Morlet Family Vineyards New Releases

USA, California, Napa Valley & Sonoma

Morlet Family Vineyards New Releases

Luc Morlet is an inventor. He mostly invents wines, taking inspiration from vineyards and grape varieties. Sometimes he invents special cuvees based on wine memories or the pursuit of greatness. Once, he invented a machine to help make better wine.

The Inventor

When he was still the winemaker at Peter Michael, Luc envisaged a new design for a sorting table. The design was partly inspired by a scar on his finger from when he was younger, working at his family’s estate in Champagne. He’d been cleaning a sorting device when the safety pin fell out, releasing the sharp-edged hood, cutting his finger to the bone. Imagining and then refining a better design, in 2001, he built a prototype, calling his invention “Le Trieur,” meaning “The Sorter.” This first iteration was mounted to a berry-per-berry manual sorting table and used for harvest at Peter Michael in 2002. The following year, it was refined to become an independent device that could efficiently remove 100% of the shot (undeveloped) berries and around 85% of the raisins, both detrimental to quality and cumbersome to hand-sort. After patenting the design for his invention and finding a manufacturer, Morlet set out to sell it to top wineries around Napa Valley and Sonoma County. The machine wasn’t cheap, but it was very effective and saved a lot on labor.

“We sold 325 of our special Le Trieur sorting units across the Valley, and that was our seed money to start this project,” Luc said during my visit to his winery in Saint Helena in July this year. The “project” is Morlet Family Vineyards, founded in 2006, which Luc and his wife Jodie have built pretty much from scratch.

Few in Napa Valley are as driven, ambitious, and committed to winemaking as Luc Morlet. Today he continues as a consultant at Peter Michael Winery and has a great relationship with the team there. (His brother, Nick Morlet, succeeded Luc as winemaker at Peter Michael, although recently left to pursue his own venture.) Luc and Jodie now own three vineyards and have lease agreements with their Chardonnay and Pinot Noir sites in Sonoma.

“Mon Chevalier was the first vineyard that we bought,” said Luc, referring to their seven-acre site in Knights Valley, Sonoma. “We planted this to Bordeaux varieties in 2008. The vines are at around 500-600 feet elevation, facing Peter Michael. This is the most Bordeaux-like of our vineyards.”

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Then in 2010, Luc and Jodie were able to buy their family house, winery, and small vineyard of just a few of acres in Saint Helena, off the Saint Helena Highway and very close to Colgin’s Tychson Hill vineyard. This Morlet Estate vineyard was planted to Cabernet Sauvignon in 2007, half to a proprietary clone from Grace Family (supposedly from Chateau Margaux) and half to Clone 4. The first vintage was 2010. Here they renovated the beautiful 19th-century stone winery, modernizing it into their gravity-fed production facility. The prototype for Le Trieur sits in pride-of-place, having been modified and improved for Luc’s purposes, and remains in use today.

Until 2018, the core of Morlet’s Napa offerings came from Beckstoffer’s To Kalon vineyard in Oakville. Purchasing fruit from this jewel of Napa wasn’t cheap, but Luc wanted the best. Still, he couldn’t help but envision owning a unique piece of Oakville one day. When a parcel of land across Highway 29 from To Kalon and a little further south came up for sale, he sorted this out too.

“The little profit we’d made at Morlet Family Vineyards went into buying our vineyard in Oakville,” said Luc. “We called it Coeur de Vallée—Heart of the Valley. We bought that in 2015 and planted it the same year. It is mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, but a third of the property is planted to Cabernet Franc.”

"As you know, Cabernet is very serious for us."

Coeur de Vallée is 24 acres, now giving Morlet Family Vineyards a significant presence in Napa. Production from this site came online in 2018, and from that year, they became 100% Estate grown for the Cabernets. “As you know, Cabernet is very serious for us,” Luc commented. “I have loved Bordeaux from the beginning and have done two internships there.”

Devoting a third of this vineyard to Cabernet Franc has as much to do with Luc’s passion for this grape as having a unique vision for crafting what is right up there with the world’s finest examples of this variety. “Cabernet Franc does very well on the clay-loam soil we have at Coeur de Vallée,” he mentioned. “We have planted Cab Franc Clone 1 here, which I love.”

Having received great critical acclaim and commercial success for their 100% Cabernet Franc wine, “Force de la Nature,” this year, Luc and Jodie will be releasing for the first time a brand-new invention of Luc’s: 2019 Force Tranquille, which is 85% Cabernet Franc and 15% Cabernet Sauvignon. This, too is from Morlet’s Coeur de Vallée Vineyard in Oakville, and the Cabernet Franc component is all Clone 1 on Riparia Gloire rootstock.

