One such pleasurable revelation at the recent Critics Challenge competition was this week’s Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week, the Henry Estate Pinot Noir 2008 ($18).

It hails from, not surprisingly, Oregon, home to many of America’s finest pinots. A cooler, more Burgundian climate, and a stubborn determination to be “not California” lead many of its winemakers to produce fresher, more food-friendly wines.

This perfectly describes the Henry pinot noir. It’s a beautiful pale-scarlet color, fresh, fruity and vibrant on the palate, and is the perfect red to drink slightly chilled this steamy season.

It’s not a serious wine, not a wine to be pondered and discussed, but a pretty, fresh, quaffer packed with the essence of strawberries and rose petals. It even manages a hint of gravelly minerality, a surprising bonus in a wine at this price.

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The trouble, in part, is California’s too-generous sunshine. It makes it easy to pick over-ripe grapes that in turn lead to super-concentrated, high-alcohol wines.

But some of it is a stylistic choice on the part of the winemaker. So last week and this  I am highlighting two winemakers who are bucking this trend, last week with pinot noir and this with chardonnay.

Larry Hyde has been growing some of the most sought-after chardonnay grapes in Carneros for 30 years. The roster of winemakers who purchase his grapes reads like a who’s who of high-end California chardonnay – Ramey, Paul Hobbs, Kistler are just a few. But in 2000, in conjunction with his partner, Aubert de Villaine, whose day job is co-director of the storied Domaine de la Romanée-Conti in Burgundy, he decided to try his hand at making his own wine.

de Villaine & Hyde

And in this he has succeeded spectacularly – his Five Star-rated HdV Chardonnay 2005 ($60) is a miracle of Montrachet-like achievement.

Even on the nose it astounds, so powerful and intense is that Burgundian combination of fruit and earthy minerality.

The lush richness appears as a paradox – it is intense yet remarkably restrained, and when combined with the beautifully balanced, green apple freshness results in a wine of glorious harmony.

One of the secrets here is old vines because, as Hyde explained to me, “Older vines accumulate sugar more slowly than younger vines. So you pick later, which means more time on the vine so the fruit acquires more richness and body. The real bonus is that those old vines also expire their acidity more sloooooowly, leaving you with more acidity, and less alcohol, more richness. Just what we are looking for in our wines.”

Half an hour after decanting the wine was opening up nicely and showing that richness Hyde was talking about. All the elements – the honeyed fruit, the crisp acidity – had melded harmoniously, and along with the now even more pronounced slatey minerality combined in a truly extraordinary wine, a wine so glorious it’s positively life-affirming.

I felt, in fact, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge who

“on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.”

Not an inconsequential achievement for an old California grape grower.

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For the budget-conscious, or those a little less stricken with Paradise, Hyde also makes a second label chardonnay, the De La Guerra, for $40. It comes from younger vines – though at 13-plus years they are older than most in California – and is a little lighter, doesn’t have the decadent richness of HdeV, but is delightfully fresh, lively and packed with minerality.

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This is owner and winemaker Joe Davis’s succinct summation of his approach to winemaking, and why his gorgeous Arcadian Fiddlestix Vineyard Pinot Noir 2005 ($60), this week’s Five Star Nick’s Wine of the Week,  is so different from that of most of his colleagues.

At the moment it just bursts with bright red summer fruit flavors, but as it matures it will more closely resemble darker fruits like plums and dark cherries, and show those beguiling old-wine flavors like cedar and wet leather. I asked Davis what he thought would be it’s optimal age and he declined to speculate pointing out he had only been working the vineyard for 9 years so didn’t have the perspective. However, given it’s adolescent exuberance at the moment, twenty years wouldn’t seem like too outrageous a guess.

I thought it near impossible, in the heat of California, to make a restrained elegant pinot like this, a wine with real fresh fruit flavors as opposed to the all too common semi-sweet cola-wine versions. Of course the Santa Rita Hills is one of the coolest growing regions in the state, but this then raises the question of why so many Santa Barbara wines don’t taste like cool climate wines. Davis’s answer is telling: “That’s a stylistic choice, quite frankly.”

Davis up to his ankles in Arcadia.

“It has nothing to do with the soil or the weather, it’s a choice made by winemakers who are choosing to pick much later, harvesting much riper fruit, producing these darker, blacker wines with very little acidity, and astronomical alcohol levels.”

