When businessman John Goelet and French-born winemaker Bernard Portet started making wine at Napa’s Clos du Val in the early 1970’s their aim was to combine the best of California’s sun-blessed ripe fruit with France’s more restrained elegance for wines that are more age worthy and food friendly than was, and is, typical in California.

And in this they have succeeded magnificently.

Not for them the trendy, quick-money oak-tree chardonnays or cola-cabs that proliferate like crabgrass in California’s Mediterranean climate. No, through the decades they have stuck to their core belief of making grownup wines for grownup wine drinkers. Recently Portet has stepped back from everyday winemaking duties, handing control of the vats to John Clews, but the emphasis on unfashionable yet ultimately rewarding wines continues undiminished.

Bernard Portet

This is what I thought as I recently drank, and appreciated – oh, how I appreciated! – their Clos du Val Pinot Noir 2003, a wine that provides sip after sip of pure unadulterated pleasure. Gloriously shiny with red berry flavors, it’s not an intellectual wine, perhaps – that will come as the vines age – but a wine to give even the most sophisticated connoisseur pause for thought. Oh, my, what has this winemaker/magician constructed here? Why does this wine sing to the heavens while so many of it’s contemporaries trudge the well-trodden path of focus group mediocrity?

John Clews

Well, it certainly takes an owner with deep pockets, but it also requires a vision, a realization that wine takes it’s own time, and that great wine is not created overnight simply by dropping of a few zillion of hedge fund profits. It takes the patience to step back and say we are going to make wine for the ages, wine with a complexity that rewards the attentive contemplation of a connoisseur who’s prepared to wait 10 or 15 years for his long-postponed, long-anticipated reward.

So bravo Messieurs Goelet, Portel and Clews, please keep up the good work.