This is pt 2, the tentative conclusion to my interview with Jason Lett of The Eyrie Vineyards. It is tentative because he is a man of many layers, at once open, yet reserved. He can be startlingly honest and subtle at the same time, in the same sentence. There is always more to learn from him. This interview, though detailed and thorough in its own way, nevertheless implies dozens more questions all of which he would be willing to answer. Some people I’ve spoken with establish an implicit contract. They make it clear from the first utterance just how much they are willing to discuss. They might imply advertorial conditions, a set of company-sponsored talking points beyond which they are unwilling to go. They might limit inquiry with clipped answers. But that is not Jason Lett’s approach. Ask him a question important to you and he will answer. He requires, I sense, a dedicated interlocutor. And I hope I have held up my end of the conversation.
Part 1
In The Vineyard
Admin This is a quiet place.
Jason Lett These are the original vines planted in the Willamette Valley. They are all planted on their own roots, so we’re going to do a little clorox wash before we go in. You just have to get a little on the bottom of your shoes.
We each step into a shallow pan of bleach.
JL So this is our tillage and cultivation center here. This is a flail mower. Its has two side cutters that I have folded over right now because we’re missing a snap ring…. But as we’re driving down the row we’re both mowing the middle but also underneath the vines.
That’s a clever design.
JL Yes. As it bumps into a grape vine it just pulls around the trunk. It is made by a local company called Rears. They build great equipment, and they came up with this design based on an older design, an Edwards mower that was used in apple orchards in Washington. So it’s pretty homegrown engineering. It’s built like a proverbial brick shit house.
At Parducci’s they had one of the strangest machines I’ve ever seen. It was designed for shallow spading. It was a series of spades moving in the oddest way.
JL Oh, yeah. A power spader. Those things are cool. It’s like a crankshaft with spades on it. They are fun to look at. But we don’t do any tillage here. And over here is our newest acquisition. Our vineyard manager, he’s been with us for 25 years now, this was kind of his 25th anniversary present, this tractor.
I can see it. After he blew out all of the candles, you put a blindfold on him and told him to come outside…
JL That’s exactly what we did! We hid it in one of the bays at the winery. We’d had our big harvest party, everybody was there. I said, “OK, everybody. We’re going out. Mamas hang on to your kids. It’s going to be dark in there.” So we went into one of the storage bays and closed the door. Nobody could see to the back what was going on. Then we flipped the lights on! And there was the tractor.
So at the heads, at the ends of the rows we’ve got these cordon-pruned vines. It’s just hard to get rid of these. They’re just too pretty.
In vineyards you sometime see the practice of digging down a few inches at the base of the vine in order to access the shallow lateral roots. I saw it demonstrated in Cahors; it was a method to improve vineyard health there. The shallow roots are then cut away so as to encourage deeper rooting. Is any of that done here?
JL Well, remember how you were observing how in Burgundy they clean-till everything or herbicide it so that there is nothing growing on the vineyard floor? Well, that means that every drop of water that hits the ground is available to the vines. So the plants are going to take advantage of that and put their water-collecting roots at the surface. That’s one of the purposes for leaving this full coverage here in our vineyard. It is to drive the roots deep. Basically, all of the weeds and companion plants handle all the minor rain events. This coverage all turns brown in late July, and it then acts as mulch. So we retain more water in the soil as a result of leaving the cover than we would if we tilled it up.
Then when harvest comes in October, and we start getting those rains that tend to panic people, this stuff is drinking up the water. The grapes, which are down into deeper sources of water, aren’t getting that big burst of precipitation; and so the clusters don’t get water-logged, for lack of a better word. This grass on the surface is drinking it all up.
And here you have a high admixture of red clay, yes?
JL Oh, yeah. This is classic Jory soil, red clay. Its got some really interesting properties. For a clay it’s stays really friable. It doesn’t seal shut in the Winter the way that a typical clay soil does. And so the roots still have access to oxygen. But it retains that ability of clay to hold water in the Summer. It’s a great soil for growing grapes on. It is very consistent throughout the hill. Where you have lots of different layers of stuff, sort of a layer cake of hard and soft, water can move in interesting and unpredictable ways. In some places where there hasn’t been a spring in 20 years might suddenly become one Winter very wet. In other places where I’ve managed that’s actually been somewhat of a problem. A part of the vineyard that wasn’t very vigorous before, and which you’re farming in a certain way, suddenly it has all this water one Summer. You then have to back off what you’re doing there, but then down on the other end, that’s gotten a little bit dryer. That’s one of the things Dad was looking for in a vineyard site in the Dundee Hills.
The Dundee Hills are composed principally of this material?
JL Yes. We’ll actually walk down and I can show you the other major soil. It’s like at the base of the Dundee Hills there is a kind of bathtub ring of Missoula floods soil.
Do you do much green harvesting?
JL Well, it depends on what the natural loads are. We are at a very wide spacing here. When my Dad came up here the common spacing he’d been trained to employ was 12 X 10. So, when he came to Oregon he was really going to pull it together and do hard-core Burgundian spacing. He narrowed it up to 10 X 6, which is now, of course, considered Combine spacing. But each one of these plants is stretched very wide. We ask each plant to give us a lot of fruit. But we also give each plant an enormous amount of resource. So, Dad basically determined this balance between how much we were giving the plant and how much we were asking of it in order to get what turns out to have been, intuitively, a really dialed-in balance.
If you look at these canes, none of the canes are bigger than my little finger. That’s really what you’re looking for. When you start getting thumb-sized canes, they’re shooting off secondaries all over the place; they start to clog the canopy; you’re not getting the sort of dappling effect; the clusters don’t have good exposure. And the plant invests more heavily in developing infrastructure in the form of canes than it does in actually ripening fruit. What we look for in the vineyard is this innate balance. And an innate yield level. These naturally yield about 2 1/4 tons an acre. We might come through and take off a little wing here and there. And that will get us down to 2. So we’re not having to physically shove the vines hard in order to get them to give us ripe, balanced fruit. It’s kinda been happening from the way the vineyard’s been structured since the get-go.
Is this a sulphur residue?
JL It’s sulphur and milk whey. The milk whey is actually a mildewcide. We used to use a traditional Bordeaux mix, but I don’t really like copper. It’s not good for people, it’s not good for the soil; so we replaced copper with milk whey. And we’ve seen improved health in the vineyards. Not what comes out of the sprayer smells like a latte! Two benefits. (laughs)
Jason then does a bit of work.
JL This was my first job in the vineyard. It’s called suckering. I was never sure if the sucker was the the thing growing off the vine or the guy doing it. There are lots to go. The guys were actually suckering and I said, “You know what? This is the perfect time to do some cane straightening.” So what we’ve done is pulled the canes up, tighten the catch wires together, tied each one. So we’re getting a good, upright canopy, which means we’ll get good airflow, good exposure, good spray penetration.
What is the vineyard’s orientation? North/South?
JL It’s actually East/West. One of the things Dad experimented with was which orientation works best. It’s funny. East/West, back in the 70s, he didn’t like very much because it was too cold. But in the era of global warming we get some of our best fruit from these East/West vines. He didn’t know it but he was preparing us for the future.
Was he an exacting records keeper? Did he record temperatures 3 times a day, take note of every rainfall?
JL Yes. We have really good historical notes. Unfortunately they are all on these 3X5 cards that are interspersed with his daily to-do lists and stuff. So he was able to go back and find anything. But if you go back into his card index it’s like… How did you do that? (laughs)
So, in other words, you’d have a complete record of climate data and changes in these particular vineyards…
JL Yeah. We’ve actually worked with a scientist up at the University of Washington who is looking at the oxygen isotope ratio in library wines to try and extract climate signals based on these wines. Really interesting stuff. Gordon Holtgrieve is his name.
Most of the vineyard here was planted between 1967 and 1974. The first vines were planted in 1966. There is a last block planted at Eyrie, in 1984. Because it is a due West facing slope, it is less than ideal. But we had a vineyard manager at the time who said, “Well, let’s just fill it in.”
These are actually the first rows right here. These are the ones my Mom and Dad laid out on their honeymoon. This is Muscat Ottonel. It is kind of a shy-bearing white varietal, something we have a cult following for. Some years we make 100 cases, in others we make 25. It depends on what it gives us.
I see that a couple have given up the ghost.
JL Yeah. Eutypa is kind of an issue with these older vines.
And that tree right there is the tree that is on the label. So when my folks were planting this vineyard there were a pair of hawks nesting up there. At the time there was a filbert orchard on the back side, so there were lots of squirrels for the hawks to eat. And they were hanging out there building their nest, and my folks were, you know, planting their vines, having their kids, and building their nest — that’s why they named it the Eyrie Vineyards. An eyrie is a hawk’s nest.
We just went through here and mowed last week. Our little wheel cutters, we had the wheels made big so they won’t go in too tight to the trunk. We come through here after the grass dries out. It gets it out of the fruit zone. But you know, when everything is up you can see what kind of diversity there is.
In California when we see grass standing this tall we often look for the nest spittle of leaf hoppers, a vector of diseases.
JL Yeah. The glassy-winged sharpshooter is definitely a concern up here. We find it in nursery stock from time to time, but it hasn’t actually naturalized. I need to knock on some wood here! But we’ve been lucky so far.
JL Not an imposing sight after a long wet Spring; but this is the first Pinot Gris planted in the United States. When Dad came up here from Davis he talked somebody into letting him get 160 from the research vineyard there. He planted the cuttings in a temporary plot down in Corvalis ‘65. It took him a year to find this spot. And then he dug up the vines he’d planted in Corvalis and brought them back up here. And this is now their home.
Do you get a lot of rabbits and wild boar? Deer?
JL No. Back in the day they used to be an issue. But now the deer all have other vineyards to eat. They don’t pick on us anymore. Even the birds aren’t the problem they used to be. I think it’s because there are so many more vineyards, and unfortunately, there is now a lot less habitat for wildlife. It just doesn’t migrate through much anymore. They used to have on the next hillside over a herd of elk. There were bear sighted in there, cougar and bobcat. The locals shot all the elk. And then they clear-cut the forest that the elk were living in to plant vineyards… And so we really haven’t nearly the wildlife anymore. The critters need continuous habitat. On the top of the hill we get a little deer damage, and a little bit on the very bottom of the vineyard.
We walk to a block of Chardonnay. Here Jason shows me the diversity of of the vineyard ground cover courtesy of the mower’s broken snap ring.
JL Here we’ve got panicum grass, wild oats, not sure what this is… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… just within this little 6 foot area we’ve got 6 species of grass. And then we have the broadleaf forbs, here’s clover… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, that’s lactuca, 6, 7, 8…, so 8 different forbs in this same area. Oh, I forgot the huge one I’m standing over, 9. And that’s just today. There is this whole cycle that happens throughout the year as new things come in. So this is a really important part of our viticulture.
We venture down to the lowest elevation in the vineyard. As if on cue, a female hawk soars overhead. Her cries, clearly audible on my recorder, punctuated our sentences for the next few minutes.
JL All the vineyards around us have been torn out and replanted because of phylloxera. But not ours. We’re right next to the first vineyard in the state to have it, as far as we know. Yet we’re still able to hang on to these vines. It’s present here, but we’re able to keep it to a dull roar. I think it has a lot to do with the dynamic that we create by having these other plants here.
And this is something your father practiced from the very beginning…
JL Yeah. He used to cultivate under the vines. We always left cover between. One other thing he did was occasionally to just mow under the vines. But then he went back to cultivation for a while. When I came back I said let’s get back to mowing again. I really like that approach. So that is what we’ve been doing ever since.
What we need is a friendly gopher to give us a soil sample here… You can see that we’ve pretty much got the same stuff here. This soil is getting a little browner. So we’re basically right at the bathtub ring where the Woodburn soil from the Missoula flood meets the Jory soil. And as we have walk down the row here you can see that we’ve much more brown here, much more friable. We’re right in the middle of this little chevron of Woodburn soil that comes up the hill here.
The skies are overcast, but very still. No shadows are thrown.
So what does this particular cloud configuration suggest? In California we might think rain.
JL It suggests more cussing and praying. (laughs) There might be rain coming but it kind of looks like that all day. So once the clouds have made the jump over the coast range there, they must be rung out enough so as not to drop on us. When we’ll see rain is when they start to stack up against the Cascades. Then the whole ceiling fills in.
The hawk’s cry is relentless. One is circling right above our heads.
JL So you can see where the inspiration for the label came from!
Can you imagine being out here, working one day and having those hawks screaming; maybe even seeing them mate. A horrifying sight!
JL No kidding! Watch out! And I’m about to have teenagers in the household. (laughs)
There’s a lot of work that’s been done here…
JL And to maintain it every year. We visit each one of these vines and tend them by hand between 13 and 14 times. I’m the closest person to full time in the winery. I don’t spend nearly as much time there as I’d like to. But we’ve got 6 full time people in the vineyard. That shows where are priorities are.
Are the vineyard folk Spanish speakers in the main?
JL Yes. There are all US citizens. Like I said, our foreman’s been with us since 1984. Our most recent hire was in 1997. We’re able to keep people around for a good long time. They know every vine. You don’t have to go in and look around to figure out what average thing you should do in a block and say, “Do it this way.” Because they are so good in understanding each vine individually. They are really farming at a vine to vine level. That’s ideal.
Then they come into the winery during harvest. I mean, I hire an intern every now and then, but for the most part the work is done by the guys in the vineyard. The winemaking informs the vineyard work. The vineyard work informs the winemaking. It’s a really great closed cycle for the people in the vineyard to also to be making the wine.
Do they have healthcare?
JL Oh, yeah. We give them full benefits. We do hire temporary work during the year, and a lot of the wineries in Oregon have gotten together to form a group called SALUD which is a non-profit dedicated to providing healthcare for the more transient portion of the workforce. There are mobile clinics that come out to the vineyards. If people have issues they are taken care of. We had an open heart surgery completely paid for by SALUD last year, as well as just dental and visual, and cholesterol, you know, just regular check-ups.
We turn to make our way back up the slope.
JL In 1979 a friend of my Dad’s who lived in Burgundy encouraged him to send her some bottles of wine for her to enter into an international wine competition. Dad looked around his cellar, and the Pinot Noir he was really proudest of came from 10 rows of vines down here at the bottom of the vineyard. He called it the South Block. He made his first dedicated South Block cuvée in 1975. These are the rows. It’s all Wädenswil clone. This is the Pinot I was talking about that tends to be a little more floppy, need more support.
I noticed in the winery, in the tasting room, there was a Pinot Meunier. Where does that fruit come from?
JL Right here. We have a tiny block, just a few rows.
Have you ever thought of playing around with a sparkler?
JL I’d like to. I’ve got the base wines in barrel, a rosé Pinot Meunier we made last year, it was our 40th harvest. i thought, well, we’ll do something fun and commemorative. But I don’t quite know how to go from the base wine phase to the sparkling wine phase in anything less than an industrial level. I need to talk to somebody who understands sparkling wine production on a smaller scale. If you know of anybody, I’d appreciate it.
I know a couple of people I could write.
JL So our first question here is how many of these are going to bloom. We can, with the kind of weather we’ve been having, and in spite of making sure we’re on top of the spray, we can get mildew development underneath the cap that will cause the berry to shrivel. Everything here looks really healthy and green, so I’m feeling pretty positive about this. But often by this time of the year these caps are starting to brown off and split at the bottom. They’ll start to fall away; that’s when pollination starts to happen. These caps can come off and we’ll have rain that totally blocks pollination. We can end up with 30% of the berries on this cluster actually setting fruit. So we wait to make any decisions about thinning until then.
Oddly, I’m reminded of a conversation I recently had with Ken Burnap, the founder of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard. I adore that man. In any event, he told me about Randall Graham stealing canes from the vineyard of Romanée-Conti and smuggling them into the US in his dirty socks.
JL I have a theory. Everybody in Oregon seems to have a row or two of a Romanée-Conti suitcase clone.
You’re kidding! It’s like most Americans have a Native American background? (laughs)
JL Exactly! But I’ve never heard of anybody actually making a wine from those canes decent enough so that they would graft over a bunch of stuff to it. You know? My theory is that at Romanée-Conti all around the edges of their vineyards they plant the crappiest Pinot clone they can find just to sandbag all the vintners coming in there to steal the cuttings!
Oh, that’s funny. You might be right! What do you think about wine blogger, by the way?
JL What I love blogging in general is that it has really decentralized the power structure of how people think about wine. This is important. Everybody’s a critic, that’s fine. At least everybody is thinking about it and not taking everything without analysis from an accepted mouthpiece. I really support that. It’s a refreshing change. I think it’s rocked the established media back on its heels and made it be more responsive and thoughtful to its readership and to the wines they’re tasting.
We arrive back at the car to return to McMinnville. The hawk begins to more loudly exult as though it alone had driven us from the vineyard. My conversation with Jason continues on for another two hours. He is a very generous man. A talented man. A happy family man. Not sure there is anything more to say.
Admin
Greybeard writes…
The Wine News for June saw Auction Houses breathing sigh of relief at the beginning of the month as a New York Appellate court ruled that Bill Koch may not sue Acker Merrall and Condit over alleged counterfeit bottles bought by the Billionaire collector, although Koch’s representatives said they’d appeal the decision and this could end up in the Supreme Court. For an insight into Koch’s motives there’s a good article on Bloomberg by Elin McCoy from February this year.
Over to Europe and the controversial Mosel Bridge looks like it is going ahead despite continuing protests. UK daily newspapers The Telegraph and The Independent carried similar articles, with the Independent also posting an emotional piece by Hugh Johnson, one of the bridges most vocal opponents.
Across the border in France and there were changes to two Rhône wine regions. Fed up with being associated with the bad press of the Tricastin Nuclear Power Plant, especially after the 2008 Uranium leak, the Côtes du Tricastin appellation, founded in 1973, has now become AOP (Appellation d’Origine Protégé) Grignan-Les Adhemar, while the renowned Rasteau region has finally been promoted to the ranks of the Crus des Côtes du Rhône, joining Condrieu, Châteauneuf du Pape, St. Joseph and others nearly a decade since its application.
The new UK Coalition government’s “Emergency Budget” in June did not change the already high Excise Duty for wines, much to the relief of the wine buying public (well, me anyway!), however, the increase of VAT from 17.5 to 20% in January 2011 will see prices rise accordingly. We already have one of the highest rates all European countries for wine taxes – working out at £1.69 ($2.50) for most still wines, £2.16 ($3.25) for sparkling and £2.25 ($3.40) for fortified – so any additional targeted taxes will be keenly felt.
As for me, one event at the beginning of the month took centre stage – the inaugural North East Wine Festival (NEWF) held in the quiet Northumberland country town of Corbridge on Friday 4th and Saturday 5th June. The weather surprised everyone and remained perfect for the open air event; a good dose of sunshine and no rain to scare off potential visitors. Saying that, attendance was not as high as hoped for with only about 350 on the Friday and approaching 800 on the Saturday, however, retailers I talked to at the end of the show seemed happy that they’d more than covered their costs and spread the word about their wines to a group of new people.
I gave a talk on both days entitled “The World Wine Web” on how to use the internet to get what you want out of wine, discussing a range of useful web based resources and links – although targeted for the North East of England you can download a PDF of the handout sheet for a taste of my first ever public speaking roll!
Of the other speakers I really enjoyed Massimo de Nardo’s engaging description of Prosecco production at his Fasol Menin winery in Valdobbiadene, while Ian Cobham, ex-winemaker and now Sommelier at the Hotel du Vin in Newcastle, kept us all guessing with a blind tasting session as part of his presentation on understanding wine.
Over both days the 11 attending retailers poured their way through hundreds of bottles, but what really made the festival were the three local eateries who set up mobile kitchens and cooked a delicious selection of snacks and light meals to be eaten in the open air Cafe environment at the tables laid out between the marquees.
Bouchon Bistrot, winner of the Best French Restaurant on Gordon Ramsay’s “The F Word” TV show last year, put together a Gallic inspired menu with wines by local stalwart Michael Jobling – the delightful Chicken liver Parfait with Onion Compote & Cornichons was my only real food on day 1.
Renowned local Chef Terry Laybourne of Café 21 was behind the pass at the temporarily renamed Casa 21 with a selection of delicious Tapas dishes accompanied by wines from Spanish Spirit, the event organiser.
Finally the Feathers Inn, one of the best Gastro-Pubs in the region, put on a menu including the incredibly popular Lindisfarne Oysters and a damn fine cheese board.
My star wines of the festival were;
* Patricius 2007 Dry Furmit (£10.99. Carruthers & Kent). This elegant dry Hungarian white had a honeyed floral nose and textured, full bodied mouthfeel – another delicious example of a style I’ve yet to have a bad example of.
* Amayna 2007 Barrel Fermented Sauvignon Blanc (£19.49. Carruthers & Kent). This was a thick, fruity wine with nutty complexity – savoury and dry but suffering from 14.5% alcohol and its hefty price tag.
* Morgado Sta Catherina, Quinta da Romeira Vinho Btanco (oaked Arinto) (£16.15. PortoVino). Another oaked white, this time from Portugal’s Arinto grape, the Morgado was light and inviting with a lemon sherbert taste, dry mid-palate and long, almost sweet finish.
* Domaine Pattes Loup 2007 Chablis (£12.95. Tyne Wines). A good example of the Chablis style; clean and flinty with a refreshing citrus fruit aspect, this was an uplifting wine with a full mid-palate, although the finish was a little short.