I found it to be a more elegantly styled expression of Cabernet Franc compared to the powerful character of the Force de la Nature Vineyard.

Apart from the Bordeaux varieties wines (which includes a gorgeous Pessac-Léognan-inspired dry white called “La Proportion Dorée”), Luc makes an impressive collection of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs from leased vineyards in Sonoma.

Morlet’s Sonoma Chardonnays

“Ma Douce is in Fort Ross-Seaview, close to Annapolis and Marcassin Vineyard, with its back to the ocean,” Luc explained. “It comes from the coolest part of this vineyard, so it has an extended ripening period. It’s mainly Old Wente clone selection. When I started, I thought the wine would be quite austere. But we are above the fog line here. At 1600 feet, we are surrounded by fog. We get a lot of UV light, although you get a cool breeze from the ocean.”

Ma Princesse comes from Ritchie vineyard in Russian River. “It is covered in fog in the mornings,” said Luc. “We farm 2.5 acres on a front-facing section and another half-acre since 2017. It’s all old vines there—more than 35 years old.”

Coup de Coeur is a barrel selection containing a fair amount of Ritchie Vineyard with some of the Ma Douce vineyard. “This is more an exercise in crafting the best of the vintage,” Luc explained.

Morlet’s Sonoma Pinot Noirs

All the Morlet Pinot Noirs come from the same major Nobles Ranch site as Ma Douce, located in the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA. “Coteaux Nobles is purely the site,” said Luc. “This wine comes from 27-year-old vines planted at the Nobles Ranch vineyard, just below the Ma Douce blocks. My very first pick is the bottom of the block, but then the rest is my last pick. This is Pinot Fin clone, which behaves a little bit like Old Wente. These berries must be watched to make sure they don’t fry.”

En Famille comes from a single block of this vineyard, facing south-east, closer to the Gualala River canyon. This is fermented entirely in used puncheons.

Joli Coeur comes from the same ranch, from a block facing east. “This comes from the sweet spot within the Coteaux Nobles and En Famille vineyards in Fort Ross-Seaview AVA,” said Morlet. “The topsoil is very thin here, and the clusters and berries are always smaller, meaning that the wine tends to be more intense.”

“With the three Pinots, we don’t pick three times; we pick 6-8 times.”

A shout-out is also necessary for Morlet’s Syrah creation—Bouquet Garni. This is 100% Syrah made from three clones planted in a 20+-year-old vineyard in Sonoma’s Bennett Valley. “This comes from three different blocks,” said Luc. “1.5 acres each. I pick them all at once and do a co-ferment. It’s my last pick almost every year. It’s a La Landonne style—I like to work just with Syrah. It’s all destemmed.”

During my July visit, I tasted a complete vertical of Morlet Family Vineyards’ Coeur de Vallée and the entire line-up of 2019s and 2020s. In 2020, no Bordeaux varieties reds or Syrah were made due to the wildfires that year and potential smoke taint issues.

 

“The growing season in 2019 was quite different from 2018, said Luc. “We had a lot of rain coming at the beginning of the season. In 2019, we had to be very careful with the crop levels. We did 3-4 passes to thin that year. Once we get to the quality segment of yields, I want to let the terroir and the vintage speak. Both need to be expressed, so we have to find the balance with the yields. If the crop is too small, the grape rushes to ripeness. If it’s too much, it doesn’t have the intensity.”

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Morlet Family Vineyards also has a library release program. This autumn, they will re-release four of the Bordeaux varieties red wines from the 2012 vintage: Mon Chevalier, Coeur de Vallée, Morlet Estate, and Passionnément (a barrel selection). A great vintage in Napa Valley, the 2012s are hitting their strides right now.

As if all this wasn’t enough, Luc Morlet was eager to share his most recent news when I visited. “From this year, we will be selling on the Place de Bordeaux,” he told me. “This is an exciting new thing move for us. We are only releasing our Coeur de Vallée single vineyard label. We can grow our production here because we have been selling some of the fruit from this vineyard. We have selected around 16 negociants that will sell the wine starting this September. It’s a great way to help grow our international presence, which is necessary.”

Necessity, of course, being the mother of invention.


Article & Reviews by Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW
Photos by Svante Örnberg

See more work from Svante at svanteornberg.se by clicking here!

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