Bob Mullen On the History of Woodside Vineyards and the SCM AVA, pt.2
Ξ March 19th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
At 83 years of age Bob Mullen, founder of Woodside Vineyards, still moves as easily through any subject put to him as he does through a group of his peers. A compact, intense man, experience informs his every utterance. He is a delightful interview. And here is the second half of my conversation with the gentleman.
Part 1 may be found here
Admin Can you tell us a little more of the early get-togethers with other founders of the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA?
Bob Mullen About once a quarter we’d get together for dinner. It was mostly social, we’d talk a little business. One of the first things we did was we all went in together and bought a truckload of barrels. We split the cost up between the ten or twelve of us. And so the Santa Cruz Mountain Vintners sort of evolved. In going through alot of the papers I’ve done lately I ran across a very extensive questionnaire that we sent out to everybody asking ‘what do you really want our association to become?’ (I don’t think we even had a formal name then.) ‘What name do you want?’ Three or four pages of questions with multiple choice answers. They compiled all of those and we decided we would become an organization, an combination of social and wine talk, cooperative activities, primarily in purchasing. There was a fair amount of exchanges of equipment, trading equipment back and forth, buying equipment back and forth. If somebody would ‘grow up’ they’d pass their crusher down to somebody who needed a larger one, so forth.
Eventually we decided, as a second step, that we’d become a formal organization. We would have by-laws, regular meetings, a board of directors.
How was the marketing done in those days? Tasting rooms, mailers, subscribers…?
BM It depended on many things, on the volume, for example. Ridge grew up pretty quickly and so they needed their own sales staff and distributors. David Bruce got into distribution pretty quick because he grew up rapidly. But we at Woodside Vineyards, number one, elected not to grow up, and number two, we had limited facilities that only allowed us to make about 2000 cases a year. So, it was easy for us to handle our own distribution. We had just a couple of tasting events a year at the winery, then sales through half a dozen restaurants, it grew to from one or two restaurants to about twenty now. And we sell to a few retail stores. That was all we ever needed.
Alexia Moore started up her distribution/broker business in Woodside. We used her for a short time. But it wasn’t really beneficial to either one of us. As you possibly know she services quite a few of the Santa Cruz Mountain wineries. And she does a pretty good job for them. But ours was, I’d say, 70% of people on our mailing list who would come to our tastings two or three times a year, and 30% to restaurants. Maybe it’s more like 60-40 now. But it’s steady. Of course, we got into the custom crush business, so it’s not really 60-40. It’s probably 40 to 50% retail, 30% wholesale and 30% custom crush.
How did you settle upon a particular wine style? what were you drinking at the time? What were your wine-drinking influences?
BM Boy, that’s a good question! That goes so far back. I’ve always enjoyed alot of Wente wines. Interesting… one of the wineries we bought from mostly from the standpoint of price was from the San Martin Winery. It’s been out of business for quite some time now. But we bought a number of their wines, and bought them in conjunction with friends and neighbors and business associates. I remember we used to make what we called the ‘wine run’ down to San Martin. (laughs) Sometimes it would be me, sometimes my sales rep who was going down that way. We didn’t have station wagons back in those days. We’d load up the back seat and the trunk with twelve of fourteen cases of wine which, as I recall, we were buying for $30 to $40, $50 a case! We’re back in the sixties here. We probably started the run back in the late fifties, come to think of it.
That was some of my early influence. They we’re great wines but they were decent wines, they were well made, made from Santa Clara Valley grapes. We certainly enjoyed them. But I just gradually got into the Napa grapes, particularly after I met these people at school up in UC Davis. I started drinking more Inglenook wines and Mondavi wines, Christian Brothers, wines made by people that I knew and had associated with at Davis.
As far as the style of our wines is concerned, I’ve always said we made wines to please the owner! And I like a dry wine, we try not to ever have any sweetness in our wines. I shouldn’t say that, we’ve made a Gewurztraminer that was sweet. One or two other whites. But never a sweet red. We did make some ‘blush’ wines for a couple of years. But the winemaking style was… you’ve heard this before, “Let the wine make itself”? Don’t screw around with it. Don’t make any mistakes. Back in those days we used all used oak barrels. We didn’t realize, until we were able to afford to start buying new oak barrels, what an influence that could have on the quality of your wine. We made a Traminer, a Chardonnay, Cabernet, and a little Pinot. Later we inherited a little Hooper vineyard that had Zinfandel on it. We started making Zinfandel sometime in the 70’s.
