It lurks in vineyards, biding its time before lashing out with tannic claws. For centuries winemakers crept timidly around the brooding grape, using it in miniscule amounts in fear that it would overpower the wine if unchecked.
Too dramatic? Well, Petit Verdot is a powerful grape — dark, bucked up with tannins and bold in flavor. For the most part it is used in small percentages to add color and structure to other varietals.
But Jeff Smith doesn’t mind straying into perilous territory.
“I decided to showcase the varietal, to show people what 100 percent tastes like,” he explained.
His 2007 Dusinberre Cellars Petit Verdot is an astounding wine. It draws you into a space at once intense and elusory. It beckons to you with wafts of dried fruit and dark chocolate that yields to old world loam. As the aromas develop, impressions of leather, aged cigar tobacco and black peppercorns crushed under a stone pull your thoughts into the wine. But they taunt you, shrinking just beyond your capacity of definition until you are left with memories of an intriguing spicy, earthy, dried blackberry filling.
It’s an introduction like no other.
The Petit Verdot opens on the palate with dense dark fruit — blackberry and blueberry with a distinct vestige of age. This plunges into earthier depths, passing down a floral path weighted by a late fall rain, into weathered leather and black pepper. It is a rich, full, brooding and contemplative wine that tugs you into its realm, burrowing into the earth and stone before emerging again with a spicy finish. And all along, there is the compelling flavor of dried fruit.
“There’s a lot going on with that wine,” Smith agreed, adding that the experience now is much different than it would have been five, three or even one year ago.
Smith aged the wine for 20 months in oak, with the heads American wood and the staves French. The grapes came from a vineyard now part of the Boatique Winery, in the Red Hills AVA.
According to Smith, the Red Hills will by nature produce tannic wines that age beautifully but will appear immature if released too soon. Winemakers preferring to highlight the fresh fruit flavors of a good younger version — and there is a strong market for such wines — will strive to soften the rigid tannins. Again, Smith prefers to play outside the lines.
“You don’t want to strip out the tannins — they are your friends,” he explained. “I make wines that age. I don’t mind hanging onto them.”
The 2007 Dusinberre Petit Verdot deserves to be shared, however. For most who enjoy wine, including long-time aficionados, the varietal is an unfamiliar one. In old world soils the late ripening grape often proved to be temperamental and the resulting wine a muscular beast.
In climates with longer growing seasons the grape thrives. And, fortunately, a few winemakers have dared to bottle the varietal on its own.
State agricultural records show that only 45 bearing acres were devoted to Petit Verdot in 1990. Now there are well over 2,000 — a fraction of the close to 500,000 acres of bearing vineyards in the state, sure, but a positive trend nonetheless.
And once people try Dusinberre’s 2007, they will wonder what all those winemakers in the past feared about the grape.
It is simply a captivating wine.
Dave Faries can be reached at 900-2016