According to Davis, twenty years ago when Santa Barbara winemaking was just taking off, the wine that was getting the most press attention was this sort of over ripe, high-alcohol pap, so this became the trademark of the region. People just assumed it was the way to make pinot noir.

So why did he decide to do things differently?

“I had the great pleasure of spending two years making wine at Domaine Dujac in Morey-St-Denis (in Burgundy). I had a different benchmark.”

His Damascene moment came in 1982 when he drank a 1978 Clos de la Roche from Dujac. “I had that wine as a young undergrad and I am pretty sure I levitated, and that forever has been the elusive chalice that I have chased in my career.”

Now, if his Fiddlestix Vineyard Pinot is anything to judge by, it seems that he’s pretty close to claiming that holy grail of pinot perfection that has eluded so many others.

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As you can gather I thought it a pretty tasty vino – I in fact gave it a Platinum award, an honor not lightly bestowed – and my approval was only magnified when the results were announced and it was revealed as a humble $10 bottle.

It has that essential slatey minerality of wines from the Mosel River, a tributary of the Rhine in Germany. It is difficult to overstate the importance of that slate, and the producers acknowledge as much in not only the wine’s name but also by depicting on the label a cairn of thin platters of the grey stone.

Not only does it dominate the flavor thanks to the absorbent nature of the roots as they burrow around the flat stones deep into the poor soil in search of water and nutrients, but the stones on the surface reflect the precious sunshine back to the leaves and grapes, helping the latter ripen, always a struggle in a region this far north.

And ripe the grapes are that went into this wine. You can tell by the wonderful summer fruit flavors it radiates – peaches, pineapples and crisp Fuji or Braeburn apples, all showing that fine balance of fruit and crisp acidity.

Ten is the key number here– the wine costs ten dollars, and is only 10.5% alcohol, so is light in weight, though not flavor, and limited in its soporific effect, and as such is the ideal wine for a summer lunch by the pool. One might even, if one was particularly reckless, forsake the post-prandial hammock and venture onto the tennis court.

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What has attracted less attention is that the region’s red wines have undergone a similar transformation, and one of my favorites is this week’s Nick’s Wine of the Week Five Star offering, the Chateau de Roquefort Gueule de Loup ($16).

The unusual thing about this wine, other than its fanciful name, is that it has no vintage designation. This is almost unheard of outside the rarefied world of champagne, and here’s the producer’s explanation. In the celebrity-free part of Provence, a few kilometers east of Marseilles and not far from Bandol, “winemaker Raimond de Villeneuve decided to create a distinctive new wine by blending two vintages, 2007 and 2008. The result of this balancing act is greater than the sum of its parts: a charming new cuvée that delivers immediate fresh fruit pleasure from Provence.”

Yes, I was skeptical too, but the blending of the two vintages really does work, and results in a wine of both depth and complexity. Perhaps this is making a virtue out of a necessity but it is an admirable virtue nonetheless.

The wine has a glorious deep garnet color, and it’s rare to find such freshness, focus, structure and vivacious personality at such a modest price. It’s a delight of balance and fruity harmony, just bursting with the flavors of strawberries, blackberries and white cherries, and as such is the perfect wine to serve a little chilled at a summer barbecue.

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My solution is to seek out light, fresh and fruity wines, and briefly chill them in the refrigerator. I don’t want them ice cold, but I don’t want them at mid-summer “room temperature” either, so half an hour to an hour in the cooler makes them infinitely more palatable.

A good candidate for such unconventional treatment is Nick’s Wine of the Week Five Star rated Domaine Lavigne-Saumur Champigney 2008 ($18). The Saumur AOC is famous for its dry whites and sweet wines, along with some excellent sparklers, but the small sub-appellation Saumur-Champigney specializes in an unusually light and fresh version of the cabernet franc grape.

This bottle shows the grape’s charming virtues to full effect – it’s smoky yet fresh, earthy yet lively;  in short pulls of the rather clever trick of being a light wine that is anything but insipid.

Zesty enough to be sipped cool at an al fresco lunch or as an aperitif on a sultry evening, but with enough punchy flavor to stand up to BBQ.  A delightful combination that makes it the perfect light, fruity wine for summer chillin’.

The husband and wife team of Eric Bonnet and Julia Moreau who run the winery are part of a dynamic group of young CNP winemakers whose wines are challenging the famous names of the region in terms of quality, if not yet, thankfully, in terms of price.

On a visit to them last year Julia explained to me their approach to this kind of modern, fruit-driven winemaking: “Old-fashioned Châteauneuf is very gamy, very heavy, we prefer freshness, elegance, minerality.”