The story goes that Ken Burnap, founder of Santa Cruz Mountain Winery, was obsessed with his beloved Burgundies. And he worked to replicate that general style. Martin Ray, of course, was a stickler for an ‘Old World’ style. But you seem to have a different philosophy.
BM First of all, I have to admit that I do not have a great palate. I know what I like, what I enjoy in a wine. I can usually agree with the experts on the best wines in a blind tasting. I will usually rank them pretty close to the way the experts do. It is not because I have a great palate and can discern all these wonderful things they do. But I can discern a well-made wine. That’s my distinction. It is one reason why, many years ago, I stopped being a winemaker because, obviously, the better palate you have the better winemaker you’ll be. I had friends and employees who had a better palate, were better taster than me. So they became the winemakers.
But in Ken Burnap’s case, he had the opportunity to go to Europe and taste European wines and decide his style. And the same for Martin Ray. I had never been to Europe until 1976 or ‘79 so I’d already been making wine for 15, 20 years before I’d even had a European wine experience. I had pretty well made up my mind by that time. I learned a few things in Europe, like we preferred Burgundy more than we thought we would. So we switched emphasis a little later on, from Cabernet to Pinot.
One of the things I learned on my first trip to Europe was farming technique. I’ve always been much more of a farmer than a winemaker. I’ve learned alot of things about tending the vineyards, equipment, and practices that thy use over there. And I would say that was the main thing that I learned from my European experience. It did not significantly influence any winemaking decisions I’d make.
I was not trying to emulate anybody’s style. I wanted to make wines that we, myself, my friends would like. Woodside Vineyards has always enjoyed alot of volunteer help. For many years we had no employees but a few high school kids over for weekends. So I depended pretty heavily on friends to help me.
How often have you replanted vines, replaced older vines?
BM Woodside Vineyards, my personal property, is about an acre and a third of grapes. It was planted in an Italian blend, Carignan, Alicante Bouchet, some Zinfandel, and a fourth variety in there. We made wine from that for a couple of years. It happened that when we built the house on the property in 1962 we had to put in a septic tank and took out about 150 vines. That very first year we replaced those 150 vines with Chardonnay. I had determined that was the best white grape to grow in Woodside. We weren’t overly pleased with the wine were making from that blend of varieties. So, every year, for the next five years, we would rip out 100 to 200 vines and replant. It was strictly a weekend activity for me because I had a full-time job with Armstrong. I had no employees at that time. It was all my work, my wife and I doing the replanting. Two hundred new vines which require watering. In those days you watered by dragging a hose around the whole acre. We would replace the weak vines. Instead of intelligently planting them in blocks we would replace the weak vines first. So you had new vines spread all over an acre and a third you had to water with a hose dragged all over the place!
It was a real arduous task all around to grow grapes back in those days just because of the way we approached it. So over about five years we replaced all the vines. I bought the vines, by the way, from UC Davis. I worked with a professor, one of the people I met in school. He was very actively engaged in developing disease-resistant rootstock. Well, back in those days that term meant little to most people, meant nothing to me, but that was great. And I supposed the big guys needed something like that so surely it didn’t matter to a little operation like ours. Besides, the professor said they wouldn’t be ready for release for a few years. I thought it was inconsequential. So we bought from them rootings at 15 cents apiece. I remember the price because we bought alot of grapes for 15 cents! But then I learned 20 years later that my vines were diseased. It wasn’t phylloxera; they had everything else! Leaf-Roll, Eutypa Dieback, oak-root fungus, you name it. The vineyard began to trail off and these 25 year old vines were dying prematurely. They had all the diseases Davis was working on.
So we replanted the whole vineyard very soon after Brian Caselden came with us. He arrived in 1990. So we probably replanted ‘92, ‘93 with disease-resistant rootstock, 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Noir. So, we replanted twice. I’m glad we did. We have a beautiful, flourishing vineyard now. We were down to a ton an acre, now we’re getting three tons. It was a task well worth doing.