* Cossetti 2004 “Il Conteso” Nebbiolo D’Alba (£18. Castello). A fruity and complex Nebbiolo with a herb and tar nose, strong tannins and a very long finish. This has been nicknamed the “Baby Barolo” with good cause, as good as many a Barolo in the £20-£25 range.
* Latium Morini 2003 Campo Leon Amarone della Valpolicella (£29. The Hop, The Vine). Possibly the most expensive wine of the festival this had a smoky, savoury nose with some cherry wood. In the mouth it was juicy with lots of fruit and a very, very long finish. Although the tannins were fine they were also in abundance and a few more years would soften and improve the wine. At 16% abv this was a big wine in every sense, however, the price tag puts this well out of many people’s range.
* Château Vespeille 2007 Muscat de Rivesaltes Vin Doux Natural (£6.70. Michael Jobling). This wasn’t even on the lists as Michael poured the wine as part of his Food & Wine pairing presentation on the Saturday. The floral, uplifting nose, thick texture (but not cloying) and very long finish marked this out as one of the better sweet wines available on the day and a QPR hero as well!
* Jordan 2008 Mellifera Noble Late Harvest Riesling (£10.75. Proteas Wines). A decadent delight, this candied Botrytis wine oozed richness, with a mouth-coating texture but acidity to balance the high sugar content – one for the hedonists!
* Quinta do Infantado 2004 LBV Port (£18.15. PortoVino). This is what every LBV should be – a hint of sweetness and the character of a Vintage Port. The nose was more of a rich, deep red with plenty of liquorice, while in the mouth there were firm tannins and juicy complexity.
The dates for next year’s Festival have already been announced as 3rd & 4th June 2011, this time with a possible 3rd day on Sunday 5th, so if you’re anywhere near the North East of England then put it into your diary and I’ll see you there!
As if one major event for the month wasn’t enough the following weekend had a large commercial tasting organised by Newcastle Wine School as part of the Newcastle and Gateshead EAT festival. The usual suspects were present, with most of the NEWF independent retailers plus the addition of local store Fenwick and the National chains Oddbins and Majestic.
There were no talks, food or the luxury of a whole day to browse the offerings here, it was the quick-fire taste and move format with a deadline to work to. Naturally I avoided wines I’d had from the week before and found a few more gems worthy of mention;
* Cossetti 2007 Roero Arneis (£18. Castello). A wonderful Italian white with a deep, musky nose which pulls you in. A textured mouthful, a little oily with a creamy buttery finish.
* Lammershoek 2007 Roulette Blanc (Proteas Wines). Extremely perfumed nose with some honey & toasty oak. Slow to start but a full mouthfeel with a long honey finish with this Cheni-Blanc, Chardonnay, Viognier blend.
* Alpha Domus 2008 Viognier (Fenwick). Herbal nose with a little rubber and a wonderful texture; smooth & rich, medium dry with a lot of subtle flavours.
* Casa Ermelinda 2006 Quinta da Mimosa (PortoVino). This fruity red was flying off the shelves and had a beautiful warm nose with some liquorice, crying out “sunshine”. I found it a little light in the mouth, very smooth on palate with subtle tannins on the finish and a savoury aspect – an easy drinking wine but it didn’t live up to the promise of the nose.
* Cantina Mesa 2008 Prima Scuro (Carruthers & Kent) This Sardinian Cannonau (Grenache) had a savoury, roasted herbs nose and was smooth with good acidity. Relatively light bodied it was delicious with a range of complex flavours and tannin, one to look out for and for £10.99 I’m definitely getting a bottle or two.
* Priests Hill 2009 Pinot Grigio (Michael Jobling). For only £5.52 this was the best white QPR by the Hungarian label, part of the Hilltop group. It had a fruity nose and, while not thought-provoking or complex, was very, very quaffable.
* Mountain Pass 2008 Pinot Noir (Fenwick). This took best red QPR at only £5.93 after Fenwick picked up a job lot of cases from the defunct First Quench group. This Victorian Pinot Noir was made by Yering Station and had a savoury nose with a little mushroom, was light & smooth in the mouth with a touch of sweet tannin and was an absolute bargain.
* Veiga Serantes 2008 Albarino (Spanish Spirit). This had a subtle lemony nose and light texture – a very good example of Albarino but, at £12.99, was unfortunately also a typical price for this fashionable grape which is becoming expensive to taste.
I’m not going to put any detail on June’s NEWTS premium South American tasting as it received a full article of its own a few weeks ago, other than to say my predictions for the World Cup proved way off mark! As I was not sent off anywhere with work there are no tales of exotic restaurants or wine exploits either, so I’ll finish off the post with the usual round up of bottles bought using my hard earned cash and consumed in the privacy of my humble home.
June saw the final flourish of my Italian White Wine buying quest with 2 more bottles, the Cossetto 2008 Roero Arneis and Della Valle Isarco 2008 Müller Thurgau, added to the Deltetto 2008 Favorita Sarvai, alta Battistina 2009 Gavi, Borgo San Michele 2005 Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio and 2005 Greco di Tufo dei Feudi di San Gregorio which I bought in May. Now all I have to do is start drinking some of them! An Australian oaked Chardonnay, the McGuigan 2009 Bin No. 156, and an Argentinean Torrontés from Vinalba concluded the whites for the month and only one red made its way home with me, a simple 2003 Grenache blend from the Languedoc destined for uncomplicated drinking within the month.
The unusual weather (i.e. not raining) meant that it was time for the first BBQ of the year and what else could there be for a pleasant evening sitting out on the patio but a Rosé? The fruity Jacob’s Creek 2007 Shiraz Rosé was an uncomplicated sipper to complement with the various chargrilled vegetables and ribs. Most of the rest of the bottles opened during the month were uncomplicated or uninspiring, except for Salentein’s 2004 MCM, a Malbec, Cabernet, Merlot blend which had an earthy, almost animal nose with smooth, integrated tannins and a smoky, sweet complexity which made it a pleasure to drink.
July promises to be equally interesting with two blind tastings to detail amongst the usual background noise. Until then, Slainte!
Greybeard
Taken by a couple of articles that have recently appeared in the Palate Press on both the history and the commercial potential for American indigenous grape varieties, I did what anyone would do: I turned to Jack Keller, author of the site Winemaking, and perhaps the net’s first fermented beverages blog, Jack Keller’s WineBlog. Though humility forbids him from saying it, I have no problem calling him one of America’s leading voices on all things fermentable. And as an accomplished, award-winning home winemaker, he brings to the discussion his considerable experience with the making of fruit, grape, dandelion, even grass wines! He is a terrific resource for information and knowledge, both the arcane and the indispensable. The Michael Broadbent, if you will, of our indigenous and fruit wines. For our purposes here, he sheds significant light upon the questions I put to him.
In addition to visiting his websites, for more information please see my interview with the gentleman from the Fall of 2008.
1) Would you say a bit about the historical eclipse of America’s indigenous grape varieties by Vitis vinifera?
Jack Keller Ken, from the earliest days, I think every generation of Europeans who came to America brought with them a memory of wine that was formed almost exclusively around their homeland’s varieties of V. vinifera. It was and still is, after all, the overwhelmingly dominant grape on the western half of the Eurasian landmass and by import throughout North and South Africa, Australia, South America, and the Golden State. Sure, the more common among the immigrants possibly also had experience with elderberry, greengage, apple, blackberry and other homemade country wines, but there wasn’t really anything in Europe equivalent to the vast numbers of American native grapes.
With a V. vinifera memory, immigrants were of course disappointed in the very different flavors obtained from wild American grapes. However, the old expression “any port is welcome in a storm” also applies to wine. Oddly flavored wine was vastly preferred to no wine at all. Besides, for those who were born in American or came here very young, they had no memory of V. vinifera, American grapes made perfectly acceptable wine. Until, that is, the second half of the twentieth century, when Madison Avenue began to tell us what was and what wasn’t acceptable.
The wild grape of Europe, V. sylvestris, is somewhat analogous to American grapes in that both are dioecious, bearing male and female flowers on separate plants. If you walk through the forests of America where grapes grow, you see many vines that are male and devoid of fruit. V. vinifera, with hermaphroditic flowers, clearly would be favored in the garden or on the farm for that reason alone. But that is but a bonus. The real draw to V. vinifera is the generally superior flavors of the juice and it’s fermented byproduct over any other grape species on the planet. Even an inferior V. vinifera variety is unquestionably superior to the best V. monticola, V. mustangensis, V. acerifolia, V. arizonica, V. girdiana, V. vulpina, V. cinerea, etc. While one can get used to wines from these grapes, they are certainly not the best of the American native species.
The better American indigenous species, V. labrusca, V. aestivalis, V. riparia, and even V. rotundifolia have all produced some outstanding varieties. But, with the exception of V. rotundifolia (muscadine), the vast majority of the commercially successful “American” grapes all seem to have a little V. vinifera in their genes. Concord, Catawba, Alexander, Niagara, Delaware, Norton (or Cynthiana, if you prefer), and Ives are but a few that have had long lasting commercial success, and all but one of those had a European pollinator in its distant past. And then there are the muscadines — Scuppernong, Noble, Scarlett, Nesbitt, Summit, Carlos, Ison, Magnolia, Tara, and so on.
Certainly you can say these wines have been eclipsed by V. vinifera wines, but they were never in the same league at all. Even so, they have their place. Personally, I would prefer a good Ives Noir to an average V. vinifera, and there are a lot of average V. vinifera wines out there.
2) Tell us something of the quality of wines the home winemaker can achieve with both vinifera and native grapes, but also of various fruits.
JK I have been judging home wine competitions for a long time. I distinctly remember the first homemade wine I ever scored a perfect 20 (out of 20 possible). It was a black raspberry with a little elderberry in it, and it was superb. The beauty of that wine was that had I not known I was drinking a black rasp with elder, I’d have thought I was drinking a very well made Zinfandel.
The best wines I have personally ever made were almost all non-grape wines — dandelion, Marion blackberry, Key lime, Loganberry, black currant, pomegranate, mangosteen, black raspberry, Boysenberry, cherry, and (you’re not going to believe this…) beet. Oh, I’ve made more than a few unforgettable grape wines too, but I like to field blend indigenous grapes and produce something no one has ever tasted before. Probably my very best was a blend of V. mustangensis, V. cinerea var. helleri, V. monticola, and V. vulpina, and it was smooth but crisp and utterly delicious. I could never make it again because I just filled the press with what I had, but of course I’ll try.
Having said all of that, I am not the best home winemaker I know. I think I am pretty good, but I know people who make wines that put mine to shame. I consider it an achievement when I can steal a Best of Show or Grand Champion from them.
I think some of the best wines and worse wines I have ever tasted were made from the same fruit or berries. You can make an absolutely delightful wine from peaches, for example, but if your method is inappropriate or you use under-ripe fruit or simply not enough fruit it can be worse than bad. The best eating plums you can find might make pitiful wine, but a bucket full of small, tart, wild sand plums can be transformed into the most delicious wine you have tasted. The same can be said of grapes. The best table grapes generally make poor wine. Have you ever eaten a bunch of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes? Not very appealing, but oh, what wine!
Native grapes present similar challenges. Many have unusual aromas or flavors associated with their species. These are not necessarily disagreeable, although they might be, but they certainly are unusual. Every winemaker knows that the wine almost certainly will not taste like the fruit from which it was made, but it will carry certain characteristics of the fruit into the wine. Learning what will and what will not be carried into the wine is one of the skills that separate really good winemakers from the rest. Put another way, knowing what the ingredients will taste like when combined and then baked or cooked is what separates chefs from mere cooks.
V. vinifera varieties present the same problem, but we have tens of thousands of examples of finished product from which to learn. With most native grapes and a lot of different fruit, you have to make the wines to learn what is possible and what is not. Learning how to manipulate what nature offers so as to bring out desirables while shedding, masking or neutralizing undesirables is what turns the average chef into the master craftsman.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the potential quality of native grape wines is really dependent on the winemaker’s skills. The same can be said of V. vinifera wines, but most viniferas are much more forgiving than are the natives. You have to be a pretty bad winemaker to screw up a batch of Merlot, but you have to be a pretty good winemaker to coax a good wine out of V. mustangensis or V. rupestris.
Country wines present different challenges, but these are basically challenges of ingredient selection and chemistry, solved by a combination of knowledge and good winemaking techniques. Just as tart plums make better wine than most table plum cultivars, tart cider apples make far superior wine than do sweet eating apples. You have to select the right ingredients and then work with the chemistry that comes with them. The results can be both surprising and delightful.
If you’ve ever eaten raw cranberries, the idea of making wine from them might seem like a waste of time and effort. But the truth is that cranberry wine served in a blind tasting will be mistaken for grape wine — usually white Zinfandel — almost every time. Few other fruit or berry wines will do this, but the beauty is what each actually tastes like once fermented. Banana wine will not taste like banana unless the winemaker adds banana extract, in which case it will taste like adulterated banana wine.
The things to remember with country wines is that they are not grape wines, should never be compared to grape wines, and should be judged by what they present — not what you expect. My wife and I were in a little winery outside of Kalamazoo and we were luxuriating in the enjoyment of one of the best cherry wines we’d ever tasted when a woman complained in a very loud, shrill voice, “This doesn’t taste like any wine I’VE ever tasted!” You can go through life complaining and being unhappy or you can just relax and enjoy the moment.
What I love about home winemakers is that they experiment. It doesn’t always work out for the better, and folks with good manners will never let their failures cross the lips of a guest. But those successes, those are where the next greatest thing might be found. My wife’s favorite wine is a wine I learned how to make from Martin Benke called Key Lime-A-Rita, which is basically fermented Key Limeade and Triple Sec, and yes, it tastes more like a Margarita than a wine. Some winemaker down in Florida is going to read my blog one day, give Key Lime-A-Rita a try, and sell a thousand cases.
3) What are the indigenous varieties which show the greatest promise for commercial success?
JK Down here in Texas we have a native grape called mustang that is probably the worst tasting grape you’d never want to try, but good winemakers have been making some terrific wines from that sucker for generations. Mustang is a real challenge, but if you can make good wines from that grape you can probably make exceptional wines out of anything else. I’m not saying mustang has great commercial promise, but at least two wineries in Texas sell an awful lot of it.
The reason I mentioned mustang first off is to make clear that a good winemaker can make good wine out of any grape. The problem with many indigenous grapes is that they bear too little fruit to be commercially viable or are too vigorous to be controlled in a vineyard setting. Those that bear well and can be managed on the trellis have largely been exploited in breeding programs or in niche markets.
There are a lot of old grapes — heirloom varieties, if you will — that were once popular but would now be extinct if not for a few breeders, memorial vineyards, enthusiasts, and the clonal germplasm repositories at Geneva, NY and Davis, CA. The ones I am referring to are mostly hybrids of the native species, but some do indeed have at least some V. vinifera genes. From this vast storehouse are some exceptional grapes that make exceptional wines, but would you plant a few acres of Herbemont, Lenoir, Hidalgo, Ives, Brilliant, Lindley, Elvira, Blondin, Clinton, Elvicand, Valhallah, Hopkins, Bailey, Husmann, Munson, or XLNTA when customers are still asking for Merlot? It would take a gutsy person to do so, but there are some such folks out there. I have tasted commercial wines of most of these grapes (still looking for Elvicand and Hopkins). Most of these grapes will grow fine down here in the Pierces Disease belt (PD), where V. vinifera bears two crops before dying.
The oldest continuously operated winery in Texas is Val Verde Winery in Del Rio. Their flagship grape is Lenoir, a.k.a. Black Spanish, and they make a darned good table wine and a highly respected (and a bit pricey) port from this grape. They also make a half-dozen V. vinifera wines, but I would bet my soul that they buy that juice from some place where those grapes will grow. And that’s okay. They have to compete, and even though Robert Parker is never going to mention Val Verde Winery (they grow that Lenoir grape!), he does seem to mention all the other wines they sell and that works in their favor.
The truth is that I don’t really know which indigenous species or varieties show the greatest promise for commercialization, but there is some good potential out there. I prefer the blends to the varietals in both vinifera and indigenous wines, so I am only limited by what I can find out there.
4) I believe the time is ripe for the expansion of fruit wines into the market, still and sparkling. As with crafted beers, there is a commercial niche high quality fruit wines can create. Your thoughts?
JK Ken, I think the expansion is well under way. In certain portions of Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, every other winery offers a stable of fruit and berry wines, both still and sparkling. I was amazed how good sparkling cherry and raspberry can be. It had simply never occurred to me to make these wines.
Throughout the South you will find many, many commercial wineries offering wines from every fruit grown regionally, including pawpaw, mayhaw, huckleberry, blueberry, elderberry, all varieties of blackberry, currants, star fruit, Clementines, and so on.
Just recently a friend of mine living in the Sierras above Oroville commented on a winery in Chico that makes blackberry, cherry, cranberry, and elderberry wines, as well as a dry mead he likes.
When I lived in San Francisco, on my jaunts down home to San Bernardino I always stopped at a place in Pacheco Valley called Casa de Fruta and picked up a few bottles of pomegranate, raspberry and apricot wines. When down your way, I always tried to stop at Chaucer’s Winery in Soquel, CA, and pick up a bottle of Olallieberry wine, arguably the best blackberry that ever grew, and a bottle of raspberry mead.
I think the wines have been here for a long time. What has happened, though, is that the commercial wine world, especially in California, is 99.9% invested in V. vinifera and that is what rules the roost. Wine writers perpetuate the “If it isn’t vinifera, it isn’t wine” mantra by completely ignoring non-vinifera and non-grape wines. In the PD belt of the South, where V. vinifera vines only survive for 3-5 years, non-vinifera grapes are widely grown and their wines widely consumed. Indeed, muscadine is the grape of the South, and people who drink muscadine have no problem with fruit wines.
5) What are the cultural, practical and gustatory obstacles to the commercial success of fruit and non-vinifera wines?
JK I think there are few gustatory obstacles. Yes, cherry wines will never taste like any wine that rude woman in Kalamazoo has ever drank, but every good cherry wines tastes, well, good. And if truth be told, I have never met a person that didn’t like blackberry wine. But, if you don’t like fruit, well, then you might want to stick to beer.
On a practical level, the shelf life of fruit wines is comparatively short. If they don’t sell quickly, they probably won’t sell. But fruit wines are almost always shoved into the corner with the lowest traffic in the store because the big money controls the high traffic areas. You have to go looking for fruit wines to even find them, and you won’t go looking if you don’t know they are there. When is the last time you saw an ad or commercial — or just a mention in a movie or TV series — for a fruit or berry wine?
So that brings us to the cultural obstacles. I think most of the above is relevant here, from Robert Parker and all the Parker-wannabes, to the farmer who isn’t going to take a chance on a vine that will grow but which almost no one still living has ever heard of. The truth is that it is a V. vinifera wine world and in America it is all influenced by two or three small valleys in northern California.
I talked to a grower 12-14 years ago who was losing all his vines to Pierces Disease. He asked the agricultural extension agent, who was there at that moment, when was someone going to put some real money into solving the PD problem. The agent said, “When PD reaches California the money will flow.” He was right. PD has reached California and there are big bucks flowing into PD research. But that too is part of the cultural obstacle. PD wasn’t a problem as long as it was just wiping out mom and pop vineyards in the South. But when it threatens Big Wine’s vineyards, then it becomes worthy of notice.
Now, it may just turn out that there isn’t a solution to PD. If that comes to past (and I sincerely hope that it doesn’t), then all those native hybrids I mentioned earlier will start looking really good because many of them are PD tolerant and some are outright resistant. Andy Walker and many others at UC-Davis and elsewhere are looking into that resistance and the genes that may be responsible for it. Until the actual genes responsible are identified and spliced, the next best approach is to cross-breed resistance from the natives into V. vinifera. Once you do that, you then cross back to vinifera repeatedly until you have just enough residual resistance to protect the vinifera without messing up the flavor too much with that pesky American muck. It’s a perfectly understandable approach. Another approach would be to simply plant Lenoir, or Herbemont, or Bailey, or….
Having spent megatons of money convincing Americans that they are mere commoners if they don’t drink toasted oaked Chardonnay, it would be, well, insincere — would it not? — to retrain the palate to like something less noble. God forbid we should stoop to anything so low as Carlos muscadine, persimmon wine or — dare I say it? — Key Lime-A-Rita.
So, bottom line, my interest is in the clear-headed promotion of commercial alternatives to Vitis vinifera. I have enjoyed a number of pear and apple-based wines recently, and was blown away by the quality. It seems to me that the success of off-dry Rieslings, for example, the dumbing down, the homogenization of vinifera wines, especially at lower price points (the Two Buck Chuck Effect!), combined with new marketing niches now possible because of the revolution of crafted beers, all dovetail into new opportunities for non-vinifera expressions.
JK Ken, I couldn’t agree more with your last opinion. Despite the best efforts of Big Wine to dictate what we should like, the truth is that not all people are sheep. You can burn out on any taste after a while. The success of all those soft drinks on the cola aisle is based on the fact that people get tired of Coke or Pepsi or 7-Up all the time. The same is true of wines. But I fear Big Wine is trying to control that desire for diversity.
Take, for example, Arbor Mist’s fruit flavored vinifera wines. I counted 11 different flavors the other day at the market, and their success validates your instincts. There is a niche out there for fruit wines and Arbor Mist is jumping in to fill it. But why not sell the real fruit wine? Why flavor Merlot with blackberry when you could sell blackberry wine? The truth probably has something to do with a glut of grapes on the market. Merlot is cheap. If it wasn’t, there wouldn’t be a Two-Buck Chuck Merlot.
