Sorry, The Wine Spies doesn't support Internet Explorer anymore. Please use a newer browser to continue browsing our wine collections.
What We Say 2007 Sonoma County Zinfandel
SUPERIOR WINE ALERT:
Today’s Zinfandel is a superbly delicious, elegant and balanced wine that delivers that something extra that earns it this special recognition.
SECRET SAVINGS ALERT:
Subscribe to our Daily Dispatch (above) and you’ll always know what our Top Secret coupon code of the day is. Every day we issue a new members-only code that entitles you to have Ground Shipping included on orders of six or more bottles and, sometimes, an added discount!
Mission Codename: Going Up
Operative: Agent Red
Objective: After a protracted surveillance, send Agent Red to infiltrate Bugay Wines and Vineyards, the producer of some of Agent Red’s favorite wines. Retrieve Bugay’s exceptional 2006 Zinfandel for our demanding Operatives
Mission Status: Accomplished!
Current Winery: Bugay Wines and Vineyards
Wine Subject: 2007 Zinfandel Mayacama Mountains
Winemaker: Randall Watkins
Backgrounder: Agent Red first learned of today’s winery nearly five years ago – during a clandestine mission to a public tasting. Red tasted dozens of wines that day, and declared a Bugay wine to be the best wine of the entire event. Unfortunately, Bugay proved to be a difficult winery to infiltrate. Their limited-production wines are almost always impossible to procure, given that they are usually snapped up by a loyal and eager wine club. Persistence paid off for Agent Red and his hard work is your gain, today. Please read his full review, plus his interview with winemaker, Randall Watkins, below:
Wine Spies Tasting Profile:
Look – Darkest garnet. Perfectly clear, and darkening at its core. After the wine is spun, it coats the wall of the glass with beautiful magenta. After a moment, the wine coalesces into tall, thin legs that run slowly down the glass.
Smell – Blackberry preserves, blueberry, dark raspberry, black cherry and soft brown spice mix with dried leaves, bramble, sweetwoods, black pepper and toasty oak.
Feel – Cool, soft and round on entry. Bright and mouthcoating, with a grippy feeling that leads to a plush dryness that spreads from the edges, inward.
Taste – Darkest black cherry, smoky overripe blackberry and dark plum are followed by braised cassis, braised fig, bramble, dried black flower petals and black pepper.
Finish – Ultra-long and darkly juicy, loaded with mix berry fruit and soft spice. As flavors dwindle, earthy bramble, oak and dark flower petals linger.
Conclusion – We are in love with this fantastic Zinfandel! The extra long finish is a fitting crescendo to delicious flavors, exciting aromatics and supple mouthfeel. Built to compliment a great meal, this wine balances an even acidity against bold dark fruit, spice and earthen elements. Pair with a spicy meal, a great steak or juicy roast. Randal Watkins has managed to create an even better wine with this follow-up to the 2006 that we featured back in 2010. Bugay’s mountain fruit and Randall’s winemaking prowess make for one fantastic Zin!
Mission Report:
WINEMAKER INTEL BRIEFING DOSSIER
SUBJECT: Randall Watkins
WINE EDUCATION: Masters in Enology, UC Davis
CALIFORNIA WINE JOB BRIEF: Winemaking for past 16 years in Sonoma, Napa and Chile; current owner/winemaker of Watkins Family Winery.
WINEMAKING PHILOSOPHY: I am committed to crafting limited production wines from the concentrated fruit of hillside vineyards. I believe that vineyard location, soil composition, climate and slope are key factors in creating wines of extraordinary quality and distinction. My goal is to produce wines of great balance with regard to ripe fruit, quality tannin, and natural acidity.
WINEMAKER QUOTE: ”All of my winemaking efforts go toward producing wines that are rich and intensely flavored, reflecting both their origin in the vineyard, and the balance and elegance of small lot winemaking.”
FIRST COMMERCIAL WINE RELEASE: 1994, 1999 as head winemaker
-—————————————————————————————————————
WINEMAKER INTERVIEW
AGENT RED: Greetings, Randall. We are thrilled to be showing your wine today. Thanks so much for taking some time to answer questions for our Operatives today.
RANDALL WATKINS: I am always happy to discuss our Cabernet Franc! I understand you are quite a fan.
RED: Indeed! In fact, today’s wine was my top pic, when I tasted it at a trade event. This is one fantastic wine! Tell me, was there a specific experience in your life that inspired your love of wine?
RANDALL: I grew up on a ranch in Sonoma County where we had horses, chickens, rabbits and 1 acre of Zinfandel and Chardonnay. My father didn’t sell the grapes, he was a home winemaker. Each vintage, all of his friends would come over to help hand-harvest the grapes and crank the hand stemmer-crusher. Then they would celebrate the harvest and their friendship with a big picnic, enjoying wine from previous vintages. From the time that I was 10 years old, I helped with the farming and the harvest of my family’s small vineyard. And when I grew older, it was my friends who came over for the harvest parties and many more great memories!
RED: What wine or winemaker has most influenced your winemaking style?
RANDALL: For Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay, Dan Goldfield has been influential. I worked under him at Hartford and La Crema and learned about the Burgundian methods of cold soaking and open-topped fermentation to help extract color and express the fruit. He was one of the only winemakers who was producing an elegant style of Zinfandel, which is the style in which I make the Bugay Vineyards Zinfandel.
For Cabernet Sauvignon and other Bordeaux varietals, I learned a lot working with Álvaro Espinoza, one of Chile’s most talented winemakers. In addition to his experience at Château Margaux, Álvaro is a well-known wine consultant and has his own highly rated label, Antiyal. He taught me the importance of organic farming, picking at perfect ripeness, and achieving a sense of place from the vineyard site.
