Smith blends affordability, creativity
When I first met K Vintners’ frizzy-haired winemaker Charles Smith – in the spring of 2001 – he had only recently set up shop in Walla Walla following a decade in Europe managing rock bands, and a brief stint as a wine retailer on Bainbridge Island.
Why Walla Walla?
“California doesn’t need any new wines,” he told me. “You wouldn’t move to Little Italy to open up a pizza place. There’s a great deal of opportunity here in Washington. You can carve out your future just like in pioneer days.”
Three years later, when we sat down to taste through his 2002 releases, he had done a lot of carving. K Vintners was securely established as the most prolific (and certainly one of the best) producers of single vineyard syrahs in Washington, if not the country.
And he was already launched on a new project, under the banner of the Magnificent Wine Co., offering more affordable wines; initially a pinot noir and a merlot. That enterprise soon morphed into the wildly successful House Wines, a red and a white, which sell for around $10 and continue to offer solid value.
By 2006 Magnificent had grown so large that Smith entered into a partnership with Precept Brands, the fastest-growing wine company in Washington. Smith continues to make the House Wines, and Precept markets them to a global audience. Smith has made his fortune, but he has more wine ideas sprouting like spring flowers in his agile brain.
“Once I had partnered with Precept,” he told me in a recent interview, “I found myself in a vacuum, and I wanted to do more creative things. I always wanted to do riesling; in the right soils it makes the greatest wines in the world. And in the old days it was what started Washington. So I came up with Kungfu Girl and I thought ‘this is just the tip of the iceberg.’”
The iceberg turned out to be Charles Smith Wines, which Smith calls his “modernist project.” His goals for Charles Smith Wines? “I thought there should be something regionally focused and vineyard driven,” he explains. “They’re wines that are grown in the vineyard and put in the bottle intact. They taste like the varietal, and they taste like where they came from.”
This may not sound like a groundbreaking concept, but in practice it is hard to find wines, from anywhere in the world, that are affordably priced and not adjusted or tweaked. Many if not most widely available brands drawn upon an ever-growing bag of winemaking tricks – everything from designer yeasts to additions of color, from oak powders, chips and staves to micro-oxygenation. It’s common for some unfermented sugar to be left in wines to mask the bitterness.
Have you noticed how so many budget chardonnays taste like buttered popcorn, and budget reds bear a remarkable likeness to vanilla-infused soft drinks? No accident there. But truer flavors, that come from the vineyard and the vines, are what Smith is seeking.
The first wine to be released under the Charles Smith label was Kungfu Girl Riesling. Roughly 6,000 cases were released last May, and quickly sold out. The wine, sourced from the Evergreen vineyard, delivered gorgeous scents of orange peel, pink grapefruit and flowers, with a complex and invigorating finish, not quite dry, but not too sweet. The label, a powerful black and white graphic, might have come right out of a Japanese comic book.
None of which surprised me, or prepared me for Holy Cow, the newest Charles Smith wines. “I always liked those cattle crossing signs,” says Smith. “I wanted something angular and modern, like the sherry signs in Spain. But the cow on my label is like modern art, and the back label has a branding iron logo – HC on a rocker base. So it’s the rocking Holy Cow brand.”
The 2006 Holy Cow Chardonnay ($12) is a full, fresh, medium-bodied wine that shows good structure and length. It has no oak and no residual sugar, just plenty of fruit and clean highlights of lime and quinine.
Its companion, the 2006 Holy Cow Merlot ($12) features ripe cherry fruit accented with baking spices, cut tobacco and a hint of earthiness. Both wines feature a friendly black and white cow on the label, with a halo over its head.
Coming on March 1 will be the 2006 Boom Boom Syrah ($15). Remember those big, black bombs that were often featured in the old Road Runner cartoons? That’s the Boom Boom front label. The back label features – what else? – a lit match.
None of this would be worth more than a giggle if the wines weren’t so good. As promised, they offer a more natural expression of flavors that come from the vineyard itself.