Now, I do understand why there is at least some grape in most fruit wines. Having made the real McCoy of every wine Arbor Mist offers, I will be the first to point out that most fruit wines are light in body. I myself usually add about 12-20% grape juice by volume to my fruit musts to thicken that lightness. But the difference between adding fruit flavors to vinifera wines or vinifera to fruit wines actually is significant. Arbor Mist Peach Chardonnay tastes too peachy, like that banana wine adulterated with banana extract. The consumer who tastes it and then tastes an excellent, real peach wine may well be disappointed in the real thing. Arbor Mist is tricking the consumer into tasting what he or she expects peach wine to taste like rather than presenting the real flavor of peach wine. This, in the long run, may well work against the real fruit wine producers.
You mentioned the Two-Buck Chuck Effect on pricing; let’s call this the Arbor Mist Effect on flavor expectations. The former has been positive for the consumer. The latter is just deception. Deception may be profitable and it may taste good, but it’s still deception. It is important to remember that whenever deception is practiced, someone gets hurt. In this case, it is probably the real fruit winemakers who suffer. The niche they belong in is being largely filled by Big Wine (Arbor Mist is owned by Constellation Brands, the largest wine company in the world) and manipulated so that many consumers will reject real fruit wines as “lacking flavor.”
I’d love to be wrong. I don’t think Arbor Mist will steal established customers away from fruit wine producers unless it is on the pricing level, but it probably will absorb the bulk of new customers turning to — what did you call it? — “non-vinifera expressions”? But of course they satisfy the change with more vinifera. The fruit wine producers may not lose customers, but they certainly won’t gain the many new customers they might have.
I really don’t know where all of this is going, but it worries me. If there were suddenly a demand for Norton, would Big Wine plant Norton, buy established wineries producing Norton, or follow the Arbor Mist model and sell Merlot with Norton flavoring added? It’s anyone’s guess.
Great thanks for your reflections on what promises to be a lively cultural conversation in the coming years.
Admin
I was on my way to the noisy world of the Wine Bloggers Conference in Walla Walla, Washington. Two stops were planned along the way: Parducci in Ukiah, Mendocino County, and The Eyrie Vineyards in McMinnville, Oregon. Neither destination would disappoint. Indeed, each in its own way would be a revelation. Let me explain…
Jason Lett would never claim that he possesses a near-encyclopedic winemaking knowledge. It is irrelevant to his mission of crafting some of the finest wines made in the US. What he does know of winemaking has come, I would argue, from two equally important and complementary sources: his father, the legendary David Lett, and Jason’s own explorations, his university training, the experience gained from producing his first label, Black Cap, and that he assumed responsibilities for winery and the viticulture in 2005.
Yet it must be difficult to grow up the son of a legend. How to find your own way? After all, a father has his ways and methods, he holds onto his truths with a firm hand. What the son first learns is how to do things the right way. Much later comes a son’s wisdom to do things his way. This is both homage and the only way forward. If I may be permitted a possibly undeserved familiarity, Jason’s quiet confidence tells me that The Eyrie Vineyards’ second iteration will continue to produce wines not only consistent with its historically exemplary standards, but will excel. And since 2005 Jason has not missed a beat. As he said to me, “Even the clamp on a hose, if not properly tightened, can affect the wine. There are hundreds of things to consider.” What he did not say was that such a refined, intimate winemaking knowledge was his. But, humility aside, it is.
A brief gloss on The Eyrie Vineyards: All of there vines are on their own rootstocks, including David Lett’s original plantings from 1965. It must add something to the taste of the wine. Hard to say. It may be that American rootstocks used for grafting express subtle distinctions in their rooting systems as opposed to varieties growing on their own.
Organic from the beginning, The Eyrie Vineyards are not irrigated, forcing roots deeper. (About this readers may learn more in part 2.) Oak is of particular disinterest. Chardonnay sees around 3% new oak. Jason is looking for only for a little help with color. The rule is that the fruit is never to be outshone by wood. To this end Eyrie continues to use barrels decades old. More, The Eyrie Vineyards is the expression of four properties that range in elevation from 200 to 900 feet, all in the Dundee Hills. Jory soils dominate. They are composed of a lighter red clay and differ in important ways from Willakenzie, a richer soil, heavier clay. Though phylloxera was introduced to the Dundee Hills in the ’80s, it has never been a problem for Eyrie. The thought is that this is because they don’t rototill. Phylloxera seems to need rototilling to expand its range. Native organic flora encouraged at Eyrie includes weeds as they are part of the local ecosystem; yet they are kept in control because of the flourishing region-specific biodiversity growing alongside. Again, all of this will be learned in part 2.
For those traveling near McMinnville, Oregon, take an hour out of your day to visit The Eyrie Vineyards tasting room which may be found at 935 NE 10th Ave. Full details may be found here.
A final note: Special thanks to Ben, a resourceful individual working for Hertz in Medford. In addition to rescuing stranded motorists, he is a home beer brewer. Should his product finally come to market, I’ll be first in line.
In The Winery
Before heading out to the vineyards, Jason shows me his parents’ original barrel room, the greater space in which the tasting room is situated.
Admin What was this building originally?
Jason Lett Some gal showed up one day and told me it was a originally a Hershey’s chocolate plant during the Second World War. This is the first room that my folks occupied, back in 1970. They had plans drawn up for a winery to be built on the hillside overlooking the vineyard. But no bank would loan them any money because they were just a couple of crazy kids. So they found this place. It was vacant at the time. It was a perfect winery. There are two layers of cork in the walls and ceiling. There used to be windows but my dad blocked them up. He wanted to create the dynamics of a cave in here. It is very cool in here. The thermal mass in this building is the wine itself. There are 10,000 gallons of thermal mass in here. That keeps the temperature low. And the concrete floor.
All the barrel cleaning is done in here? And the waste water, how is that treated?
JL Yes, we clean the barrels here. The city of McMinnville invested a lot of money about 10 years ago in a processing plant to handle the stuff and get it back downstream in a good condition.
Did the city build it with the wine industry in mind?
JL No, it was for the capacity of the town. But they over-built it. A lot of the towns around here didn’t have the foresight. It’s a good place to have a winery just from a green perspective. You know, the streets are already here, the water infrastructure is already here; we take the chlorine out of the water with a big charcoal filter; the three-phase comes in on the wire; we don’t have to drop a big infrastructure onto farmland in order to make wine here. The infrastructure is already here. From a green perspective wineries should probably be built in town.
You were asking about barrel cleaning, well, when my folks moved into this room, they came here with 30 new French oak barrels. And here are several of them. We’re still making wine in these original barrels from the 1970 vintage. Anything with the letter ‘S’ and a number lower than 30 is from the original vintage. Dad came up with some very good techniques for keeping barrels in sanitary condition through the years.
What kind of techniques?
JL That’s a trade secret! (laughs) The Pinot Gris is done in unjacketed tanks. We do inoculate with Champagne yeast, good old EC-1118. The great thing about it is that it is very neutral. It doesn’t really impose any of its own flavors. Seems to me that if you’re trying to talk about the vineyard you don’t want to necessarily want to impart flavors from the yeast. The very best case scenario is when you can use the yeast from the vineyard. We’re successfully able to do that with smaller fermentations, but with these big tanks, if they start going sideways, it’s a major investment. I’m a little bit more conservative in my winemaking approach with the Pinot Gris, the Pinot Blanc, than I am with the Pinot Noirs.
And how often do you top off?
JL Right now we’re doing it every two weeks. When summer comes we’ll start doing it every 10 days. I like to stay on top of that. We’ve certainly had longer topping periods in the past. Dad preferred a more oxidative winemaking style. One of the nice things about these older barrels is that they are really tight. They don’t transfer oxygen as much as a new barrel would. Certain vintages, like the 2008, we had to keep in barrel forever! That was a big, structured vintage. It needed a lot longer time to open up. And since we’re topping at a tighter interval, they weren’t getting as much oxygen contact that way; so it just took its time getting that micro-oxygenation through the walls of an old barrel. Most of the cooperage in here is French; we’ve got a little bit of Oregon oak. That’s kind of fun.
What do you get from them?
JL A lot of oak. With Oregon oak you have to use it homeopathically. The flavors are great, but they are so strong. Our cooper who does these, every thing is three-year air dried. He’s also doing a rock salt soak in these. It pulls some of the tannin before he assembles the barrel. And they’re incredibly well-made. Since we’re keeping barrels around for the texture they impart rather than the flavor, the quality of the construction is probably the key point for us. The barrels here… there’s one from 1993, here’s one from 1970; this is a mid-1980s barrel; these guys down here are from the late 1990s… we probably have some of the oldest cooperage in the United States in continual service here. Well, shall we run out to the vineyard?
On The Road To The Vineyard
You know, I was talking to the winemaker at Ridge, Eric Baugher. And he told me that for their Montebello they use a very complex mix of French and American barrels. But the American oak is sourced from a number of very specific forests each of which he claimed imparted different characteristics to the finished wine. What do you think?
JL From a botanical point of view, oaks are probably the most prone to hybridizing of any broad leaf tree in that group. There are 200 recognized species of oak in the United States. Red oak versus White oak is a woodworker’s term. It really doesn’t have anything to do with flavor. They just cross like crazy. You’ll see some funny little shrub oak in Colorado, in the Four Corners, it’s a White oak. The Quercus garryana we have here in Oregon is also a White oak; but they are incredibly different species. I just like to make a wine in barrels made from oaks on the other side of the hill!
In terms of looking at an oak mix, oak is such a limited part of the flavor profile of our wines that I don’t obsess about it too much. We kind of go counter to the trend. If you’re employing more oak in your blend then you’re probably going to more toward a darker toast because those tend to give you the coffee and cocoa tones that integrate better. This is all well and good. But for our style we find that the light toasted barrel is preferable. For one thing, you get less bubbling, and issues inside the barrel, but also in a very moderate new oak program – ours is about 5% – those flavors actually integrate better. In a high concentrations, yes, it’s like licking a plank. But to mix one of those barrels into 25 neutral barrels and all of a sudden you get this beautiful support from the wood without any obvious or overt oak signature.
The valley floor here used to be covered with Quercus garryana, Oregon White oak, before colonization. The Native Americans used to do controlled burns to maintain clearings, but the whole white oak ecosystem was basically a whole complex of plants and creatures that were adapted to the White oak, living in conjunction with it. Now we have isolated pockets of trees on the hillsides. You don’t see it so much on the valley floor; the ecosystem is very different.
The White oak is a massive tree. It has a lot of branches as opposed to the European oak which are grown in rows close together so they don’t branch very much on the bottom. They tend to be very slender and long, and very straight. Ours are almost exactly the opposite. It takes a bit of a different approach to make barrels out of Oregon oak. But Oregon oak is distinctly different from what people call ‘American’ oak, most of which comes from the South Eastern part of the United States, from a warmer climate, longer growing season. The oak tends to have wider rings and have a little bit more of that vanilla, coconut characteristic.
It’s ironic to talk about the oak signature at Eyrie!
Well, coming from California it is increasingly difficult to find lighter-oaked wines. Fortunately I live in Santa Cruz. Our AVA has a quite a number of cool climate sites. Wines tend to be marked by restraint. There is some experimentation. But it is not a particularly wealthy AVA, and holdings tend to be small. New technologies are not immediately embraced owing to their expense.
JL Well, if technology made great wine, then jug wines would taste better than artisanal wines. In fact, the opposite is true. In the end, what determines great wine is not the amount of technology you can throw at it but the amount of personal dedication. And I’m not sure why that reflects in the flavor, but it seems to.
I think that a lot of the larger producers realized a long time ago that they could not win the battle over artisanal quality. So what began to happen, I think, is that it dawned on them to limit, through the use of wine critics and to some degree even the Wine Institute, the general development of consumer wine education, the deepening of the understanding of wine. Larger producers seemed to say “If we can keep the consumer dumb as a post then we’ll have a chance in the marketplace.”
JL (laughs) You’re a subversive, Ken!
Very much so! (laughs) So what has essentially happened is that the California wine industry is to some degree dedicated to the proposition that the consumer remain ignorant. That means they needn’t worry about the use or consequences of technological fixes as such. That many wines approach the character coca cola and the unctuous mouthfeel of cheeseburgers is not really a problem. The consumer is always right, after all.
JL So we’re in the Dundee Hills. There is a big wheat field over there. That is the last big chunk of ungraped land on the hillside. And that’s owned by Old Man McDougall. He must be 150 by now. But he’s holding out. He’s not going to let these fancy grape people plant everywhere! And I actually love that. It really reminds me of the way the hill was when I was growing up. We were a very, very minor part of the farming scheme in Oregon back in those days. Grape growing was not a very big deal. There was a huge and diverse agriculture around us. Lots of cherries, cane berries, prunes, and, except for Old Man McDougall, most of that has been supplanted by grapes.
It looks like McDougall’s property has a southerly aspect as well.
JL He’s got a beautiful piece of land. It’s right next to the Stoller vineyard. I’m sure that Bill [Stoler] just looks over the fence and just drools. Yes, it faces South and rolls East, a great exposure for grapes.
End Of Part One
Part 2 will begin with our arrival at the vineyard.
Admin
Ryan Crane owner and winemaker at Kerloo Cellars and Sean Boyd, owner and winemaker of Rôtie Cellars are the best of friends and demonstrate a cooperation that is one of the finest features of the Walla Walla winemaking and wine growing community. Each producer helps the other in ways both great and small. Though all folks are committed to winning in the market place, those in the wine business there understand that the success of one is not possible without assistance and labor of all. As Ryan Crane put it, “We’re all in this together.”
And so it was that Mr. Boyd provided me an introduction to Mr. Crane, just as the electric Abigail Schwerin of Sapolil Cellars had pointed me to David Stephenson of Stephenson Cellars And had I the time for a longer stay, I am certain the chain of referrals would have gone on uninterrupted. But even so, the Crane/Boyd connection is an unusual one. Each moved from the Seattle area at roughly the same time. Each had been ‘discovered’ when still winemaking assistants. And, most amusingly, each had their wines rates by the same critic. And Ryan Crane received the better score. So what? As you will read, Ryan was quick to point out the success Sean Boyd has recently enjoyed. I must say it has made the work I’ve done in Walla Walla a great pleasure.
Admin Hi, Ryan. Are you watching the World Cup?
Ryan Crane Hey, Ken. No, I’m not. This is kind of wild, I’m actually composing an email to a dude in Bangkok. He wants to buy 20 cases of my wine! This is the first deal I’ve done overseas. He’s got a registration number for a logistics company. They’ll pick up the wine here at the winery and ship it to Bangkok.
I’ll be damned! Congratulations. How did that happen?
RC He had my wine at El Gaucho in downtown Seattle. It seems he’s getting married, and he wants to pour our wines. So, I’m working on the costs of shipping the wine to Bangkok.
I understand you and Sean Boyd are good friends.
RC Sean and I have the same sort of story. He’s originally from Seattle as well. We both wanted to get into the wine industry. I come from a background in distribution and sales. I think Sean was more on the enjoying drinking side; I was too. He moved to Walla Walla about a year before I did. We basically packed up everything, quit our jobs. I went to wine school here and just started diving into the wine business.
Were you one of Billo Naravane’s students?
RC No, I was in the last class of Mr. Stan Clarke. He’s passed. He was awesome, the core of the program when it first started.
When was the program started at College Cellars?
RC Boy… I graduated two years ago. I think it started in 2004? Stan and Myles Anderson from Walla Walla Vintners were the two that kind of started the whole program. Myles then stepped away and they hired another director to handle the program.
Was the program designed to turn out winemakers? Viticulturalists?
RC It’s both. The first year is all in viticulture; the second year is all in winemaking. It’s a two year program. Stan taught all the viticulture classes and Mike Moyer taught all the winemaking classes.
I see. So you could just walk off the street and get what, a BA?
RC It’s basically an Associates degree in Sciences on paper. But its an Oenology and Viticulture certificate out of Walla Walla. A graduate is free to pursue either. I love making the juice.
Yes. I was fortunate enough to be given a bottle of your 2007 Syrah by Nicole Rivinius of Rôtie. But as rare as it is, I find it heartbreaking to open it!
RC We’ll take care of that. I want you to get an idea of what I’m up to, my styles. I’ll ship you a bottle of each of my ’08s, both Syrahs and a Tempranillo. And you’ve got the historic ‘07 wine. You can pick and choose.
Damn! Thank you very much! You and Sean are very generous. Are your wines made exclusively from grapes within the Walla Walla AVA?
RC I source outside the AVA as well. My philosophy with varietals themselves is that I want the best, from where they grow the best. So I make unique varietals across the board. For Syrah I’m a cooler climate guy. For me Syrah is going to be Walla Walla all the time. I get my grapes from Va Piano were I work, and make the my wines. And then I also pull from Stone Tree vineyard, a remarkable vineyard. I love it. I also pull a little Tempranillo from here, Les Collines, block 6. And then I pull some Malbec from a little bit north of Red Mountain. Sean and I share some Grenache from Alder Ridge, Horse Heaven Hills. And I’ve got some Cabernet coming on board this year from Bacchus Vineyard, block 10.
I am fascinated by the Walla Walla winemaker’s philosophy. You understand what the AVA offers, but your creative imaginations and tasting sophistication demands that they source from outside the AVA. You folks don’t seem to be concerned about a general Washington State AVA designation. You just want to make the best wines you are able. I like that approach to Walla Walla.
RC The one thing that’s a little bit different on my side from a stylistic standpoint is that I try to make wines that are true from where they’re grown. I really want to make terroir wines, wines of place. So I don’t blend a lot of wines together. I like to make vineyard designate wines that speak of that site. I ask what style of wine do I want to make. And where in Washington State does that varietal grow best. I then select sites. So, Syrah, I like to make good, concentrated Syrah, but balanced across the board. This is what Walla Walla give me; slow concentration and slow maturity in the vines. At the end of the day, when I make the juice, they tend to be really concentrated and well balanced.
With Tempranillo, I’m trying to pay homage to Rioja-style Temps from within the state. I want to make wines that are palate challenging across the board. Just as there are cooler and warmer Spanish Riojas, I want to source the same here in Washington State and blend both together to make the Rioja style: brighter fruits, good tannins, good acid, low alcohol. With Malbec, which traditionally needs some heat to get ripe, I’m kind of edgy, on the cut. I crop it at 1.67 tons per acre. And it’s just stoopid, I mean concentrated just off the chart. So, I like to make vineyard-driven wines.
Where do you do your fermentations?
RC I make all the wine, I’m bonded, out of Va Piano. Sean is bonded at Waters, I’m bonded at Va Piano.
And your distribution circle?
RC I have no distributors. It’s all done through me, Ryan Crane. I haven’t picked up anything yet. I’m really in no hurry. When I moved here, just like everyone else, my wife and I would go out and taste in Portland and Cali and Washington State, and a lot of times you walk into a winery and you don’t even know who the winemaker is, you have no idea of what is going on. For me, I wanted to create and carry the brand. I sell the wines by appointment only, because at the end of the day, my hope is that every bottle of Kerloo Cellars on the table the people can say they met the winemaker, they shared a glass of wine with me, they tasted a barrel sample with me; I think the story drives the brand. I’m really focussed on that part right now, especially in the early vinages of Kerloo wines. I’m in no hurry. And I don’t have much juice. Thankfully we’ve had some good press; we’re moving relatively quickly. I have it in the books that I will have, in the next four years, three distributors. But for now it is just me.
One of my disappointments at the recent Wine Bloggers Conference was the absence of so many small producers. Many were not even referred to in the official literature. Why is this? Is it all about dollars? After all, some of the most interesting wines are being made by the smaller producers. Why should we hear so much about the big guys?
RC I don’t know. Some of the events were definitely driven by the bigger boys. Yes, it’s capital-driven. But I think there is a small core of us little guys that are staying a little out of the mainstream, that are just trying to grow our brands by word of mouth. As for the reasons, I didn’t really hear anything about tastings with the bloggers coming into town, or of any events. For example, there is an event coming up featuring distributors, big wine buyers from all around the country; we were invited to that only because I know the director running it. The little guys just aren’t known. And when a tasting comes to town we may not even know about it. We aren’t necessarily invited to anything.
The Wine Alliance could do a better job, especially with the small guys. But they ask for $2000 every year just to get your name on a small list. For us it is not worth it to write the check. Because it sometimes happens that Boom! Ken Payton comes to town and we end up talking. And truth be told, I think one of the cool things about the small guys is that everyone wants to talk to the smaller brands.
One of the difficulties is that a certain understanding is established between the major wine press and the big guys should the former spend only time with the latter. I don’t want to name names, but the presence of new oak was obvious in many of the wines I tasted. Who can afford new oak? Well, principally the big guys. But that theirs are the ones that are often tasted, a picture or model or standard emerges of the AVA that is uses lots of new oak. That feature then becomes an element of the dominant taste profile. The risk is that smaller brands can become pressured to convert to a barrel program against their better judgement.
RC For me it’s not really about that. They are going to sell more wine because they have more wine to sell. I really want to get the people who want to meet small brands, who want to be a part of the up and coming generation of winemakers in Washington State and, obviously, Walla Walla. I’m patient. And then there’s Brandon at L’Ecole, he runs the wine club there, he’s a huge fan of my wines, and I get many phone calls from people he points my way. Brandon Kubrock is the Tasting Room Manager; the Wine Club Manager is Jaime Chalk.–Admin] The cool thing about it is that we have this kind of underground movement, and Sean is the same way, so whenever people come to town everybody knows who to send them to. People find us. That’s a cool way to do it.
