The Grapevine: Attractive yet difficult, viognier remains a winemaker’s challenge

By Laurie Daniel

Viognier can be an extremely alluring grape. In France’s Condrieu appellation, in the northern Rhône, it can produce a glorious wine with an intoxicating fragrance, flavors of white peach, honeysuckle and mineral, and a silky, supple texture.

Why, then, are so many of the viogniers from California so clumsy? Some display the heat of high alcohol. Others are noticeably sweet. Some wines are both hot and sweet. Then there are the examples that taste more like chardonnay, with heavy-handed use of oak and the buttery flavor that comes from malolactic fermentation. (Note to winemakers: If you want to make a wine that tastes like chardonnay, use chardonnay grapes, please. Besides, chardonnay is easier for your customers to pronounce.)

I spent a recent morning in Cloverdale blind tasting about 80 viogniers (vee-oh-NYAY), most of them from California, at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Admittedly, such a competition offers only a snapshot of what’s out there. A lot of top producers don’t enter wine competitions. Nevertheless, the results were pretty depressing.

Overripe grapes

Much of the problem appears to be overripe grapes. Viognier needs to get fairly ripe in order to develop the proper flavors. Underripe viognier (and there were a few in the competition) can taste a bit like mediocre sauvignon blanc, which isn’t a very attractive proposition. But in sunny, warm California, ripeness quickly turns to over-ripeness. When grapes get super-ripe, a winemaker is faced with several choices: Produce a wine with high alcohol, leave some residual sugar in the wine or both. There’s one more option I’ll get to later: Use one of the available methods for reducing the wine’s alcohol level.

Based on this tasting, I’m left to wonder whether a lot of California viognier is being grown in unsuitable surroundings. Condrieu, the appellation where the grape finds its best expression, is very small, with only about 250 acres planted. Contrast that with California, where there are about 2,500 acres in areas as diverse as cool Monterey County, warm Paso Robles and downright hot San Joaquin County (the county with the most viognier, at 800 acres, according to state statistics).

Best of the Californians

The viognier that was judged best of class was from a relatively cool area, the Santa Cruz Mountains. The wine is the 2006 Martella Viognier ($32), made by Michael Martella, better known as the winemaker at Thomas Fogarty Winery. The wine, which is made in extremely tiny quantities, is weighty without being heavy and displays white peach flavors and a firm core of acidity.

“I’ve had very few California viogniers I’ve liked,” Martella says. “They’re way over the top” with ripeness and excessive oak. “My goal,” he adds, “was to make one that expressed more of the viognier character.”

The grapes were harvested fairly ripe in late October, but the wine doesn’t taste sweet or excessively alcoholic, weighing in at around 14.5 percent. It was fermented in small stainless steel barrels—no oak. And Martella tried to get weight and complexity by stirring the lees, the dead yeast cells and other sediment that fall to the bottom of the barrel.

‘A tough grape’

Steve Anglim at Anglim Winery in Paso Robles took another approach. Viognier “is a tough grape,” he says. “The flavors I like tend to be out where it’s riper.” If he picks too early, he adds, the grapes have a lemon-lime character that’s not typical of viognier. But despite trying to manage the crop size so that the grapes ripen fully without accumulating too much sugar, Anglim has struggled with high alcohol in past vintages. Once he left some residual sugar instead.

So for the 2005 Anglim Fralich Vineyard Viognier ($22), he turned to technology. Using reverse osmosis, Anglim took a wine that had alcohol in the high 14s and reduced it to 13.8 percent. Some people may debate whether alcohol reduction is an excessive intervention (bear in mind that a lot of winemakers do it, but many will not admit it), but I have no doubt that this is a better wine because of it. The wine, which was awarded a gold medal, has good weight and very pretty nuances of white fruit and honeysuckle.

A couple of gold medal viogniers that are more widely available are the 2006 Curtis ($20) from the Santa Ynez Valley and the 2006 Bridlewood Central Coast Reserve ($22). The Curtis is aromatic and fresh, with peach and pear flavors, while the Bridlewood displays white peach and an intriguing, almost salty overtone.

Laurie Daniel writes a weekly column on wine. E-mail her at ladaniel@earthlink.net .