Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022 - 38

THE NEW PlaNTINGS aT
THE JORDaN ESTaTE COVER
a PaTCHWORK OF KNOllS
BElOW THE MaYaCaMaS.
CALIFORNIA | SONOMA COUNTY
Jordan
Alexander Valley cabernets that define an elegant, longlived
style of California wine.
FOUNDED:
1972
WINEMAKER:
Maggie Kruse
VITICULTURIST:
Brent Young
OWNER:
John Jordan
ACRES OWNED:
1,200; 90 planted
ANNUAL PRODUCTION:
100,000 cases
38
When John Jordan took over from his parents, tom
and Sally, in 2005, he hoped to advance his family's signature
style of California cabernet. Jordan was known
for cabernets with fit structures and lithe fruit, wines
that put food first. He worked with Rob Davis, Jordan's
winemaker from the start in 1976, to reconsider all the
tools they were using. And he challenged Davis to make
his ideal wine. Holding to the Jordan style, Davis bottled
a super blend, a reserve selection of top parcels that presented
a quandary: They had, in the past, followed a
Bordeaux philosophy, blending their best lots into their
primary wine. Jordan recalls Davis saying, " I can make it
all like this. " He just needed the resources. Davis and his
young associate Maggie Kruse set out to develop their
network of benchland and hillside vineyards in Alexander
Valley, which led, eventually, to Jordan's selling off
the original valley-floor vineyard. And they transitioned
to French oak barrels-for 100 percent of the cabernet
by 2015, the top Jordan wine we tasted this year.
Then, in 2016, the team began replanting the Jordan
Estate, more than 1,000 acres of rolling hills surrounding
the winery at the foot of the Mayacamas. Brent Young,
Jordan's director of agricultural operations, worked from
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electrical resistivity maps of the soil to determine where
to plant, what rootstocks to use and when to harvest. He
now farms 90 acres of vines at the estate, and will have
125 in total planted next year.
Since Davis's retirement in 2019, Kruse now heads up
winemaking. Along with Young and Dana Grande, Jordan's
grower relations manager, she's been taking breaks
from harvest, driving to a nursery in the Sierra Foothills
to taste a range of clones as the fruit ripens. " We'll
leave at 3 am, we'll taste the clones and we'll head back, "
Young reports. They are looking for fruit to give wines
that have " the depth, the softness and the roundness, "
he says, to complement the Jordan style. -J.G.
Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon in magnum (2015,
$199, 95 points; 2016, $215, 94 points) Jordan's 2015
comes in at 13.8 percent alcohol, the fruit of small berries
and reduced yields due to cool temperatures through a long
flowering. Davis and Kruse played the vintage for subtlety,
using the amplitude of that ripe fruit to fill out the wine's
cedary, tobacco-scented tannins with delicate plummy
depths. It's a high point of Jordan's magnum releases-from
a library that goes back to 1977. The 2016, also in magnum,
earned 94 points for its cool blackcurrant fruit framed by the
sage and chaparral scents of the tannins. Fresh and delicious.
2018 Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon ($60, 93
points) There's a sleek and fragrant richness to this easygoing
cabernet, its depth of fruit lightened by a lean structure-what
Patrick Comiskey described as " a classic Alexander
Valley leafiness. " A mountain blueberry scent lasts in the
end, the wine sturdy and set to open over the next four years.
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