We’ve all heard the wildfire horror stories and know many vineyards have been severely impacted by smoke taint. Winery owner reactions have run the gamut from bottle and sell as usual to desclassify to bulk it out and forego the vintage. Navarro, a Mendocino producer of whose wines I think highly, has chosen the path I’ve cut and pasted below from their email. I’m trying to decide how I feel about this. It’s honest and above board, separates the wine from their usual bottlings, and significantly reduces the price. Though I am a little unclear based on the wording as to whether these were originally bottled and sold under the Navarro label, and are now being relabeled for “clearance”. I think I’m taking a flyer on a 3 pack to see how they taste. But I must admit that I have fairly big reservations that they’re going to be like licking a campfire. Thoughts and opinions on this tact?
Navarro Vineyards is offering our friends an opportunity to be the first to sample three Gold Medal winning wines at savings up to 65%. But there’s a twist. These wines are bottled under our secondary label, Indian Creek. Indian Creek runs through Navarro Ranch and is a tributary of the Navarro River. Since 1977 Indian Creek has been our label for odd lots with smaller price tags. These wines have done exceptionally well in competitions but they reflect a unique vintage.
During the summer of 2008 hundreds of wildfires raged in California and were named the Lightning Complex. During June and July there was a distressing loss of lives, property and wildlife habitat. Grapevines are living organisms and, like us, they were affected by the hazy skies that summer. As a result, our 2008 red wines have a smoky undertone that is uncharacteristic of Navarro reds. Sensitivity to smoke compounds varies greatly among individuals. Many high priced wines are intentionally aged in heavily charred barrels to add obvious smoke to the wine. While some Navarro customers prefer the fruitier wines of past vintages, others think the smokiness is a good complement for grilled meat and autumn’s earthy flavors.
Because these wines have developed this uncharacteristic nuance for Navarro, we have decided to offer all remaining 2008 red wines under our secondary label, Indian Creek with savings up to 65%. To celebrate the decision, we are having a Wildfire Offering on three wines that have all won Gold Medals as higher priced Navarro bottlings. What was intended as Navarro’s 2008 Mendocino Zinfandel is being released as Indian Creek Zinfandel. Our entire 2008 Méthode à l’Ancienne Pinot Noir bottling has been labeled as Indian Creek Reserve Pinot Noir, and Navarro’s 2008 Mendocino Pinot is now relabeled as Indian Creek Pinot.
I have purchased the L’Ancienne bottling for the past several years, generally in the 375 ml. I was not sure if I would be doing the same this year due to the fires but, based on their price reductions on the vintage, will probably go in for a 6-pack of the 375 mls. I have had several bottles of Anthill’s '08 Anderson Valley and have not been unduly bothered or distracted by the smoke taint. With the offer of $0.01 shipping I am out only $48 if everything goes awry. However, I strongly suspect that for my palate, this wine will prove to be a steal at $8 per 375 ml. Just think about the quality of pinot you get for $4 per glass of wine off of any restaurant wine list. Very low risk in my opinion.
A group of us from up in Seattle visited Anderson Valley last month. Navarro was one of the highlights – especially their whites and the unfiltered Pinot Noir. For the 2008 reds, they’re offering a 3-pack sampler (2 Pinots & a Zin) for $30 (includes shipping). Seems a pretty low risk way to “take them for a test drive”. A few of us all chipped in, so the cost to sample is pretty negligible. If they taste like a campfire, oh well. However, if they turn out to be good, it’s time to back up the truck and clean 'em out. In other words, no real downside – but small possibility of big upside…
Haven’t had the Method Ancienne but did try a bottle of the Mendocino PN when it was sent out earlier in a sampler. To my palate the smoke was intrusive. I’m a big fan of Navarro and have many bottles of PN & Zin. Perhaps the Anderson (Method Ancienne) will have more beef to back up the smoke but for me it’s a pass.
I think the approach is spectacular. They were very upfront about it, changed the label, and gave a significant price reduction. What else could one ask for?
To do as Copain did, not bottle any. I took a chance with the '08 Anthill and I know some weren’t bothered by the smoke, but the 2 bottles I have had were almost un-drinkable. If the smoke taint is noticeable enough that you have to discount it, why bother even selling it.