In what direction do think the AVA is headed?
RC It will continue to expand. I think the growth in the past 5 years has been relatively fast. We’re, I think, 140 bonded wineries now. Within the next three years there will be another 50 new wineries opening. I can say, from a numbers standpoint, that ever since Kerloo opened the door, and Rotie, I haven’t seen that many other wineries put in licenses to open here. It has slowed a little because it is such a capital-driven market. But we will continue to grow, perhaps not as fast as we have the last few years.
And from the vineyard side of things, Walla Walla is tricky. There are some really good sites here, and there are some really poor vineyard grounds as well. That part of the business will grow more slowly. I don’t see a whole lot of vineyards opening or starting to plant right now. It also has to do with land allocation and parcel development. Depending where you are at in Walla Walla, some parcels are only divided into 40 and 80 acres plots. Buying 40 acres at $700,000, plus putting in a vineyard after that, we’re talking some crazy cash.
Who are the people who have opened up and are opening up wineries? Are they from out of state? Are they from within Washington State? Walla Walla itself?
RC I think it is a mixture. I’m originally from Seattle, born in Minneapolis, but have lived in Seattle my whole life, so I’m a Stater. Sean is a Stater. A lot of them are from within the state itself. Sinclair Estate Vineyard is Microsoft owned, but they live in Seattle as well. Corlis is within state. Maybe even most are within state.
There must be just a modest number of viticultural managers and vineyard consultants in Walla Walla. Some use Dr. Kevin Pogue, for example. Are there so few that the 140 wineries all share the same small coterie of consultants?
RC It is pretty much the same group. Of the handful of vineyards that are selling within Walla Walla, yes, everyone talks to the same vineyard manager, absolutely.
But does that mean that canopy management is roughly the same? That the layout of the vineyards is roughly the same?
RC In a general sense, yeah; I mean, it’s all on VSP. There is some Sprawl up at Les Collines. There is really no other trellising that’s getting played with except for at Morrison Lane. They’re playing with some Scott Henry and some double tier quad lateral action. So, most of the vineyards, all of the ones I work with, are on VSP. So, in an overall sense, most of it is getting managed in much the same way. Outside of how much you decide to leave from a fruit standpoint.
What is it that Cayuse does differently? Or are they within the same frame?
RC Well, Christophe is doing the VSP system as well, as far as I know. He hangs the cordons a little lower to the ground to get some more heat from the rocks, obviously. I think he’s hanging one to two clusters per shoot. He’s biodynamic. So, no spray program, no pesticides, that I’m aware of. But he’s very secretive. So this is all guessing. He’s a very cool guy. I’ve gotten to know him pretty well. I’ve got nothing but good things to say about him. Half the people in Walla Walla hate him, half the people like him. I think he’s a cool dude. I would say that his sites are truly terroir. His is all native yeast fermentations from what I know. They tend to be really high pH, low acid, kind of stinky wines. That’s all I know. I don’t think he is doing anything out of the ordinary, apart from Biodynamics.
My real question was whether you felt there was a sufficient multiplicity of voices giving advice to the emerging AVA. Can those currently available handle all the exigencies and differences of the multiple terroirs available in Walla Walla?
RC Oh, yeah. I think that’s the most exciting part, frankly. If you look at two of my wines, the one that you got, the ‘07, that’s basically a two vineyard blend, 80% Va Piano, 20% Les Collines. That’s a pretty big, powerful wine. I don’t want to say feminine, but Les Collines is definitely more feminine than Va Piano. My point is that I try to make two distinct Syrahs. Some people like Syrahs that are a little bit bigger, more powerful, with a little bit more viscosity. And Les Collines is like that beautiful lady in a red dress walking to the theater. Those sites, Les Collines and Va Piano, are literally four miles apart and the fruit is totally different. That’s the beauty of Walla Walla.
What is it that readers should know about Kerloo Cellars wines?
RC My goal is to make wines that are true to varietal. I’m not going to make wines that have 1% Petit Verdot, 2% Cabernet Franc, 3% Cabernet Sauvignon… I really want the varietal to speak for itself. It is a harder way to make the juice, but that is my way. So you’ll see a 100% commitment to true varietal wines with Kerloo wines across the board. What that gives me is palate challenging wines from carefully selected sites. I don’t make oak bombs. I use oak minimally, usually about 20% new wood. Right now I’m at 22% new wood with my ’08s. My Malbec and Grenache are at about 25% new wood. Everything is going to be under 30%.
When we started the brand, we meaning my wife and I, we asked how did we want to do this? I already had a style in mind. We wanted to build a brand similar to us: Simple and Sexy. My goal is never to walk away from the project. I’ll always be making the juice. I want everyone to know that. I’m not looking to hire someone to take over the program because I always want to be the face of the brand. And we’re only going to make 1,500 cases max. Between 200 and 400 cases of that is going to go to the wine club. The 1000 cases left are going to be the only things you can get. It’s a chance to be exclusive and really give our customers a chance to get to know us on a personal basis.
While I was in Walla Walla, it was often been pointed out to me that one of Sean’s Rôties received 2 stars and your Kerloo received 3 stars at a particular tasting. Why do you think this happened? Actually, I think it was Sean who first brought it up!
RC (laughs) That’s hilarious. This is kind of a funny story. A wine writer, Sean Sullivan, out of Seattle, a very cool guy, he found me way back in the day. I haven’t been making wine that long, but he was there right when I started; I mean, I had 8 barrels when he came out and tasted with me. I had just put my ’08s to barrel, I think. So he did a focus report on both me and Sean [Boyd of Rôtie) about assistant winemakers starting their own brands in Walla Walla. I'm not totally sure why the ratings were different. Sean goes to bottle a lot earlier than I do. I'm guaranteed 16 to 22 months in barrel and then another 4 to 6 months in bottle before I release. So I'm not sure if it was that the wine tasted more mature. I don't know if my style is more to the liking of Sean Sullivan's palate. I would say my '07s are bigger and have more weight than Sean's just because of our styles. In '07 I tried to make little bit bigger wines. And I think that Sean's are a little more lean and fresh, on the brighter side. Mine are a little bit more on the massive side. But I didn't even ask Sean [Sullivan] about it.
But Sean [Boyd] got a 94 with his ‘07 Southern in the Wine Enthusiast or Wine Spectator, I’m not sure which one. Hey, dude, that ain’t too shabby! The only other thing is that I’m better looking than Sean! And I think I have a better sense of humor; I throw things around a little bit more than old Boydie. So maybe the additional star was for my shining personality!
So whose wife is the better cook?
RC (laughing) Well, my wife took off this morning on a business trip to the fine town of Cleveland. So she’s not here. Annie is the better cook, his wife. No doubt about it. But Sean is a better cook than me as well. I barbeque just as good as Sean. But Sean is a little better cook than I am. I just tell him, “Don’t worry, Sean. You cook, I’ll make the wine!”
Well, it was a great pleasure to speak to you, Ryan.
RC You too, Ken. Take care.
Admin
I met Yashodhan (Billo) Naravane (right) at the Three Rivers Winery. He was member of one of many panel discussion organized, in part, by the good offices of the Wine Bloggers Conference spread among wineries throughout the Walla Walla Valley. Though meant to be instructional in character, centering on explaining the basics of the Walla Walla AVA, it became very clear to me that this gentleman was no ordinary panelist. It turned out uttering generalities is not where Billo excels. His is a very disciplined mind, a curious mind, exulting in a profound natural intellectual freedom and flexibility rarely encountered outside of a university setting. He and his equally gifted brother, Pinto (left), founded Rasa Vineyards in 2007. And in just a few short years they have demonstrated an understanding of viticulture and winemaking which repeats in yet another field their considerable academic achievements. But inasmuch as this is an interview with Billo, we may read a fragment of his CV below:
“Billo has worked in various technical and managerial positions in the Computer Industry for over a decade and a half. Billo received his BS in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from MIT and his MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. Billo finished his MS in Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis in June 2008 and is currently running the Viticulture program at Walla Walla Community College.”
But as I was to learn, the CV is by no means complete. As you will read below, Billo is launching new projects that will require significant modification of the thumbnail bio above. Please enjoy my encounter with Billo, without a doubt, the smartest man in the room.
Admin So let’s jump into the middle of things. Tell me about your wines.
Billo Naravane We were interested from the beginning in building a luxury brand. This was when the economy was good. So, we initially poured our wines for MWs, and told them that the price points [for QED and Principia] were $65 and $75. We asked for an honest critique of the wines. We got great feedback, they were said to be beautiful wines, worth the money; but the economy was not the greatest. They suggested pricing it a little bit lower, it might be to our advantage. So we had to go back to our investors, and we decided to price the wine, the QED, at $50. Now, $50 is expensive. We’re not delusional. But that wine I think offers an extremely great value for the money.
We’ve had it in blind tastings with some of the very best wines in the world: Guigal’s La Landonne, La Mouline, Henschke’s Hill of Grace, against Grange, you name it, it’s been blind tasted against it. It really holds its own against the best wines in the world. So, that wine is 94% Syrah, 3% Grenache, and 3% Mourvèdre. It is mostly Les Collines; the Syrah is about 85% from Les Collines Vineyard.
I hear Les Collines being referred to constantly.
BN Les Collines is a great vineyard. It’s a huge property, 300 acres, or so, I think are planted up there. There is a wide degree of variation within the different blocks of the vineyard. It is not an homogenous terroir. Some blocks I really like; there are two we sourced from for the ‘07. One block had this really earthy, mineraly, almost truffle-type character underlying the core of fruit. The fruit is this black berry, black cherry on the Syrah, but has this depth to it. The aromatics are fantastic form that property as well. The finish is sometimes not the greatest. The finish is nice; it’s just not as long as we would like it for a high-end Syrah. So we have to address that via blending.
I’m a big fan of blending in that when done correctly you can achieve an aromatic complexity and a palate complexity, and broaden the finish out, rather than using just one specific wine. Now the trick, however, is that we’re also big fans of terroir, so how do you preserve the Walla Walla sense of terroir in a blended wine. That tricky to do. Blending is highly non-linear. You can put in 2% to 3% of something yet change it by 30%. So you have to be very careful not to obliterate a sense of place, of terroir in blending. But what we’re trying to do, being technically minded, we go through every permutation in the blending process. We do all the samples. Me and my brother then go through all of them, we argue back and forth, and then we decide on the final blend, whatever tastes the best and still preserves that terroir of Walla Walla or of any other region.
In that year, 2007, it was 94% Syrah, 3% of Grenache, Mourvèdre. In 2008 the blend has been different. Our QED will always be a Grenache/Mourvèdre blend, but the percentages will be different based on what the year gave us. 2007 was a very warm year, so we got riper fruit versus 2008, which was a pretty cool year. So, stylistically, our Rasa wines are more along the lines of French wines rather than California. We are huge, huge Francophiles. We love the great Rhone wines, Bordeaux, and Burgundy as well. But we don’t make a Pinot Noir… yet! We amy do so in the future.
Best of luck with a Pinot!
BN We were introduced to a gentleman who owns a small block of Pinot Noir, so we may try it out, not this year but next. Pinot is not something I’ve worked with yet. I’m really kind of anxious to try it.
That reminds me. Rasa is the rough Indian equivalent of the word terroir. Could you explain the distinctions between the two concepts, if any?
BN So the actual root of the word Rasa, it’s from Sanscrit, technically, though it can be used in a couple of different contexts, in one context it means essence. For us that is essence of soil and variety. And almost in a slang parlance, it can mean juice. So we have this essence and juice concept that is the closest word we’ve found that is also relatively easy to remember. Some of the related Indian words can get quite long and complex, hard to remember. We were looking for a word that tied together wine and our heritage. My uncle is the one who thought of it. He speaks Sanskrit. He’s not a wine aficionado, but after explaining what we were doing, about terroir and why it was so important to us, he thought up the word. We fell in love with it. It’s a great name! (laughs)
We’re originally from India; me and my brother were born in India. Our parents moved to New Jersey when I was turning 6, my brother was 8. We just wanted to have a tie-back to our heritage and still have something that was easy to remember, and with a wine connotation.
You mentioned that you initially tasted widely throughout the Walla Walla AVA. And we know the AVA is still in the process of being defined, the proper terroir for which grape, and so on. So, what are the relative merits and demerits of having a Washington State designation as opposed to having a Walla Walla AVA designation? In a conversation with Sean Boyd of Rôtie he said that the AVA designation, though not irrelevant, will not necessarily result in the best wines. He is willing to sacrifice, especially for so young an AVA, a specific designation in favor of an overall quality.
BN I tend to agree with Sean. In our 2007 QED we did source the Grenache and Mourvèdre from Minick Vineyard over in Prosser. We also had a little Lewis Vineyard Syrah in there, which is also from Prosser, over in Yakima. Now, Grenache and Mourvèdre are not best for our area. Let me put it this way: I haven’t tasted great Grenache and Mourvèdre grown here in Walla Walla. Now, this is all price point dependent. I’m talking about a $50 and up price point wine. You can definitely grow good enough quality Grenache and Mourvèdre here for a $20 bottle. I’m not questioning that. But for a quality that you want to deliver at that higher price point, we’ve just not found that yet in Walla Walla. So we have to look elsewhere. And we found this great cooler climate site. We would much rather get this cooler climate fruit. We like the acidity to be preserved naturally, and to get that balanced flavor development, rather difficult at a super warm site. The cooler sites tend to give wines that are much more elegant and refined.
We don’t want to be making wines that are 16% alcohol. There’s nothing wrong with those types of wines; they’re just not stylistically what were going after. I still do enjoy the occasional Australian Shiraz, but I tend to prefer Rhone style for Syrah.
We are after making the best wine possible. While we want to remain as true as possible to terroir, we want to make the best wine possible. For the QED, since we could not get the Grenache and Mourvèdre of a sufficiently high quality, we needed to go outside the AVA. We don’t see that as being contradictory. And if you taste the QED, that is a Walla Walla wine; 91% of the fruit is from here. It is in the blending process that you have to be very judicious to maintain the sense of terroir. One of our blends during the trial phase, when we were going through all the possible blends for the QED, it was roughly 5% Grenache, 7% Mourvèdre, and the balance Syrah. That did not taste like a Walla Walla AVA wine. We did not go with that blend even though it was pretty tasty because it did not taste like it came from the AVA.
You seem to have been blessed with an extraordinary palate. I was reading one of your blog entries about a tasting party you attended some time ago. Could you say something about your tasting history?
BN I’ve been extremely fortunate. When I lived in Austin I had a bunch of very eclectic wine collector friends that I had met throughout the years. It was a wine group we started called the S.O.B.s, the Sons of Bacchus. That name was quite fitting for the group in many respects! They were from many different backgrounds. And some had been collecting for many, many years, 30-40 years. They had these amazing wine cellars. We got to be such good friends that when invited over they would pull these unbelievable bottles of wine: an ‘82 Mouton, ‘61 Lafite, these crazy wines I had the privilege to taste. My brother had a similar experience in New Jersey. We really have tasted, just through really good friends, some of the best wines that have ever been made. One time I got to taste a 1900 Chateau Margaux, and the ‘47 Cheval Blanc, all these wines that are considered to be the best wines ever made. That is one the the biggest strengths that Pinto and I bring to the winemaking process. We are able to recognize, or at least have a perspective, of the best wines ever made. We bring that to our blending and winemaking processes.
It is kind of startling to me how many wine people I’ve met here in Washington, many of them winemakers, who have never tasted a first growth! They probably couldn’t tell you who the first growths are. It’s kind of shocking to me. I would wonder that if you don’t have it in your head what great wine is, then how do you know when you’ve made one?
That’s a very interesting question, and it bears upon the question of wine education, certainly of the average drinker, to the degree there is such a thing. There is a problem within marketing, I would argue, that through a series of commercial feedback loops, they work to maintain a certain level of knowledge, or, alternatively, of ignorance, amongst the wine-drinking public. It is very difficult to know how to challenge that, how to convince people there are depths to wine that can essentially change your life. How would you go about educating people to continue looking and searching for wines of revelation rather than listen to marketers, who have an interest, after all, in limiting that same revelation?
BN Boy, that’s a really good question. I don’t have a good answer. At some point everyone needs to have a friend, or somebody who is into wine, to expose you to an Aha! moment where you taste a great wine that is compelling and kind of leaves you speechless. It is that experience that everybody needs to have. That’s when they realize that there is something to this wine thing. My moment was when I was just starting out in wine. When I lived in California I used to go up to Napa a lot back in 1990 and ‘91. Back then you could go tasting all day in Napa for free. It was great for people just out of college, who had no money and could drink for free. But after doing this, me and my brother started to recognizing the differences between Pinot Noir and Cabernet. Wow, there must be something to this wine thing! It may not be all bullshit!
And then I had an experience in ‘91. I was at a store called Beltramos. I lived only 3 miles from there at the time. I believe it was the ‘86 d’Yquem that was just being released. And they were pouring it in their wine bar. At that time I did not know d’Yquem from anything. There were 3 other Sauternes they were pouring. They cost $3 for a taste of them. The d’Yquem was an additional $10 to taste. At that time I thought, Wow!, I couldn’t afford that. But there was an obviously wealthy woman there. She tried the wines, took a sip out of each one, and left. I asked the guy behind the counter if the d’Yquem was really worth $10 for just a taste? He said it was one of the best wines made in the world, “You should try it.” He let me take over the wines the lady left. The d’Yquem was my Aha! wine. It floored me. I had never ever smelled or tasted such an amazing array of things. It was indescribable. I could not find the words… My perspective on wine changed immediately. I began reading books on wine, going to Napa, not to just get loaded, but to actually meet with winemakers and learn about wine. The passion just went crazy after that. Then we became serious collectors. That was our downfall! (laughs)
To get people jazzed about wine they need to taste something that blows them away, and that they can’t quite put into words. For a friend of mine, it was the ‘90 Lafite. For another it was a Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet. It’s fun to hear people tell you what wine did it for them!
Now, you are also a teacher at the local community college. How did you assume the teaching position, and in the local colleges, how long have viticulture and enology programs been offered?
BN That’s a good question. I’ve always enjoyed teaching. When I was at MIT and Stanford, and U.T. Austin, I had the opportunity to teach mathematics classes here and there. I’ve taught Calculus and Differential Equations, Probability Theory, even a Pascal Programming class, and it was always a lot of fun. And when I moved here to Walla Walla in 2008, I was tasting wine at an event over at Dunam Cellars, and I started talking to a gentleman who, after a half an hour, began asking where I went to school and what was my background. He suddenly asked, “Can you teach viticulture?” “Sure!” When I was at Davis I took all the classes in both viticulture and winemaking. So it happened that the previous instructor had unexpectedly passed recently. So again I began teaching in January of 2009. I took over the viticulture position.
That having been said, I just resigned a couple of weeks ago. I did enjoy the teaching aspect of it quite a bit. Community College is an interesting place. You have students from very wide backgrounds. Teaching in places like Stanford, everybody has a similar background. They have a similar intellectual capacity. At a community college you have students that are super bright to those who I could not quite figure out why they were there. It was a little bit frustrating at times. But I had more frustration with the management there, rather than the students.
I took the tack that I would teach roughly 50% of the viticulture material that we did at Davis. I figured that was a reasonable target. But on no less than 5 separate occasions, the director of the program came in said that I had to dumb down the material. The last time I was approached was in April. I then knew this was not the right place for me to teach. I had tried to make some adjustments. But when eventually I was teaching only 25% of the material they should be learning, I really considered it less than a viticulture class then a viticulture-like class. I didn’t feel good about teaching it. I think the management there is a bit misguided. With the rising competition from other programs at other schools, it makes no sense to take ours out of contention.
At Washington State University (WSU) they recently hired a great, great director, Dr. Henick-Kling. He’s very well known in viticultural and enology circles. He’s going to raise that program up to probably compete with UC Davis at some point. I talked with him, and I was thinking of doing my PhD there. He gave me a run down of his vision where WSU is going to go. If he executes, it’s going to be a great program. It will produce 40 to 50 undergraduates a year, and 10 or so Master students a year. And you’ve got other programs cropping up in Yakima and South Seattle; and then we have Walla Walla Community College that wants to diminish the quality of their program. That doesn’t make any sense to me. It’s a bit short-sighted.
That is unfortunate. They may well be in the process of becoming an irrelevant institution just when the region needs qualified people the most. I hope the transition is not too jarring, but about pesticides, I’ve noticed that a number of vineyards in the valley, even some near Cayuse, a biodynamic property, are fringed or surrounded by apple orchards and other crops that require a substantial use of pesticides. I was told that Japan, for example, demands perfect apples. Many tons come from the Walla Walla Valley. Now, for someone who aspires to something like an organic status for their vineyard, what are the tensions, if any, between fruit farmers and grape growers? I asked this question of the winemaker at Buty. He said that although the fruit trees bordering his property are heavily spray, he just doesn’t pay attention to its impact on his vineyard! So, what is going on?
BN I can’t imagine how there couldn’t be conflict because of the proximity of these orchard sites to vineyards. They really are often on top of one another. As best as could have been done, they have put restrictions on the application and the timing of the sprays. They are not allowed to spray if the winds are more than 3 or 4 miles an hour to contain the drift, for example. Now, on the local basis you can’t tell a specific orchard owner that they can’t spray something that is legal for them to apply. There is this whole question of legality versus sustainability, organic and biodynamic. So just because you can spray something, doesn’t mean you should. And if you are going to spray something, then you’ll probably want to do it in the least invasive manner as possible. So overall there is a great deal of friendship and trust between the growers that they are not going to do something that is going to damage their neighbor’s crop. People here are very cognizant and willing to work together, which is great.
