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Carol Shelton joins Steve Jaxon and Dan Berger on California Wine Country today. For more information visit her website https://www.carolshelton.com/
The wines tasted today.
Dan Berger met Carol Shelton when she was making wines for Windsor Vineyards. They were winning gold medals in a lot of competitions but they were not widely known. So Dan wrote about how she was taking good fruit and making great wine. She spent 20 great years at Windsor after graduating with her degree in enology, until 2000 when she founded her own winery. She and her husband lost their house in Larkfield in the October 2017 fires but they are rebuilding.
Carol Shelton was one of the first dozen women to go through the wine program at UC Davis, graduating in 1978. They taught winemaking but they didn’t teach viticulture so she learned that at Santa Rosa Junior College under Rich Thomas, who has been on the show many times.
Identifying Herbs by their Smell
Carol’s mother taught her to cook from a very young age, and to identify herbs by the smell even before she could read. Her parents offered to pay for her education if she took something scientific that could lead to a good job, but they would not pay for her to study poetry. So she visited a winery and smelled oak saturated with red wine and she decided she wanted to smell that every day at work.
They taste her Wild Thing 2016 Chardonnay from a vineyard that they own. It’s all barrel fermented, no malolactic fermentation. Steve says it is adorable, Dan says it is a very succulent wine and is ready to drink now. It has a little tropical fruit flavor and has a rich mid-palette without any oak character. Carol says they stir the barrels every Wednesday for eight months. Dan says it’s so delicious and is ready to drink now, which is suggested by its screw cap.
The next wine tasted is called Coquille Blanc and is a blend of four varieties, mostly Grenache Blanc, and also Roussane, Viognier and Marsanne. Dan admires the complexity and subtlety of this wine and the different characteristics that come from the different grape varietirs. Viognier gives you floral components.
Grenache Blanc
Grenache Blanc gives some chalky minerality, the Roussanne gives you peach and pear components, but Dan can’t figure out what is Marsanne’s best quality so he asks Carol. It has more peach flavors where the Roussanne has more almond. As this wine ages, they both will give a sweet honey flavor. Steve is surprised that he was thinking almonds just as she mentioned it. The Coquille is Carol’s favorite out of all the wines she makes. Dan says she is lucky because it is hard to get a good vineyard to grow all these grapes and she agrees that even if it is far away, it is worth it.
Wild Thing
She bottles about 15 or 16 wines right now. She is no longer going to make Pinot Noir but her Zinfandel is so famous that she is concentrating on that now. The name Wild Thing means she uses wild yeast, which means she adds no yeast to it, and it is farmed organically.
Now they taste the Carignane, which has the weight. Carol Shelton says that you can tell Carignane from Zinfandel grapes when they are ripe in the vineyard because Zin crunches and Carignane disintegrates in your mouth, it is pulpy like watermelon. She treats it like a Zin and keeps it in American oak, which loves big fruity wines.
Dan notes that Carol makes mostly red wines and asks why she doesn’t make so much white wine. She loves Zinfandel and wants to set her own standards rather than to copy styles from Europe. She does not want high alcohol or high sugar or too much oak. The temperature range is narrower, between 70-90 degrees F instead of 50-105 degrees F in. To avoid higher alcohol content, they sometimes have to pick their grapes before all of the tannins are mature.