It’s not a huge leap from veterinary medicine to winemaking, and that leap is made even shorter when you’re enrolled at UC Davis which happens to be the top school in the nation for both. Dan Lee initially thought he wanted to work with animals, but a few courses as electives during his vet school tenure were enough to convince him to immediately enroll in the Enology program as soon as he finished his undergraduate degree.

While he still loves animals, Dan hasn’t looked back, graduating and continuing on to become a winemaker for Jekel and Durney (now Heller Estate), all the while plotting to start Morgan Winery. In 1982 he and his wife Donna celebrated their inaugural vintage with the release of a Chardonnay and since then have been making a wide variety of high quality wines with fruit sourced from other vineyards, and starting in 1999, with fruit from their own vineyard, the “Double L.”

With the maturation of their estate vineyard, Lee switched to focus exclusively on Monterey County fruit as well as to completely organic farming at the estate. Winemaker Gianni Abate also came aboard, fresh from a career as winemaker at some of the country’s largest wine companies, including Bronco, Delicato, and Robert Mondavi Winery, allowing Lee to assume the title and responsibilities of “Winegrower.”

After more than 25 years, the Morgan portfolio includes nearly 30 wines, including those produced under the second label “Lee Family Farm.” Lee has been making this Metallico Chardonnay for the last 7 years, with fruit primarily from the Arroyo Seco appellation of Monterey County. The bulk of the grapes come from the winery’s estate vineyards along with their neighbors, the Lucia Highlands Vineyard.

The grapes for this wine are crushed from whole clusters into stainless steel fermenters that are cooled to make sure the fermentation takes place slowly and in a controlled fashion. After the primary fermentation, the wine is racked into neutral, three-year-old oak barrels and is not put through a secondary malolactic fermentation (one of the chief sources of the buttery qualities of most California Chardonnays). It is aged for several months in these barrels on its fine lees (the yeasty sediments that fall to the bottom of the barrel) which are stirred to give the wine more body.

Unoaked Chardonnay is a wonderful invention as far as I am concerned. I think I had my first such wine in Australia about a decade ago, and fell in love with Chardonnay all over again. While it doesn’t achieve the profundity of some of the great white Burgundies, unoaked Chardonnay from the New World preserves some of their most appealing characteristics: crisp, pure fruit coupled with a nice minerality, usually accompanied by great acidity. More versatile than their heavily-oaked brethren, these wines are yet more proof that anyone swearing off Chardonnay on principle is really missing the boat.

Tasting Notes:
Light gold in the glass, this wine has a lively nose of crisp apples and unripe pears, with a hint of guava. In the mouth it is crystalline in quality, with restrained lemon curd, cold cream, green melon, and wet slate flavors that slide refreshingly across the palate. A hint of buttered sourdough toast creeps into the finish, which, like the rest of the wine can only be characterized as refreshing.

Food Pairing:
I had this wine with a crab, tomato, and watercress terrine, and while most Chardonnays would have been a little heavy for the dish, this wine was a great match.

Overall Score: around 9

How Much?: $19

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

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Spring is in full force in much of the Northern Hemisphere. It’s time to start charcoaling those steaks and smoking that brisket. Randy “Bucko” Buckner offers some big Zins, crisp whites and more as he presents his monthly report on 100 new wine releases.

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Perhaps some of the most interesting wines in the world are made by cranks, crackpots, and wackos — iconoclasts that keep time to their own secret rhythms and make wine in ways that often make sense only to them. You might say that I’m a collector of such wines and winemakers, in the same way that young boys collect baseball cards.

And today I’ll add another to my growing menagerie of eccentric visionaries that make extraordinary wine. François Blanchard is a jazz musician who one day found himself the owner of his family’s (somewhat decrepit) wine estate and decided that there was music to be made with its ancient vines.

The Blanchard family estate, known as Chateau Perron, sits on the Touraine plateau in the Loire valley southwest of Chinon, and was farmed by several generations of his family as far back as the mid 19th century, until it fell into disrepair several years ago. The young Blanchard found himself the sole heir to the family’s once prosperous farm and without much of a plan, decided to restore the estate to its former glory.

Or something like that.

What Blanchard actually did was simply to install a little electricity, patch up a few of the biggest holes in the walls, and start giving a little love to the ancient Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc vines that poked up out of the weeds around the old stone chateau.

The weeds still carpet the fringes of the chateau, and run through the 30+ year old vines, mowed only occasionally in between the rows when necessary. Blanchard remembers a time when the family farm employed nearly seven people, but for the past six years he has been the sole farmer and winemaker, and continues feel his way through with no training whatsoever. That hasn’t kept him from making the whole operation Biodynamic, nor has it kept him from making some exceptional, unique wines.

Blanchard seems to apply his jazz musician’s sensibility to the way he produces wine. Everything unnecessary is removed, stripping the process down to its bare essentials, and then improvising using the most raw of materials.

The grapes are hand harvested, mostly by Blanchard, his girlfriend, and some occasional volunteers. They are crushed by foot, and then the reds are fermented in cement and the whites in steel, with only native yeasts, and they are left to take as long as they need. Blanchard avoids the use of sulfur dioxide whenever possible (only occasionally needing to add it to the wine) and all filtration or fining. The wine is handled as little as possible, and when it is moved, it is done so by gravity without any mechanization. The wines are also bottled by hand, and closed however Blanchard sees fit — in the case of his white table wine, with a crown cap and wax capsule.

This particular wine is bottled with a cork, but it is bottled in 500ml bottles that are normally reserved for dessert wines. Blanchard’s reason for doing this? Apparently so that 300 more people could have a bottle of it. When the production is only 1300 bottles, that does makes a certain amount of sense.

And the name for this little package of old vine Cabernet Franc? Like many of his wines, this one was named for Blanchard’s sense of the melody it sings. Part violin, part cello, part high astronomical notes of satellite. But most importantly, 100% unique and tasty.

Tasting Notes:
Inky garnet in color, this wine has a nose of nut skin, wet leaves, iron filings, and cedar aromas. In the mouth it is dark and loamy, with rich wet earth, black cherry, cedar, and nutty qualities that are held in suspension by a beautifully balanced acidity and velvety tannins. The fruit core of this wine is dark — pitch dark — and strangely both ripe and earthly bitter at the same time. A long finish accentuates the acid of this wine, and speaks to its longevity. I have had a bottle corked in my refrigerator now for 12 days and it still shows little sign of oxidation, meaning that this sucker will no doubt age for many, many years.

Food Pairing:
I’ve now had the chance to try this wine with a number of dishes, and it went particularly well with a coriander crusted grilled lamb chop that we had the other night.

Overall Score: around 9

How Much?: $20

This wine is sadly quite difficult to come by here in the United States, due to the small production levels that Blanchard maintains. I purchased my few bottles from Garagiste in Seattle.

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