Val and Dexter Ahlgren of Santa Cruz Mtns. Ahlgren Vineyard
Ξ February 2nd, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, Wine History, Winemakers, Wineries |
My exploration of the many tributaries making up the winemaking history in the Santa Cruz Mountains has led me to another rich source: Valerie (Val) and Dexter Ahlgren. Their winery, Ahlgren Vineyard, is one among the original 13 operating at the time just before the founding of the Santa Cruz Mountains American Viticultural Area (AVA). It is my great pleasure to present an extensive, rollicking interview with the formidable Val Ahlgren.
Being principally interested in the presentation of her views, I leave the searching of their web site to the interested reader. One note before we begin: it seems the vineyard and winery is for sale. I know few details but that the sale is motivated by a sober understanding of the daily demands of operating such a business. The work never ends, a reality more forceful as they move on in life. But as Val has written to me: “unless and until a sale takes place, we will keep making wine.”
Enjoy.
Admin Let’s begin at the beginning. I was reading on your website of the history of your winery. Apparently you were the pioneer here…
Valerie Ahlgren I was. Dexter says it’s all my fault. (Laughs)
You began by making fruit wines.
VA Oh, I made wine out of anything I could get my hands on! I think my first experiment was with a mead, honey mead. In those days, the early days, late sixties, early seventies, Dexter and I were sailors. We sailed a hot dinghy called the 505, the International 505, a great sailboat, very fast.
The crew, that’s me, hangs outboard on a line to balance it. At any rate, we went up to Vancouver, Canada one summer, for a regatta for 505. While we were there I saw this shop that had home winemaking supplies, these beautiful hand-blown demi johns in the window. And I said I’ve got to have one of those for sure! We stopped in and discovered these little books on and how to make wine, how to make mead, all based on English tradition, which is: you can make wine out of anything. They don’t have grapes, right? So you make wine out of everything else!
I bought a nice little book written by a monk, and when I got home I started fermenting two or three gallon jugs with a nice honey. And it turned out pretty good. In the meantime I was also experimenting with beer-making. Our daughter worked for Wine Art and once a month she was given a can of this fruit concentrate, concentrated grape juice, and we tried that but it was universally hated! But the mead and some of the apple beer turned out very good. A neighbor had a family with some property in the Sierras and she came home with a whole bunch of elderberries one day. She said if you show me how to make wine I will share my elderberries with you. Which she did. And that stuff turned out really well! You really couldn’t tell it from grape wine. Of course, the big difference was that it was made in glass, no wood barrel or anything like that.
At any rate, when things began to taste pretty good Dexter got interested. It turns out he’s the one with the talent. He had the palate, the nose, and he has, although he’s not a cook, he has that sense about wine that a good cook has about food. He knows when it [wine] should be bottled, when it’s had enough time in the barrel, when it’s this, when it’s that. And he intuitively knew all of that.
But it was trial and error…
VA Yes, it was trial and error but, you know, we’re big readers, we read a lot. Finally, with another family, we bought, started buying, grapes. We bought a couple of tons of Zinfandel.
Do you recall the family’s name?
VA Yes. Darrell and Rosemary Watt. We knew them from the Palo Alto Yacht Club. Darrell was a photographer for Sunset Magazine at the time. You drop that magic Sunset name and all of a sudden you have access. We went up to Ridge and talked to Paul Draper in his early days. We started looking for property, at some of the land the Ridge families owned, and ultimately found the property we have now. So, Rosemary and Darrell Watt were early partners with us. We made some very nice wines together.
We converted our Sunnyvale garage. Dexter was a consulting civil engineer, as you read from the bio. We lived in Sunnyvale. So, he built a room within a room. We had a 2 1/2 car garage. We put wine barrels in there. It was well insulated. And we made real wine! And it was very, very nice. Then, in 1972, we started looking for property and bought this property in partnership with the Watts.
