Jeff Emery of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, Pt 2
Ξ December 10th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, Interviews, Wine History, Winemakers, Wineries |
In part 1 of my interview with Jeff Emery, owner/winemaker of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, we concentrated on more general and historical matters. Part 2 gets closer to Jeff’s practice as a winemaker and as an experimenter. Intellectually curious, respectful of the past, Jeff looks forward by understanding from where he’s come.
Part 3, the conclusion, will post early next week.
Admin Would you say a little about your barrel program?
Jeff Emery I’ve been experimenting with that a lot in the past four or five years. Of course, it’s different for different wines. For Pinot Noir, as good an American barrels have gotten compared to a few years ago, I still don’t like American wood on Pinot Noir. So, I’m using Hungarian and French and in some cases Russian oak. American barrels have come leaps and bounds from where they were twenty-five, thirty years ago when they were basically a modified Kentucky Bourbon barrel that wasn’t charred as much. I’m very pleased with some of the newer barrels out there, and I do use some amount of American oak on Tempranillo, Merlot, Cabernet, a tiny bit on the Durif, what we call Petit Syrah. So, it depends on different wines.
The last four or five years I’ve done many side by side experiments of the same forest source of a barrel made by three different coopers with the same wine. Or three different forests, the same wine in barrels made by the same cooper. I’m trying to do some semi-controlled experiments on that and learn something about the different sources, how they play with the different wines.
How long do you use your barrels?
JE I use the barrels indefinitely as a container. I have some barrels that were actually in Ken Burnap’s original winery. But in terms of giving wood character to the wine there is, of course, an exponential drop-off. The first year you get a lot, second year you get a fair amount, third year to fourth year, if you leave the wine in there for its entire 18 month cycle you’ll notice the difference over an inert barrel, but not much.
Some wineries use spent barrels for fermentation…
JE No, we have not.
Your yearly case production?
JE It’s about 3,500 cases.
How much is sold by subscription? How much is foot traffic?
JE Well, it’s changed a lot in the past few months since we have our first tasting room in 33 years! I think we’ll only build on this [Surf City Vintners] little complex where we have so many wineries within walking distance here. I actually haven’t run the numbers more recently. But it’s been traditionally, let’s say, two-thirds wholesale and the rest the internet, wine club and direct retail. Even without a tasting room we did still sell a fair amount by appointment in the old regime. We sold a fair amount through the mail.
Have you enjoyed the tasting room experience?
JE I have! I really like the marketing lab opportunity it gives me. It’s fun to just literally sit down at the computer the night before and print out the wine list we’re tasting for the weekend, play with different things to see what people like… it’s interesting.
And what a variety of wines you have, not only your current releases but also your Library wines. I have never seen in a small winery with such an extensive and deep list of vintages…
JE Well, Ken Burnap believed very strongly in that. Especially if you’re making wines in the style we’re making them where they can age for decades, something we’ve proven, we’re still drinking Pinot Noirs from that first vineyard, from the 70’s, today. They are very much alive and well. Ken kept five to seven cases of everything red we’ve ever made throughout the course of the business. When we moved out of the old winery building on Jarvis Road in 2004 he realized that there was more wine there than he personally could drink in his lifetime. It would be a shame to have those wines go over the hill without people experiencing them. At that point we did a hand pick of our long-term customers and offered library wines. Some went that way. And I’m launching a new program here in the tasting room where I’ll be pouring on the second Saturday of every month one or two of them. And offering them for sale. This is Ken’s stock and he’s given me the green light.
All the way back to ‘75?
JE There is probably precious little left of ‘75 but certainly through the 80’s vintages.
I find that just thrilling.
JE I don’t understand why so many modern wineries sell off to the last bottom case of what it made. Maybe that makes sense if it’s an early drinking style of wine, but some of these wines of the Santa Cruz Mountains can age for a very long time. You don’t learn anything about your winemaking technique and how it applies long-term unless you keep some of your things back and try them now and again. And look at… well, this was a drought year, this was a rain year, this was a different barrel regime, you know, what’s working twenty years out. It’s interesting to me as much as what’s working three and four years out.
So Mr. Burnap was an exacting note-keeper?
JE He’s a self-described anal retentive Virgo. I have the winery diaries, the entire history of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard. The first vintage was 1975. He used those little composition notebooks. That first book went to, like, 1985. The first two-thirds of the volume of that book is of the first vintage. He took notes on absolutely everything; temperature probes at eight or twelve different levels in the fermentation tanks, he plotted all of that. An unbelievable amount of data collecting.
