Sips
Published 7:00 am Monday, October 9, 2006
Stimson Lane Vineyards & Estates is the 800-pound gorilla of Northwest wine. As owner and marketer of the Chateau Ste. Michelle, Domaine Ste. Michelle, Snoqualmie, and Columbia Crest marques, Stimson Lane has annual sales of $175 million, including two-thirds of the homegrown wine the state of Washington drinks. But the company can also exhibit a deft touch on the small end of the scale, as in collaborations with Germany’s Ernst Loosen on the superb riesling called Eroica or with Italy’s Marchese Piero Antenori on Col Solare, the top-of-the-line Columbia Valley red.
Since the early 1990s, Stimson Lane has supported an even more specialized line. The brainchild of veteran Northwest winemaker Gordon Hill, Northstar merlot, now available in its fifth (1998) vintage, has so far bucked the trend to create wines that reflect the potential of a specific vineyard and microclimate—what the French call terroir. Hill’s wine reflects not a place but an idea. Each edition of Northstar has been blended from grapes selected from dozens of different vineyards inside and outside the Stimson Lane system, sometimes drawing only from specific blocks or even single rows, all in order to produce the closest approximation to Hill’s ideal of what a great Washington red wine should be.
The refinements don’t stop there. Even after the fruit is pressed, fermented, and aged in small oak barrels, Hill and his collaborator, California vintner Jed Steele, reject up to 75 percent of what they’ve made before blending the final product from the remainder. And though the final blend has never contained less than 75 percent merlot, all Northstar vintages to date have also featured an admixture of cabernet sauvignon (or, in one case, malbec) to round off the effect.
Vine growers have learned a lot about producing first-rate grapes year after year since Hill began focusing on red wine making in 1987, primarily by strict control over irrigation in desert eastern Washington. But nature still plays a major role; spring temperatures affect the time that buds and fruit set, and the number of clear days through to the first frosts of autumn play their parts as well.
Each of the five Northstar wines is a knockout in its own way: Hill’s own favorite (and the favorite of everyone who’s tasted it) is the just-released ’98; even the most problematic, the ’97 (only a quarter of the barrels made the final cut) is a fine quaff with food despite its still-tight tannins, suggesting it might yet blossom out into something very special. Unlike most Washington wine, made to sell out the year it’s released, the Northstar vintages are all still available by special order, though the price (averaging $50 a bottle) means few are likely to pick up a complete “flight” for side-by-side at-home comparison.
Stimson Lane obviously believes deeply in Hill’s operation despite its being miniscule (500 to 1,000 cases annually) in the corporate scheme of things: The company has just announced the purchase of 33 acres of prime Walla Walla Valley bottomland to plant a home vineyard for Northstar, and a full-bore winery is also slated for the site. Along about 2007 or so, Northstar will be a place as well as an idea; but as long as Hill is bottling ideas as good as the ones he’s had since 1994, no one will be impatient.