The interesting thing that happened here was when we made an offer on the property it be conditional on having a successful well drilled that would provide water for three dwellings, because there were three parcels involved. The well driller sent us a letter that said, “Congratulations! You have enough water for three dwellings.” Well, it took us about a year and a half to get PG&E power to the property and to pump that well. And it turned out to be false, the well report was false. There was no decent well water, no well water of any decent quantity. Now, by that time our house was about 60% finished. We were definitely committed. We’d sold our house in Sunnyvale. We were living in Boulder Creek…. At that point, it was decided between the Watts and the Ahlgrens that we would buy them out because there was no economic viability for them to hold their share of the property. It was a nightmare. Many sleepless nights, needless to say. (Laughs)
Long story short, we sued the well driller, not because he didn’t find water but because he sent us a fraudulent letter. He tried about three other wells, none of which produced. In the course of the lawsuit the county agreed to allow us to have an alternative water system. We explored two different avenues: reverse osmosis and the other was a rain water collection system with a large storage tank. The latter, the rain water collection system turned out to be the most viable, and that’s what we’ve used all these years.
Rain water is the sum total of your source? The weather must concern you.
VA We’re always concerned! But because we have such a large tank, and we do have an account with the local water district, we could have water hauled. It sounds unbelievable to people, flatlanders, that we would have water hauled to the house, but there are literally hundreds of houses in the Santa Cruz Mountains that have water hauled. Wells are very spotty. You can get a good one and then in a year of two it will fade out. Ours didn’t make it past the first test, really. The rain water system has worked very well.
When we have a serious drought year, like we have now, we buy water early in the season, before there’s any rationing. We buy a lot of truck loads. And then we’re very careful with it. And it doesn’t matter how expensive it is. I mean, you buy gas when it’s $5 a gallon, right? So we buy water when it’s a nickel a gallon.
It has worked out very well. I mean, we would be under water rationing no matter where we were; if we had a well, if we had municipal water, they still have use constraints when you’re in drought conditions. In that sense, we’re no worse off than anybody else. And perhaps better off because we can manage our own water use.
Do you have a water reclamation system for barrel cleaning and the water requirements of the winery itself?
VA What we do with the winery is we have, well, throughout the whole property, we use water very carefully. We have plenty to use and none to waste, that is our theory. We use a high pressure, cold water system for washing our barrels. We smoke them with burned sulphur to keep them clean; we do not fill them with water and citric acid like many people do. We store them dry. We have timers on every hose for the garden. We have a little hot water heater right under the faucet in the kitchen so that hot water doesn’t have to be piped around and wasted. It’s no bigger than a cigar box, and we’ve had it for 33 years. It works perfect.
The same one?
VA Yes, the same one. It’s amazing, you know. (Laughs)
When did you folks first encounter other Santa Cruz Mountains winemakers?
VA I suppose the first winemaker we and the Watts met was Tom Kruse. He was behind a lot of Santa Cruz Mountains people getting their hands-on experience. He’s now in Lake County, I believe. But the biggie was a party given in 1973 at Nat and Jan Sherrill’s house in Woodside, California. That’s where we met Annamaria and Bob Roudon, Dave Bennion was there, a whole bunch of people. It’s been along time! (Laughs) Tom Kruse was there. At that point everybody wanted him in the group but it was decided, because he was so far out [Gilroy] of whatever the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation was going to be, that it wasn’t really practical. Now the appellation boundaries have just been… membership in the appellation association has been stretched almost infinitely, so if he were still around he could join now if he wanted. Alfaro’s Vineyards, further away from the mountains than he [Tom Kruse] was by a few blocks, is now a member.
But at any rate, this group started meeting and pot-lucking. Merry Edwards from Mount Eden was involved, the folks from Martin Ray were involved. We had these meetings pretty regularly. We’d taste wine, talk about technical things, and this idea of getting an appellation going. Dave Bennion and Ridge were very much behind it because without the appellation you cannot have an estate, an estate vineyard winery bottling. That was a big impetus for getting the thing going. We were one of the first ones in California I guess to push through under the new regulations.
My understanding from Jeff Emery is that the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA was the first in America predicated entirely on terroir characteristics.
