2002 Chardonnay Marcassin Vineyard

The Marcassin wines are frequently somewhat temperamental bottles that require some special handling if they are to show at their best.Here are John Wetlaufer's helpful hints for getting the most out of your Marcassin bottles:First, shake any sediment from the cork before storing the bottle on its side at cellar temperature for two to three weeks.Then store the bottle at a 45-degree angle for three or four days so that the sediment collects at one side of the bottom of the bottle.Prior to serving the wine, pour it into a decanter in one smooth, continuous motion.So much for spontaneously grabbing a bottle of Marcassin pinot and popping the cork right now! I don't think Wetlaufer went to such lengths preparing his bottles for my tasting in March, but the wines-especially the pinots-showed spectacularly.By the way, Helen Turley and Wetlaufer plan to speed up their release schedule over the next year: the current plan is to get the 2001s out this spring and the 2002s in the fall.

Marcassin Vineyard, the prized Sonoma Coast hillside property owned by Helen Turley and John Wetlaufer, may be Burgundy's lost grand cru.While the vineyards that Turley and Wetlaufer have jointly developed with the Martinelli family have already manifested their considerable potential, there is clearly something special about the Marcassin Vineyard site. As I tasted through the set of Marcassin 2000s with Wetlaufer in early March, it crossed my mind that pinot noir doesn't get much more hedonistic than this, anywhere. And that's not to say that the wines do not possess the nuance and backbone to appeal to the intellect as well. The young 2003s I tasted from barrel showed similarly extraordinary potential, with the Blue Slide Ridge and Marcassin Vineyard cuvees offering incredible concentration and sweetness without loss of definition or energy. Still, it must be noted that the kind of laissez-faire winemaking and elevage practiced by Helen Turley involves a degree of risk:in the past certain Marcassin wines were bottled with too much haze (bottling without filtration is something of a fetish here, and the wines, according to Wetlaufer, are assembled in tank only hours before being bottled), at the expense of some of their aromatic clarity. And the recent pair of 1999 pinots I tasted in April were too advanced for their age (the Marcassin Vineyard bottling in particular showed a distinctly oxidative character).With the advantage of hindsight, it's easy to say that these pinots should have been released to mailing-list customers two or three years ago.