Partially this results from the extremely low level of production – more European than Californian – with many producers not even bothering with traditional distribution channels being content to sell their few thousand cases to their enthusiastic mailing list customers and a handful of restaurants in Portland and Seattle.

Thankfully Cristom in the Willamette Valley function on a somewhat larger scale because their pinots are among the very best around so it’s good to be able to actually find them on wine shop shelves.

Steve Doerner

Many Oregon producers define themselves, accurately if somewhat defensively I feel, as the the non-Californians, and Steve Doerner epitomizes this attitude. He made wine in California for 14 years before moving to Oregon in 1992 as Cristom’s first winemaker in search of the opportunity to produce pinot noir in a cooler climate and on a smaller scale. He practices hands-off, old-world winemaking, employing limited use of new oak and, as he enthusiastically points out, especially important is whole cluster pressing, a practice that gives the wines structure and backbone, what he calls “nervocity.”

This all results in wines that are more elegant and restrained, and in style fall somewhere between California’s blowsy opulence and Burgundy’s intellectual, slow-maturing wines.

This is especially true of Cristom’s entry level Mt. Jefferson Cuvée 2006 ($30). A beautiful balance of fresh, lively fruit, bouncy tannins and real minerality all integrated into a fine classy wine for grownup tastes.

It shows a remarkable complexity and great texture for a pinot at this price. As Doerner told me it “has a more European kinda style to it. New world pinots are normally so fruit driven but in this one the fruit’s restrained and other things are coming through, the minerality and texture. You can taste the earth.”

Yes please!

This is because at its heart the art of champagne is the art of blending. Even a vintage cuvée is a blend of hundreds of Champagnes made from three different varieties of grapes grown by hundreds of different vignerons.

Then, when you come to the multi-vintage cuvée, the chef has yet another set of variables to factor into the mix — he has at his disposal wines from several different vintages all of which must be blended into hundreds of thousands of bottles of bubbles that taste the same this year in Hong Kong as they did last year in Helsinki.

This is the challenge facing the chef de cave; to produce a consistent product from an endlessly varying set of organic agricultural ingredients.

Laurent-Perrier

Prestige cuvées, a more recent addition to the Champagne pantheon, are just up-scale versions of vintage fizz, all be it one that use the best grapes from the best vineyards.

Thus quality in Champagne has become associated with a bottle that shows a specific vintage on its label.

However this is not always the case. At the house of Laurent-Perrier, in 1959, it occurred to Bernard de Nonancourt, the owner, that this system was too restrictive and he realized that by combining three different vintages they could make a prestige cuvée that was at the same time more complex and more consistent. Hence was born Laurent-Perrier Grand Siècle ($210), a new category of fizz, a multi-vintage prestige cuvée.

Still with me so far? I hope so because Grand Siècle is a really fine Champagne even if it bears no vintage date. At first it seems as if it is all refinement and delicacy, but give it a little time in the glass – or better, a second glass – and its true subtle strength and power emerges, along with flavors of almonds, hazel nuts and honey, white peaches and toasted bread, and all this a testament to the fine art of blending Champagne.

In the past I had not liked these wines much finding them bland and homogeneous so it comes as a very pleasing surprise to sit in the tasting room of Jacob’s Creek winery in the Barossa Valley and taste through their current range. Jacob’s Creek is part of the Orlando wine group, in turn a subsidiary of the huge French drinks conglomerate Pernod-Ricard.

What impressed me the most is that up and down the line the Jacob’s Creek wines are clean, immaculately made, easy to drink and terrific value at their particular price points. This is especially true of the least expensive wines like the Jacob’s Creek Chardonnay 2008 ($8).

House built by Jacob's Creek's founder, Johann Gramp in 1847

Jacob’s Creek have recently dialed back the use of oak and malolactic fermentation in their chardonnay – halleluiah! – and this allows the quality of their much improved fruit to shine through. Put it another way, these are now wines made in the vineyard rather than the winery – they are fresh and alive – and the chardonnay shows off this change splendidly. It’s packed with so many glorious fruit flavors – white peaches, nectarines, honeydews and cantaloupes – that one might easily assume that it’s a semi-sweet wine, but it’s not; it’s entirely dry, with a crisp, zesty, citrus-driven finish making it an ideal food wine.

A Jacob Creek's picnic

Whether the winemakers at Jacob’s Creek, and the suits who give them overall direction, are becoming more sophisticated in their tastes and setting a trend, or whether they are responding to a public whose palates are evolving, is an interesting though irrelevant question – what matters is that they are making better and better wine, wine that is more fruit driven, wine that is a pleasure to drink and wine that represents terrific value. And that is an achievement for which they deserves enthusiastic applause.

I spent a day at each property tasting their range of wines and the experience was nothing short of revelatory.

The great Australian wine makeover of the 1970’s and 80’s when the country went from specializing, if that’s the word, in bad – and I mean really bad — “sherry” and “port”, “burgundy” and “claret” to producing cleanly made, everyday wines at ridiculously low prices has been well documented.

A Wyndham Tasting

These were the wines that stormed the supermarket shelves, first in the UK, then everywhere from Stockholm to Stockton, and shook the old wine world to its foundations in the process.

The only trouble was that much of this production consisted of wine that one wouldn’t exactly describe as subtle — sticky over-oaked whites and huge over-ripe reds abounded, and for a long time I ignored them, dismissing them as industrial cola wines.

But what I encountered at Wyndham Estate – I’ll talk about Jacob’s Creek next week – astounded me and changed my perceptions 180 degrees.

They make a dizzying array of wines but the true standouts are at lower price points like the Bin 555 range, especially the Wyndham Estate Bin 555 Shiraz 2006 ($9), and yes, it’s not a typo, that is the price.

