanne from Paso Robles California.  This wine is distributed by MBJ Wine Group, who provided me with this sample bottle gratis and with whom I do have something of a professional relationship.*  Ambyth Estate is a biodynamic producer that focuses on Rhone varieties and is committed to "natural winemaking" practices, meaning minimal intervention and, in this case, no added sulfites.  In the glass the wine was a fairly deep lemon gold color with a bit of haze to it.  The nose was moderately intense with delicate aromas of honey, honeysuckle, peach and ripe red apples on their way towards cider.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with medium acidity.  The flavors were also delicate and subtle with ripe apple and apricot fruits along with a touch of honeysuckle and apple cider.  The wine presented an interesting mixture of delicacy and perhaps light oxidation.  It's a lithe, nimble wine that is a very different animal than the big, oaky example from Australia above.


*I am essentially an editorial consultant with them, for which I do receive slight compensation.  I have not received any compensation for this review, however, and any opinions I express about this wine are my own honest feelings and do not necessarily represent the thoughts or opinions of MBJ Wine Group.

Cortese - Gavi, Piemonte, Italy & Upper Goulburn, Central Victoria, Australia

When I went to put the name of today's grape into a Google image search, I expected to get a lot of results that weren't related to the grape itself.  Growing up in the 1990's, I watched a lot of MTV Sports and was mostly expecting to see photos of the host of that show, Dan Cortese.  I was surprised to see that Dan had only two results on the first page, but was even more surprised to see that one entry on the first page of results was actually for the Cortese grape.  The rest of the results were split between someone named Genevieve Cortese, who I take it is some kind of an actress, and someone named Deena Cortese, who I take it is on Jersey Shore.  All of which is to say that now I feel kind of old, since it looks like MTV sports has been off the air for over 15 years now and I have never even heard of the two women who return the most results.

But we're not here to talk about people named Cortese, we're here to talk about the Cortese grape, which has been around for much longer than any of the people mentioned above.  The first mention of Cortese can be traced back to 1659 when an Italian estate manager wrote to tell the Marchese Doria about some recent plantings of Cortese and Vermentino grapes in the family's vineyards in southeastern Piemonte.  The grape really hasn't strayed very far from this region in the last four hundred or so years, as most of the current plantings of Cortese are concentrated in the Colli Tortonesi, Cortese dell'Alta Monferrato, Monferrato Casalese and Gavi regions of Piemonte, which are all clustered in the southeastern portion of that region.  A little bit is grown just over the border in Lombardia and some finds its way as far east as Lake Garda in the Veneto, but the majority of the 1500 or so hectares devoted to Cortese in Italy are in southeastern Piemonte.

Gavi is far and away the most famous region for Cortese and is frequently cited as being the place where Cortese really reaches its greatest heights.  Cortese seems to have some trouble getting fully ripe in some of the other sites in Piemonte, which can be a serious problem as it can be searingly acidic if not fully ripe, but it rarely has that same problem around Gavi.  Gavi is a small town in the Alessandria province of Piemonte, about 100 km southeast of Turin.  The name Gavi is thought to come from a princess in the early Middle Ages named either Gavia or Gavina who had a castle in the area.  The Gavi DOCG region is an area of about 1100 hectares surrounding the town itself, and any wines from this area labeled Gavi or Cortese di Gavi must be made from 100% Cortese grapes.  If you see the phrase "Gavi di Gavi" on a label, it just means that the wine was made in the town of Gavi itself and is no guarantee of a higher quality wine.

Gavi's reputation among critics rarely seems to match the prices that most wines from there tend to command.  In his Barolo to Valpolicella, Nicolas Belfrage notes that Gavi's reputation for producing one of the finest whites in Italy is "not fully justified, according to some."  He goes on to say "that it has been one of the most hyped is beyond dispute, and when it's good - full enough of body to match the acidity, with a twist of lime cordial on the nose and finish - it can, in the right context, be just the thing," which is an absolute clinic in damning with faint praise.  The Oxford Companion to Wine's entry on Cortese says that "at its best, the wine is clean and fresh," and, generally, that "the use of oak is usually misguided."  In their entry on Gavi they say that "with care in the vineyard and cellars, the delicate flavours of the Cortese grape, retained thanks to the moderating maritime influence due to its proximity to the Ligurian coast less than 70 km/40 miles way, can yield pleasurable wines that are easy to drink," which, again, is hardly a ringing endorsement.

Never one to take critics at their word, I hunted down a bottle of the 2009 Villa Sparina Gavi, which set me back about $22.  Nicolas Belfrage notes in his Barolo to Valpolicella that many believe that Gavi doesn't show it's true character until after at least two years in the bottle, though since most of it is drunk very young, that theory is rarely put to the test.  This bottle had three years on it when I finally pulled the cork, so let's see how it was.  In the glass the wine was a pale silvery lemon color.  The nose was muted with some pear fruit and a bit of leesy funk, but not much.  On the palate the wine was on the lighter side of medium with medium acidity.  There were some pear, green apple and lemon fruits with a hint of cheese, like Parmigiano-Reggiano.  The wine finished with an intense steely minerality that was probably the most pleasurable thing about it.  The wine was crisp and clean, but not much else and I found myself getting bored with it fairly quickly.  The word "bland" pops up several times in my tasting notes.  I can't say that I've had dozens of wines made from Cortese, but the ones I have had haven't been much different than this one.  They're aren't objectionable in any way, but they're not exactly pleasant or appealing either.  Considering that you're looking at an investment of at least $15, and typically more than $20, it's a hard wine to recommend.

**UPDATE**

I was recently able to track down a wine made from the Cortese grape that is not only made utside of the confines of Gavi, but outside of Italy altogether.  The wine was the 2005 Lost Valley Winery Cortese from Central Victoria, Australia.  My understanding is that this is the only planting of Cortese in all of Australia, and for this vintage (2005), only 7000 bottles were produced.  I found this at Brookline Liquor Mart and paid about $14 for it.   In the glass the wine was a pale lemon color with a very distinct greenish tint to it.  The nose was fairly intense with melon, pear, passion fruit and mandarin orange aromas with a touch of beeswax as well.  There was something bizarrely distinctive about it that I couldn't quite nail down.  On the palate the wine was medium bodied with fairly high acidity.  There were flavors of green melon, mango, passion fruit, lime, beeswax, honeysuckle flower and mandarin oranges.  There was also something slightly vegetal or herbaceous about it, but it kind of tasted and smelled stewed, like baby food or something like that.  It certainly had a unique flavor profile, but I'd be hard pressed to call it enjoyable, exactly.  It's hard to say how much of this bizarre character was due to the wine's age, but given that it was almost seven years old, I thought it was holding together pretty nicely.