Perhaps it’s destined for the Bancroft Library Wine Archive! A few details about the Crush this year?
JE It was a tough one. We’re in this new building so, first of all, we entered Crush already worn out! We took possession of this 3,100 square foot raw space in mid-May, Denis Hoey, my employee, and I. (He’s worth far more than I can pay him.) We spent 2 1/2 to three months playing ‘contractor’. We had to put in the drains, the lights, the walls, sheetrock, paint, everything. Now, harvest came early this year. We saw our first fruit on August 14th. We were in nothing but triage mode from June 1st until about three weeks ago. It was basically scrambling to take care of it all. We had the year that is one in ten where everything came at once. We had arrive 70% of our annual production in twelve days. I damn near killed us! That’s a 30 year record in my career. The other one was crushing five varieties in one night, I’d never seen that before. We had fruit in the parking lot just stacked up by type so that after it was dark we didn’t screw up and put the wrong variety in the wrong bin.
How much control do you have over when the grapes are harvested?
JE I pretty much have the say on that with most of my vineyards. In some cases it’s a crew issue so if I’m taking a very small amount I can’t just pick one day that is only for me, I’d have to piggy back on someone else. Generally, I have a hands-on relationship as to when I get the fruit. This particular year it was more a matter of how fast we could process it. We were pushing the edge of getting things too ripe for my taste. About that, we had a solid two weeks of heat the first two weeks of September. The cold snap that came at the end of that period came not a second too soon. We would have lost control of quality with even two more days of heat.
So, it tested the new space! The good news is we found out very quickly we can ferment a lot of grapes here, much more than in any other place I’ve been. We had 36 tons fermenting at once under the roof. Insane!
We had quite a few fires this year. Any smoke issues?
JE I’ve read a lot about that. Some of the labs have come up with smoke-testing protocols for grapes. We did have a Mendocino Grenache as it was first crushed and early in its fermentation, I got a smoky, cardboardy kind of thing. We were quite concerned about that. I was going to send it to the lab, but by the time it finished to dry two weeks later that had seemed to go away. That was the only thing I saw, and that was my only Mendocino fruit. Fortunately, none of my other sources were in any smoky area.
You’re starting a new line of Iberian wines called Quinta Cruz….
JE Yes. After making wine for so many years, and after a couple of trips to Portugal for pleasure, I fell in love with some of the varietals there. They are so entirely different from the wines were used to drinking. By chance I was perusing the Wine Country Classifieds, an industry journal, there was a listing for a vineyard that had just planted Portuguese varietals. I still don’t know why to this day, why they put the ad in when they did because they didn’t actually have fruit yet. I think they were just looking to see what the interest was. I got connected with these folks very early on, the Pierce Family down in the San Antonio Valley; it’s a new AVA, only two years old, by Lake San Antonio and Lake Nacimiento, off Jolon Road in south western Monterey County. It’s a good region for warmer climate fruit. So I started working with them from their first crop on some of the varietals: Tempranillo, Touriga Nacional, Touriga Francesa, Tinta Cão. That relationship has continued.
I’ve had Tempranillo on the Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard label since ‘03, and with the ‘05 release in about two weeks, that will move to the Quinta Cruz label. Quinta Cruz is a brand simply devoted to Iberian varietals, of Spanish and Portuguese origins. I did that because I got deep enough into these other varietals that I thought it made sense for the brand not to muddy the waters to where people would say, “What’s he doing? Pinot or Portuguese?” Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard Pinot remains the flagship line. Quinta Cruz can be more experimental. I’ve added Graciano. It’s the third variety that goes into Rioja, Tempranillo, Garnacha being the other two. Graciano is the base player, it’s the Mourvedre in the mix, deep, dark, spicy, brooding…. Around 3 to 12% in Rioja, but I will have a 100% varietally labeled wine. There are fewer than a dozen in the world. I know of only five.
I’ve not done white wine in over ten years but now that I have a tasting room it seems prudent. In my world it wasn’t going to be Chardonnay, so I’ve produced two Iberian white varietals, Verdejo and Torrontés. Torrontés is better known as coming from Argentina, but it comes to Argentina via Galicia, Spain. The Verdejo will be available before the end of December, the Torrontés will be out sometime next Spring.
End of pt 2
Admin
