2010 April Wine Club Vintner Selection
If you think your own family has a wacky side, you’ve never hung out with the Benziger clan. They all work in some aspect of the family winery, from winemaking to marketing, and they’re all nuts about Biodynamics. But one stroll around the grounds of their vineyard and you would be too: without it, they wouldn’t have their own bees buzzing around their own organic fig trees, their own sheep and long-haired cattle grazing in the vineyard rows, and they wouldn’t have some of the best street cred in the Biodynamic viticulture scene of any good sized California winery.
They’ve got it pretty well figured out, and as head winemaking honcho Mike Benziger likes to say, now they just need the consumer to get on board. “It’s kind of like learning to like good dirt-grown tomatoes over bland hothouse tomatoes again. It’s happening.” Whether you know the back-story on the winemaking or not, it’s hard not to appreciate the vanilla-laced pineapple character of this refreshing Chardonnay.
