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San Francisco Chronicle
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
A top California winery is getting a little edgy. Here's why
Calling it a rebellion would be a stretch. But when Rory Williams started his wine label, it constituted a meaningful departure from the Napa Valley wineries that his parents ran. The winemaker is the son of Frog's Leap Winery founder John Williams and Tres Sabores founder Julie Johnson — excellent wineries that both appear on our Top 25 Bay Area Wineries list, whose annual update we published on Tuesday. In 2009, while working for both of his parents' businesses, Williams launched Calder Wines, a vehicle to explore older plantings of forgotten Napa Valley varieties like Valdiguie, Charbono and Riesling. These were wines that at the time, he believed, would have seemed too edgy for Frog's Leap or Tres Sabores, which have made their names largely on Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel. Calder earned acclaim, and it became an important player in the mid-aughts movement that brought attention to lesser-planted California grapes. But Calder is no more: After the 2019 vintage, Williams decided that Calder had run its course. That was driven by a desire for some semblance of work-life balance. On top of working for Frog's Leap, Tres Sabores and Calder, Williams had a new daughter. He told himself to choose two. His daughter and Frog's Leap won. Yet on a recent visit to Frog's Leap, where Williams' title now is vice president of viticulture and enology, it was hard not to see Calder seeping in. Williams has brought his Valdiguie, Charbono and Riesling under the Frog's Leap umbrella, and he's experimenting with techniques like concrete aging. The end of Calder has enabled at Frog's Leap 'a proliferation of little fun things,' Williams said. The heart of this effort is a vineyard now known as the Williams Rossi Ranch, where Williams grew up and still lives. The Rossi family planted grapes on this 50-acre Rutherford property in the early 20th century and never quit, not even during Prohibition, and kept Valdiguie, Riesling and Charbono in the ground even as they grew unfashionable. In the mid-1990s, Frog's Leap arranged to farm the vineyard for the Rossi family and take its fruit; in 2007, after the death of longtime owner Louise Rossi, the Williamses bought it outright. Calder was born from a desire to do something with those unfashionable varieties at Rossi. In the intervening years, they've become more fashionable. 'Stuff that was ludicrous 15 years ago is no longer ludicrous,' Williams said. If a wine like Valdiguie — a light, fruity red once known as Napa Gamay — previously seemed polarizing for the clientele of an establishment winery like Frog's Leap, nowadays it 'just adds spice.' Spice is an apt descriptor for the 2024 Frog's Leap Charbono, which will be Williams' first post-Calder release of the wine. This red grape, best known under its Argentinian pseudonym Bonarda, was a celebrated Napa Valley specialty in the early 1900s but is now nearly extinct there. The 2024 is delightful, with a Christmasy set of aromas that recall mulled-wine spices and fresh pine needles. Not all of Williams' innovations in the cellar involve obscure grapes. He's excited about expanding Frog's Leap's use of concrete vessels, which can provide some of the oxygen exchange of an oak barrel without imparting oakiness. Using concrete cubes for Zinfandel, he's found, 'locks in freshness,' delivering 'that crystal ball of red energy that is Zinfandel at its best.' Concrete egg-aged Sauvignon Blanc produced such a distinctive wine that Williams rolled it out into a separate bottling. Compared with Frog's Leap's grapefruity, grassy core Sauvignon Blanc (which sees a little bit of concrete aging, but is mostly in stainless steel), the 2023 concrete-aged Sauvignon Blanc is round and minerally. It's also cloudy, thanks to a lack of filtration. Some experiments still demand a new label, however. Williams has introduced a $30 red blend called Flycatcher, which tastes like fresh strawberries and licorice. He sources Zinfandel from Lodi, Merlot from Mendocino, Petite Sirah from Yorkville and Tempranillo from the Sierra foothills, 'the idea being just get out of Napa,' he said. He wanted to explore these vineyards in other areas 'and not say no because it's not our brand identity' at Frog's Leap. Also, Williams added, buying less popular grape varieties from older vineyards helps ease the economic pressure their owners may feel to pull them out of the ground. These wines ultimately constitute a small share of what Frog's Leap is doing. And Williams is clear that he's never lost his passion for the winery's mainstays like Cabernet, Merlot and Zinfandel. 'We're a 45-year-old Napa Valley winery. What's the single greatest danger for us? Myopia. Just punching our card making Cab,' he said. But immersing himself in the world beyond Cabernet, seeing what other grapes can do, has allowed him to return to it with a wider view. He loves Napa Cab all the more now.
San Francisco Chronicle
24-04-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
This wine's wild popularity is baffling Bay Area restaurant owners
The chilled red is unstoppable. Even at a time when Bay Area restaurants are seeing lagging red wine sales, the chilled-red niche appears to be thriving. Many establishments report that anything marked as 'chilled red' on a menu becomes their most in-demand wine — notable continuity for a category that's so malleable. 'Recently, oh my God, it's like everybody wants a chilled red,' said Lalo Luevano, an owner of the San Francisco bars Bodega, Key Klub and Celeste, all three of which count chilled red as their best-selling category. The popularity inspired Luevano to create a custom chilled red for Celeste, in partnership with Richmond winery Les Lunes. They went through 15 cases of the wine — a blend of Nero d'Avola, Valdiguie and Grenache — in its first weekend. They then decided to create a second Les Lunes collaboration for Bodega (a Zin-Cabernet rosé-Carignan-Chardonnay), and it sold out too. 'We burned through 320 cases in a matter of 2 ½ months,' said Luevano of the Bodega red. 'That's just pallets and pallets of chilled red.' But what is a chilled red? Of course, any red wine can be put in the fridge, and all reds should ideally be served at least a little below room temperature. But some are better suited to a deep chill than others. The ideal candidates will be light in body and low in tannin. The concept proliferated in recent years thanks to natural wine bars, which sometimes serve reds cold because the chill can mask certain flaws. Yet the phenomenon is not confined to natural wine bars populated by youths. It's even happening at fine dining restaurants. Last year, red wines by the glass were slumping, but Saison wine director Molly Greene put a chilled Beaujolais on the menu, 'and that helped,' she told me in December. 'We sold out of that by-the-glass in two weeks whereas it would normally take us a month.' Dan Polsby, an owner of Best Friends in Albany, posits that we may have reached 'peak chilled red.' Five years ago, getting people to drink cold red wine was a tough sell, he said, but 'now 'chillable red' may be the single most requested category' of red wine at his bar. 'Anecdotally, it seems like the only thing the youngsters are asking for,' said Charlie O'Leary, an owner of Rampant Bottle + Bar in the Outer Richmond, where chilled reds have been the highest-selling items since opening night last September. Rich Table wine director Kevin Born said the wines have 'way eclipsed' the popularity of orange wines, which looked ascendant a couple of years ago. Chilled reds seem to be more universally embraced than orange wines ever were: 'People who would have had a white are having a chilled red now.' The current craze, however, risks sweeping up some wines that are not meant to be cold. 'If you're putting a California Zinfandel that's made in a classic way into a bucket of ice,' said Andew Nelson, owner of Golden Sardine in North Beach, 'I don't think (the people) know they're not supposed to drink it that way.' Cold temperatures will make a big wine's tannins feel harsher, and they'll mute some of its nuanced aromas. Just as a frosty temperature can disguise a wine's shortcomings, it can also subdue its charms. No wine should be served hot. But perhaps not every red wants to chill.
