We love visiting Clos Pegase in the upper Napa Valley off Silverado Trail. The owner’s pitch it as a temple to wine and art and we agree.  The Michael Graves designed building is both unique and beautiful.  The landscape art is is intriguing.  The wine fits our palate perfectly. 

We attended an event there a couple of years ago and shot some video that will be in our upcoming Discover Napa Valley video.  Fortunately part of the event was a slide show by the owner Jan Schrem about his huge art collection.  The show was in an intimate theater deep in the barrel caves.   If you have an interest in art this is a must see show – and winery.   The giant thumb sticking out of the ground is a Napa Valley icon and popular photographic target for visitors.  The art collection is displayed around the winery grounds, in the courtyard entrance, and inside the tasting room and barrel cave.  It will appeal to a variety of art tastes.

Wine distributor Wilson Daniels recently sent me a couple of bottles of Clos Pegase wines to review.

The 2009 Chardonnay is from Clos Pegase’s Mitsuko’s Vineyard in Carneros at the southern end of the Napa Valley near San Francisco Bay.  This is a popular area for Chard due to the cooler temperatures.  It is a malolactic wine aged 8 months in new and neutral French oak.   These grapes are from the 4th year of low rainfall and the vines were a bit stressed.

We paired the Chard with Trader Joes chicken salad nested in grilled endives and grilled turkey and ham kabobs on our patio on a warm summer evening.  The Chard has a big nose full of bouquet and aromas, full fruit with oak that compares with Rombaur.  My nose picks out soft banana tones, which I love, but many people don’t seem to get that aroma.  Whatever; you’ll find plenty to explore here and a very reasonable suggested retail price of $24.

Next up was the 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon.  The grapes are from several vineyards around the winery and were aged 18 months in both new and neutral French oak.  The winery is near Calistoga in the north and hotter end of Napa Valley.  This is the heart of one of California’s most famous Cab regions and home of the big Napa Cabs.  The lower rainfall stressed the vines and produced bigger favors than normal.

The tasting notes supplied by Clos Pegase speak of blackberry, plum, cherry, vanilla, baker’s spices and a hint of licorice.  OK, maybe.  We found a wonderful cherry chocolate with a big nose of aroma with refined fruits that open beautifully in the glass.  Could we detect the specific aromas in the tasting notes?  Yeah, sort of, but we actually don’t care.  Too much work for us.  What we tasted was a drop-dead terrific big Napa Cab with very modest tannins that followed up our light dinner as desert.  While a retail price of $43 is a bit much for our limited and stretched budget, remember that developing WineQuesters.com and our iPhone app Winery Quest cost us over $1M in time and money, this Cab is worth it.  It is a thrill to drink.

We pumped the air from the bottle and opened it the next evening.  The wine was a little softer but still excellent.  The flavors and aromas held up even without using argon gas to preserve them.  Nice.

- Jim

Neuroscience research is showing us that there is substantial “bleed over” between sensory sections of our brains.  Each sense is far from walled off from other senses or from other functions such as emotion.  Senses can affect each other and other brain functions. For instance, some people can see music or hear red.

Without getting technical here, there is decent research that supports what many people already observed; taste can be affected by other environmental factors such as color, experience, product, interior, and architectural design, producer reputation, taster experience and attitudes, fashion, culture, third party validation (judges, ratings), and price.  The various alternatives or factors with just this list yields billions of different combinations that can and often do affect taste.  Extensive training and experience can reduce their influence but can’t change the fact that our brains are hardwired without much insulation from other functions.

I believe that there is plenty of evidence that individual opinions of taste are meaningless for anyone else.   Can say eight judges do a decent job of validating taste for consumers?  Sure, but only if the tasters are in a similar context (rare).  If the judges are in a sterile air conditioned hotel conference room is that applicable to a taster in an intimate setting with a friend outdoors at a picnic?

The answer is no, no way, nada, nyet, non, and so forth.

I’ve never cared about what Parker, Wine Spectator, or the others have rated and reviewed.  I’ve long realized that unless you are in the judges entire context, not just the room, their ratings are meaningless except as some kind of placebo (which does work).  The current rating systems are just bull shit.

How does this affect wineries and tasters?

I see an incredible opportunity for wineries to influence taste with the experience they create in their tasting rooms.  On the flip side the tasters can enhance their taste experience by seeking environments that make the wine taste better to them.  In other words, taste preferences can be constructed largely by the participants and their interaction with each other and the tasting environment.

Lots of people already know that subconsciously so this is no surprise.  However, architects, interior designers, landscapers, and tasting room staff are rarely aware of how to specifically design for enhanced taste.  They may stumble into this effect but it would be best if the tasting environment was carefully enhanced to support taste optimization.

Katya and I are researching this topic at home.  We use color, form, line, texture, lighting, and other design elements to affect our experience and taste.  We find that almost every wine tastes great in our carefully constructed California wine country environment.  We have not found a research method to show this scientifically so our opinion, while informed, is quite subjective.   Our Intiri Designs project has products that are the result of this and other research.

- jim