Tasting Notions: Cameron – Dundee Hills – Chardonnay – 2020
TL;DR review: the wine drinks as fresh and big and sharp and soft as the breezeblown spring sky & every bit as complicated & full of good mischief; Joy-To-Be-Alive wine, for sure.
April, 2022 – I’m afraid I’m a little too well-suited to COVID-isolation life. Things in the world–the people, the processes, the intuitional moon-pull of workin’ life–seem to be rushing back to the old ways, head-over-heels, and the new variant seems to be working its way into every corner of the world.
These things move, birds-as-a-feather. They’re little kernels of metaphor and metonymy nesting everywhere you can pry, and they’re growing each moment, their angels bent close to whisper ideas into flames. I know there’s no hiding for good from this world. Chewing on this feeling makes me downright unpleasant to be around. So this is me trying to make my heart wake again, get blood pumping and feel the wind and sun coming into nice balance again. I’m making a fucking effort to focus on what’s good, and with an attitude as shitty and rot-spoiled as mine, it’s hard work.
Spring has settled on the valley, and the grape hyacinths have come & withered. The ragweed’s got everyone’s dander up. The stress I been simmering all winter seems like it’s gone to seed too–started festering and the I-myself-am-hell voice in my head’s matching up with the constant acceleration of work life and traffic around me have started coming to crescendo. If you let it get in there, the stress accumulates in your body till it turns toxic. Once you can see the infestation, it’s probably too late to do much else but mitigate. Got to use all the tools at your disposal.
Getting outside and taking in as much of the sun and the air as you can is as best a place I know to start. I went for a long run on a windy day last week and then come back to have a sip of this in my back yard before my kid got home from her grandparents’ house. My wife was visiting a neighbor. It was a little, quiet in-betweeny moment to enjoy this wine, which was the first Cameron white wine I’ve had a chance to drink in years. I work in human services, and my wife freelances. It’s fair to say my wine taste is a good ways above my pay-grade. So I look back on the time before I had a kid and a house and this cynical-syrupy bad attitude of heaviness and sighs, and it seems like it must have been someone else drinkin’ all those Abbey Ridge blancs.
So when I got my grubby little paws on some of the Dundee Hills cuvée, I was bitter-hoping it wouldn’t be a bad bet–would half approximate that memory of drinkin’ old Camerons in my old apartment. Feasting days, which I was worrying might hold a golden-hue in memory that was undeserved cold light of critical analysis.
First Impression?
The golden hour light doesn’t flatter this gorgeous little wine. It’s brilliant in the glass, all golden-notioned and clear eyed. The nose is absolute magnificent, bustling with all sorts of good-wine-smells, to borrow my buddy Magic Lion’s favorite tasting note. It’s fulsome, and rich. But great, zippy acid underpins the whole arrangement. There’s fresh fruit, all green-gold apples, and plenty of barrel-given richness and vanilla. It’s dazzling in the way those elements are poised, though. It doesn’t give the sense of back-and-forth contrast so much as it gives you a little Sibelius walk up the chromatic scale, hitting this note and that and finally swirling into one big sense of wine and beauty.
Notes? Technical specs? Anything halfway helpful or precise for us?
The fruit is bright as brass, but doesn’t beat you over the head. The richness is less thundering chorus and more busy-building energy. The two swelling and receding in concert. Do we usually just call that “tightly poised,” or “finely balanced” in traditional tasting notes? If we’re supposed to just leave it at that, I don’t think it does justice. There’s real tension and play between these major elements.
Indeed, I reckon the energy on the palate is better described as gleeful self-contradiction, rather than contrast. If that oaky richness rings a little sappy, the richness of fruit, and its sharp-lined limits in your mind’s eye/nose, gives you just enough of a taste to think you’re flying.
It’s fucking gorgeous to sit and drink this under a bustling blue sky. Watching the sky busily pushing wisps of recently-gone spring storm up out of the valley, I was certainly struck by the similarity of energy between this and the rapidly unfurling blue spring sky.
Rating: Brass Tax: Take a Position on this Wine Already
I reckon if you’re about to try to chart how the sky tastes, the right scale to use isn’t Robert Parker’s scale, but rather Sibelius’ chromatic walkabouts. That said, if you want me to tell you how I rate this wine, I’m giving it my highest ranking: the category of Joy-to-Be-Alive wine because it plays its role perfectly, and does so in a way that gives the absolute height of pleasure.
Within the category of Joy-to-Be-Alive wines, you might be tempted to call it the ideal of everyday Chardonnay. The modern spitting image of what Hemingway describes in drinking cold white wine in one of the cafés. That’s surely true. But I think the temptation is to say that he was describing a kind of modest wine, that might compare somewhat poorly to the great white wines of the world. I’ll say there’s fancier Chardonnays–certainly more complex, intricate, and even mind-boggling ones. But if we act like the everyday moments of our lives are worthwhile enough to be appreciated at the highest levels we’re able, there also deserves to be a spot for the non-rare bottle–the non-unicorn that regular people can also drink? If we’re reaching for Hemingway (who I reckon was good at enjoying wine, to be fair to the fella), then I reckon its perhaps bottles of cold Mâcon while he was driving Zelda’s car back to Paris with Scott. I think it would fit that bill handsomely, aside from the drunk driving.
In the spirit of Enjoyfulness without recklessness), let me then reckon this is even in the eyes of the most snooty/New York/High-Dollar/Fancy-Provenance-Only drinker that this must rank as worthy of attention and praise. At the least, such ragweed’s ought-to should agree it’s a better-than-good-wine, better than really fucking delicious wine. It’s priced well enough I can buy it on my small regional nonprofit salary. It’s stunning in the glass, and absolutely delicious. But most of all, it is joyful to drink. It doesn’t put its energy into challenging you–it puts it into surprising you. It’s glorious. It’s mischievous. It’s playful like the light itself.
Age it A Long While in the Deep-Delved Earth? Drink now?
If I had to guess, I’d take a shot down the field to say it’ll age a good bit. I don’t imagine the eight or ten you might give one of their single-vineyard wines (with respect to whatever sort of palate you might keep). But I’d see this drinking beautifully and continuing to develop those tertiary aromas you hope for, and, with the right wines and constitution of soul, might even dare to expect. It drinks magnificently right this moment, though. Life is short, and when the weather is like it is, I won’t blame you for opening one now. I’ve got a few more I’ve stashed for down the road, and I’m going to do my best to keep my hands off ’em.
Don’t You Use an Awful Lot of Music Analogies for Someone Who Doesn’t Read Music? (Are Your Wine Reviews as Suspect as They Seem?)
Yes. They are. Like Arrigo Sacchi said, just because I’ve never been a horse doesn’t mean I can’t teach one to play the trumpet. And I know Sibelius used to finish a symphony and pretty much get to Paris as quick as he could once he’d gotten paid, so he could drink it all up in Champagne.
Again, I’m sure there’s technically more intricate wines. There are Chardonnays of intense and beguiling nose, with strange twists on the palate, and vicious acid. Those do certain specifics, and they do them marvelously. But not everything needs complicating. The glass of Chardonnay I had last week is perfect for what you need to do with it. You don’t need to write a dissertation, you don’t need to put it up for auction. You don’t even need to impress anybody with the price tag. It’s wine. You need to drink the fucker first and enjoy it, and we’ll discuss the rest later.