How did you come to meet Brian Caselden?
BM He was working part-time… well, he’d worked for David Bruce, he’d worked for Cinnabar; but at the time we hired him he was mostly working for Mirrassou. He had alot of experience with vineyards, important to us. He’d been working in vineyards since he was a pre-teen, actually, down in the Saratoga area. And he had experience with both a mid-sized winery like Mirrassou, and small wineries like Bruce and Cinnabar. David Bruce and Tom Mudd, Katherine Kennedy, he had three people recommend him to us! It made our decision easy. We were convinced we’d picked the right guy. Twenty years later it is still true.
Do you recall your first wine award?
BM Yeah! It was what now is called West Coast Wine Competition in Reno, Nevada. We submitted a couple of wines and won an award with each one of them. I don’t recall whether it was a Gold, I think it was a Bronze, and a Silver. We were pretty proud of ourselves. We were probably making a thousand cases then, in competition with all the middle and big-size guys that are talked about. We went up for the event when the awards were passed out. It was quite a treat for a little guy. Now don’t pin me down on the year. It was probably the mid-seventies.
By the way, about the time we would have gotten involved in the California State Fair tasting they discontinued it. There was a big uproar that big wineries like Gallo were making special lots of wine to submit to the tasting. One of the things they published in the results was how many cases were produced of a winning wine. You’d have a Gallo Chardonnay in there with 300 cases produced. They normally produce 10,000 cases at a time. They were accused, whether it was the case or not, the big guys were accused of creating wine strictly to enter into the competition. Because it was a State Fair somewhere in the State Legislature it got so nasty that they just dropped the whole competition for quite a few years.
In the early years of competitions we had just the county operations, Orange County, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco….
Now, about the AVA, what is different about the Santa Cruz Mountains?
BM Well, it pretty much evolved from the social get-togethers we were having. But back then AVAs were very, very new. In fact, we didn’t even know what AVA meant! We didn’t call it that at the time. We knew there was the Napa area, the Sonoma area, Mendocino County area. North Coast, South Coast, those things didn’t exist. So, we were one of the early ones to get the idea. We came up with the notion that we would do it on Geography rather than county lines or highway boundaries which many of the existing areas were defined by. Four hundred feet along the Coast, 800 feet inland, those are the contours though we made a few exceptions. They accepted Woodside because, though we’re only 430 feet, they wanted to include Rixford’s La Questa in the AVA. And they made an exception for Kathryn Kennedy. There may have been others.
And you could do that. You made your application, you defined your area. Unless somebody challenged it that’s the way it came out. Dave Bennion of Ridge and Ken Burnap of Santa Cruz Mountain Winery worked out the boundary. It was a real labor of love. Both men were great hikers.
From your December, 2008 Newsletter I read you were moving the winery. Could you explain?
BM About the time I reached 80 I realized it was time to make some other arrangement for the winery. Brian Caselman has always been considered a part-owner of the winery. His participation was never clearly identified except that he certainly deserves something for sweat equity even though all the financial involvement was mine. So we agreed we needed to do something different. And what happened was that I sold my house and the vineyard first, I sold it four years ago. I made the agreement we could stay in the house for three years and the winery would remain for at least five years. So at the end of three years last May we moved to Menlo Park. Brian is still on the property. We rent back the winery and the vineyard from the present owner and continue to operate.
But it was obvious we were going to have to move some place. Last Spring we were approached by a couple of men who had just recently leased a large, 20,000 square foot building in Menlo Park and were going to have a custom car storage area. They were car buffs. The also decided store wine on the same premises, the theory being that people who were going to store million dollar cars probably had $10,000 worth of wine stashed around. Maybe they’d like to have it in a temperature controlled space where there car was. So they came up with the name AutoVino.
They found out we were looking for a home. It turns out one of the partners lives just a couple of blocks away from us in Woodside. We made a general proposal that they buy my portion of the business and keep Brian as a partner. Happily we’ve become very good personal friends. We found common ground. We signed an agreement that will be finalized in the next month or two. They will build a winery in the AutoVino facility that will be finished in six weeks or so. We might then move in.
There should be a move and it should take place hopefully before Summer.
Thank you, Bob.
BM You’re very welcome, Ken.
Admin
