Russian River pinot noirs—almost a buzz word these days for rich, jammy, alcoholic wines.
“They don’t need to be,” says Kathleen Inman, owner/winemaker for Inman Family Wines. “The fruit-forward, luscious pinots are what people seek out. A lot of wineries focus on these types of wines to stay in business.”
Inman, a ferocious advocate for her wines who fights mightily for broader distribution, wants more than anything to be a success … well, almost more than anything. (Inman wines will soon be available in Georgia.) Her primary goal is to show consumers that Russian River wines taste like none other.
“You can get hints of that lusciousness in a balanced wine, too,” says Inman, who does as little as possible after her grapes are picked. An avid gardener who planted her 10.5-acre Olivet Grange Vineyard in 2000, Inman focuses her energies on growing the grapes. Her number one worry is deciding the perfect time to pick, when the grapes best express the ups and downs of the vintage and the location of the vineyard.
Inman and her husband, Simon, looked at properties to the north of Sonoma in Anderson Valley and to the south along the Sonoma Coast and Carneros regions. For her, the Russian River is the place for grape cultivation. Quite the chef, Inman looks at the Russian River Valley wine region as a 27-mile-long spice rack.
“To the north, near Sebastopol, those wines have black tea on the nose and a more savory quality. Then you get down to Westside Road and you get a lot of cherry, cherry-cola fruit profiles. The best thing about the Russian River is the diversity,” says Inman, noting that there are more soil types in Sonoma County — from the ancient seabeds in the west to the gravely soils in the middle to the volcanic remnants in the east — than in all of France. The Russian River cuts a swath through the midst of this geologic jumble.
To explain her hands-off methods, she uses the example of a garden-fresh, vine-ripened tomato.
"You can see the tomato ripening on the vine and you can wait and wait and wait. If you pick it when it is overripe, it loses its texture. It will be very sweet and you can make sauce with it, but you would have to do something to the tomato to make it 'right.' But, oh, when you pick it when it is just ripe, what more would you want to do with it?"
Interventionist winemakers derisively refer to Inman’s technique as benign neglect, when one considers all the technology available today that allows winemakers to siphon off alcohol, increase a wine’s intensity, adjust a wine’s acidity and alter its tannic structure.
Inman does not have an unkind word to say about those who manipulate wines to fit a certain taste profile. She, however, appreciates the differences of wines from different vineyards and the variations that each vintage brings. At some point, she says, jammy pinot noirs start tasting alike, year in and year out.
“I can make wines that are jammy and high in alcohol,” says Inman, who has experimented with interventionist techniques. “I know I could sell more wines, faster, but I want to make wines that I like to drink.”
Gil Kulers is a sommelier and maitre d’ for an Atlanta country club. You can reach him at gil.kulers@winekulers.com.
2010 Inman Family Wines, Olivet Grange Vineyard, Pinot Noir, Russian River, Calif.
$68
Two Thumbs Way Up
Intense aromas of red berries, rose petals and candied ginger. Equally intense flavors of red berries and tart black cherries and persistent notes of cola and cinnamon on its long finish.
Note: Wines are rated on a scale ranging up from Thumbs Down, One Thumb Mostly Up, One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Up, Two Thumbs Way Up and Golden Thumb Award. Prices are suggested retail prices as provided by the winery, one of its agents, a local distributor or retailer.