VA I’m sure that is true. But there haven’t always been AVAs in California. Before the 70’s they didn’t exist. It was a big, long deal to get the BATF to agree to that. And I believe that the Santa Cruz Mountains was one of the very first to be formed. I don’t have any documents to prove it but if you go back and look at Napa, Sonoma, Santa Cruz Mountains, Livermore… they would all be in the very early group.
Weren’t some of those political boundaries?
VA Yes. I hear what your saying. I’ve been reviewing a little bit of the history in Mountain Vines and Mountain Wines by Casey Young and Ken Dawes, and they said in there that Hallcrest Vineyards was not in the appellation but in fact it was. It was specifically chosen by Ken Burnap and Dave Bennion. They did literally review the edges, walk the boundaries of the AVA. Now, Mr. Hall had established these wonderful grapes there. They had to be included, historically. He grew Cabernet, Chafee Hall did. They only ripened one year out of eight is what I recall, that was the scuttlebutt. But that one out of eight was fabulous! It was felt that, historically, the property had to be in. So, the boundaries went down to that low elevation, I think it’s 400 feet.
So that the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA begins at 400 feet on the West side is because of Hallcrest?
VA Oh yes! Absolutely. You know, I’m ashamed to say… when you talk about pre-technology days, we went to that Federal hearing with all our documentation but with no copies. They said, “Oh, we need our own copies”. But none of us had copies!
Dexter was the president of the organization at that point. He and I worked very hard, did a lot of researching, in order to provide a comprehensive review of the background of the appellation. Dave Bennion was there, [historian] Charles Sullivan was there, Eleanor Ray was there; there were people who went back along ways, people who did a lot of work. We made a very interesting presentation.
Did you ever encounter Martin Ray?
VA Oh yes. We never really knew him particularly well but we ran across him. Our daughter, Denelle Ahlgren, as I mentioned, was working at the Los Altos shop, Wine Art (which actually was Canadian, an outgrowth of their home winemaking thing in Canada). Martin and Eleanor Ray used to come down there and buy supplies. So Denelle knew them and kept us posted. And then when we had these early meetings, we would meet at a different winery every time. We sometimes would meet at the Martin Ray property.
I think the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA is infused with the independent spirit of Martin Ray. It that fair to say?
VA I think it is very much infused with the spirit of Martin Ray! Also the Ridge families, and early on, David Bruce was a very important influence. I’ll tell you, another thing that has preserved that independent spirit in the Santa Cruz Mountains is that there are no large winery sites. You can’t build a big winery here. There ain’t no place! (laughter) Santa Cruz County is the second smallest in the state of California. The only one smaller is the city and county of San Francisco. Not only that it’s very precipitous, it’s wooded; there are just little pockets here and there. Perhaps the biggest places are on the top of Ben Lomond Mountain and up on Monte Bello Ridge, and even there it’s pretty limited.
Yes. Clark Smith recently wrote a piece for Appellation America in which he suggests you can’t make money in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Perhaps the size of the wineries is a leading reason.
VA Right. I feel it is a real limitation and so you have people who are happy to work alone, who don’t need a big organization around them. It is very interesting.
David Bruce has a fairly good size winery but compared to Napa and Sonoma or San Benito and Santa Clara counties…. You could put these [Santa Cruz wineries] in your eye and they wouldn’t cause a tear. Dex says were dinky! Were dinkier than some but you look at P&M Staiger and they’re dinkier than we are.
How did you folks decide which grapes to grow? Was it trial and error? Have you changed varieties over the years?
VA Yes to all of the above. (laughs) We now have one acre of Pinot… our ground is precipitous, billy goat country. We decided we weren’t going to kill ourselves trying to completely plant wherever we could on it. We have one acre. And over the years we’ve tried Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, it wouldn’t begin to ripen, we’ve tried Cabernet Franc which would not ripen, now we’re trying Pinot Noir; and we have a couple of Semillon vines. But Pinot Noir is the grape for us here.