That being said, if you have a biodynamic site and your neighbor does not, how do prevent somethings from coming over? Some drift is inevitable. In fact, the biggest case is probably 2,4-D. This is something a lot of the wheat farmers like to use to contain weeds. However, 2,4-D is extremely toxic to vines. I mean, just a small amount of 2,4-D drift coming onto your vines causes serious damage; you will essentially see the arrest of the photosynthetic capability of the vine once just a little bit of 2,4-D gets drifted onto it. With this we have been seeing a little bit of contention between people using 2,4-D versus people who don’t want it used because it is affecting their grapevines. Some of these things need to be sorted out. But the spirit is generally one of cooperation.
And could you discuss the difficult issue of the local migrant labor force? What is the local mentality?
BN Hmm. Ask 10 people you’ll get 10 different opinions. In general, while I would prefer people to be properly documented – when we came over, we’re immigrants, we had to go through the whole process, the Green Card, the Passport – I would appreciate everybody to do that and respect the laws of the country. But we realize that there are some kinds of labor Americans don’t want to do. The laborers here during harvest are great people. They want to work. They are very industrious. They work hard and get the job done effectively. It needs to be addressed at the Federal level. I’m kind of for giving amnesty for the people who are already here, and getting them appropriately documented. This might curtail future people from coming in. But all the workers I’ve met here have all been tremendously great people.
I must congratulate you and your brother on your extraordinary success. You’ve gone from 0 to 60 in nothing flat. You’re one of the brightest individuals I’ve ever met. Maybe you should become the president of the community college! What are your plans for the future? What are you academic plans, if any?
BN I still do have aspirations to complete my PhD. I have worked in Theoretical Mathematics, kind of at the cusp of Electrical Engineering, so I toy with the idea of going back to mathematics or possibly doing something in Plant Physiology or Viticulture. Right now my focus is to get Rasa to be successful. I think we are headed on the right trajectory. Our wines are improving. We’re just beginning to get positive praise from the critics. We’re having the major critics coming through right now. Jay Miller was here just a couple of weeks ago. Tanzer is coming soon. I can see success on the horizon. Once that is done, I think I’ll pursue my PhD.
An extraordinary pleasure, Billo. Thank you.
BN Thank you, Ken.
Admin
Anonymity. It is one of the great difficulties facing the young winemaker. How to break through the wall of advertorial noise, the clamor, protectively surrounding established labels? The quality is there. The dedication, the labor. But absent good fortune or dumb luck, the new kid on the block faces a long slog toward much deserved recognition. And this is as it should be within the marketing ecosystem. Indeed, during my recent participation in the Wine Bloggers Conference there was not an ‘official’ word spoken of a number of very good small producers, Sapolil Cellars, Stephenson Cellars, Kerloo and, of course, Rôtie. To be mentioned in the ‘official’ literature costs money the little guy does not always have. So it falls to independently-minded bloggers, caring only for wines of quality and of story, to pound the pavement to find them.
And Sean Boyd of Rôtie Cellars has very good karma, if I may put it that way. For so great is the reservoir of good will and reputation for quality he has built up within the Walla Walla wine community that his efforts are on the minds of the locals. It is for this reason tha when researching an entirely different story, I stumbled into Vintage Cellars and met the exquisite Megan Bosworth working there. She told me there was someone I should meet, a certain winemaker I should know about. Come back at 5 o’clock. I did, and met Rôtie’s lovely marketing whiz Nicole Rivinius, also an employee of Vintage Cellars, and Sean Boyd himself. The results may be read here.
Ms. Rivinius worked the next day to diligently arrange a tasting at Rôtie’s freshly minted tasting room. I dragged several important wine writers along, including Hoke Harden, Remy Charest and Joe Roberts. Hoke Harden over at Elixir Vitae has written a very entertaining and informative piece on our experience there.
What follows is an account of the balance of my time with Mr. Boyd. I should mention that I was asked not to reveal certain vineyards from which Mr. Boyd sources some of his fruit. I have honored that request.
In The Tasting Room
Admin I like this. It’s a nice space. Simple.
Sean Boyd This is Nicole’s sanctuary. She sells the stuff; I just make it. Let’s get you some bottles. You have to promise me that you go to Saffron, the best restaurant here in town. Well, that’s the line-up. The VDP, the vin de pays, which means country wine, has some of my most expensive fruit. But it just wouldn’t blend into the Northern. I make about 70 barrels a year, and I sell off about 30. I pick the best barrels that I possible can for the wine club. So nobody really gets this. Let me find you a box…
These are for me? Are you shittin’ me?
SB Yes. You got to taste the wines to see if you like them. You’ve got to open these f*ckers up, shake them up, because they’re ’08s. Open them up in the morning. They’ll hang very well. They’re very tight.
Our white is a Roussanne and Viognier, a 50/50 blend. The ’09s will be 50% Viognier, 30% Roussanne, and 20% Marsanne. Marsanne is my new favorite grape. The ‘08 was a little heavy handed with the Roussanne, I think. I was really trying to dial in the first year by playing with Roussanne. I learned a lot. It’s a very heavy, viscous grape. I stopped it from going through secondary fermentation, so it’s as crisp as they come. It’s definitely elegant, but its got a weighty back-end. You only really realize how much acid it has when you have it with food because it really clears the palate. But you still think of it as having gone through secondary. So adding Marsanne really helped in ‘09. Sommeliers love it, but they’re definitely in the minority. We definitely have a good following with the white, but not everybody is there. Some say, “Ooh! That’s a little different. But there is no oak and no butter!?”
The Southern is 70% Grenache, 15% Mourvédre, 15% Syrah, all from Horse Heaven Hills. That is the one that does well with awards. The Northern, co-fermented Syrah and Viognier, comes from 4 different vineyards. Definitely give these babies some air. Please. Please, please.
These will be much appreciated. I have a bit of a European palate. Living in California can be difficult… And I’m not crazy about grotesque amounts of oak. You know the story…
SB Hopefully you don’t mind grotesque amounts of fruit! Are you going to drink wine tonight?
I’ve got some writing to do. Yes.
SB Here’s one from the last four cases of ‘07 [55% Grenache, 35% Syrah, 10% Mourvédre]. These cases came back from California battered and bruised from the transit. I have no clue what happened to them. So try that tonight.
Thank you, Sean. It’s extraordinarily generous of you.
SB Hey, you’ve got to buy off the Press, even if you get shitty stories off of it. That’s just the way the world works. (laughs)
Well, in my case, what I typically do is just turn on the mic. I then will transcribe verbatim, along with my questions and narrative ornaments, of course. This is an extreme case, but I recently interviewed Tim Thornhill of Parducci. I had to get completely the hell out of the way for that one. But I like minimal intervention, a more documentary approach.
SB That’s how we sell wine. I had a guy selling wine for me in Seattle. I asked him, “Jesus! How are you selling all this wine?” He used to say, “Well, what I do is ask for a wine list and a menu when I first sit down. I open up the wines. I act like I’m looking at both menu and wine list. I let them all talk; they all like talking. And all I do is nod once and a while; and they buy.” I thought that was ingenious! Everybody likes to hear themselves talk, especially in this industry. There are so many egos and heads out there.
In The Winery
Sean Boyd This is my playground. Here in this winery we’ve got Wines of Substance, which it Waters’ second label. They split some with Gramercy. I think Gramercy has 10% ownership in Substance; Waters has 90%. Waters does about 3,000 cases; Substance is probably about 10,000 or 12,000 cases. And Gramercy makes their wine independently here. They are probably pushing 5-6,000 cases.
It’s kind of a crush pad facility?
SB Well, it’s definitely Waters’ facility. It’s so capital intensive to build a winery. So us little gutter dogs like to come in, and for a reduced salary I make Rôtie Cellars here. It works well. I wasn’t born with $1,000,000 in the bank, or $5,000,000, which is probably be what it would take to get a nice facility.
So basically, the fruit comes in half-ton bins. Then you go into either 3/4 or 1/2 ton fermenters. We love stainless steel. These are the best ones, these round, hot tub tanks. We had these designed so that we could control the fermentation temperature. If it gets too hot the yeast eats itself up. That death phase just kicks right in. Then you struggle through your fermentation. But if you can keep it at 75-78 degrees, then it is a nice, cool fermentation. It finishes a lot smoother. I really like having control. As the fruit is nearing dry, it’s nice to be able to also plug them in and heat them up. The worst thing you can do to wine is leave a little sugar in there for microbial growth. If I could have a winery loaded with these, it would be a no-brainer.
By how much does the temperature vary in the Fall, I mean after harvest?
SB September is still pretty warm; but in October it is down to, well, here we get this diurnal shift, so it’s down to 45 degrees in the night, which is fine for barrels. Anything under 58 degrees is pretty good. We do almost all the fermentation indoors. We like to try and keep our VAs low. The coolness helps that. We do a lot of whole cluster fermentations, so those require some pump-overs, though we prefer to punch down. It’s fun to be able to have lots of small fermentations because you can really play around with what yeasts you’re using; you can try different lots, some with stem, some without.
The blending program here is based on the idea that you don’t just go off of the vineyard and how prestigious it is, or how much you loved the last year, or how fantastic it was when you picked it. It’s more along the lines of tasting everything every month. So if I have 7 different vineyards of Syrah, I’ll blind taste them with people whose palates I really respect. I don’t want to know what they are. I want to know what I like the most, not what vineyard I want to have in a bottle. Then it’s fun. You can figure out what you like. Some vineyards really surprise you. Doing it blind helps.
Some of the wines we’ll try today will include Grenache. I’ve just blended 2 blocks in their 13th and 14th leaf off of Horse Heaven Hills, from nice south-facing slopes, one is 28 brix, one is 24 brix. I’ve blended those because they had interesting phenols going on. Then there are 8 barrels of another Grenache, the vineyards of which is even further down the river. It’s turned out to be some of my best Grenache; 24 and 1/2 brix. It was picked in early November, really rare, because usually we have a freeze that come into Washington State by then; but this site is so hot, and as we talked about yesterday, it’s the kick-ass area for Rhones, for Grenaches and Mourvédres. It enjoys a super-long cycle, very temperate. It’s magical for those varietals (sic). You just have to find all the crazy people that started growing them 15 years ago! They are the fun ones. Shall we taste?
Yes, of course. One quick technical question. How many punchdowns a day?
SB Three. It depends. Your fermentation tells you what’s going on. If you’re smelling H2S you have to make Nitrogen additions. A punchdown can tell you a lot. If it was Pinot Noir, we’d go much lighter on it. We’d probably cover it. We’d let that heat and moisture just kind of work itself out. But with Grenache and Syrah you’re given a lot of leeway. It’s hard to beat them up too much. It’s just keeping the cap wet. Let’s taste through.
You have distributors locally. What about back East, or California, for that matter?
SB In California the market is just dead. We sold out of our ’07s. And California still had 21 cases. But everybody seemed to want deals and deals and deals because the market is so saturated down there. So we pulled it. We’ll sell it here. I don’t want to make deals that will cheapen my brand. Seattle is my major market. There are not too many in Portland yet. Of the distribution, about 20% of production goes straight to Seattle. Most of the rest goes out of the tasting room. It’s a double-edged sword. You want to sell it as close to retail as possible, but it is really important to service the accounts in Seattle so that you are seen. So that costs a certain percentage of the portfolio.
As we taste through the barrels, Sean explains his love of Grenache, especially when dominant in Châteauneuf-du-Papes. He rhapsodizes over Cornas, another passion we share. Some of the barrels are full of violets and roses, odors of an English garden spilling out. The Grenache in other barrels is lighter, leaner, almost Pinot in character. Still other barrels, whether of Syrah or Grenache, are bowls of fat blueberries, and marked by the occasional reductive character, mushroom and forest floor. Selection after barrel selection is of a very distinctive character. I begin to understand what Sean means by the winery being his playground. The blending opportunities are extraordinary. It is almost like the range of admixtures one might find in a perfumery. Sean’s talent is clearly in finding diverse vineyards from both within and without the AVA, and from varied elevations, that conform to his disciplined understanding of Rhone varietal correctness. And vineyard site variety is key. After all, for a Syrah pH that pushes 4 on the Walla Walla Valley floor, but that possesses a mid-palate he wants to preserve, Sean’s trick is not to add water or to acidulate (as one might with an estate designation), but to blend the softer expressions with, say, 24 degree brix juice with very high acidity from another locale. We were not able to taste the Mourvédre or Cinsault. It was being held at another facility.
SB The first year I didn’t have enough contracts. But now I am able to pick and choose which vineyards and barrels I use. People ask why didn’t I try to extract more. That’s ridiculous. Grenache is mean to be a lighter color, leaner. Of some lots, I don’t tell too many people where I get it. I just say ‘down the river from Horse Heaven.” Can you leave the specific vineyard out?
Of course.
I take one last picture of Mr. Boyd, one among his favorite barrels. I then take my leave, smarter, pleased to have played a roll, however small, in the celebration of this guy. He has good friends in Ms. Bosworth and Ms. Nivinius. He owes them a beer, or two.
Admin
On this Independence Day I will take a break from my noisy pyrotechnic display to quietly reflect on how our country was built and how it is sustained. It was hard work to build the Trans-Continental Railroad, the Highway system, to fell the forests, to electrify America, and to fight our wars. How beautiful the sparks from welder’s torch, the miniature daily display of 4th of July fireworks! From the captains of industry to the common laborer, all are part of our unexampled historical narrative. The phenomenal growth of the agricultural sector deserves special praise. The efficiency of our farmers to put food on our tables from coast to coast, to fill supermarkets to bursting with produce is heroic; but reflection must also fall upon the migrant laborer as an indispensable engine of America’s transformation.
But times have changed. A new fever is sweeping across the country, a divisive, toxic reaction to the presence of undocumented, unauthorized workers among our ranks. Arizona and Texas are just two of the states promoting draconian legislative solutions to the strangers in our midst, their governors falling over themselves to formulate the most un-American rhetoric. Even though the Labor Department tells us that “three out of every four farm workers were born abroad, and more than half are illegal immigrants”, crass political opportunism knows no shame, let alone decency.
But help is on the way! In our quest for mind-numbingly simple solutions, no matter who gets hurt, Stephen Colbert and the United Farm Workers of American (UFW) are joining together to promote the Take Our Jobs initiative. The idea is as elegant as it is peaceful: via the UFW site itself American citizens, only those able to prove it, of course, may pour over a constantly updated listings of agricultural jobs offered across America. Those wishing to work may sign up. That’s it! Training will be provided, for it makes a difference whether one picks, for example, grapes, lettuce, or strawberries. And the working hours are strictly enforced. So prospective field laborers must arrive on time. Just what attire is appropriate is also explained. You wouldn’t want to show up without a hat in triple-digit heat! Water will be provided, though there are no guarantees in this world.
Though the site is currently active, Mr. Colbert will provide an update on its progress July 8th on his show, The Colbert Report. Have a safe and sane 4th! I won’t!
For additional information, please see this.
Admin
What follows is my gaze into the crystal ball of wine writing’s future. I was invited by the organizers of the Wine Bloggers Conference, this year held in Walla Walla, Washington, to offer my views along side of those of the steady Steve Heimoff and the durable Tom Wark of Fermentation. My invitation to participate, I must say, was a bit of a lark, entirely unexpected. It is one thing to go about the quiet, deliberative work of presenting important ideas and issues to the public, one’s readership; it is quite another to take to the stage with gentlemen of such considerable experience and wisdom. Though I will not dispute for a minute the insight of the Conference organizers for having thought of me, I will say that I approached the panel discussion with humility, indeed, with a haunting sense that it could all go very wrong. But it didn’t. In fact, it may turn out that our exchange will take on an after-life none of us could have predicted.
Not used to public speaking, fully aware of the shortcomings of my presentation, here I offer an enhanced, fluid reconstruction of my remarks.
So It Begins…
None of us on the panel had any idea of what the other would say. We had agreed that our point of departure would be the question of whether in the future there would be a handful of important critics, gatekeepers; whether the consumer would continue to depend upon select voices for navigating the bewildering choices. However interesting the answer may be, it was clear to me that the question did not remotely approach what I understand by wine writing. Whether there will be gatekeepers in the future is a marginal question at best. The handmaiden to mere commerce, tasting notes and scores threaten to trivialize wine, and make of wine writing little more than the penning of serviceable haikus. A sub-genre at best, tasting notes and scores might more properly be understood as the discursive equivalent of a wine additive or manipulative technology.
And the assumption of a passive consumer deepens this impression. Having worked in a winery and knowing the manipulations commonly brought to unbalanced juice, I have often encountered a deep cynicism with respect to the public. And just as it is a common feature of winemaker psychology, so too does it afflict the wine writer. Aware of winery shenanigans, to the degree that they turn a blind eye to such manipulations in their tasting notes and scores, they, too, show a lazy contempt for the consumer, more so when, as often happens, they are made fully aware of a specific winery’s procedures and practices. Critics often share an unspoken compact with a winery that some things shall go unspoken. Indeed, it is just this structural deformity, the non-equivalence between wine critic and consumer knowledge that encourages contempt for the latter and generates dependance.
Now, to be put properly on the path to being a successful wine blogger, especially one specializing in tasting notes, will often mean accumulating secrets, a knowledge of which the public is unaware. It is the effective concealment of aspects wine knowledge, rather than its elaboration, that informs credibility. How humorous is the spectacle of established wine critics slamming bloggers for their lack of expertise when what they really mean is that they don’t know where the bodies are buried! You don’t need a PhD is business to know that controversy will close more doors than it opens. So, a wine blogger’s success, their monetization, is often built upon a foundation of bad faith, the requirement that wine drinkers be reduced to passive consumers, and that some aspects of wine knowledge be strictly policed.
The principle obstacle to improving the fortunes of wine writing in a broader sense is, unsurprisingly, the digital form it is required to take. These days there is no wine-related conference one may attend at which social media does not play a commanding role. Whether it be Twitter, Facebook, or blog formats themselves, these forms can significantly limit expression. A technological fetish, the various forms of social media, endlessly promoted, are granted magical (commercial) powers. But at the expense of thought and culture. We are repeatedly told that no one reads anymore; that 500 to 1000 words is all we should write on our blogs. But that is a function of social media’s digital forms. They aggressively subvert thought, largely preferring commercial applications alone. The corrosive financial impact of multiple digital innovations on traditional wine writers exploring the complexities of wine history, culture, and the literary side of the wine world, is everywhere evident. After all, democratization has, since Plato, known another face. With respect to wine writing we might call it a variation of the tragedy of the commons.
The future of wine writing ought to include readers in the writer’s explorations. No longer relegated to a passive position, the word ‘consumer’ should be scrapped. It was just a short while ago that Oz Clarke referred to Merlot as America’s gateway wine. Following upon a series of news reports in the 1980s about the beneficial effects of moderate wine drinking, America turned to wine in a big way. Merlot was chosen because it was the least wine-like wine, by which was meant that it caused no offense and was easy to drink. A lot has changed since then. The ‘consumer’ is not longer in that place. I compare our understanding of the evolution of the ‘consumer’ to traveling by car in the south of France to the Spanish frontier. The architectural forms, the local vernacular, slowly change. To take a single snapshot at any given mileage marker tells you nothing of the subtle, on-going transformations. It is the same with our idea of the ‘consumer’. Though we may try to fix the concept, it is morphing, taking on complexities of its own. So, the first principle of future wine writing in digital formats should be this recognition. Educate readers! Invite them along. Deepen their understanding along with yours. Most importantly, make of your own developing sophistication a promise to readers that your current ignorance will become a shared future knowledge. For your journey is also theirs.
There are great opportunities for on-line wine magazines. The Palate Press and Catavino are among the best examples we currently enjoy. Though differing in intent, each offer opportunities for multiple genres and topics to be more fully explored, even if somewhat briefly. The world of wine demands the multiplication of genres the on-line mag performs. The Palate Press’ recent stories on under-valued indigenous American grape varieties amply illustrates the point.
And then is the interesting possibility of wineries themselves taking on a greater role in wine writing in the future, to help gently force the agenda. It has long been felt that a winery can only provide updates on the humdrum ‘everydayness’ of their work. Perhaps one might read on Facebook an announcement about a festival or wine sale, the comings and going of the winery dog, that is about it. And whether one is organic or biodynamic is a one-off utterance. “We are organic!” Next month they write, “Yup. We’re still organic!” What is needed is for a winery to enter into a compelling narrative, for themselves to become a generator of important news. And this, in my view, is what Parducci Wine Cellars, the whole of the Mendocino Wine Company, is fast becoming. America’s first carbon neutral winery, the 100% reuse of winery waste water, the construction of wetlands, the aggressive promotion of biodiversity on their properties, these and many other green initiatives make of the Mendocino Wine Company an on-going performance of its vision of the future. The process moves. It is the unfolding story with multiple chapters.
Their most recent chapter may well be that as the anchor for a broad-based micro-finance initiative throughout the Mendocino AVA itself. Briefly stated, micro-financing is the use of monies aggregated from multiple private sources for the purpose of peer-to-peer lending. The purpose is not only to eliminate banking hierarchies and their usurious interest rates, but to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit. And to open up opportunities for development often closed to small farmers, for example, in our troubled economic times. Were a struggling farmer wish to do the right thing, to improve the efficiency of their water recycling system or even to install one, where a bank might not see a compelling financial interest, private micro-financing dedicated to such an initiative could quickly respond.