That was sorta where I was headed. Even though the name is differnet and the price is low, if this turns out to be a huge smokefest, I will probably ofrever negatively associate that with Navarro. So if they turn out to be that bad, I think bulking the wine out elsewhere and completely disassociating would have been the logical choice. But then I also don’t know all the various economics.
Well, because they think it might not be bad in their case. This isn’t a one size fits all answer. If the taint make s wine undrinkable to most people, don’t bottle. If it’s a background note to most people, I think they’ve taken the right course - bottle, discount, inform people. The problem is that we can’t really tell because we’ve not tasted the wine so it comes down to trusting them. The price is low enough that I can’t see a real issue - try a bottle or two of the various wines, see if they fit your palate. If not, write it off to an experiment. IF you like the wines a lot, buy more at a great discount.
Chad,
Why on earth would you feel negatively toward Navarro? They’ve been totally upfront about things - if you still choose to purchase knowing everything they’ve told you, I don’t really see that you have any grounds to complain. Your alternative is to not take the chance and simply pass. If you’re unsure, try a bottle and see what you think.
I have nothing against Navarro, and they seem to be upfront about this bottling, but I find some of the wording here kind of fishy:
we have decided to offer all remaining 2008 red wines under our secondary label … wines that have all won Gold Medals as higher priced Navarro bottlings.
Does this imply that they initially bottled this wine under the Navarro label and they’ve decided to stop, perhaps after getting blowback from customers? The “Gold Medal” on its own means nothing yet it’s used here to say the wines are better than, say, “nothing objectionable” which contradicts the rest of the statement. Maybe I’m reading too much into this, but reads to me something like “we got caught trying to pass off this juice, now look how honest we’re being about it.”
Anyway at least for this, people know the risk going in. In terms of grading the strategy/reponse good or bad, what Copain did has less risk of damage to the brand, but I hate to judge people in a business whose entire year’s income can be ruined by a single shift in wind direction at an inopportune moment.
Didn’t Copain decide to not bottle AV SVDs but rather bottle its '08 Anderson Valley grapes under the Tous Ensemble label?
If you found the Anthill undrinkable then you should definitely avoid the Navarro, er Indian Creek, because you will most likely have the same experience.
I had one of the Anthill Anderson valley bottlings a few weeks ago and, while I noticed some smoky notes on the back end, it really wasn’t a big deal. The rest of the wine was beautiful. If the guys at Anthill tasted what I tasted, then I think their decision to declassify into the lower end bottling was appropriate.
If they tasted it and found it undrinkable… well then I would have to say that they shouldn’t sell it.
Looking on cellar tracker, there has been some wild variations on responses to the wine. I wonder if you can chalk it up to palate differences or if there is actually some bottle variation out there.
I don’t know much about Navarro - don’t buy from them, but not everyone has the financial stability to just throw out a large % of the crop for the year. Drop the price, give full disclosure, I am A-OK with that decision.
Edit…I do agree that if the wine tastes like an ash tray, then yes - throw it out. I guess it depends on that taint level.
yes, but they also filtered the wine to remove the smoke taint. I’m sure the filtering also removes some flavor, but selling it that way blended into a much less expensive wine makes sense to me, more so than discounting smoky wine and still selling it. The wording of the email does raise some questions in my mind.
I’m not Chad, but if someone sold me wine that I thought was terrible I’d be upset too, even if they told me that it might taste smoky. Not living near the winery makes it much more difficult to try one bottle and then maybe decide to order more. I’m sure we all have varying sensitivities for smoky taste, but they know if the wine is bad. That said, I haven’t had the wine, so I don’t know how smoky it is. Maybe it’s not bad at all (for most people) and they’re just being above board about the whole thing.
Sure, I get that if someone sold you wine that you thought was terrible without telling you of a risk you’d be upset, but they’ve been very clear about what they’re doing. That disclosure is why I"m puzzled that anyone would be upset - no one has to take the risk now that they know about it. People have a few very clear options… take a flyer and buy a quantity, buy a bottle or two, don’t buy at all. Of course, if Navarro is passing off heavily smoky wine as something that’s only lightly affected, that’s different, hence my post above about how most people might perceive this wine.
