Drink
In my first spring installment of an occasional series on warm-weather sippers, this 2007 fumé blanc from Sonoma's Chateau St. Jean ranks high for lip-smacking complexity at a fair price.
Fumé blanc, of course, was a figment of Robert Mondavi's brilliant imagination, a sexy '70s rebranding for then-unglamorous sauvignon blanc. Its oak-enriched goldenness had little to do with the similarly named, but crisper, Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire. But it has lived on nonetheless as one of the most popular non-chardonnay expressions of California white.
This example from incredibly consistent Chateau St. Jean shows why. It has all the brightness and minerality of a good sauvignon blanc, but a sweet kiss of semillon gives it a more voluptuous, juicy profile, with a touch of stone fruit and a whiff of wood rounding off the austere edges. At $13, it's also priced to quaff.
The 2007 fumé blanc from Chateau St. Jean is available in Pennsylvania for $12.99.
- Craig LaBan
