11300 CIENEGA ROAD, HOLLISTER, CA – We are here at Calera, Food Night’s wine Mecca. While we sample the day's offerings, we are roaming all over the Calera Campus, like teenagers in a comic book store, or wolves in a henhouse… not sure which is a more apt analogy. As we roam, we are bombarded with images of mountains and boxes and stacks upon stacks of Calera…
… not to mention treasures like this… a case of 1990 Jensen Pinot Noir…
It’s a sensory overload of Calera!!! I cannot even begin to imagine the Food Night we could throw down here in Calera’s warehouse. And speaking of aged Jensen Vineyard Pinot Noir, about a year ago, Josh Jensen came to Minnesota for a tasting in Bloomington, which your Food Night correspondents happily (and obviously) attended. While there, we got a sip of 1992 Jensen out of a magnum. And um, yeah, that wine was preposterously good. A Top 5 wine of all time, for yours truly. The only thing I can compare it to… Leroy. The uber-Leroys that is, not the simple little Cotes du Beaune Villages discussed previously on these pages.
Anyway, I don’t even remember how this happened, if everyone gets this treatment, or if you have to practically foam at the mouth and act like 10 year olds at Disneyland for the first time… but eventually our very gracious and PATIENT hostess Lindsay was leading us up a staircase to Calera’s barrel rooms. I don’t know if there is a more technical term, but I’m going with “barrel rooms”. Some of the barrels Calera uses are brand new…
… while some barrels are older…
But all are made of French Oak, which imparts more subtle and gentle aromas/flavors/textures to the wine than does American Oak. And of course the older the barrel the softer still the impact it has on juice it contains. I believe Calera keeps barrels around for a max of 4 years, before they are put out to pasture in the great “barrel room” in the sky. There is certainly a TON of expertise that goes into blending wines from barrels of various oak volumes, and Calera does it brilliantly.
This first barrel room was fairly dark and even eerie feeling. Water sprayed/dripped from the ceiling in an effort to… I have no idea but it was certainly a moist environment.
Then there was barrel room #2, or so I’m calling it, where we saw cool stuff like this… remember this…
What do you think that is? Wow, why yes, that’s correct, it IS the inspiration for the tattoo I just got! How did you know?! But, it is ALSO a close-up of the absolute coolest door in the history of the world…
How neat is that??!! If you can't tell, the doors are like 13 feet tall... roughly. Don't they look like something out of a Medieval Castle?! Or from Lord of the Rings, like these are doors that keep the Orcs out. But actually, these doors lead up to the unloading zone, which I believe is where grapes picked up on Mt. Harlan arrive for processing. I could be wrong. If anyone who actually knows what they are talking about is reading… BY ALL MEANS… chime in. I’m just your host here, I don’t claim to know much of anything about anything*.
* Except for scallops. I can sear you a helluva nice scallop.
Next, we went to a pretty special place... Calera's Wine Cellar. Residing here are things so completely and utterly awesome that my head nearly exploded. Things like the first* Reed Pinot Noir ever bottled…
*At least I'm pretty sure 1978 was the first year the Reed was bottled...
And these “Leaking” bottles of 1996 Selleck Pinot Noir, that all of us would have GLADLY taken off the premises so as to prevent them from leaking all over anything but our mouths…
And even THIS…
A magnum of 1980 Calera Zinfandel?!??! Are you kidding me?! And speaking of Calera Zin, remember that one additional bottle I said we tasted at the end of the last post… YEP. We got to try a bottle of 1979 (NINETEEN SEVENTY NINE!!) Calera Zin!
I was absolutely shocked at how disparate the aroma and flavor of the wine were. The nose was almost… how do I say this delicately… the nose smelled nearly rotten. Decaying organic matter was all I could come up with for a description.* My expectations were immediately reduced to virtually nothing as I smelled this seemingly off-putting wine.
*”Decaying organic matter.” Not something you often see on a wine’s label as a selling point.
But then we tasted it, and of COURSE it was spectacular. Smooth, silky, and still totally alive. Absolutely astonishing. I don’t even know how to process a 1979 Zinfandel… but that just happened!
Finally, we purchased some wine (Pinot Noirs – 1996 and 2000 Mills, and 2002 Jensen), some t-shirts, and scooped up some dirt from these sacred grounds to take home as a memento. OK – I made that last part up, but I would have likely done so had I thought of it at the time. And you think I’m kidding…
Well, I suppose that about wraps up our visit to Calera. As we drove away, we couldn’t help but think… where do we go from here? We thought; "We are going to be in the Napa Valley all day tomorrow, but, how can we POSSIBLY top a day that featured a Monte Bello tasting, AND a tasting at Calera?" It’s like Usain Bolt running the 100m in like 2.73 seconds or whatever he does… that's simply as good as running gets. Monte Bello and Calera in one day? That's as good as wine tasting gets in America.
As we navigated our way north back toward San Francisco, we contemplated just cancelling all our appointments the next day and flying home a day early. Actually no, that is totally false, we did not consider that at all. What we DID do was stop by K&L Wines near Palo Alto, where we secured a little something to enjoy with dinner at the Market Bar in San Fran (the view from Market Bar is pictured above)...
The wine we bought at K&L was a 1992 Howell Mountain Dunn Cabernet. That's it above, along with one of the best Chardonnays you will ever have, from Navarro Vineyards. If there is a better pairing than Drake's Bay oysters and that Navarro Chardonnay... I'm not aware of it. Also pictured is the 1996 Mills we bought at Calera, which went unopened due to our relatively brief stay at Market Bar (you’ll understand why it was a brief stay in a moment). I won’t belabor the details of the Dunn other than to say 1). Dunn is atop the destination list for the next trip to Napa, and 2). all three of us thought the Dunn was EASILY in the top 3 wines we tried on the entire trip. Spectacular stuff, even out of these preposterously tiny B.S. wine glasses they had at the Market Bar.
Apparently the owner of Market Bar decreed that all wine and spirits (and maybe even beer, I’m not sure) shall be consumed out of these thick little glasses with 1 inch stems and small bowls. Mind you, this is a pretty nice restaurant. Maybe not this nice...
... but pretty dang nice. And as the manager of the restaurant was relaying this bit of flawed glassware logic to us, he was actually simultaneously asking us to LEAVE because we had stayed until the preposterously late hour of……….10pm. I kid you not. Anyway, my inner wine-snob may be showing a bit here, but it was borderline criminal to drink the Dunn out of these glasses. Imbibing from these “stems” was like trying to listen to a live performance by Miles Davis... underwater. The fact that the Dunn was STILL so spectacular blows my mind to this day. Dunn makes two wines… the Howell Mountain and the Napa Valley. The Howell Mountain is the top label, and contains 100% fruit from Howell Mountain. The Napa Valley label contains up to 15% fruit from the Napa Valley floor, the rest from Howell Mountain. Do yourself a favor, and get some. Post haste.
In any case... wow, Calera. We actually went to Calera! Here's the proof...
Thank you to Lindsay, Dora, and to Josh Jensen and every single person at Calera. There is nothing else like Calera in this country.
Up Next; Food Night Field Trip A.C.*
*After Calera. And yes – it was worth it. Very much so, in fact.
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