When people ask me what my favorite wine is, I like to quote a good friend the late Jimmy Mancbach. When Jimmy was asked this question, his standard answer was-“I like to drink the wines that my friends make”. There are so many great wines in the world you tend to have a special connection to the wines that people you like make. One of my favorite personalities in the wine industry is Tony Soter.
I have been following Tony’s handy work since the early 1990's when I was the wine buyer at Cafe Maxx. In fact, I used to have people in the business tell me that I even looked like Tony. Soter’s list of consulting clients in the early 1990’s is like a who’s who of the California wine industry including: Araujo Estate, Dalla Valle, Moraga Vineyards (the only non-Napa winery), Niebaum-Coppola, Spottswoode and Viader, to name a few.
Over the years we have become friends and even though he is no longer the owner of Etude winery we still have to pay tribute to the man who got things started at Etude winery in 1982. Although Tony is still consulting for Etude winery continuing Tony's oenological quest for perfection at Etude are current winemaker Jon Priest and viticulturalist Franci Ashton.
And we can't send out an offering on Etude wines without attaching an offering on Tony’s new wines from Oregon. One of my favorite vintners in California is now one of Oregon top guns. Check out the line-up of wines from Soter Vineyards at www.sotervineyards.com.
Today, we can offer you an older vintage Etude Cabernet Sauvignon at an incredible price. This 2006 vintage took a bit of time to shed some of its tannins and is just now starting to open up, this wine was even better on the second day open! For more information call Wine Watch at 954.523.9463 or www. winewatch.com
A bit about Etude Winery:
In music, an étude is a composition built on a technical motive, essentially to hone skills, but one that can be played for its own intrinsic artistic value. If the old adage "practice makes perfect" applies to winemaking as it does to music, then Tony Soter, the founder, owner, and winemaker of Étude Wines has it down pat. For a long time Tony Soter has been known to the world of wine as the artist who was the driving force in creating, developing, managing, and making the great Cabernet Sauvignons of Napa's Spottswoode Vineyard. However, local cognoscenti who follow the scene even more closely have been watching Tony Soter's solo effort since its inception in 1982. Now that Étude is becoming more available on a national level, thanks to an increase in production, Soter's own brand may eventually become as well known as Spottswoode.
Tony Soter's winemaking career began in 1975 in the cellar at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars at about the time the famous 1973 Cabernet was being bottled (that Cabernet went on to win the famous 1976 Paris Bicentennial Tasting in which it vanquished some of the top French Bordeaux). Tony came to wine via the study of philosophy with an eventual legal career in sight, but serendipity would have it that a college job selling wine blunted his legal leanings and piqued his palate for wine. After the brief stint at Stag's Leap, he went to work for Stonegate Winery while doing postgraduate work in chemistry, enology, and viticulture at U.C. Davis. In 1976 Tony spent the harvest at Napa's Spring Mountain Winery and then went on to Chappellet Vineyards, where he became the winemaker there in the summer of 1977. Soter's talents became quickly evident with the 1977 Chappellet Cabernet - one of the top wines of the 1977 vintage. Soter's intellectual prowess and obvious natural talent for winemaking earned him a reputation that burgeoned rather quickly, and a number of California wineries began to seek out his services on a consulting basis. Over the course of the next few years, Soter had a hand in making some great wines with clients like Cain Cellars, Far Niente, Ritchie Creek, Sequoia Grove, Shafer and William Hill. In 1982 the Novak family, proprietors of the Spottswoode Estate, hired Tony to completely handle all aspects of Spottswoode wines from vineyard management to winemaking. When the 1982 Spottswoode Cabernet was released, it caused something of a sensation among critics and consumers - we can remember few Cabernet producers that debuted so auspiciously. Since that first release in 1982, Spottswoode has continued an unbroken string of successes right through the 1998 vintage. Spottswoode has been consistently in our list of top ten Cabernets of the year for the past decade in The Wine News. Soter has never rested on his laurels. He has taken on winemaking duties at Napa's Niebaum-Coppola, Viader, and Araujo Estate as well as an unusual winemaking project at the Moraga Estate in Bel Aire, Los Angeles. Some of the red wines he has made at Araujo and Viader have drawn rave reviews and have catapulted those estates to the very top of the Napa Valley elite. Soter’s associate Mia Klein now serves as a consultant to Spottswoode, Araujo, Viader and Dalla Valle as rumor has it- Tony is a full-time dad. His winemaking career taking a bit of a hiatus over the last year.
The original intention of Étude was to produce only Pinot Noir, and the name Étude was intended to thematically convey his approach to winemaking, which is fundamentally an exploration of the elements of style. By his own account Soter “consciously focuses on technique to achieve the desired results in a California context. Subscribing to the Socratic ideal of continually searching for wisdom through challenging assumptions, Étude Wines are dedicated to learning something about the winemaking craft. Perhaps because Pinot Noir, in particular, is so difficult to master, the name also implies a certain humility of approach toward the most technically and stylistically demanding of table wines.” Although we had heard much about the very limited Étude Pinot Noir, we did not have an opportunity to sample it until the 1985 vintage. This wine was quite a revelation and was certainly one of the finest Pinot Noirs made from Napa Valley fruit that we had ever tasted. In 1985 Soter also released his first Cabernet Sauvignon, a wine that we dubbed "rookie of the year" for Cabernet producers. Cabernets produced at Étude since that first vintage have been excellent and sometimes outstanding. Soter has been experimenting in recent vintages with a small amount of Pinot Blanc (about 350 cases) and Pinot Gris (50 cases). In addition, he produces one of the finest rosés (a Rosé of Pinot Noir) made in California. Current production of Pinot Noir is about 6000 cases; and Cabernet is about 1500 cases.
The Cabernet Sauvignon from Etude has become their most sought after wine the last three releases. The 1997 was a blockbuster and one of the best wines made in this outstanding vintage. But it is vintages like 1998 where great winemakers really shine. The press dubbed this vintage “bad” and many collectors have overlooked the 1998s entirely. Etude’s 1998 effort was our pick for best Cabernet Sauvignon released in 2002- we would challenge you to find a better wine from this difficult vintage. Mother nature cooperated with California vintners in quality for the 1999 harvest but the quantity was very small, many vintners producing half the wines that they did in 1997. The 2000 vintage was similar to the 1998 vintage in northern California, it was a difficult year, especially for the late ripening Cabernet Sauvignon, but this is when great producers like Tony Soter really shine. The last few vintages from Northern California have been excellent. There seems to be a difference of opinion among the U.S. critics about this latest vintage from California’s north coast. James Laube from The Wine Spectator has called this vintage a “Great Vintage”. Once of the other leading authorities on wine in this country Robert Parker Jr. of the Wine Advocate had this to say about the 2004 vintage:
Soter Sold Etude in 2001 to the Fosters group. Continuing Tony's oenological quest for perfection at Etude are current winemaker Jon Priest and viticulturalist Franci Ashton
