Other Wines We Love: 2012 Qupe Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard Grenache
June 01, 2018
The next in an occasional series of our non-Tablas Creek wine discoveries.
Bob Lindquist is one of my favorite people in the wine business. As the founder of Qupe and one of the pioneers of California's Rhone movement, Bob probably needs little introduction to most fans of Tablas Creek. He has been making wines from Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo County grapes since 1982, and has been honored with many awards, including the 2015 Rhone Rangers Lifetime Achievement Award. Even more interesting, to me at least, he's still on the Rhone movement's cutting edge. He's planted Rhone varieties in new places, most notably the Sawyer-Lindquist Vineyard in the cool (UC Davis Region 1 on the Winkler Scale) Edna Valley. He adopted Biodynamic farming early enough that this year is year 10 of the Sawyer-Lindquist Vineyard's Demeter Certification. And he's still a tireless promoter of the category we both inhabit; I've run into him in airports and at out-of-state wine events more times than I can count.
Bob's wines are in style like his manner: thoughtful, understated, and long-lived. They're rarely flashy when they're young, although they're always pure and correct. But they have remarkable longevity, and (like Bob) the more time you spend with them, the more insight you realize they have to offer.
Last night, we opened a bottle of Qupe 2012 Sawyer Lindquist Vineyard Grenache. We paired it with a Blue Apron recipe for seared steaks with parsley-caper butter, which we dressed up by grilling the steaks and zucchini and then serving the zucchini over a whipped ricotta concoction we'd loved from a different Blue Apron recipe. The food was terrific: one of the best meals we've cooked this year. The steaks turned out juicy and flavorful, with the meaty flavors brought out by the umami of the parsley-caper butter. The mashed potatoes were tangy and rich, while the sweet smokiness of the slow-grilled zucchini was given texture and cool richness by the ricotta. But the wine was the star of the show. Grenache has a tendency toward being candied on its own, but this rendition had none of that: just pure crunchy red fruit, vibrant acids, and a little welcome spice at the end. The wine came across as almost weightless, in the best possible way: flavors distilled down to their essence, as I often find from grapes grown in a region almost too cool for them to ripen. Just an absolute pleasure to drink. A snapshot, mid-meal (I didn't stage a shot at the beginning because, well, I wasn't expecting the revelation we got):
The Grenache grape can be something of a chameleon, which is perhaps unsurprising for a grape planted in so many diverse places around the world. It is a warm climate staple, and most regions where Grenache is widely planted (including the southern Rhone, Spain, and Paso Robles) are warm ones. And some of the characteristics that I found in this Qupe Grenache are those we see here at Tablas Creek: its red fruit profile, its brilliant garnet color, its good acids, and its spice. But while many examples of Grenache world-wide are earthier and show more baked red fruit character, this wine felt so fresh, even at age 6, like it was all high tones and electricity. I don't know what age will do to the wine, but given Qupe's track record for aging and the wine's freshness, I'm confident it's going to go somewhere exciting, though it's so good and so pure now, I'm sure lots of it will get consumed in the near term. And best of all, it's not an expensive wine, still available for $35 on the Qupe Web site. If you have the chance to snag some, or you have some in your cellar, you're in for a treat.
Bravo, Bob.