REthink Wine Blog

Many people just getting into wine in a serious way have never heard of “clones”, and how they contribute to the taste of any particular varietal they favor. Despite being a wine lover for quite a few years, my first exposure to to the concept of clones was at a distributor’s tasting event my wife’s company (Diageo) held at BV winery about 18 months ago, just after she started work there.

“Clone 6 is an unusual name for a wine!” That casual observation led to my own introduction - a conversation with one of BV’s assistant winemakers about the concept of clones and how Clone 6 was named. In hindsight, this seems obvious, but at the time I was surprised to find that there are literally hundreds of “clones” or “strains” which make up each of the major varietals such as Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir, and that these clones can have quite different flavor profiles. “A rose is a rose is a rose” is not quite true when it comes to wine grapes!

Knowing this concept is one thing. Experiencing it is another. My “epiphany” occured a few months later, in the Fall of 2005, when I was in the beginning of my love affair with Pinot Noir. My wife and I had recently discovered this amazing, and amazingly inexpensive (at the time) Pinot from Joseph Swan called “Cuvee de Trois” at favorite restaurant of ours in Palo Alto called Zibbibo. One day that Fall, while visiting our favorite winery, Lynmar, to pickup our latest wine club shipment, just after we picked up a few cases of Cuvee de Trois from Swan, I asked the tasting room manager if he had ever tried any Pinots from Swan. I mentioned that we liked Swan because it tasted similar to the Pinots we loved from Lynmar.

“We planted our Pinot vineyard with cuttings from Joseph Swan”, the manager informed me! Theory meets practice. My assumption the wines tasted similar simply because they were both from Russian River Valley vineyards not too far apart was shown to be only part of the reason why they were so similar in style.

Since that epiphany, my ongoing search to find wines I truly love has had an added dimension. To terroir, weather, varietal and winemaker, one must realize that another variable is always at play - the clone. It keeps the game interesting!  

 

 

This entry was posted by Michael Crawford on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 at 2:03 pm and is filed under Inertia Buzz. 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.