We’re in an interesting location in that we’re in the very northern corner of Santa Cruz County, right near San Mateo County. Our cooling influences come down Pescadero Canyon. We do not get cooling from Monterey Bay. We’re inland but we have this huge canyon that comes down from the north San Mateo Coast and it pipes its fog right to us. It doesn’t come to our property very often but it is within a mile of us. We didn’t even realize that until we were building the house and we’d see these afternoon fogs come down. And then we looked at the physical map down at Big Basin… it’s pretty obvious, very obvious.
Have you done experiments with various clones?
VA Well, the first stuff we put in, the Chardonnay, we got from Mount Eden. We felt it was a good clone. I don’t remember where we got the Cabernet. But we got them from good nurseries, good vine nurseries. We didn’t try Pinot Noir early even though we knew it was the right grape. In those days, in the early 80s, late 70s, California was not making a whole lot of tasty Pinot Noir. It was like Burgundy still is: you taste a hundred and you like two. But those two were fantastic!
We wanted to make wines we really loved to drink. So we started buying grapes from these select vineyards, and that’s worked out very well for us. But by the time we decided we were going to get serious about planting this meager acre of ours the clonal situation had changed and so had Pinot Noir winemaking in California. We have Dijon clones and carefully selected root stock for this kind of shallow mountain soil. It’s working pretty well.
It’s not a vigorous vineyard because the soil was terribly damaged before we bought the property by dirt bikers. They’d spun away the topsoil of part of the hilltop. The soil is a clay loam, and the topsoil, the ‘a’ horizon, was surely gone. It has taken us years to get a cover crop to grow. And there is forest all around.
To get back to the subject of making money in the Santa Cruz Mountains, this is not the kind of vineyard you can really make money on. But we felt it was important to have a real signature spot, and we’re delighted with it. The wine is very promising if we could get the production up. We’d like to be able to make one barrel off of this acre. We haven’t had a ton yet. The vineyard is eight and a half years old now. It should be “in full production”. The yield is unacceptably low. We’re still struggling with it.
How many vines have you planted? And what is your case production of Santa Cruz Mountains-sourced wine?
VA Our vines are planted 1200 to the acre. So one of the things we’re working on now after having recently prepared the site, is clearing away the brush that has encroached on the vineyard, because that means competition for moisture and everything else. So we’re working on cutting the brush back this year. We’re going to make a concerted effort to get the production up a bit.
Now, our case production of Santa Cruz wines varies from year to year. This past year, for example, there was no Merlot. But it’s around ten to fifteen tons, about 600 to 900 cases. That includes a Pinot Noir, and the Bordeaux varieties from Bates Ranch.
Do you remember the experience of winning your first medal?
VA Well, it was pretty astonishing. We got the top gold medal for Cabernet from the L.A. County Fair in 1977, and it was from Paso Robles. Go figure! (laughs) And then the next year we got a gold for the ‘77 Monterey Ventana Chardonnay. What did we know? We weren’t all that confident, we just thought they were pretty tasty! You know?
We have a certain level of sophistication now. But we certainly didn’t have much then.
Well, I’ve got a lot of material to work with!
VA We could talk for weeks! I must add it’s been just a wonderful experience making wine. We don’t know where in life we could have had the sense of adventure, have met the kind of people we’ve known, had the creative opportunities… you know, a tiny winery is just as complicated as a big one in many ways. You have to file the same reports, pick up the grapes, do all the same things on a smaller scaler, of course, but it’s a complicated little business.
Was there ever a time when you felt like throwing in the towel? Was there ever a low point?
VA No. We’ve never felt that at all. Right now we’re looking at difficult economic times, but we’re solid. We think
we’re going to make it. The biggest thing is we’re getting old. We celebrated Dexter’s 80th birthday and we’re going to celebrate my 77th pretty soon; but we’ve got a really good, young assistant winemaker, Mike Walters, who is also doing his own label here. We’re working on that as well.
Well, it’s has been an absolute delight speaking with you. And I’ll be in touch for a longer conversation down the line.
VA We appreciate your interest. It has been a pleasure. Feel free to call anytime.
Admin
