Ken Burnap of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, pt.2
Ξ July 20th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Uncategorized |
This, the second part of my interview with Ken Burnap, was not without its quiet moments. Mr. Burnap is a man of considerable appetites and of curiosity, for wine and food, sailing, travel, but he is also a man of great sentiment. As you will read, a life well-lived is not without it’s obstacles and setbacks. Adversity, like a strong headwind, must be put to good use or it will simply drive you off course. It is not a question of choice but of constitution. And Mr. Burnap is made of the right stuff.
It is best to read Part 1 before this portion, of course. The reference to buying off-years of Latour for a couple of bucks will make much more sense!
Admin You mentioned copious notes and note-taking of the chocolatier. I know that you kept notebooks, that you’d take notes on virtually everything related to winemaking. I also know you kept many maps of the tracing of the proposed boundaries of Santa Cruz Mountains AVA when you went out on your hikes with Dave Bennion. What is going to happen to those notebooks and maps? Are they going, perhaps, to the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley? They have extensive wine history holdings there.
Ken Burnap Nothing so grand at all. In fact, I’m not even sure where the notes are, although I am absolutely an incurable pack rat. I hardly ever throw anything away. I’ve got an office in my home with many stacks of cardboard boxes, cardboard file cabinets. I’ve got some mineral rights in Texas. I’ve got file cabinets of geological maps I should have thrown these things out a long time ago. The rights are essentially worthless. I used to get a check for maybe $3.70 once a month.
That’s two bottles of off-year Latour…
KB (laughs) Exactly! It wasn’t just a matter that I had this piece of paper that said it was such and such, I wanted to have maps of where it was. I have file drawers full of maps all of which should have been thrown away twenty years ago. That’s apropos of nothing; it just illustrates that they [winemaker notes] are probably in there somewhere…. Also the garage has got some big boxes!
Every now and then I think I really should go through all this stuff and save what I want to save and throw the rest away, rather than leave it for my kids to do after I’ve died. And then later I’ll say ‘Ah the hell with them. Let them figure it out.’ And this is kind of a personal note. My wife and I were married for 37 years. One wife, four kids. We were big buddies in all these adventures. And she died about 16 years ago. And it all stopped being fun at that point. I got back into it, and I kept doing what I was doing, and a couple of times I started clearing out all this stuff. Emotionally, I can’t get very far through it. I know that sounds childish. Anyway, I don’t know what’s going to happen to that stuff, or even if I’ll find it.
I mentioned earlier that I’m really an admirer of French wine and food; absolutely incredible microclimates for growing things that you can eat and drink. I really got interested in food. I love the food. But I really was never too curious with trying to make it myself. The wine was entirely different for some reason. I got interested in wine and then, after a while, after I figured out what really good wines were, then I wanted to got to all these places to see just exactly how they worked. So, we spent a couple of months a year for about eight or nine years knocking around mostly France. And during that process I learned how, and not too far downstream, my favorite wines became Burgundies. The whites are o.k., but the reds were where is was at.
I think I went through the normal progression. My first love was Lancers Rosé. It was in the barrel for 65 cents; and we went from that to the sweet, cheap German wines, eventually we got to red wines and, of course, Bordeaux! That was the epitome of everything until I started tasting really great Burgundies. It’s ironic. Bordeaux is always good in a good year. And you can buy certain châteaux, futures on them, sight and sense and smell and taste unknown being sure that when you got them from a good year they would be good. It’s not that way with Burgundy at all. It could be the right vineyard and the right winemaker in the best year, and he makes a really shitty wine. It isn’t that he makes it, but something about the Pinot god at that point decided he didn’t want it to be good. I really love Pinot so we ended up spending most of the time in Burgundy. That was where I learned how wine was made. By hanging out with these guys, the guy I thought were the great winemakers, Ponsot, many others.
When I started making wine what I did was made wine essentially the way it was made in France about 100 years ago. In Burgundy I don’t think they ever change. “Why do you do that?” “Well, that was the way I was taught. My father did it that way.” They won’t ever say “Well, it’s because we can lower the acid content.” It’s just the way it has always been done. So, I did a lot of research on the conditions that my favorite wines were grown and made in. What I knew about wine, really, technically, was the best place to grow Pinot in Burgundy! And the best way to make Pinot in Burgundy! (laughs) So when I decided I wanted to have a vineyard I had this criteria, about 11 points that applied to the different vineyards that produced, in my opinion, the best red wine in Burgundy. It was a certain type of soil, a certain face to the sun, so on and so on. And sometimes two great vineyards have something in this one that wasn’t in this one, and one would have another thing not in the other, I just jotted it down anyway. Probably of the 11 criteria I jotted down, two or three of them were important!