And that is also what makes this wine so extraordinary. Yes, it shows rich, generous fruit, fine, elegant structure and harmonious balance but to achieve all this at $9 is pretty incredible. I would not have thought it possible before I tasted the wine.

I am generally biased towards small production, privately-owned, artisanal wines but the fact that a winery that bottles 2 to 3 million liters of wine a year, and that is owned by one of the world’s largest drinks conglomerates, can make a wine of elegance and style, and sell it for $9 a bottle shows that in at least case, that bias is unfounded.

It also raises the question that if Orlando can pull this off, why is there so much undrinkable plonk out there?

Then, banking 180 degrees, we turn back east and there before us is our destination – cut into the vast wall of dark green redwoods and conifers that cover the mountain side is a tiny rectangular patch of pale green, Hartford Court’s Seascape Vineyard.

What’s so remarkable about Seascape, and the chardonnay it produces, is that it is a perfect example of what separates truly great white wines from the merely excellent – that is it’s a wine that is a pure expression of the terroir from which it comes.

Because it is located on a ridge line overlooking the Pacific it is one of the coolest vineyards in California, so cool that the chardonnay is often not picked till November.

The point here is that while it’s possible to make fine wine in warmer climates, as a general rule the very best wines tend to come from the extreme northern limits of where that particular varietal will ripen. A longer growing season – hang time in winery-speak – results in leaner, more intensely mineral laden wine and that is exactly what I found in the Hartford Court Seascape Vineyards Chardonnay 2001 I tasted recently.

So tightly wound and closed at first that all I get is a bracing lemony acidity. There’s even that petroly element

It's unusual to find a vineyard next to conifers

you often find in old rieslings. Then, slowly, after an hour, subtle floral and mineral flavors begin to emerge, along with hints of lychees, grapefruits and Mackintosh apples. The next day, after a night spent in the refrigerator, these all become more prominent, especially the slate-like minerality, but this is a wine that’s still very far from revealing it’s true potential, even at eight years of age.

As such it epitomizes that unique angularity, that edgy personality, that sense of pure elegance great white wines are capable of achieving. Moreover, no other California chardonnay manages to be so totally and unmistakably an expressionof its unique terroir.

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A note on availability: In some years only 85 cases of this special wine are made, in some as “much” as 500 cases, so the 2001 will be pretty difficult to track down. The 2006 is available in limited quantities from the winery at $65.

In addition, they are holding a series of events around the country to increase consumers’ understanding of blended whisky and not coincidentally, to promote the brand.

I attended one of these the other evening, a tasting at The Brandy Library in New York at which Andrew Ford, Johnnie Walker’s Master Blender gave a master class in blending. He showed how the various different styles of single malt whisky – Lowland, Highland, Islay etc – are combined with grain whisky to make a great blend like Black Label.

Elements of a blend

And the process was illuminating – it turns out Black Label consists of about 40 different single malts — they are very guarded about the exact recipe, to say the least — in which the rich, sweet, preserved-fruit flavors of sherry cask whiskies predominate, supported by a distinctive backing of island smokiness.

The Johnnie Walker Black Label Centenary Pack is available now and costs about $50.

But these days the Austria’s wine industry is being rejuvenated and energized by the efforts of a series of dynamic young producers who are making wines will real verve and style, and a fine example of this is the Johann Donabaum Setzberg Spitz Riesling Smaragd 2006.

I opened this wine without knowing it’s price, expecting just another thin, dry European riesling. One sip though and all my preconceptions were turned upside down – my taste buds screamed This Is A Fabulous Wine!

Then I looked at my notation on the back label and saw why – it is also a $42 wine.

Now, when it comes to wines, price is not always an indicator of quality. Even leaving aside the absurd, mad-money prices commanded by certain small production trophy wines, there are far too many over priced name brand bottles turned out all over the world that I wouldn’t drink at a quarter the price. However, these are the exception – as a rule, and over time, Adam Smith’s invisible hand asserts itself, and good wines, even great wines like this, get their financial rewards, or at least their financial rewards as far as the limits of fashion allow.

Johann Donabaum

And that is why, even at this price, this astounding wine is still a very good deal.

But why is it so special? Too start with, when riesling is good it is not just very good, it is astounding. It’s as rich and complex as chardonnay but more subtle, more restrained and with a whole panoply of more slatey, earthy, mineral flavors – tasting great riesling has been describes as like licking wet stone – than you find in any other white wine.

It rolls over my tongue leaving a trail of astounding flavors in it wake, flavors that linger in the mouth for minutes after, a haunting legacy of greatness.

Lemons and tangerines, mushrooms and pepper, pineapple and cloves overlap in layers of intriguing complexity, yet this wine is still so young, and will live for at least another decade during which time all those flavors will only intensify, and it will mature and ripen into a wine of unbelievable decadence. And you thought $42 sounded expensive?

Trouble finding this wine? Try www.wine-searcher.com.

The best of these go by the immodest name of Vino Nobile di Montepulciano, but don’t be put off by the grandiose handle, it is mere Italian braggadocio — the wines themselves are charming, delightful and totally without pretension at the same time as commanding prices that are anything but aristocratic.

One of the top producers is Avignonesi and the Avignonesi Vino Nobile di Montepulciano 2005 ($27) is about as good as the appellation gets.

Montepulciano

The wine is wonderfully quaffable, the ideal drinking wine as opposed to a sipping and contemplating and discussing wine. It’s full of light, airy freshness backed by succulent, red-fruit flavors and just enough earthy richness to make it really interesting. It has a bit more gravitas than your usual Chianti Classico without the credit card thumping price of the more august Brunellos.

This makes it the perfect wine to share with a group of friends over a casual, laughter-filled supper.

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To find this wine near you try www.wine-searcher.com