Reign of Terroir

Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, Pt 1

Ξ December 4th, 2008 | → | ∇ A Day at a Time, Interviews, Wine History, Winemakers, Wineries |

Jeff Emery, owner/winemaker of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, is a very fortunate man. For those of us asking after the history of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA you would do well to listen to him. He was witness to many of the informal discussions of a generation of winemakers who founded it. Mr. Emery was in the right place at the right time. The reasons will become clear over the course of this three part interview.
He began as a cellar rat working at the right hand of Ken Burnap, a no-nonsense pinot pioneer in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Over the course of years Mr. Emery has come to understand what the AVA has to offer, its strengths and weaknesses. He is an unassuming man, a man of quiet confidence. Expertise and clarity of conviction will do that.
I interviewed him at his new winery on 334-A Ingalls Street, Santa Cruz.
 
Enjoy.
 
Admin Tell us a little of your early history with Ken Burnap, founder of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard?
 
Jeff Emery I was a sophomore going to UCSC in a Geology program in 1979. I knew somebody who worked for Ken and helped him out once and a while. Well, his wife went into labor that morning and he said, “Oh! I told Ken I’d go help him bottle. Can you go help him? Here’s an address. Bring a sleeping bag, they’ll feed you.” It was to be a two day deal. I went up there and bottled the ‘77 Cabernet from Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard. I had an incredible meal. The other person bottling was a professional chef; had amazing wines, which I knew nothing about because I was nineteen years old. Then Ken said, by the end of the second day, that he was at the point where he needed some extra help now and again. So I started working part-time, finished my degree, I thought that was important, and have been with Santa Cruz Mountain eve since. I have never written a resume, never filled out a job application.
 
What ensued was a terrific 25 year collaborative apprenticeship with Ken. He wasn’t the classic home winemaker who becomes a professional winemaker story. He was more the meticulous researcher. He had developed his own theories about how to make Pinot Noir primarily. He also had an incredible cellar of Burgundies which he was very generous with. I did a lot of my learning by drinking old world versions of Pinot Noir with Ken. I lived at the winery with Ken for some nebulous 15 to 18 year period, literally at the winery. I’ve never looked back. Ken and I worked together for 25 years, up to his retirement in 2004.
 
Ken Burnap strongly believed in the use of gravity, he built a three-tiered winery. What are the advantages of using gravity?
 
JE He felt the less you could do to screw up the wine the better it was. The winery was technically 4 tiers. We crushed on the roof. The fruit would come in through these hatches he built in the roof directly into the fermentors down in the next level. Then there was the settling tank room we would press into and where we’d also stage the wines for bottling later. And then the barrel cellar at the bottom level.
 
We changed that philosophy slightly over the years. We realized that with big, tight mountain red wines some air early on is not a bad thing, it can be a good thing. But certainly, the gentle handling, not whipping it up with pumps is good. We didn’t even own a pump until we started making white wine sometime in the mid-eighties. We would do absurd things like siphon the barrels into a tank we had on a truck and drive the truck to the top of the hill in order to have it flow downhill into the tank to bottle. [laughter] We literally did that!
 
What kinds of fermenters did you use?
 
JE We used big open top fermenters, one of them is sitting in here, six ton capacity open tops, seven foot in diameter, six foot high, three of those, and one four ton fermenter. Ken had them made. He was an industrial contractor in his former life and had many fabricators at his beck and call. He had a lot of it made for him.
 
So what is it about the Santa Cruz Mountains and Pinot?
 
JE Well, it’s one of those places in the world that has a very good climate. Because of the marine influence where we get warm enough days to get things ripe and fully developed with mature flavors, but cool enough nights that we keep the natural acidity and structure. The character of Pinot Noir is very ephemeral and easy to burn out with heat, especially overnight. So you get these valley floor situations where it’s hot all night long. You then lose the acidity, you lose that bright black cherry-berry fruit character in pinot.
 
This is precisely why Ken Burnap got into making Pinot Noir. He loved Burgundy and couldn’t figure out why California Pinot Noir was so flabby and uninteresting in comparison. Of course, we’re talking what was in the market in the sixties. And in those days, it was primarily the Napa Valley where grapes were grown, almost exclusively. We now know Napa is too hot to grow good pinot, and if it has a Napa appellation it’s Carneros on the cool end. But that wasn’t the case then.
 
Ken set out to find regions he thought would produce better pinot than where they were being produced. And his two short-list answers in talking to winemakers and looking at climate were the Russian River and the Santa Cruz Mountains. Mind you, this was the early 1970’s, long before Russian River became a ‘thing’.
 
And the clone selection he preferred, that you prefer?
 
JE That’s a whole different topic! I have my own opinions about some of these modern clones that I think are more negative than the general market view.
 