I started looking for vineyard sites in California because I couldn’t go to France and make wine. First of all, not being a French national I could never buy a grand cru vineyard. You have to be French to do that. If you’re incredibly lucky and erudite and a good person to be around then maybe you could meet a widow that owns some grand cru vineyard; maybe Madame Lalon Bize-Leroy, now wouldn’t that be nice!
So I started looking in California and I spent a lot of time in the stacks in the Food Science building at Davis going through books there. Winkler was a big help. Davis had some research stations 10-15 years earlier, and I studied all their stuff. But anyway, from a book a book that was written in 1941 by Schoonmaker to the hand-written diaries of Martin Ray on how to make Champagne, which was in those stacks; he had given it to them somewhere along the line and they just stuck it on the shelf. That was the most incredible thing. Martin would write, he would list these things down, and sometimes he would take pages out of French winemaking brochures and paste it down on a page and write over in the margin “This is bullshit!” It was incredible to see. I hope it’s still in the stacks.
When I decided to make sparkling wine I used Martin’s directions on how he made his sparkling wine, which was exactly the way they did it in Champagne.
One of the stories I often hear about Martin Ray is that he would greet people at his house with Champagne. Perhaps it was his own sparkling wine.
KB Yes. Martin made a lot of that stuff. When he sold the Paul Masson Winery after the war, and he then Martin went up on top of Mount Eden, built his place, planted some grapes, he kept the keys to the winery or a set of keys. Now, this was told to me by one of those brothers in the family who bought the Paul Masson winery from Martin. He said “That son of a bitch would come down in the middle of the night in his pick-up and let himself into our winery and steal bottles from our bottling room.” This all came up at some wine event at Pebble Beach. I wound up setting at a table with him and [Maynard] Amerine, a professor at Davis. And somebody started talking about the old days, and some of the wines that came out of the Santa Cruz Mountains, they were just the best, they said. I said I loved Martin Ray. This guy just exploded! “That rotten son of a bitch!” (laughs) For years he put up his Pinot Noir in Champagne bottles, and the reason he did, according to the guy I was talking to was that he would come down there at night and steal cases and cases and cases out of the Paul Masson winery. A little side-light.
Martin was very mercurial. He could be absolutely charming and fascinating, considerate and thoughtful, and two hours later he could be mean and vicious. I was dazzled by the wines that he made. I was also horrified by some of them. Somewhere along the line he sort of missed a lot of the finer points. He would bottle wine out of the barrel when you bought it from him. He might have some that were all bottled and labeled and ready to go, but I think Martin thought it was good sales PR for customers to take it out of the cellar in bottles. When he had a barrel that was half empty, he’d stick the bung back in it and it would just sit there until the next time he wanted to bottle some wine. So when I bought wine from Martin, we’d be walking through the cellar, I’d walk by the barrels and give them a little tap, tap, you know, surreptitiously, until I found one that was full. I’d say to him “Martin, there’s something about this barrel that is speaking to me. I would really like to buy this.” (laughs) You had to careful with him. He might throw you out of the place!
That is funny. You know, Neal Rosenthal mentioned a ’scandalous’ Chardonnay you made, one of your earliest. It had an orange cast to it…
KB They were all scandalous! (laughs)
That was the word he used; scandalous by California standards at that time.
KB Yeah. What I did was make a Chardonnay as if it were a red wine. We left it on the skins and used whole clusters. I did a lot of things that were very old-fashioned and ancient, out of fashion. We crushed a lot of grapes but the Virgo in me made me go out and buy white odorless, tasteless, food-grade rubber boots which were kept immaculately clean. We didn’t just get in there without any clothes on and bare feet as they did at the Zinfandel Stomp in Monterey, I think it was Monterey Vineyards, it had a monk on the label.
That reminds me. I have a bottle of Martin Ray, vintage dated 1931 Champagne. [Audible gasp from the Admin] It was given to me by Dave Bennion (that’s my birth year), at my sixtieth birthday party. It was one of those milestones. Dave somewhere along the line, heard from one of his buddies from Ridge, that some big wine collector on the Peninsula died. And his wife wanted to sell it all, the guy’s collection. She was somehow connected to Stanford and Dave found out about it. And they gave her a price; it was hundreds and hundred and hundreds of dollars. She said ‘great, just take it all’.
