Chris Benzinger, vintner at Benziger Family Winery (benziger.com), was full of stories when he co-hosted a harvest wine dinner at CLINK. restaurant in Boston’s luxury Liberty Hotel (libertyhotel.com).
He relates that his family’s first foray into the alcohol business was his grandfather’s bootleg operation supplying New York City speakeasys. Chris’s father became a legitimate importer. The whole family got into the winemaking business when Chris’s older brother Mike moved to California in 1973 and came back a few years later to pitch the clan on the idea of a family winery in then-rustic Sonoma County.
‶So my dad bought this land with three acres of chardonnay and 10 acres of cannabis,″ Chris said. ‶It was a golden time when all you needed was passion.″
The family planted its first blocks of vines in 1979 and by 1995 was ready to embrace biodynamic winemaking. ‶We told the Monsanto guy to take a hike and let nature run wild.″ That’s an exaggeration, of course. There’s a strict discipline to Demeter-certified biodynamic farming, all of it designed to work with the land as a living thing by encouraging the spread of a healthy biome. The most obvious result is having colorful herds of livestock (Highland cattle, little short sheep) as well as miles of vineyards.
Over the last decades, Benziger Family Winery has expanded a great deal, and some family members split off to form Imagery Estate Winery. Over the course of the dinner, we tasted wines from serveral of their properties. Our two favorites came at the beginning and end of the meal by executive chef Patrick Patrick Bassett.
Sipping some of Benziger’s best
We began with an amuse bouche of Wellfleet oyster tempura enhanced with a tiny splash of yellow aji pepper sauce underneath and a little green apple foam on top.
The morsel — really just one mouthful — was delicious and beautifully balanced. The accompnaying wine was one of Benziger’s best. The 2024 Paradiso de Maria Sauvignon Blanc — initially made by Chris Benziger’s brother for his wife, Maria — was a Sancerre-style sauvignon blanc with a nice flinty minerality and fresh punch of acidity.
Planted more than 30 years ago, the vines have received no irrigation at all for the last 15 years, forcing them to develop deep roots to extract nutrients from the rocky volcanic soil. To preserve the sharp freshness, the grapes are harvested in the early morning and the whole clusters are immediately pressed. Most of the fermentation takes place in stainless steel, but some of the juice is diverted for fermentation in French oak casks. Four months on the lees before bottling the two married lots gives the finished wine a lightly toasted finish. We could have drunk this wine all evening.
Moving on to the reds
But other courses beckoned. Our other favorite wine of the night was the 2022 Tribute Cabernet Sauvignon. Tribute is the name Benziger reserves for its flagship red, and it was the first Demeter-certified wine from Sonoma County. The wine was accompanied by a deliciously salty beef tenderloin topped with a bone marrow crust and lightly bathed in a cherry jus. In most years, Tribute is a Bordeaux style blend where cabernet sauvignon dominates. The real taste of the land comes through in the way it is produced by fermenting with natural yeast. ‶There’s no shortage of wine yeast,″ says Chris Benziger. ‶At last count we found 253 fermentable yeasts on the property.″
What impressed us most was that Tribute proves to be a very gentle, approachable red. It has enough tannin to maintain structure and despite 18 months in French oak, the wine has nicely rounded edges. On the nose, it’s all bramble fruit. The palate, though, is a surprising blend of stone fruits (cherries and plums) and milk chocolate with a long finish. It’s just what we look for in a Cab — strong and firm but not afraid to be soft enough to be friendly.
We even saved a little to go with the chef’s chocolate tart with salted caramel.