I shall have much more to say about this matter moving forward. It is best for now to simply let the process take its course and, hopefully, to awaken the imaginations of other wineries to the idea of micro-financing.
So, there are many, many ways to approach the question of the future of wine writing. I have related here not the sum total of my speculations, just those generally consistent with my presentation at the Wine Bloggers Conference. There will be much more to come. After all, tomorrow is the future.
Admin
Greybeard writes…
As South America is currently dominating the World Cup being played in South Africa (with all their teams clearing the group stages and Argentina looking good for the title) it is perfect timing to write up a recent tasting of Chilean and Argentinean wines I attended and highlight some of the excellent wines the region is producing in general.
As you may know I am a member of the North East Wine Tasting Society, or NEWTS as it is colloquially known. The format is simple; each month we sit down to critique 8-10 wines, typically following a theme and usually sourced and presented by one of the society members. Occasionally we have a trade presentation from one of the local retailers and this month it was from the UK national wine chain Oddbins on South America, given by Laura from the Newcastle branch. At the start Laura admitted she had been apprehensive about the wines to bring for the evening and had called in a few favours from other Oddbins stores around the country to pull together a selection of bottles not readily available in Newcastle, including one which only just arrived on the morning of the tasting.
The first wine was the 2009 Garuma single vineyard Sauvignon Blanc by Viña Leyda in the relatively new winemaking region of Leyda Valley, only 10 miles from the Pacific Ocean. Chile is starting to make a reputation for itself with good Sauvignon Blanc in a richer, smoother style compared to New Zealand – one of my favourites is the Terrunyo single vineyard by Concha y Toro – and the Garuma was in that vein. It had a smooth, rich nose with aspects of Sauvignon typicity (but not over the top) while in the mouth it had a very pleasant texture; dry, fruity with a lemon zing – although there was a touch of heat at the end from the 14% abv. For £9 a bottle this was a very well made wine, good value for money and didn’t change my opinion that Chile is worth looking at if you’re tired of all those carbon copy Marlborough Sauvignons.
The next white was from Argentina, although surprisingly not a Torrontes, which is fast becoming as synonymous with that nation as the Malbec grape is for its reds. Instead we were given Dona Paula’s “Naked Pulp” Viognier, made from the free-run juice – the grapes then used to co-ferment with the wineries “Olives road” Syrah-Viognier.
After 10 months in new French barrels the Viognier had an overtly oaked nose which masked any fruit, but an enjoyable texture and viscosity in the mouth, along with a touch of sweetness, brought out pineapple flavours. The viscosity, oak, alcohol (14.5%) and £14 price are likely to put off some but many more would enjoy this full bodied white.
The reds started with a confused offering from Italian producer Masi, taking some of their home-grown ideas into Mendoza’s Tupungato Valley to produce the 2008 Paso Doble. Malbec grapes were fermented first and then a second fermentation was started after the addition of 30% of semi-dried Corvina grapes, in the Passito style more commonly seen in Valpolicella. Considering the large Malbec component, the wine was relatively thin, with a menthol component on the nose but a green aspect I didn’t appreciate. Although smooth in the mouth it was dry with a short finish, a simple wine for its price (£13) and winemaking technique.
Thin and simple couldn’t be applied to the next wine, Norton’s 2006 Privada blend of Malbec, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. Norton is rightly known as a consistent producer of quality wines and the Privada is made from old vines with very low yields of 4 tonnes per hectare (ton/ha) to justify the £20 price tag. This was a big, dense wine with a massive nose of black fruits and spice and an almost syrupy texture with tannins throughout, rich and fruity from the mid-palate but a disjointed herbal bitterness to the finish detracted a little.
After 2 Argentinean reds it was time to cross over the Andes into Chile and Cono Sur. The winery was founded as a subsidiary of Chilean giant Concha y Toro in 1993 and has developed a reputation for environmentally friendly winemaking under Chief winemaker Adolfo Hurtado (Tim Atkin has a good interview from last year on his site).
Initially building its reputation on reliable low to mid-priced wines it moved into the premium sector in 2003 with the launch of the “Ocio” Pinot Noir and it was the 2007 vintage that was next on the tasting list.
Some questioned tasting a Pinot Noir after a big Malbec blend but it soon became clear that this was no ordinary Pinot! Also produced from yields of 4ton/ha, mostly from the El Triangulo Estate in Casablanca, the concentration could be seen as the bottle was poured. There was some mushroom on the nose behind plenty of fruit and some cigar-box, while the taste was clean with overt acidity, but a savoury sort which carried a host of subtle flavours into a moderate finish. I can appreciate that the acidity would be seen as too much by many palates, but for me it made the wine with a sharp savouriness that I had not come across in a Pinot before, although at £32 a bottle the price is outside of my typical purchasing range so that may not be surprising!
We stayed on the Pacific side of the mountains with Neyen de Apalta in the Apalta Valley, part of the larger Colchagua region. This small winery only produces one label and the 2004 vintage was a blend of Chile’s signature red grape, Carmenère, with 30% Cabernet Sauvignon at 14% abv and £28 a bottle. The two grapes came together in a very dark wine with a thick, concentrated nose of liquorice and smoky fruit. This was extremely smooth and seamlessly integrated; fine grain tannins and subtle complexities resounded around the mouth with a strong chocolate component.
Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon went solo next for the 2005 Viñedo Chadwick, a wine with an impressive pedigree as part of Eduardo Chadwick’s blind-tasting roadshow first brought to the attention of the world after the 2004 “Judgement of Berlin”, when the Viñedo Chadwick and the Viña Errázuriz Seña were ranked ahead of Château Margaux, Château Lafite, Château Latour, Sassicaia and Tignanello. Tom Cannavan did a tongue in cheek re-enactment (The Judgement of Glasgow!) on his UK Wine Pages last year which included the 2006 Chadwick.
As for the 2005, this had an ethereal nose with little cherry wood, was also very smooth (more so than the Neyen) and was fresh with a touch of mint. Tannins came in on the mid-palate and carried on through the very long finish. I am not going to try and describe the various secondary flavours of this wine as I would undoubtedly fail to do it justice, but when someone shouted out “bargain” at its £35 bottle price (on Bin End at Oddbins) I had to agree – this was as close to a 5 star wine as I have come across, not trying to be anything else other than stunningly good.
A final hop back over the Andes for the last wine, the 2005 Finca Pedregal single vineyard Malbec (70%), Cabernet Sauvignon (30%) blend by Pascual Toso.
This had a strong savoury nose with some tar and maybe a little volatility and there were big tannins and a lot of blackberry in the mouth. I used the word seamless for the Neyen, but this was more so with a long plateau of flavour from start, thought the mid-palate and into the sweet and fruity finish. with. At £38.50 I wouldn’t put it ahead of the Chadwick, Neyen or even Ocio, but like the others this was an exceptional wine which gave a lot of enjoyment for a price far lower than some of the more established Old World equivalents.
I left the room at the end of the evening with a strong feeling of being privileged to have tasted some beautiful wines all on the same day. Of course the tasting was more of a Chile and Argentina tag team match – Brazil and Uruguay still have some way to go before they can lay claim to the same accolades – but if there’s anyone left who thinks South America is only for Supermarket wines then they need to think again.
Slainte!
Greybeard
One of the great advantages of arriving in Walla Walla earlier than the commencement of the Wine Bloggers Conference is the people you meet outside the official program. Always one to stray, I have been very fortunate to happen upon an excellent young winemaker, Sean Boyd, owner of Rôtie Cellars. He makes some of the finest Rhone expressions in Washington State that I have had the pleasure to taste. EVER. He sells out quickly. His wines are sought after by sommeliers in Seattle, and they are very popular here. But he’s a small producer. And should he grow it will only be if he is certain that his fundamental winemaking philosophy remains firm. A glimpse of his approach, his ethos:
“The whole point of Rotie Cellars is to make traditional Rhone Blends with Washington State fruit. So what do traditional Rhone blends mean to me? To start with, they mean lower alcohol, less ripe, less wood, balanced, finesse driven, mouth coating wines.”
But as I can personally attest, this is no mere marketing b.s. He believes what he says. And spend a few minutes with the man and it becomes crystal clear that he’s having the time of his life life making wine. The funny thing is is that he would be the first to shy away from the hype, to just laugh off the praise. As he says, “I’m just the janitor.” He believes all the quality his wines will ever have is achieved in the vineyard. Site location is of paramount importance, especially in the wide open spaces of the Walla Walla AVA and beyond.
The assembled bloggers for this weekend’s conference are fortunate that Côtie Cellars has just opened a tasting room that will be open tomorrow (Friday) and Saturday. Sparsely decorated, with only lonely orchids blooming, you simply must make time to drop in while there are still wines of his to taste. It is located a couple of blocks from the Marcus Whitman, at 31 E. Main Street, Suite 216.
Though it is not my custom or style, I will make an exception and provide tasting notes on another occasion. For now enjoy a little time with the gentleman.
Admin So you like Rhone varieties?
Sean Boyd Yeah. Naming my winery Rôtie Cellars is a little cheeky, but I just wanted to focus on making what I love to drink. I thought it was a fad ten years ago, but it was always one of those constants. You know, when you start drinking wine, for me, it was Zins. I started with Zins out of Paso Robles. I started there. Then you realize your love for other wines. You’ve filled up your cellar and one day realize you can’t drink anything out of your cellar because you think they’re all disgusting. You’ve moved onto Pinots. Then you move on as your wine education develops. Then you move back to what you’ve always loved; for me, Rhones.
Now, Cote Rôtie’s have higher acids, firm tannins, need aging…
SB For me it’s lower alcohol, less manipulation, finding sites that grow the vines very well. Walla Walla is a horrible place to grow Grenache. It’s a horrible place to grow Mourvèdre. Super long cycles, even longer than Cab. When you think about where Grenache and Mourvèdre come from, you think hot sites. Walla Walla is a much cooler site than a lot of the places around Washington. Now, I don’t want to put wines out that just say ‘Walla Walla’ on them to sell bottles. It’s more about finding the best spots to grow the grapes. With Grenache and Mourvèdre, the best spots are along the Columbia River. Super high winds, south-facing slopes, so I found Horse Heaven Hills and north of the Hood River where you have the gorge… you have these constant winds. You don’t get hit by winter frosts.
Grenache is a very temperamental grape. It comes from hot climates. It does not like cold weather. So during the winters around Walla Walla the vine starts deteriorating at around 7 degrees F. Syrah, Cab, Merlot, they start deteriorating between -3 and -12 F. And so if you have a 24 to 36 hour period of sub-zero, which we do every three or four years here in the valley, people are having to cut it all back. And they’re wondering why it’s not waking up in the spring. The reason is that it just doesn’t like cold weather. But if you have that constant flow from the wind, when the temperature stays in the teens at sites nearer this gigantic river, the Columbia rolling through, it helps keep the ambient temperature down, plus you’ve got this wind flow. So for me, that whole area is going to be fantastic for Grenache.
That for me is the highlight of Washington State, those Rhone varietals. I’m picking stuff that’s 24-25 brix, letting it hang until early November; it comes off with fantastic acidity. Because of the long cycle, you get those fantastic ripe-picked characteristics, where it’s phenolically ripe yet it is lower alcohol. So, finding spots that grow grapes well is the battle. If you’re more focussed on estate vineyards, where you’re predicated on Riesling to Cab in the same 40 acre parcel, on the same plot of land, that makes no sense to me. You’re going to have different ripening times all throughout it. Right now we have this incredible reservoir, especially with the crash of the economy, people are dropping out of vineyards left and right. So you’re able to find these incredible contracts, five acres for five years with an option for another five years. I’ll pay the going rate, no problem, with a 5% escalation clause, of course. Let’s see if we can manage it a little bit better. I want to chop it back to 2 1/2 tons per acre. Let’s just see where it goes from there. This after they’ve been producing 4 1/2 to 5 tons an acre because people are just looking for ordinary table wine. My idea is to concentrate the fruit, make some really fresh, high acidity wine by selective green cropping inside and outside of the canopy. Then it starts getting exciting.
So you source along the Columbia Gorge?
SB Yes. All throughout the Gorge. That’s Grenache and Mouvèdre. Now, the advantage of Walla Walla is the Syrah. Walla Walla is Syrah. It’s too cool, the cycle’s just not long enough; some years it’s fantastic, but for me it’s not long enough for Cab. It’s fantastic for Merlot; it’s a little earlier cycle than Syrah. But for Syrah it is just perfect here. It grows really well in the valley. Just beautiful, silky smooth tannins, plenty of color, just the way I like it. You can get reductive down on the rocks to super bright up on the loess… it’s a great spot for Syrah.
And I like to bring in a little bit of edge with lots of stem fermentation.
So you include stems? I love that. It’s considered heresy in certain parts of California.
SB Absolutely I use stems. A lot of it has to do with the sorting machines. The just chop away at the stems. You’re getting all these fractures, the little cuts, when chopped up by the de-stemmer. And if you don’t have a secondary sorting table, vibrating or what not, and you have guys picking out absolutely every little bit of green out of there, you’re not necessarily going to want that. You’re going to have greenness coming into your wine. At least if you do it with whole cluster, you’re getting away from all those little cuts that are happening when you’re sending it through a de-stemmer. It’s $150,000, $200,000 to get proper de-stemming equipment and sorters. It would be nice to have that kind of equipment to decide. If your stems are super, super green then maybe we need not to use them. It will bring in too much pyrazine.
Cab, you can’t really get away with putting lots of stems in. But with Syrah you don’t get those pyrazine issues, as you do with Bordeaux varietals. They would be super green: asparagus, green bean, pickles… but with Syrah using the stems really gives you that spice, that edge, it gives you that stinky funk that makes things interesting; so that it’s not just a bowl of fresh fruit.
I imagine you use a bladder press.
SB Yes, it’s a bladder press. We take all the free run out and mark them. Then with pressing we go up to about a bar, and we stay there after six or seven cycles. Some of the press juice is the best out of Syrah. We don’t do extended macerations. Most of the fermentations are done in 15 to 16 days. I’m not worried about color or extraction, and so some of the press stuff really gets nice tannin in there. I don’t like to rack. You leave the lees in there. Of course, you don’t want 4 inches of lees! But a good 1 or 2 is fine. Keep it sustained at the bottom of the barrel, keep it really topped, and as long as you’re not adding oxygen and that it goes through secondary, you’re fine. Then you become a janitor! This is really what winemakers are, glorified janitors. How you can get an ego about being a glorified janitor I’ll never know. Everything important is about getting it off the vine. You know what? I ike to be a janitor!
How did you get your wine into the right hands? I mean, there are dozens and dozens of new wineries yet there is a lot of buzz about Côtie Cellars. How did you break through?
SB I think it’s that I really enjoy what I am doing. On the marketing end, I hire the right people. Actually, it’s cool. I have two people. They came to me. What more perfect situation can you have than people coming to you? But it’s simply that good wine will sell. People say Syrah is a bad word right now. Syrah doesn’t sell. Blah, blah, blah. If you chase fads you’re going to get burned. You got to do what you love.
I started with Grenache. I got a contract suddenly. Somebody had just backed out of half a block and I had three hours to decide. There were a lot of people lined up to buy the fruit. But I had to take all of it. So I said I’d call my wife. I hung up the phone and literally hit redial. I knew my wife wasn’t going to like this! She was going to think it was a really bad idea. So I bought every last drop of it! Sign me up for the three acres. That’s what started it off. I knew it was a great site. When you know you’re getting this fantastic 14th leaf fruit of Grenache that people would fight over if they knew it was for sale, you can’t say no.
I just don’t want to mess it up, the wine. And there’s a lot of messing up here: like too much oak, like tartaric acid, like water… And then you get into the big boys and it just goes exponential from there. You start talking about RO, taking alcohol out, all those things that fool you. Super ripe and tons of acid, yet low alcohol… what the fuck is going on? Again, it’s about finding the right sites. Right now I have about 24 tons of Grenache under contract. I only use maybe twelve. I sell the fruit off for the same price I pay for it because I don’t want to piss off the growers. But I know that as were moving forward and things change, I want to have access to all the older vine Grenache so I can really work with it. Syrah is now very plentiful. So I don’t really worry about it. It’s easy and it’s fun to work with.
How important is the appellation designation, Walla Walla?
SB The winery is in Walla Walla. But for me it’s Washington State. I could care less if it’s Walla Walla. There are some incredible wines and vines being grown in Washington State, and Oregon. I could care less if it’s Walla Walla AVA. I think that’s doing a wine a disservice. I think it’s cool to do single vineyard Syrahs out of here, but to predicated yourself in Walla Walla just for the label, just because we’re getting in the magazines, is just ridiculous. If you’re fruit is a Cab you’ve gotta be in Horse Heaven Hills, you gotta’ be in Red Mountain, you know, super hot, really fun, floral, beautiful sites; it’s definitely not Walla Walla, for me. If you move into Merlot and Syrah, and some fantastic whites coming out of here, then it’s Walla Walla. For me the AVA does not matter. It’s the vineyard.
So Walla Walla is still working out its identity.
SB Absolutely. If you look at the vines I would say that half are between 7 and 14 years of age in the valley. There are some that are 35, like Windrow and Seven Hills East. The majority is young, with tons and tons of new plantings on the way. In France 35 years is still considered juvenile. We’re definitely trying to get our bearings, dial it in. It didn’t help that we had a huge frost in ‘04. But you can’t worry about it. You have to think of doing what’s best for the vines; not what’s going to burn into my profits. Right now we’re looking long-term. The only way you can be long-term in the wine industry is by putting out a quality product. If you don’t, then you might as well go do something else.
Tell me something of the water rights issues here. I’ve heard a lot about the ‘use it or lose it’ model.
SB Yes. If you don’t use it then you lose it after five years.
So it has to average out to whatever inches you’re initially allocated, or, if you’ve gone from fruit trees to grapes, for example, whatever has been grandfathered in.
SB Correct. A lot of people donate it back. If you put in a drip irrigation system you’re never going to need that type of water you need for growing trees, like the old apple and cherry farmers who would do overhead irrigation. I bought a small piece, ripped out all the trees, and we were going to irrigation. The government was going to give us money because of the water savings. That meant we had to donate water back to the river, but yet we got money back for that. They were very excited about it. They paid for all the main lines, the pipe, there were discounts on the pump, all these fantastic things where you’re getting, even as a first time farmer, 75% of the cost of your drip system, materials and installation. That’s fantastic. You’re helping the water table by using less. You have to use drip irrigation. Hopefully you find spots that can grow grapes without using it. But you can’t really do that in the juvenile stage of a vine’s life. You have to be very careful.
If I had endless amounts of money I would say that for the first 6 years not to take a crop off of a vine. Just get it up, grow some wood, give it what it wants but not take anything from it. And then roll into it. But economics being what they are, the 4th year you can start to make rosé out of it. Hopefully you’re in a spot where you’ve thought far enough ahead that you’re, down the line, not necessarily needing to water. Hopefully they’re big enough, the vines are strong enough. If they’re tree trunks after a few years, then you know damn well that it’s a fantastic place to grow that varietal. The can withstand a hell of a lot more if their 5 and 6 inches in diameter than they can when they’re one inch in diameter.
On a personal note, how does your wife feel about your new calling?
SB She’s from New Jersey. So, every time we come onto the other side of the mountain she says to me, “What the hell are we doing over here?” But then we get to Walla Walla and it’s ok. She’s also a school psyche. We’ve got the prison, and one step beneath that we’ve got the wineries and the service industries. It’s a small community and there are issues in it you don’t find in Seattle where they sweep in under the rug and move to south Tacoma. But here it’s a small community. You get all walks of life.
So a lot of the fruit here is hand-picked.
SB Absolutely. Talk about work. They guys who pick the fruit are unbelievable. It’s amazing when you walk out there and try and do a bin or two yourself. It’s really impressive. I won’t even pretend that I could do that work. We’re janitors. Those guys are laborers. They get paid pretty well, which is good; but it’s only seasonal. We’ve definitely seen the crunch with all the immigration bull shit. People want to work. And they’re willing to do it. You need to give them a shot. It’s how America was founded. The tough move up. Hard work is supposed to count for something.
Great guy, great wines. He left for France today, I believe. A pity the blogging folks could not meet him. But his wines may be found around town, especially in the tasting room. Again, I strongly recommend his work.
Admin
A curious thing happened on the way to Milton-Freewater, Oregon, a small agricultural town a few miles south of Walla Walla, and home to the vineyard of winemaker David Stephenson, just across the road from Cayeuse. What was to have been a vineyard tour first passed through Mr. Stephenson’s remarkable introduction to Walla Walla’s wine growing past, present, and ambitions. I shall be doing a second post on the vineyard portion of my visit as well as the stop at Stephenson Cellars itself. But, for now I felt it would be particularly helpful for fellow wine writers and bloggers here for the Wine Bloggers Conference to be brought up to speed via his spirited account of the AVA.
Mr. Stephenson produces round 1,000 cases a year. He is also a consultant, helping with site location, variety selection, bonding paperwork, fruit contracts, the whole deal. As he has said, “In two years I can take anyone from zero to winery”. His knowledge of the local scene makes him an invaluable source of information for visiting bloggers. Indeed, though he is not, sadly, currently on the list of wineries the bloggers are scheduled to visit, I strongly recommend they make their way down to his tasting room at 15 South Spokane St. here in Walla Walla, just minutes from the Marcus Whitman Hotel.
