July 2008 Archives

Acquiring my wine grapes was done perhaps hastily and perhaps randomly. And perhaps you can remove the perhaps from that sentence.

 

After almost a month Mike Larner emailed me back with the following:

 

Mike,
So I didn't scare you off with all that economic loss talk, ehh!
Unfortunately I don't have anything for sale, well fortunate for me I 
guess. I know of a vineyard coming on line this year, same soil, 
climate, and good clones. I on't know if it has a home, but i will 
contact them and get back to you (I have done some consulting work for 
them, so I know the vineyard pretty well). Otherwise call Jeff Newton, 
I think Watch Hill vineyard has some unsold Syrah. However, you may be 
up against many others since the frost did a lot of us in, I lost near 
10 acres in one night! What was that about economic losses!
I will be in touch.
All the best,
Michael

 

Oh yeah, the frost! Maybe there weren't any grapes to be had in Santa Barabara County. I called the people he suggested and they had nothing to sell. A prudent person would have waited and explored the area further, since I wanted to center my wine operations in the county. An impatient person would have done what I did: check out Wine Business Monthly classifieds and make inquiries.

 

Wine Business Monthly is one of the main trade publications for the North American wine industry. The articles have names like "Tasting Room Survey Report" or "Annual Crusher/Destemmer Comparison", and can vary widely in terms of usefulness. They also publish the numerous various press releases emanating from the industry, usually who's buying who, which winemakers are switching companies, new brands and wines introduced, distribution deals, etc. The print version mostly consists of ads, for everything related to winemaking: corks, crushers, fermenting tanks, barrels and every other piece of equipment. The first time I opened this magazine I couldn't believe how many items and products potentially went into the making of a bottle of wine.

 

Wine Business Monthly's primary value, however (especially the online version) is their classified ads. This is where industry people can source or sell barrels, grapes, bulk wine, equipment, land, etc, and this is where I looked. One listing I responded to advertised up to 10 tons of Solano County syrah available, at the low price of $1000/ton.

 

I decided at the outset that my primary grape variety for the virgin go-round would be syrah. Syrah was plentiful and it was a widely recognized varietal - it's certainly acceptable to bring a California syrah to any event, as opposed to, say, Sangiovese or Grenache, widely accepted international varieties that are still considered slightly avant-garde at times in this state.

 

Most importantly syrah is known as a variety that will not only tolerate rough or indifferent treatment, but actually likes it. I heard from more than one established winemaker (including Mike Larner, who grows a lot of it as well) that a vigorous pumpover was the best way to extract the maximum flavor and color from syrah grapes, without much worry as to whether their feelings would be hurt. A thick-skinned Mediterranean grape, evolving in the hot sun, begging you to bring it harder! Syrah in fact most probably originated in the Middle East, possible ancient Persia or Babylon (there is an ancient  town named Shiraz in Iran and of course the Aussies call syrah shiraz in deference to the grape's presumed Persian origins).

 

Put succinctly syrah is relatively difficult to screw up. And it's damn tasty. Syrah comes in different styles - a colder weather version that shows white pepper and anise characteristics all the way up to a full on California (or Australian) fruit bomb, and everywhere in-between. It's the only red grape used in the Northern Rhone area (e.g. Cote Rotie and Hermitage), where it makes some famous and pricy wines, and it's right behind Grenache as the most widely used grape in the South (ranging from Cotes du Rhone to Chateuaneaf du Pape). You will likely not find a 100% syrah in the Southern Rhone but it's in almost every blend to some degree (along with Grenache).

 

I've had some beauties from California as well and Australia's most prestigious wine is Penfolds Grange, a (mostly) Shiraz. Apropos of nothing many Australian shirazes have some Cabernet Sauvignon and many Aussie Cabs have some shiraz, including blends that are almost 50-50 (Grange usually has between 3 and 10% cabernet), a practice seen only rarely in California and never in the Rhone (or possibly anywhere in Europe to my knowledge)

 

So Syrah was going to be the maiden voyage, if it happened at all. I also harbor a dream to make pinot noir, but whereas syrah likes to be spanked, pinot noir is by universal acclamation the most difficult red grape to work with by a considerable margin. This was driven home to me by the AHC winemaking class where we used pumps to rack and transfer all the wine except our pinot noir, for which Norm brought a specialized siphon-type thing whose name escapes me.

 

The fragility of pinot noir was further brought home to me when, during a brief heat wave in Santa Maria, the class's pinot noir, which had been tasting excellent, rolled over and died, its color a disheartening brown shade, and the taste worse than the color. The other wines were unaffected. To add to the fun, a ton of quality pinot noir in SB County is now going for between $4000 and $5000 while even the top syrahs go for much less. And of course after you buy those nice grapes you're obligated to use some nice new French oak as well.

I budgeted $2000/ton for my syrah purchase, figuring I could snag a couple of tons, so when I saw the grapes from Solano County advertised for half that I knew there would be a catch. I answered the ad to see what the deal was.

 

A man named Roger King called me back almost immediately after I sent the email - he didn't own the vineyard but was the head of the Solano County winemakers association (I think), and was closely involved with the vineyard, owned by a man named Steve Wirth.

