Buying the Grower
When I was learning about wine, I tried to spend as much time as I could around good wine and smart wine drinkers, who could tell me something worthwhile. There isn’t any other way to learn about wine, I reckon. Corks must be pulled, none too few; and knowledgeable discussion must ensue, in order for there to be any real dividends of pleasure.
I remember one conversation in which a woman for whom I had a lot of respect said something about the ways people tend to categorize their wine purchasing. People buy wine, she said, according to categories, like the country or region where the wine was grown. Those who become more interested, and who have the means to do so, might purchase more wine from a particular growing season (which is called a “vintage”).
And then there was the category that appealed to me personally, quite a lot more than the others, which was the suggestion that a lover of wine might “buy the grower.” Without worrying about the exact composition of what is in the bottle, from this or that vineyard parcel or mix of different grapes, and importantly, without regard for the specific qualities of a vintage, just follow the work of a grower every year whose wines have seemed striking to you.
This thought recurred with me recently when I was peeking around the shelves at the Spirited wine shop, on the Lenox/Pittsfield border. I was looking for something bright and interesting and reasonably priced, and I found that I was curious about a lot of bottles. After doing it for almost twenty years, I have now been out of the wine buying game for almost three years. I missed the release of 2019 and 2020 Burgundy, and I’ll never get them back. No matter. The point about buying the grower is that there are many interesting vintages, in a lot of places all over the world, in fact they’re very nearly all interesting. And this is just my opinion, but I think there is no greater pleasure as a wine drinker than becoming familiar with a certain winemaker’s style over many years.
I knew as soon as I saw it, and the price tag, that the 2021 Tyler Santa Barbara Chardonnay at $29.99 was the wine I wanted. I have been a fan of Justin Willett and his Tyler wines for about ten years, and with every wine I taste, I become more convinced that he is singularly talented. Tyler is a label which is dedicated to the two famous grapes of Burgundy, one white and one red, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Justin’s wines stand out for their clarity. They’re always fresh and beautifully clean; wonderful iterations, respectively, of each grape, and also tremendous values.
Not ten minutes into a dinner party the next night, my shrewd friend Jen wanted to be right up front with her misgivings, as she scoped the first bottle of the night. “I don’t usually like Chardonnay,” she said, voicing the number one American wine prejudice over the last two or three decades. “Ok,” I said, “but important to understand that Chardonnay is just a type of grape.” And really, it’s a gorgeous grape; the lone ingredient of brilliant wines from Chablis and Puligny-Montrachet to Santa Barbara. It’s just that it was mishandled for so many years by wineries that decided to make the wine as rich as they could, and aged it in so much fresh oak that you could practically spread it on toast.
Justin was his perfectly dependable self, the Chardonnay defense I mounted to Jen was validated after her first sip. The Tyler website, I just learned, because I looked at it for the first time in years, says that their wines are “of the sea.” I know it to be true, because I have heard other Santa Barbara winemakers talk about the way the Pacific receded from canyons on California’s Central Coast, leaving the soil full of marine residue. Marine strikes me as just the right word for Justin’s wines, just as it is for the wines of all the top growers in Burgundy, who work in places like Chablis and Puligny-Montrachet. They try to grow the best and most complex fruit they can, and then to leave it alone as much as possible. After following Justin Willett over so many vintages, I think of him, and the rest of the world’s top winemakers, as something like artists of the earth.