Admin I’ve heard repeatedly about cooperation among winemakers here in Walla Walla. You’re view?
David Stephenson There is a unique level of cooperation here in Walla Walla. It’s a small town. We all know each other. We have to eat at the same restaurants and stare at each other. We tend to get along. But it’s really about trying to lift everybody up at the same time, because if we have people who’ve driven six hours, or who come here from New York or Chicago, and they have a bad experience at any of the wineries, then that carries through for the rest of their visit. It kind of shadows the valley. So we all made a decision early on, the people who founded this place, the wine community, that it made a whole lot more sense to make sure everybody was successful. We’ll let the marketplace sort out your competitors. We’re not competing against each other. We’re competing against ourselves.
What percentage of the local production goes outside of the Walla Walla AVA?
DS As far as the fruit… that’s a tough question. I would say, this is a guess, about half. There are some relatively large wineries that have locks on some of the old, established vineyards here. Long-standing contracts. They understand that it probably helps to lift the quality of their wines buying our fruit. Basically, I would say that the percentage is high for wineries here in Walla Walla that source fruit outside of the AVA as well. One of the things we’ve learned in Washington, at least Eastern Washington, is that it’s a pretty unpredictable place weather-wise. So you need to hedge your bets, I believe. So if I’m exclusively one AVA, there is a chance that about every six years you’re going to freeze. And when you do, you don’t get any fruit. So you either raise your prices 20% to cover the loss, or you try and source fruit from outside the valley. A lot of folks just don’t want the headache of that. There is great fruit all over, so it makes sense to borrow from each other, if we can.
So how does Walla Walla understand the distinctions between its terroirs and the terroirs of the Yakima Valley, or other locales?
DS Oh, you know, that’s still an on-going discussion! Over the years I kind of go back and forth on the whole concept, wondering if it exists [terroir], because I have in my own vineyard sometimes as much difference from one end of the vineyard to the other as there is from one end of this valley to the other end. There’s just a lot of different micro-climates. It’s a pretty large, expansive area. And I think that anybody who comes to Eastern Washington is blown away by just how huge the wine growing areas are. I mean, they stretch to Idaho; they stretch up to the Canadian border; they stretch all the down to Bend, Oregon. So it’s just an enormous amount of real estate. That said, Walla Walla does seem to have a real lushness and warmth to the fruit that I think shows through. It’s not like any other place. That doesn’t mean it’s worse or better. It’s just different. And I really enjoy working with the fruit from here.
I’ve settled here. I’ve bought vineyard ground.
And when was your first vintage?
DS It was 2001, my first commercial release. I had worked for a lot of the bigger wineries for 3 or 4 years prior to that. I apprenticed with some really great guy that showed me a lot; showed me what not to do as well. I was real appreciative of that. I’ve been around for awhile compared to most of the valley, I guess.
Yes. I noticed that there are two major wine books about Washington, including Walla Walla, of course. And even though they were published in 2008 they already seem to be seriously out of date.
DS They are completely out of date. Our growth has been exponential. A lot of what is happening is, and there is a lot of romanticism that goes with this, but there are just a lot of people who’ve worked hard their whole lives, and they get to be about 50 or 55 and they wonder what do they want to do in their retirement years. They are productive people, professionals, successful in their fields, so they want something that’s challenging but at the same time enjoyable. So they come here. For as many baby boomers as there are, we talk about an aging population, that’s the demographic that really wants to start these wineries. They maybe spent their college years in Europe and haven’t been back, or they visited and want to have a piece of that enjoyment. I sometimes think there are more people who want to start wineries than there are people who want to buy wine.
Is there any conflict between established wheat growers and the pursuit of new vineyard acreage? I’m thinking with respect to land prices.
DS Initially there was. But it has really balanced out. What you see now is wheat farmers who often own vineyards. They are not foolish. They understand that if the land prices go up exponentially, and they’re sitting on 3,000 acres, if it goes up ten times that’s not exactly bad for them. It’s tough to farm. If you wanted to get into wheat farming, if that was your life’s goal, to do that without an existing farm would be pretty difficult. That’s just the way things are.
But as far as taxes on land… that must be burdensome.
DS Well, you know, farmers, we take care of ourselves. There are tax exemptions. You don’t pay the same as if you had an apartment building on your property. Oregon, especially, is very, very protective of their farming ground, their agricultural land. In fact, the vineyard we’re heading to now are in what is called an ‘exclusive farm use area’. I couldn’t build a home. If there is not already an existing home you’re not allowed to occupy any square foot of that land except for agriculture. You have to go with your hat in your hand and beg the planning department if you want to put up any sort of structure that would take any acreage out of production. In exchange for that you have dramatically reduced taxes. It really does work to keep it in agriculture.
What about the erosion of your agricultural base? In California a farmer pulling down $50,000 a year might be approached by some real estate speculator who wants to build McMansions. He’s offered millions of dollars for his 100 acres. He’s 70. What’s he going to say? Of course he’ll take the money.
DS We’ve seen some of that here, south of town, toward the slopes of the Blue Mountains. There was a lot of 10 acre zoning that were wheat farms; but that seems to have slowed down. People have realized that it’s much better to live in town if you want a to have a second of third home. You’ve got services. You’re not dealing with well failures, mowing, and agriculture all the way around you. It’s really no fun living in a dirt zone, unless you’re farming it. It’s not that romantic.
So what about water rights? What percentage would you guess, of course, it has to do with locale, but what is the percentage of vineyards dry-farmed? And what are the irrigation protocols for many of the wineries?
DS That’s a good question. Very few wineries or vineyards here are dry-farmed. This road we’re sitting on here is the road down into Oregon. Basically, the rule of thumb is that every mile that you go to the East you pick up an inch of rain. We’re at about 17, 18 inches. It’s almost like clockwork. As you go up the slopes you pick up more water. Basically, as you get this rising elevation, you tend to scrub a little bit more moisture out of the thunderstorms. The difficulty with this area is that we have an enormous amount of water. Walla Walla means ‘many waters’. We’ve got creeks and springs bubbling everywhere. The aquifers are good. It doesn’t mean that they’re not going down–but that’s not due to grape farming. Grape farming uses minimal amounts. The biggest issue that we have is that if you turn your apple orchard, or your cherry orchard, your irrigated fields over to grapes, you’re going to use a tiny percentage of the water that you used to. There is a kind of ‘use it, or lose it’ rule. If you don’t use your 36 inches per year, you may well forfeit it. You can lose it forever.
You lose it forever? So they determine your allocation by how much has been historically used? So your incentive is to use as much of your allocation as possible even though you’ve switched over to grapes?
DS It’s a terrible system. My right is for 36 inches per year. So you’ll see out here cow pasture where people have a pump going year-round. They just flood-irrigate the field. They just have it running because if they don’t use it up, they’re going to lose it. We all know that in the future that water will be gold. None of this happen without water. Land doesn’t have any value here if you don’t have an irrigation source for it.
We don’t get any rain from basically this point until the end of September, sometimes into October, we’re not going to get an inch of rain. So, unlike France, or other places that dry farm, we get our 18, 20, 22 inches, but it’s all in the Wintertime. We’re in a little bit different situation. We desperately need to irrigate.
Speaking of France, when a winemaker first starts out here who do they turn to? To what nation’s winemaking traditions do they model their winemaking? I’ve noticed a certain use of oak, shall we say.
DS I would say Rhone is closer. We have a very hot climate. You wouldn’t know it now because it’s temperate, but we’re usually scorching in the 90s right now; that’ll go to a 100, sometimes 110 in the Summertime. Tempranillo is here as well. But it was Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay, that’s sort of made in more of a California style. Some want to go to the oak. You want bigger, bigger, bigger, because that is, quite frankly, what your customers want. If you want big scores, you go with lots of oak and heavily extracted fruit. But at some point, you kind of settle down. You make the wines that you love to make. You gain confidence over time. I think you can then throttle back and start paying attention to subtleties. But initially, if you look around, you’ll see that this stuff has not been planted to grapes for very long; I think 40 years is about the oldest vineyard here. Most of them are 10 years, 8 years. And so, with that you get this explosion of new, raw, big, bold, beautiful fruit. They’ve got an excess of carbohydrates. It’s fun while it lasts, but at some point we’re going to settle down here.
Where do folks turn for their rootstock?
DS There are a couple of nurseries. Washington is a little different because we grow on our own rootstocks, predominately. We’re not using any rootstock here. We don’t have phylloxera at this point. We are too bloody cold; too bloody hot. That we can plant vines ungrafted is another thing that I think gives Washington really unique wines. We’re not having to control for the effects of rootstocks. What you’re getting is kind of a pure blast of Cabernet, or whatever varietal you’ve cuttings of.
Do you pay attention to clones?
DS There is some attention. I would say that that research is a long ways away. We’re still trying to figure out what site grows fruit. We’re in our absolute infancy. We just haven’t been doing this for very long. and, again, if you look at how much space we have left in the Walla Walla Valley, it’s an enormous area.
We have about 1800 acres under grape cultivation in the entire AVA. I will tell you that there is a new expansion we’re going to be right below [Seven Hills]. It will be about 2000 acres in size. That will double the acreage in the Walla Walla Valley AVA with that one planting alone. So, we’re kind of on the radar now. We’re starting to see a lot more outside money coming in.
So, a new winemaker would essentially turn to a limited number of viticulturalists and siting experts in the area and be told what most are told. There is a model or a pattern.
DS There is a pattern that gets you in the door. Then, after that, you begin sourcing from small, little independent farmers. And this the community of Milton-Freewater, very different from Walla Walla. This is the old time agriculture: cherries and apples and prunes. And now grapes as well. There are lots of little pocket vineyards in here that are fun to play with.
Interesting. So there might be an apple grower here, for example, who might plant an acre of vines. Winemakers would then spot buy, as it were.
DS Yes. Absolutely. And there are a lot of winemakers here who work with a farmer. They’ll go up to an orchardist with a 100 acres and ask for five acres to plant under a long-term contract. Then they’ll split the development costs. The farmer gets the ’sure thing’. The winery owner has clear ideas of what he wants to see, what varieties… there’s a lot less risk for both of them.
—As mentioned above, a second post on Mr. Stephenson’s vineyard itself will be forthcoming.—
Admin
“My name is Tim Thornhill. I grew up in Houston. Some 35 years ago we all took off and went to work or went to college. The family only got back together once or twice a year sorta’ only when somebody died or got married. About ten years ago my brother [Tom] and I started thinking about what we should be doing, and what we would regret not doing; and that was trying to get as much of our family back together in one location, if possible. So I looked around the country, Tom already lived in the San Francisco Bay area; we settled on Northern California as being the region. We spent three years looking through Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino counties. While Napa and Sonoma have the geography and the climate, they really didn’t have the community that we were looking for. When your gathering family together to put down really deep roots, you have to look forward 40 or 50 years as to where you’re leaving them and how are they going to feel about it.
“What Napa had to offer, as far as all the commercialism and tourism, it just really didn’t fit for us. Also, this community is a very, very green community. There is 5 times as much organic acreage in Mendocino county as their is in Napa or Sonoma counties. So it really worked for us. When we purchased the first property [La Ribera Vineyard], it had 150 acres of vines on it. We ended up in the vineyard business. But it was really the landscape for the family estate. My parents were here right away. One of my older children has come back. In fact, I just became a grandfather three days ago [6/15]. My daughter [Kate], who runs the export and does all of our contract grower negotiations, married one of the winemakers here, and has now thrown off the next generation, probably a biodynamic baby, to be honest. Then we partnered up with Paul Dolan.”
All of this was said within the first few minutes of my revealing vineyard tour at Parducci Wine Cellars. I knew then and there I was in luck. Tim Thornhill is a rarity, in my experience. He needs no prompting to get to the heart of the matter. And he thinks big. But this has nothing to do with any Texas cliché. For he is a man of the world.
As you read what I will call a ‘lesson’, perhaps you might think money was an overwhelming factor. Not all wineries, after all, may believe they have the resources to accomplish what has been done at Parducci. But Mr. Thornhill turns the question around. Aligning yourself with the natural forces of Nature (with a big ‘N’) will save you money. And perhaps the world. After all, how much is spent on pesticides, municipal water, and electricity? How great are the monies spent resisting the natural world? Biodiversity, plant and insect succession, water filtration, oxygenation, gravity– these are biological and physical processes to be harnessed. The idea is to align your project with how the natural world expresses itself, how it goes about its business.
Life loves to live, I tell my kids. Even the lowly weed sprouting in the median along I-5 is an act of grace. Caltrans may knock it down, but there is no denying the weed’s determination to live. There is a beauty even there.
We now join a conversation already in progress.
“We take a row, I think it’s one every 14 of 16 rows, and we put in an additional drip line, sub-surface, and then we plant around 30 to 40 different plant species in our mix. We have flowers year-round. You’ll note this row [pictured] runs all the way through the block. So we get good distribution of insects all the way through. I want all the insects I can get! They will balance themselves. There’re almost 3000 species of predatory insects in Northern California. It’s really about habitat. We do the same thing time after time after time, whether it’s the insects or the owls.”
I am shown a video, recently taken by Mr. Thornhill, of the interior of one of their many owl boxes around the property. Barn owl eggs are clearly visible. In another box fledglings hiss behind a partition. A third video shows a mother owl starring at the camera.
“People ask me, ‘So, do you put owls in the box?’. I tell them no more than I put insects in that insectary. ‘Where did you get your owls?’ Well, the owls are indigenous. They just need habitat. An average owl consumes 53 pounds of rodents in a year. So I don’t need poison in my vineyard. I don’t need traps. They will balance themselves. The owls wouldn’t be here if there wasn’t food. They just need the habitat.”
Reduce The Use
“The first thing I want to do with all of my energy consumption is ‘reduce the use’. And what we find is that if you measure there is an almost immediate reduction just because people know you’re measuring. Of course, there is a push-back in the beginning for most people when you say you want to measure everything. So, in the vineyard we installed what’re called tensiometers. They measure available moisture in the soil. We used to make our decisions based more on schedule, what was convenient, or maybe what was historical, which usually was not based on data; it was based on feeling, emotion. ‘In god we trust; all others bring data’.
So we put all these tensiometers and started measuring available moisture in the ground. We found we did not need to necessarily water on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, like we were doing. We might not even water at all that week. We’ve reduced our water use by 25% in our worst case, and 37% in our best case. And we end up with better balanced vines, better fruit, and better wines in the end.
“We’ve reduced the amount of water we pull from the aquifer, the water we pull from the rivers, the amount of biodiesel burned to run the pumps, the number of hours run the pumps… yet the quality of our product has been improved. A lot of people will say being environmental is too expensive, that they can’t afford it. Being environmental means being efficient. When you’re efficient, things drop to the bottom line. So first we reduce the use. Then we get into recycling.
“Here in the winery to reduce the use, I went through and divided it up into 22 different sections. Each section has its own water meter. So when walking through the winery right after I put the meter in, the gentleman running the barrel room for 17 years said he’d seen that I had put one there in his spot. He was a little concerned that I would now how much water he was wasting. I said, no. I want to know how much water you’re saving. Well, guess what? He’s done nothing but save water. And so have all of his other guys, basically in competition. They’ve got the scoreboard right there, the water meter!”
“All of our utilities have been coming down. Our electric consumption, for example, between ‘06 and ‘08 went down by 15%, but our production actually increased by between 100-200%. So, while we’ve grown the production operation tremendously, we’ve reduced our electrical use. And you see our water use in the vineyard also declined. The period from ‘05 through ‘09 was one of the worst droughts in California history. But even while we had a tremendous drought, this means far less ambient moisture, we were still able to reduce the amount of irrigation we did, and ended up with better fruit and better balanced vines.”
Reuse and Recycling
“I try to use the water that rinses the tanks to also, at the end of the day, rinse the floors. We’re using it twice, if at all possible. Then the water is to be recycled. At that point the water is BOD. Here is a picture of what it use to look like when we first got here. It was basically purple. All designers told me back then that I needed to put four 10 hp motors in my pond, basically agitators like any sewer plant uses. But signing up for 25 years for four 10 horse motors was not in my game plan. I kept going through consultants until I found one willing to think completely outside the box. We went out and maximized existing resources.
“Here’s how we did it. In the winery I gave everyone dust pans and brooms so that they could sweep up all the debris of winemaking first before they tried to wash down the floors. It all use to just go down the drain. That use to be ok, and legally it was ok, too. But it also meant that the water was basically ruined. It had no oxygen. It’s called BOD, biological oxygen demand. It’s created mostly by sugars and solids. The sugars, in our case, comes from the fruit. So my job is to get the solids out and remove the sugars, and put the oxygen back in the water.
“So when the waste water leaves the winery (after years of bringing all the plumbing into one place), it goes up to the tanks way up on top of the hill. Up there we have repurposed old fire tanks. They now serve as anaerobic digesters. 
The water spends between 20 and 30 days to go through those tanks. Then, via gravity, it comes down through a series of trickle towers. The first one is near the tanks. Here’s another one [pic]. The water comes up through a pipe and runs down the trickle tower.
Now, the consultants I went to designed a trickle tower for me, but it was going to be $100,000. It was all stainless steel and plastic. Instead, what I did was take some old grape trailers. These things were in the weeds. Nobody even knew they were here. They do hold water. So I then took barrel racks, old steel barrel racks, stacked them up; welded them together; stuck it full of wood slats to act as a media; I then jammed a bunch of willows between. You’ll note what most people would call black slime coating the sides. It’s actually called filamentous fungi. What it does is consume compounds, sugar being my main compound. And as the water trickles down through here it also gets aeration. So, my settling goes on in the tanks on the hill. My de-sugaring goes on in these trickle towers.
“This one [pictured above] was built about three or four months ago. The efficiency is quite measurable. It’s an amazing thing. It has a whole lot of surface area; and the filamentous fungi, if you take it in your hand, feels kind of like wet cotton. You can squeeze it. It has texture. But lay it out on the flat rock in the sun, and by the next day it is like a piece of paper. It’s almost nothing but structure.
So the water passes through the trickle towers, the last one sitting just before the water goes into the pond. So that’s the delivery of the water from the winery to the pond. Now, in the pond is where they wanted me to put these four agitators. They would have just consumed the power of three or four houses. Instead, we built a water falls.
“Think about the two main processes in this world with respect to water. The giant water filters are the Everglades of the world. The oxygenators are all the streams and rocky creeks. That’s where the trout live because that is where is found the highest oxygen level. So we figured out that with one five hp pump all we had to do was lift the water in this pond twelve feet. That takes very little psi, very little power to move a lot of water. So I raise about 400 gallons a minute twelve feet. From that point it is gravity again. The water is raised above the pond level to the road height. From there gravity takes the water through a series of water falls. Those are my aerators. All gravity. No moving parts. Rocks. Plants. No service! And were operating at 20% of the power of the four aerators originally proposed, and we achieve a water quality 3 to 4 times what they would have ever had as a goal. We’re pretty pleased.”
We pass by a portable chicken coop with a solar door which opens at dawn and closes at dusk. It must be moved every six months when the predators in the area catch on. Guinea hens pass through. Hawks, a couple species of duck, egret, black, green, and great blue heron, common snipe, geese, sandpipers, killdeer, turkeys, bluebirds, a kingfisher, even the occasional troublesome otter, all make use of the pond, one way or another. There are muskrats.
“This pond use to be purple four or five years ago. It had a smell that people on the freeway would call and complain about. There is now no smell. Again, when the water comes out of the winery it has a BOD of about 2,500. Before I can use it on land it has to have a measurement of 80 ppm. I am now somewhere below 10 ppm. We can’t even get a reading. So I have virtually no BOD. When the water comes out of the winery there is zero oxygen. I’ll measure the oxygen down where it comes out of the wetland. We’ll probably find it is over 4 ppm. Trout require about 5 ppm.
“My minimum requirement for oxygen is 1 ppm before I can land-apply it. The BOD minimum is 80 ppm before I can land-apply it. So this water in the pond can be used anytime.” [To clarify, there are two measurements in play here. One, for BOD, is a measurement of organic material: the lower the number, the better. The second is for oxygen saturation: the higher, the better. The 'minimums' Mr. Thornhill refers to are establish either at either the state or federal level, or both. Admin]
“The water has to go back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. It comes in via gravity, passes through the water falls, is pumped back up the twelve feet and starts all over. The plants in the pond do all kinds of things. They suck out all the excess nutrients left in the winery water; all the phosphorous, the nitrogen. They will also remove heavy metals. They also introduce oxygen. Aquatic plants pull oxygen out of the atmosphere and introduce it back into the water through their roots.
I had a neighbor call me to ask if I was interested in some concrete. He was taking out a big patio. I went and looked. There were forty of these slabs [pictured]. I said I would be right back with my truck! So I am going to put a path of these all through the wetlands so that people can see what is going on.
“So here’s our dissolved oxygen level. And I would venture to say that we are probably close to 6 or 7 ppm. We’re over 5, that’s for sure. When they first gave me an oxygen set to test, it went from zero to one, in tenths. Right? I would measure and tell them that I was getting 1. They would ask if I was getting a full 1 or a point 1 [.1]? No, I was getting a 1! And if you went to the bottom of the water fall it would be 12 ppm, off the charts. Saturated. So I got a new set. I come out to check the oxygen levels once a week, usually when I’m doing a tour, just out of curiosity. But I do have a guy who checks it in three different places every single Monday. We can see a difference from end to end of the pond and wetland.