These are on fine display in the Secrets de Pignan, a single vineyard wine of astoundingly intense fruit flavors from 70-80 year old vines.

The old, old vines.

It is 95% grenache, but not obviously so, and is redolent of blackberries and black cherry fruits. It has a seductive, heady, perfumed aroma –  it goes up through my nose, races across my eyes and explodes in the front of my brain. And all this before I’ve even begun to taste.

On the palate it’s focused but surprisingly light and elegant. This beguiling contradiction results from the rich concentration of the old-vine fruit, and the wise decision of Eric and Julia to vinify and age the precious nectar entirely in stainless steel, with not a touch of oak. This allows the true Hallelujah Chorus of the grapes’ splendor to shine through unhampered by the weight of unnecessary and distracting oak.

Not many winemakers would have had the understanding, yet alone the courage, to take such an unusual step. But these imaginative young vignerons do, and the results are satisfyingly impressive.

Recall that feeling of hot sand between your toes as you sit down to lunch in the cool shade of an awning at some beach-front café just steps from the Mediterranean? That’s the image these rose-hued  beauties conjure up for me.

I have never figured out if there is a definite causal relationship between the pale pink/orange color of these wines and their delicate, elegant flavor, or whether it just seems that the two must to be linked, but in my mind they certainly are.

And the Domaine Houchart Côtes de Provence Rosé 2009 ($13) is just what I look for because it displays both these characteristics with élan. It’s a quintessential Provence rosé – delicate, soft and subtle, quite dry, but with enough ripe fruit flavors – strawberries, of course, the calling card of this sort of wine – to ensure it’s quafability, another essential requirement of rosé.

But this alone describes many Provence rosés, many decidedly ordinary, boring wines good only for drinking ice cold in the swimming pool, as long as one isn’t too demanding. No, what I also want in a rosé, and what the Houchart most decidedly delivers, is a distinctive flinty minerality that provides depth and complexity – not an insignificant achievement in a wine at this price – and also, incidentally, makes it far more interesting with food.

And, talking of food back at the beachfront café, please pass that plate of delicious black olives, and the crusty baguette.

That is why, when I come across a wine like this treat, the 42°S Pinot Noir from Tasmania at a mere bagatelle of $18, I fell like shouting the achievement from the rooftops.

In real English the wine’s name is Forty-Two Degrees South and herein lies its secret. This is the line of latitude upon which Tasmania sits, and it’s a long way further south, and therefore a lot cooler, than more established wine regions like McLaren Vale and Barossa.  And to make good pinot you have to have a cool climate.

Now this is not a great pinot in the style of Burgundy, but hey, what do you want at this price? Nor, thank God, is it like the creamy, over-oaked California versions. It is lighter even than Oregon pinot but does manage to capture the same rose-petal freshness of those excellent efforts.

Forty-Two has that perfect balance of ripe fruit and zingy acidity and even manages to capture hints of real pinot rusticality. Simply put, it’s a pure, uncomplicated and totally quaffable summer delight.

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When I was growing up in England the light, fresh whites from the valley of the Mosel river were highly fashionable, as in fact, were many German wines. Fashions change though and these days riesling, the predominant grape of the area, faces an uphill battle. The venerable firm of S.A. Prüm has taken care of at least two of the problems confronting the region in an attempt to make its wine more accessible to the American consumer. With its entry level Essence Riesling 2009 ($12) it has done away with the gothic German label with its confusing medieval script and instead chosen one boasting a modern, international design.

Then it has eliminated the traditional but confusing practice of varying the sweetness of the wine from vintage to vintage, a practice that has always struck me as not the ideal strategy for building brand loyalty. Essence is without a doubt a dry wine. Every year.

On the other hand Prüm have retained one of the great advantages of German wines, their low level of alcohol. At only 10.5% it is the perfect wine for a summer’s lunch – leaving you fresh enough for a couple of sets of tennis that afternoon – as a cocktail aperitif on a steamy summer evening, and as an accompaniment to food. Charcuterie definitely, oysters, shrimp, clams and especially scallops, provided they aren’t in too rich a sauce, and milder cheeses.

The explosive fruit on the front of the palate gives a strong impression of sweetness but this is deceptive, and it disappears as the wine slips down, the bracingly acidity asserting itself for a bright, crisp finish.

Essence is redolent of ripe peaches and pears which, combined with riesling’s wonderful aromatic minerality results in a pure and inexpensive summer delight.