The bottle looks exactly like it tastes: black label, black wine.
How many old-vine, single-vineyard, 100% Mourvedre wines have you ever heard of coming out of North America? Before last month, my number stood at zero. Then my best friend Marc, a burgeoning wine lover himself (I’m working on it), got me this bottle for Christmas; it was one that he had tried at a party and couldn’t get out of his head, leading him to hunt it down and grab one for each of us. It was about the most intriguing Christmas gift that I got this year — obviously I do good work in picking friends.
While most California winemakers would shy away from grapes like Mourvedre in favour of Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot and other varietals more recognizable to the general public (and therefore more sellable), Kenneth Volk seems to immerse himself in them. While his company Kenneth Volk Vineyards also makes the classics, it produces a special series of “Heirloom Varietals” wines that examines and honours “underappreciated rarities” that don’t often get their day in the sun in the US. Mourvedre certainly qualifies — while I’ve seen it in a GSM (Grenache/Syrah/Mourvedre) or two from my home continent, I’ve never seen it get the spotlight to itself domestically until now. This particular Mourvedre is from the Enz Vineyard located in the tiny Lime Kiln Valley AVA in central California: it can be found just southeast of San Jose, about 1/3 of the way south from San Francisco to LA. Interestingly (or crazily), Lime Kiln Valley finds itself immediately beside the San Andreas Fault, one of the more tectonically unstable places in the world (you want interesting soils as a winemaker? Plant in an earthquake zone!). Even cooler, this bottle comes from one of the oldest grapevine plantings in all of California: almost 90 years old, the Mourvedre vines in Enz Vineyard were planted in 1922. Think of all the wines that come out of California. Now think that, pre-dating almost all of them, before “California wine” meant anything to anyone, there was this lone patch of Mourvedre planted in this obscure valley close to the coast. Who would plant Mourvedre in California in 1922? Who knows? But that decision let me, almost a century later, crack open this mysterious and alluring bottle, because it had previously worked its magic on a great friend. Wine rocks.