RED: Who do you make wine for?
RANDALL: I make wine for people to enjoy and share. I want the people who try my wine to want to have another glass, and that is why balance is so important to me. Some Zinfandel wines can be overripe and raisiny, sweet but with a burn from high alcohol. I prefer to make a more elegant style which has balanced alcohol and acidity, retaining the freshness of the fruit and the liveliness that makes young Zinfandel such a fun wine to enjoy. And that is why I was awarded Sonoma County Winemaker of the Year for my Monte Rosso Vineyard Zinfandel a few years ago!
RED: How would you recommend people approach your wines and wine in general?
RANDALL: Have fun with it, feel comfortable having an opinion on what you like and don’t like. Go with your instincts. There is no point in suffering through a wine that you really don’t like just because you have read that it’s supposed to be good. Wine, like art, is subjective. Try new things, new producers, new varietals, wines from different growing areas. Trying different wines is the only way to build your sensory memory and discover your own tastes. Realize that the most important characteristic of a good wine is balance. A wine’s flavor can have many different elements: fruit, tannin, spice, oak, etc. The best wines have all these things in a complex harmony, and no one flavor overshadows the others.
RED: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?
RANDALL: There is no better way to end a day than to relax and share wine, food and conversation with friends!
RED: Thank you so much for your time, Randall. We learned a lot about you – and your wine. Keep up the great work, we are big fans!
What the Winery Says
Bugay Vineyards
About This Wine:
Ripe strawberry, smoked meat and dried flowers on the nose. Smooth and rich with dark plum and blackberry flavors with perfect acidity – conveys balance without any raisiny compromise. Extremely fresh and juicy with excellent finishing clarity and exotic spiciness. This wine displays the pure essence of Sonoma mountainside Zinfandel.
About The Winery:
“We believe the potential to make great wine must originate in the vineyard. Our most important role is to be mindful custodians of our extraordinary vineyards and surrounding habitat while insuring notability in our wines.” — John and Reta Bugay, Proprietors
Man of the earth and passionate visionary, John K. Bugay, relocated to Sonoma County in 1996 in order to pursue the life-long dream of creating his own hillside vineyard estate. A gifted renaissance man, he began his mid-life career with an extensive knowledge of soil chemistry, plant biology and landscape design on a grand scale. His experienced and acute palate for fine wines supports and enhances the duality of viticulturist and vintner.
From locating the perfect vineyard environment high in the Mayacamas Mountains of Sonoma County, to meticulously planting and maintaining the vines, to setting a standard of excellence in the winery, John is truly a pioneer and perfectionist.
About The Vineyard:
Bugay Vineyards is the embodiment of a dream driven to reality by passion, perseverance and patience. Long ago, the search began to find the ideal site for planting vines. Although Napa and Santa Barbara Counties were thoroughly investigated, we were most intrigued by the irresistible beauty and challenge of this land we now call home, located high in the Mayacamas Mountains of Sonoma County. We immediately fell in love with the stunning beauty of this rugged, inaccessible and forested parcel. To our great fortune, this parcel revealed hillside meadows suitable for vineyards and the soils proved to be a winemaker’s dream.
About The Winemaker:
Winemaker Randall Watkins grew up on a vineyard located in the foothills of Taylor Mountain in Sonoma County. His father was a garagiste, creating rustic Zinfandel and crisp Chardonnay in a barn on their property with the help of friends who were paid in wine. Beginning when he was only 10 years old, Randall participated in the annual harvest and grape crush, and as he grew older he continued to learn about farming and fermentation from his father.
In 1993, Watkins received a bachelor’s degree in sociology and management from the University of California, Davis. After a brief stint working for an environmental consultant in San Francisco, Watkins again felt the call of the wine country. He continued his hands-on winemaking training, working in the cellars and labs of Buena Vista Winery and Hartford Family Winery in Sonoma County, as supervisor of red wine fermentations at Carmen Vineyards in Chile, and as assistant winemaker at S. Anderson Vineyards in Napa. Watkins then returned to UC Davis, where he rounded out his practical knowledge by completing a master’s degree in enology in 1999. Watkins went on to produce stellar wines over the next 7 years as winemaker and General Manager for Carmenet Winery and Moon Mountain Vineyard.
Throughout his winemaking experience, Watkins found that grapes from hillside vineyards produced red wines of incredible richness, depth and concentration. After making Cabernet Sauvignon from vineyards in Sonoma, Rutherford, Stags Leap, Red Hills, Mendocino, Monterrey, and Chile, Watkins discovered that his favorite big red wines were consistently from vineyards located in the Mayacama Mountains. “I loved the wines that came from the mountain fruit of Monte Rosso Vineyard, Moon Mountain Estate, and the top of Nuns Canyon. Then one day I met with John Bugay at the summit of Bugay Vineyards in the northwest Mayacama Mountains, and I was blown away by the vineyard site and the quality of the wines that it produced!” Soon after, Watkins left Moon Mountain for the opportunity to make wine for Bugay Vineyards.
“All of Bugay Vineyards wines come from their estate vineyard, which means that we have complete control of quality. John Bugay would never cut corners on farming practices because the grapes are going into his own wine – in fact, he insists on the highest level of care in his immaculate vineyard. Standing in the middle of Bugay Vineyards gives you a sense that you are in a very special place on earth, and a glass of the wine confirms it above and beyond!”
Technical Analysis:
Appellation: Sonoma County
Vineyard: 100% Bugay Vineyards fruit “From the south-facing slope of the Mayacama Mountains”
Varietals: Zinfandel
Cases Produced: 563
Alcohol: 15.2%
pH: 3.60
TA: 0.62g/100ml
RS: 0.05g/100ml
Aging: 9 month in French Oak.
