Bonny Doon Vineyard
Paso Robles Viognier
2009
Current price: about $20 (as club members we paid $17)
This wine is a pure, pale yellow, washed clean like spring sunshine. It gives up a nose of apricot and apple blossoms, with an earthy background that smells like warm melon and beeswax. It starts citrusy in the mouth, then blossoms into more apricot and stone fruit, trailing off finally in a langourous, minerally finish. Savory, mouth-filling, but not unctuous like most California Viogniers. Not sweet: grounded and serious. It's an '09, but it tastes much older: one going on four.
It was made from vine cuttings salvaged from the original Bonny Doon Vineyard before it succumbed to Pierce's Disease in 1994. The winemaker had originally thought his vines were roussanne, owing to a trifling label mix-up with the original order, tra la, tra la. They turned out to be viognier, and this genetic line now bears the winemaker's name: the Randall Grahm clone.
We're ordering more tomorrow.