As for it being harder to try a bottle because of distance… well, it’s not really though you might feel it’s a bit silly to order a single bottle to be shipped (I would). In that event, just pass. Wait for the 09s. But if you’re a fan of the wines, ordering bottle or two isn’t really hard presuming you have some place to receive shipped wines and live in a state that can be shipped to.
It’s a sorry fact with CA pinot noir that a $16 price tag is the implicit message that you (an experienced pinot noir drinker) are probably going to find significant deficiencies.
For those who are interested, Navarro provides a fair amount of info as to how they handled the grapes in question: Navarro Vineyards - Vintage 2008" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; Their approach sounds very similar to that of Copain and other.
And finally, the verbiage for the 2008 Indian Creek Pinot Noir Reserve states: “The wine has ripe cherry-strawberry fruit from the cool ripening, vanilla from the French oak, and smoke from the summer wildfires.”
If any of this causes you pause, then it’s best to move on to something else. The only reason to stick around, apropos to my first point, is that if smoke taint does not bother you then you have found a helluva deal.
Doug & Rick, Navarro is offering a 3-pack of one each of the wines for $30.00 including shipping so you can try the wine and see if it is a buy for you or not. I’m going to take 3-pack and see for myself if it is worth ordering any more. For $10.00/btl. the down side compared to the possible upside is a no brainer for me. YMMV.
The insides of expensive French oak barrels are charred over an oak fire so new barrels are smokier than seasoned barrels. Since red wines are aged in oak barrels, the wine is going to have some of the same smoky chemical compounds as the smoke coming from forest wildfires. None of Navarro’s 2008 Pinot Noir samples tested above 45 µg/L for guaiacol, the compound that correlates to smokiness. As Professor Linda Bisson from the University of California at Davis pointed out, wines put in oak normally test between 20-50 µg/L for this compound. We made our sensory and laboratory analyses in early summer and recognized several batches of 2008 wines with a trace of smokiness and some with noticeable smokiness. The majority of the lots with the higher smokiness were actually from grapes grown outside of Anderson Valley. These lots were filtered using reverse osmosis and either sold off as bulk wine or declassified to our less expensive house blends. Filtration effectively removes the smoke compounds, but the wine also suffers a loss of other desirable characters and therefore is relegated to a lower priced bottling. We made almost 50% less of our flagship Pinot Noir Méthode à l’Ancienne in 2008 as compared to 2007. We think all this extra effort paid off. Although we don’t have as much Deep End or Méthode à l’Ancienne Pinot Noir to sell as in previous vintages, we can assure you that what got bottled is a sound and complex wine that made the best of a difficult vintage.
Let me see if I can clarify my original point, which I perhaps made more murky in my subsequent post. I did order the samplers 3 pack. And Navarro did discolse that there’s some smoke (amount TBD based on individual palate). So if I find that I’m out $30 and have 3 bottles of smoky wine that I could possibly envision that someone might find okay, I won’t be outwardly “upset” in a go punch them in the nose sort of way. I’ll shrug it off to a test that didn’t work for me and go on.
My original question was less geared toward “what should I do” and more intended to be a “is this a smart move on the winery’s part”. And the reason I was a bit critical of the move was two-fold. 1)As Larry P mentions above, I thought the wording of the email was a little odd and did imply they tried to sell this under their own label and had adverse backlash. IF that’s the case, I think I’d be trying to dump the tainted wine as far away from me as possible with no possibly way of associating it back to me; not just knocking the price down and hoping folks would find it tolerable if they paid less. And 2)if I tell you I’m gonna kick you in the shin, you don’t move, and I kick you in the shin, bad on you for allowing it to happen. But even if you acknowledge that it was your fault, you’re still gonna think “there’s that SOB that kicked me in the shin” next time you see me. And in my role as amateur psychologist, I just have a feeling that (if the wine is smoky and unpalatable to more than a minority of people), even though folks admit that “I was warned”, there’s still a remaining negative subconscious reflection on the place it come from.
Hmmm…don’t know if that cleared it up or just mucked it up further…