Dijon?
 
JE Dijon, in particular. I think they have their place but I think they’re overused in California. They get ripe too early, they were developed in a place, Dijon, where it’s cold. I think there is a whole generation of pinot drinkers who don’t understand what pinot is in the classic sense because these modern clones when they get even slightly over-ripe they just become cola-cherry soda pop. No back spice, earth, forest floor and all those other nuances that good pinot can have.
 
In Ken’s case he wasn’t specifically looking at clones. Clone’s weren’t that big of a deal in the 70’s. Nobody was really talking about clones. They were talking about location, soils, people were talking about how Burgundy had a lot of calcareous limestone elements in the better, premier cru vineyards. Josh Jensen at Calera was really big on that, saying Calera has limestone. So people were more focused on soils in those days. Clones weren’t on the radar of the circle I was with. And the vineyard that we had had already been planted by David Bruce. Ken came to the vineyard already planted in pinot.
 
And these days, how are your vineyards selected?
 
JE It is a matter of what is available out there. I’ve just come upon my two main sources. It wasn’t a conscious, pro-active situation. In the case of the Branciforte Creek vineyard, which is a mile away from our old estate on Jarvis Road, that was a vineyard that a customer of ours who came visiting from Chicago one day years ago and who had thought about moving out here. Loved the idea of a wine vineyard. And they ended up moving to the Santa Cruz Mountains and planting this vineyard in about 1988. We made the first crop off of it in 1991 on our label. But the person who owned the vineyard realized very quickly that he wasn’t a vine tender, he needed help with that; and we weren’t a big enough winery to do that kind of program. But David Bruce was. The fruit went to them. Then in 2003 the grower came to me and said he wanted to make some changes. Were we interested in having the fruit? It was perfect timing. In 2003 I knew I was to lose the Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Estate source when Ken retired and sold the property a mile away. It was pure, fortunate luck obtaining the Branciforte Creek vineyard. It was a little bit older vineyard, planted in 1988. It produces terrific fruit. Pommard clone. We just signed a six year contract to manage it. So we’re back in the vineyard business, controlling all the viticultural aspects.
 
My other pinot source is yet another mile away, two miles from the old Estate, and it’s called Branciforte Ridge vineyard. This is endlessly confusing for my customers so we call the second one by the family name, Bailey’s, Bailey’s Branciforte Ridge. That vineyard I’ve been connected to since it was raw dirt. There is a very well-established vineyard tender/installer by the name of Rick Anzalone here in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He’s been a fan of our style of Pinot Noir and was sort of looking out for us. So when he was contracted to do this project he told us we might be interested in this. I started working with Rick and the owner early on to be one of the two wineries that would have that fruit. Its first crop was 2003. And they are Dijon clones, 115 and 667. The road passes right down the middle; I take one side of the crop, Clos Tita takes the other.
 
How has the market changed since you’ve been in the business?
 
JE [Laughter] That’s a big question!
 
Then let’s take wine styles.
 
JE The wine business, in my opinion, is always cyclical and pendular. It will go through these lopsided, cam-shaped loops; oak to no oak, butter to no butter in Chardonnay, high alcohol to moderate alcohol. I’ve gone to many of these trends in my 30 years. Probably most obvious is the fairly recent and, in my opinion, dying out approach of really, really ripe California wines, the whole ‘Mondovino’ thing, wines that are 15, 16 percent alcohol.
 
The Parker palate.
 
JE Yeah. We’ve always been the opposite of that. We’ve always been very European, making wines that have higher acidity, tighter structure, longer lived; we’re making wines for the table, wines for the cellar. Wines that go with food. The Parker palate brought in a lot of new wine drinkers and we’ve surprisingly overcome France in per capita wine consumption, which I never thought I’d see in my life time. He had a lot to do with these big, juicy, jammy things that were easy to approach, and people got used to drinking them. That’s for better or worse the stereotype of the American palate, that it does not really understand subtlety and that it goes for power. As much as I don’t like to drink those kinds of wines I think they did a great service to the industry by bringing in many new wine drinkers. As new drinkers get more sophisticated perhaps they’ll realize that these wines may be nice as an aperitif, they’re really fun to start a meal, but when you sit down with some food it’s a train wreck!
But then, new drinkers will eventually find out about more traditionally made wines, what I laughingly hear people call ‘lower alcohol’ wines. I make properly balanced wines. They are not over-ripe.
 
That’s just one example of the swinging of the pendulum. There is also the incredible over extraction of oak, backing off the oak… But we’ve never been trend followers. Maybe we all would have made a lot more money if we did. I think sticking to your guns, keeping your style is the way to go. We have many, many customers on the mailing list who go back more than thirty years.
 
End of Pt.1
 
Admin

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