And Dave had the most eclectic, incredible wine collection. Dave built… he dug trenches under his house and you had to walk in the trench or you’d hit your head, but the wines were just stacked up on the dirt underneath the house. One of the wines that he had, he originally bought a couple of cases of, was a mixed bag of vintage dated Martin Ray Champagnes. He gave me this one because it was my birth year. “Ken, I’m going to tell you straight up. This wine is absolutely horrible. For god’s sake don’t ever open it and drink it. It’s meant as a decorator item or to remind you of your birth year.” (laughs) Anyway, I’ve got that. Actually, I know where that is! I wrapped it with purple tissue paper and I put it in with some other things. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I wandered off and told you that.
Actually, I was going to ask about David Bennion…
KB Dave, I loved Dave. Dave and I actually came up with the… we drew the boundaries of the Santa Cruz Mountain appellation.
You both were avid hikers.
KB I’m not as avid as Dave was. Yeah, I liked to hike but not like Dave. We did hike the entire thing. It took a couple of months, and we were going at it pretty steadily. One or two days a week we’d hike for eight hours. Dave was an incredible guy. He had such a passion for life. Dave would try anything if it was edible or drinkable, just to see what it was like. He was down in San Diego one time at a conference, a conference of educators. He was in the Philosophy Department at Stanford. He taught. At the conference they had a couple of hours off so David decided to hike through that park up where the zoo is, a great place. He saw some mushrooms, the first ones he said he couldn’t identify. So he said he thought about it for a long time, and he finally decide to take a tiny, little bite. An he wound up in the Emergency Room! (laughs) It wasn’t a mushroom, apparently. That’s the kind of guy David was. It was ‘damn the torpedos, I’m going to try this.’
He had a black doctor’s satchel, the kind when doctor’s came to your house to treat you. That one. So we’d be out, he had some kind of French car, I can’t remember exactly, but we’d be out there, it was his turn to drive that day, we decided it was time for lunch. He’d open his satchel and there would be a salami in there and four or five chunks or blocks of cheese that had been chewed on, that were moldy, a couple of loaves of bread; then he’d open the trunk of the car and there were cases of wine in his car, all the time. He lived in a very cool part of the Peninsula. I never had a bad, oxidized wine come out of that car. Maybe they weren’t in there for very long…
They were Ridge wines?
KB Yeah, all Ridge wines. Invariably it was the current release. Maybe he was making sales calls and pouring samples. But I remember that satchel. We had many a meal out of that satchel….
That was such an incredible tragedy, god. The first time they ever really had any money, he and his wife; it was after they sold Ridge to investors. They took the money and he spent a whole harvest season in Australia, seeing how they made wines. He had been driving on the wrong side of the road for six or seven months. They were only back for one or two days. He made that turn on the Golden Gate Bridge, on the wrong side of the road. It was not that bad of an accident. The car did not have extensive damage. It must have hit in such a way….
Yeah, we figured out the appellation.
But there were a series of exceptions…
KB We actually had, both of us had our favorite vineyards that didn’t quite fit into the boundaries because we went strictly by climate, by degree days, temperature more than anything else. The closer you got to the ocean the lower you could get, but you couldn’t get too low because then it got too cold. So, it went by elevation mark, but it would go up and down in various places. Then we would come to our favorite vineyard somewhere and it didn’t quite get into the appellation. (laughs) I think it’s called gerrymandering! We’d have the line go down this creek bed to this draw at this elevation to include Bates Ranch, for instance. Bates Cab was not within the appellation according to the boundaries we had set by elevation, 800 feet on the east side of the mountains. But it got higher and lower in a couple of spots, not really because of the gerrymandering but because of other reasons we discovered, certain types of airflow in some places and so on. And then there was the gerrymandering, we made sure this and that vineyard got in the appellation.
Still, all in all, it was a hell of a lot better thought out than the first appellation that was approved, in Missouri, and it was a county line. The very first paragraph in the requirements for the appellation as drawn up by the government stated that they were not to be geo-political boundary lines. They would be lines that were associated with terrain, temperature, climate, this sort of thing. And the very first one they approved was a county line on three sides of the boundary!
Anyway, we did make a few little exceptions. I see some labels now, wines labeled ‘Santa Cruz Mountains’ appellation and I know the grapes did not come from the appellation. I mean, they came from the Santa Cruz Mountains but not within the boundary. It doesn’t matter, especially when you think it was just Dave and my idea of where the appellation boundaries should be. (laughs)
End of part 2
Admin