“We check BOD once a month. That’s kind of an expensive thing or I would do it all the time. But we don’t see huge changes once we get out of harvest. There just begins this very steady decline. In fact, BOD removal is much faster now because of our trickle towers. We can go right to a trickle tower and measure the BOD in the water as it comes out of the tank. At the bottom of the tower BOD is cut in half. That is just at the first tower; and I’m going to have four.
“We recycle 100% of the winery water. After we’ve ‘reduced our use’, we reuse it more than once. It’s kind of like a wine glass. When people ask me what is the difference between ‘recycle’ and ‘reuse’, I tell them that a wine glass is reused. When it is broken, it’s recycled. So with the water, we try to use it more than once. But it does get ‘broken’. Then we have to recycle it. So this entire process here saved me about 5 million gallons of water last year that I was then able to use for irrigation. It’s high-quality water. I would have otherwise had to buy it.”
“So, number one, we recycle 100% of the water. Number two, we do it in a way that consumes very little energy, with no chemical applications. Number three, we’ve ended up with a bird sanctuary out of it; more habitat, more biodiversity, a greater contribution to the biodynamics of this property. And number four, I get to share the knowledge with people and try to teach others.
“When you want to talk about sustainability, what is true sustainability, well, first of all it means living your life and running your business so that it doesn’t adversely impact future generations. I didn’t come up with that. But I also think that it means sharing information. If you are not passing the information along, that is not sustainable. The sooner we pass it on right now, the better. It needs to be viral.
“My partners and I came to the conclusion, when we created our partnership, that if we waited for the governments around the globe to address environmental concerns, then it wouldn’t happen fast enough. However, industry can turn on a dime, with incentives. They are now incentified. They weren’t five years ago.
It’s been a struggle all my life to be an environmental person. Other people sort of laugh at it, and don’t pay any attention. It’s the same thing with organics. I remember when I kept thinking, well, there getting it now. That was 10 years ago. Maybe they’re getting it now. That was 5 years ago. Now they’re getting it. I mean, now there is a big push. A big wave. There is incentive.
“You take Walmart and Clorox. I’ve sat on boards with the environmental guys and that is the number one thing they are focused on is turning their company green. They know that if they don’t, they’re out. That company will not be around five to ten years from now. I’m convinced.
“The generation coming into play now, my kids, basically, the twenty and thirty year-olds, they are distrusting. They see what is happening. They want third-party certification. So, that’s where ‘certified organic’ or ‘certified biodynamic’ comes in. A lot of people don’t want to be measured. I do. It’s kind of like running in a race. If I’m going to run, let’s make it a race. If it’s going to be a race, then I really prefer the front. It’s just a lot more fun.” (laughs)
We then drove to the winery’s tasting room where I enjoyed a healthy lunch. I turned off my recorder. Both my intellectual and corporeal appetites were satisfied.
Admin
How strange and jarring can be the experience when reading old wine books, especially those centered on California. But what might be meant by ‘old’ ? Is 1978 old? It can seem like ancient history when reading Wines of California, by Robert Lawrence Balzer. Yet that is the book’s great strength. Selling for pennies on the second-hand book market, Mr. Balzer’s book provides valuable insight into where we’ve come from, how far has the industry moved in 30 years. California’s first great modern wine writer, his Wines of California enjoys an unusual distinction of having been written on the cusp of California’s explosion onto the international wine scene, a fuse lit by Mr. Balzer himself.
Who is Robert Lawrence Balzer? From his Special Collections page at Cal Poly Pomona.
“Balzer is recognized for having had an enormous impact on the California wine industry, and on the acceptance of California wines worldwide. He began championing quality California wines in the 1930s, decades before the rest of the world realized their stature. In 1973 he organized a blind tasting with the New York Food and Wine Society, where California Chardonnays received the top four scores. That contributed momentum toward the famous 1976 “Judgment of Paris” blind tasting where again California wines received top scores over French wines (portrayed in the 2008 film “Bottle Shock”). The acquisition of the Robert Lawrence Balzer Collection builds on an already significant Wine Industry Collection at Cal Poly Pomona Library and further strengthens the library as a research venue for the wine industry.”
A man of many talents (he played a small role in the 1975 film Day of the Locust), a practicing Buddhist, Balzer’s distinguished writing and teaching career earned him the enduring gratitude of Ernest Gallo, Robert Mondavi, and the California wine industry as a whole. A charming post from the Underground Wine Letter describes a recent March 2010 visit with the gentleman this way,
“Robert, the first serious wine journalist in the U.S., has been a wine writer for close to 70 years. I had not seen him since his birthday before last and he will be 98 in June. A true Renaissance man and an epicurean, Robert has been a retailer, an actor, a restaurateur, a Buddhist monk, a flight instructor during World War II, a wine instructor and the author of 11 books. While age is finally catching up with him, he is still charming, knowledgeable and articulate, especially when reminiscing about the earlier days of California wine. He stills drinks wine and Scotch regularly, which he partially attributes to his long age. An amazing man, he has known the rich and famous in politics, food and wine, Hollywood and more.”
Adding to his august reputation is the New York Wine Tasting he organized in 1973. Years before the far better known Judgement of Paris, the New York tasting
“assembled 14 leading wine experts including France’s Alexis Lichine, who owned two Chateaux in Bordeaux, a manager of the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City, and Sam Aaron, a prominent New York wine merchant. They evaluated 23 Chardonnays from California, New York, and France in a blind tasting before an assemblage of 250 members of the New York Food and Wine Society. California Chardonnays received the top four scores. Fifth place went to the 1969 Beaune Clos des Mouches Joseph Drouhin. Other French wines in the competition were the 1970 Corton-Charlemagne Louis Latour, the 1971 Pouilly-Fuisse Louis Jadot, and the 1970 Chassagne-Montrachet Marquis de Laguiche Joseph Drouhin.”
I belive much may be learned from older, out of print wine books. Mr. Balzer’s Wines of California is a case in point. There is a kind of innocence about his style. Free of technical, highbrow cant, we may read what are now almost tragicomic observations such as this about California Pinot Noir.
“Pinot Noir, both the grape and the wine, remains an enigma to California viticulturists and winemakers alike. [....] Pinot Noir in California seems to elude even the most intelligent application of enological science in the production of wines comparable in stature to those of the French Côte d’Or. [...] Few wineries can afford more than a year or so of bottle age before general release. That aging is the beginning of the refinement necessary to achieve a wine’s full potential. It is up to you, the wine buyer, to allow your wines the time they need to reach their peak.”
Or this (abbreviated) breakdown of California’s “own wine, unique, complex, and [...] varied” Zinfandel.
“1. A light, young, and fresh Zinfandel, its berry-like flavor suggesting the French Beaujolais.
2. A heavier-bodied, deeper-colored wine, capable of long cellar aging, comparable to the finest French clarets of the Médoc. Such wines are most likely to emerge from the cooler regions.
3. Late-harvest Zinfandels, with alcohol content as high as 17 percent by volume [!] and with minimal residual sugar. These have rare aging potential and suggest the results that will be possible when viticulture and enology marry in the science of winemaking.”
From rare pictures of youthful and noted California winemakers, Fred Franzia, Dave Bennion, Martin Ray, Joe Heinz, Warren Winiarski, Michael Mondavi, even Justin Meyer, to an excellent gloss on California wine history, this book has all that a contemporary wine enthusiast might want to learn about how the California wine world was understood in the late seventies. Mr. Balzer’s accounts of what he calls The Corporate Investment Period (1965-1974) and the Financial Adjustment and the Post-Boom Crisis (1974-1976) are especially insightful.
So, it is to Robert Lawrence Balzer, who will turn 98 on June 25th, that I offer my deep gratitude for his work. I strongly encourage folks to visit their local used book store and buy a copy of what will prove a classic, the Wines of California.
Admin
May was a relatively quiet month for news but sent a steady trickle of wine and events my way, including a welcome addition to my Château Musar collection. My involvement in the inaugural North East Wine Festival at the beginning of June means that this post is even tardier than usual but, while it may seem strange posting a piece about May in the middle of June, I suppose it’s no different to the Decanter Magazine I get in June July on the front cover yet being full of stories from April!
The biggest news for May must be the rise in opposition to HR5034, the dreaded bill for State based alcohol regulation: in the US which threatens free wine trade across the country. Although proposed in April it was last month that saw a concerted outpouring of opposition to the bill with a dedicated web-site and Facebook page. Anti-HR5034 Tom Wark of Fermentation has put together a compelling set of posts on this subject while Jon Bonné has written a good piece over at SFGate.
Over in France researchers at the Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences (ISVV), in Bordeaux released details on their study of wine stored in different packaging types; glass, bag-in-box, single-layer PET and small multi-layer PET. The initial results don’t indicate any obvious negative effects for red wines, but for white it suggests that signs of oxidation are apparent after only 6 months in the plastic packaging.
Moving across to Burgundy and Decanter.com reported the news that Domaine de la Romanee Conti was the victim of a blackmail attempt which threatened to poison vines at the famous Estate.
Keeping with a French theme but moving to Asia for Vinexpo in Hong Kong at the end of the month and Decanter.com reported on the Bordeaux 2009 Vintage being the main talking point. The exhibition ended with a 40% increase in attendees compared to 2008 and confirmed a resurgent Asian wine market, at least when it comes to Bordeaux.
Australia’s woes continued with news of falling grape prices and unsold wine in warehouses as an era comes to an end in Antipodean winemaking and sees thousands of hectares of vineyards being grubbed up. The most likely outcome of the expected 3–5 year realignment of the industry will be a smaller but higher quality production and the disappearance of the ubiquitous cheap Australian brands from UK supermarket shelves.
Bringing the news summary to a close and I had to smile when I heard that Gary Vaynerchuk is to be an airline wine consultant for Virgin America and that passengers will have the delights of WLTV broadcast on the in-flight entertainment. Having watched my fair share of these videos I’d be interested to see how an average passenger takes to his enthusiastic presentation style!
So to my little corner of the North East of England and Château Musar proved to be a running theme throughout the month. My occasionally random tweeting as @KSLaczko persuaded one of my followers to pick up a 2002 Musar from our local Waitrose store and open it for her husband’s birthday at the beginning of the month. I haven’t even tried the 2002 myself yet so I was relieved to hear it went down very well, so well in fact that by the end of the month she’d bought the 2001 and tried it over a supper of Fish & Chips (which apparently was a lovely match!). However the best Musar news came with an e-mail from the Wine Society with a special offer of a mixed case; 2 each of the 2003 Rouge, the 2004 Blanc and the 2003 Père et Fils. Since the 2003 Rouge would normally only be available in the UK towards the end of the year the decision to spend £84 was almost instantaneous and less than a week later I added these early release bottles to my cellar.
Spain supplied a large proportion of drinks while out and about during May. A week on the South coast of England courtesy of the day job required a cheap bottle of wine for hotel room drinking and £5 at the local Sainsbury’s got me the Castillo de Calatrava 2001 Gran Reserva Tempranillo from La Mancha, which punched way above its price range. Later on a Thai meal was accompanied by the young and fruity Torrelongares 2003 Reserva, a Grenache/Tempranillo blend from Carinena, while night-time drinks in the hotel bar had me trying out a selection of Sherries including a fine dry Amontillado – although after all that the most memorable wine turned out to be the Vidal 2009 Hawkes Bay Riesling, a racy citrusy white from New Zealand.
Back home and I had cause to dust off the kilt for a friend’s wedding, however the evening meal at one of the local hotels didn’t have an inspiring wine choice. A rather sharp, chemical Chilean Carmenere underwhelmed, followed by an inexcusable Vin de Pays du Gers Blanc (Cuvée Lamartine). A passable Pinot Grigio Blush was an improvement but luckily Spain came to the rescue with a fruity Viña Sanzo Verdejo and a half-decent 2005 Rioja Crianza to dull the senses and lubricate the rest of the evening, ending up with me dancing like my dad into the wee hours!
The monthly NEWTS meeting was a showing of some of the latest offerings from UK retailer Majestic, although due to a booking mix-up store manager Greg wasn’t available to give the presentation.
The first big wine was a white in the form of the Astrolabe Kekerengu Coast 2009 Sauvignon Blanc with a heavy citrus flavour, but with a quick finish and a £20 price tag this didn’t receive a lot of enthusiasm from the members with comments about “why produce another (Sauvignon)?”. A Beaujolais then provoked a mixed response; the Domaine Christophe Cordier 2008 Morgon, Côte du Py Vieilles Vignes, was decreed an atypical Beaujolais but for me it was the better for it, with smoked strawberry nose, chewy tannins and a cherry mid-palate. It had a slightly bitter aspect and plenty of acidity which cried out for food, and could possibly have benefitted from a year or two more in the bottle.
The reds moved up a gear with the Contino 2005 Rioja Reserva which had a turbo-charged nose with vanilla and smoky liquorice. This full-bodied, modern style of Rioja had plenty of sweet fruit and received unanimous approval befitting it’s price tag approaching £30. For significantly less than that the £13 Bordeaux Blend Craggy Range 2006 Te Kahu Gimblett Gravels from New Zealand’s Hawke’s Bay also met with group approval. This was a superb wine; a slightly vegetal nose with blackcurrant and liquorice, smooth and rich in the mouth with plenty of tannin on the mid-palate and finish, but could have done with a few more years to integrate.
In comparison the D’Arenberg 2006 Coppermine Road was rather dull, good for a second before turning rather flat and with nothing to commend its £25 price, so we moved to South America for the final wines of the evening; the Catena 2006 Alta Malbec from Mendoza and the Viña Mayu 2007 Syrah Reserva from Chile’s Elqui Valley. The Mayu had only recently been lauded in Decanter magazine as a 19pt, 5 star wine so I was looking forward to trying it, especially as it retails for less than £12. Unfortunately it was a confected, syrupy wine with a chemical nose and a cloying texture that impressed no-one – “alcoholic Ribena” was shouted out, the reference to the sugary blackcurrant juice not a sign of appreciation! Argentina didn’t fare too much better with the premium Catena Alta either, as I don’t usually pay over £25 for an easy-drinking “quaffable” wine which doesn’t elicit much thought while you drink.
The Contino (owned by Spanish Stalwart CVNE) was voted best wine on the night but for less than half the price I’d recommend the Craggy Range Te Kahu – if you’re in the UK then look for the Marks & Spencer Lone Range Gimblett Gravels Red, which is effectively the same wine made with an M&S label.
And so finally to my monthly roundup of bottles at home and it was definitely a month for the cellar with 17 incoming and only 8 outgoing, suggesting June will be a lean month! Apart from the 6 bottles of Château Musar there was another country theme with the Feudi di San Gregorio 2005 Greco di Tufo, Borgo San Michele 2005 Lacryma Christi del Vesuvio, alta Battistina 2009 Gavi and Deltetto 2008 Favorita Sarvai catering to my current quest for Italian white varietals.
I also managed to pick up a couple of good Australian deals in local stores; first with a Tim Adams 2006 Riesling hiding amongst the 08s in Tesco, and then with a Tempus Two 2003 Botrytis Semillon for only £5, however, it was 2 bottles of another dessert wine which had me most satisfied as it completed a search for an unusual German example – the Schales 1999 Huxelrebe Beerenauslese from Rheinhessen should be the perfect close to a tasting I’m planning for next year.
Of the drinkers only 2 were of note. A classic English white was first, the Chapel Down Winemaker’s selection 2006 Bacchus reserve. This crisp aromatic wine had similarities to Sauvignon Blanc with a touch of lemon and nettle – not great QPR at £11 but worth it for the experience. The £10 Heredad Ugarte 2005 Crianza proved to be an excellent Rioja from a very good vintage, ticking all the boxes for a medium bodied, food-friendly and easy drinking red.
And so to June, already upon us, but you’ll have to wait a short while for news of the Wine Festival.
Slainte!
Greybeard
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JL So this is our tillage and cultivation center here. This is a flail mower. Its has two side cutters that I have folded over right now because we’re missing a snap ring…. But as we’re driving down the row we’re both mowing the middle but also underneath the vines.
JL Oh, yeah. A power spader. Those things are cool. It’s like a crankshaft with spades on it. They are fun to look at. But we don’t do any tillage here. And over here is our newest acquisition. Our vineyard manager, he’s been with us for 25 years now, this was kind of his 25th anniversary present, this tractor.
So at the heads, at the ends of the rows we’ve got these cordon-pruned vines. It’s just hard to get rid of these. They’re just too pretty.
JL Well, remember how you were observing how in Burgundy they clean-till everything or herbicide it so that there is nothing growing on the vineyard floor? Well, that means that every drop of water that hits the ground is available to the vines. So the plants are going to take advantage of that and put their water-collecting roots at the surface. That’s one of the purposes for leaving this full coverage here in our vineyard. It is to drive the roots deep. Basically, all of the weeds and companion plants handle all the minor rain events. This coverage all turns brown in late July, and it then acts as mulch. So we retain more water in the soil as a result of leaving the cover than we would if we tilled it up.
JL Oh, yeah. This is classic Jory soil, red clay. Its got some really interesting properties. For a clay it’s stays really friable. It doesn’t seal shut in the Winter the way that a typical clay soil does. And so the roots still have access to oxygen. But it retains that ability of clay to hold water in the Summer. It’s a great soil for growing grapes on. It is very consistent throughout the hill. Where you have lots of different layers of stuff, sort of a layer cake of hard and soft, water can move in interesting and unpredictable ways. In some places where there hasn’t been a spring in 20 years might suddenly become one Winter very wet. In other places where I’ve managed that’s actually been somewhat of a problem. A part of the vineyard that wasn’t very vigorous before, and which you’re farming in a certain way, suddenly it has all this water one Summer. You then have to back off what you’re doing there, but then down on the other end, that’s gotten a little bit dryer. That’s one of the things Dad was looking for in a vineyard site in the Dundee Hills.
If you look at these canes, none of the canes are bigger than my little finger. That’s really what you’re looking for. When you start getting thumb-sized canes, they’re shooting off secondaries all over the place; they start to clog the canopy; you’re not getting the sort of dappling effect; the clusters don’t have good exposure. And the plant invests more heavily in developing infrastructure in the form of canes than it does in actually ripening fruit. What we look for in the vineyard is this innate balance. And an innate yield level. These naturally yield about 2 1/4 tons an acre. We might come through and take off a little wing here and there. And that will get us down to 2. So we’re not having to physically shove the vines hard in order to get them to give us ripe, balanced fruit. It’s kinda been happening from the way the vineyard’s been structured since the get-go.
JL This was my first job in the vineyard. It’s called suckering. I was never sure if the sucker was the the thing growing off the vine or the guy doing it. There are lots to go. The guys were actually suckering and I said, “You know what? This is the perfect time to do some cane straightening.” So what we’ve done is pulled the canes up, tighten the catch wires together, tied each one. So we’re getting a good, upright canopy, which means we’ll get good airflow, good exposure, good spray penetration.
JL Yeah. Eutypa is kind of an issue with these older vines.
JL Not an imposing sight after a long wet Spring; but this is the first Pinot Gris planted in the United States. When Dad came up here from Davis he talked somebody into letting him get 160 from the research vineyard there. He planted the cuttings in a temporary plot down in Corvalis ‘65. It took him a year to find this spot. And then he dug up the vines he’d planted in Corvalis and brought them back up here. And this is now their home.
JL Here we’ve got panicum grass, wild oats, not sure what this is… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6… just within this little 6 foot area we’ve got 6 species of grass. And then we have the broadleaf forbs, here’s clover… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, that’s lactuca, 6, 7, 8…, so 8 different forbs in this same area. Oh, I forgot the huge one I’m standing over, 9. And that’s just today. There is this whole cycle that happens throughout the year as new things come in. So this is a really important part of our viticulture.
What we need is a friendly gopher to give us a soil sample here… You can see that we’ve pretty much got the same stuff here. This soil is getting a little browner. So we’re basically right at the bathtub ring where the Woodburn soil from the Missoula flood meets the Jory soil. And as we have walk down the row here you can see that we’ve much more brown here, much more friable. We’re right in the middle of this little chevron of Woodburn soil that comes up the hill here.
JL Oh, yeah. We give them full benefits. We do hire temporary work during the year, and a lot of the wineries in Oregon have gotten together to form a group called SALUD which is a non-profit dedicated to providing healthcare for the more transient portion of the workforce. There are mobile clinics that come out to the vineyards. If people have issues they are taken care of. We had an open heart surgery completely paid for by SALUD last year, as well as just dental and visual, and cholesterol, you know, just regular check-ups.
JL In 1979 a friend of my Dad’s who lived in Burgundy encouraged him to send her some bottles of wine for her to enter into an international wine competition. Dad looked around his cellar, and the Pinot Noir he was really proudest of came from 10 rows of vines down here at the bottom of the vineyard. He called it the South Block. He made his first dedicated South Block cuvée in 1975. These are the rows. It’s all Wädenswil clone. This is the Pinot I was talking about that tends to be a little more floppy, need more support.
JL So our first question here is how many of these are going to bloom. We can, with the kind of weather we’ve been having, and in spite of making sure we’re on top of the spray, we can get mildew development underneath the cap that will cause the berry to shrivel. Everything here looks really healthy and green, so I’m feeling pretty positive about this. But often by this time of the year these caps are starting to brown off and split at the bottom. They’ll start to fall away; that’s when pollination starts to happen. These caps can come off and we’ll have rain that totally blocks pollination. We can end up with 30% of the berries on this cluster actually setting fruit. So we wait to make any decisions about thinning until then.