 

Roger explained the vineyard situation to me - the vineyard had been laid out and planted under the direction of a winemaker in Sonoma who had agreed to take the full production of the vineyard every year (which apparently would be fairly substantial). The winemaker had refused to honor the agreement and in fact would not even return phone calls or emails. This would be the fourth vintage; the first three years of production were sold off to home winemakers. This was somewhat discouraging, as I would have liked to taste a wine made (commercially) from the grapes. Roger felt that most of the wine (all of which was homemade apparently) he had from the vineyard's grapes was flawed, although he felt there was one he could get that was "correct" that I could taste.

 

Roger King owns his own vineyard in Solano County and reinvented himself as a grower/winemaker after a long stint in the corporate world (as a ski executive, mostly). He was uncertain about the clone(s) that had been planted in the Wirth vineyard, but had some theories about it. Since I knew nothing about syrah clones, that part of the conversation went by without much input from myself.

 

In recent years clones have received increasingly greater attention in CA winemaking circles (the definition of a clone is simply a common DNA imprint, just like humans, sheep,. etc). It mostly has been centered on various pinot noir clones. By all accounts the different pinot noir clones all taste somewhat different, as well as ripening at different times and having varying requirements as far as temperature, moisture, etc. Because pinot noir is such an unstable grape that mutates readily, the quantity of different clones has built up over the centuries. Pinot noir, pinot gris (grigio) and pinot blanc are all different mutations of what started out as the same grape, and it's not unheard of (although rare) to see a pinot noir vine with a branch that has produced clusters of white or pink (the usual shade of pinot gris) grapes. This is considered a bad thing, by the way.

Entirely different grapes, such as Pinot Meunier (widely used in champagne) are thought to be pinot noir mutations as well.

 

In the winemaking class Norm had brought a cross section of different clones from the same vineyard for the class to taste. They definitely tasted different, and you could tell the differences just from the juice. I had already realized that there were different pinot clones but I never realized there were so many: In Santa Barbara County  there are many different pinot clones, some more widely used than others of course. (The well regarded Fiddlestix property, a 100 acre pinot noir vineyard in the prestigious Santa Rita Hills AVA, has at least 10 different clones planted. Melville's vineyard in SB County has 14 different clones planted); most winemakers will blend them; some like to make a single clone pinot noir. Norm in fact makes 2 versions of a pinot from the same vineyard, one using only Dijon clones (Dijon in this case is a sub-class of a whole family of clones).

 

Almost every family of grapes has a variety of clones but in some cases it just doesn't matter. For example there are various Sangiovese clones, but ultimately there are two types of Sangiovese: Piccolo (found in Chianti) and Grosso (most notably in Brunello and Rosso di Montalcino). As you might guess one is larger than the other, and they are very different to the point where they are almost  different varietals. However the various clones (despite having different DNA) within these two main groups are fairly similar from a winemaking and grape growing perspective, so in the case of Sangiovese (clonally speaking) perhaps all you really have to know is: Grosso or Piccolo?

 

Incidentally Sangiovese is the most widely planted red grape in Italy, and I have no idea what the clonal distribution is outside of Chianti and Montalcino.

 

Of course Sangiovese and Pinot Noir are the extreme examples, and the current thinking is that syrah clones do make a significant difference, so I hoped for the best. I wish I could spin a few nifty facts or anecdotes about syrah clones, but that's a research project for another day. And after all, at this point no one seems to know what the clone(s) is/are in the Wirth vineyard anyway.

 

I told Roger Id need to come up, meet him, taste the homemade wine and look at the vineyard. The reason for the low price was now obvious, since no one had ever made any money from these grapes.

 

Jason is one of my main wino buddies and my best friend dating back to college. He lives in Berkeley (where we went to school), less than an hour south of Solano County. Every year I travel up north and we take a short road trip through an area of Sonoma County, which is probably our favorite wine region. It's a great area for touring and tasting and exploring because, while absolutely dense with wineries, tasting rooms and vineyards, it seems for the most part to have escaped the tourist overrun that has afflicted much smaller Napa County (although you can escape the hordes in Napa if you head to the obscure reaches of the county). Thus I called Jason and suggested he come with me to have a look at the vineyard, followed by our annual Sonoma sojourn.

 

The largest city in Solano County is Vallejo, just over the bridge from the East Bay. Jason described it as "a place with a lot of murders and gangs", i.e. not a garden spot. After we passed Vallejo we got off the freeway per Roger's directions and found ourselves in Fairfield, a city roughly equivalent in charm to Vallejo. I was buying grapes from here?

 

Luckily, as soon as Fairfield ends the wine country begins - it's like someone flipped a switch: one moment you're at a light in front of a rundown mini mall featuring liquor, check cashing and donuts (there must be some sort of trinity in there somewhere), and the next you're passing a lush vineyard estate (gated of course, to keep out the mini mall people). We continued down the road to Wooden Canyon winery, where Roger made his wines. He was scheduled to do some filtering that morning. We were running late so I hoped we weren't getting off on the wrong foot.

 

Wooden Canyon winery is a nice spot, complete with tasting room, winery, picnic areas and well tended vineyards. I was feeling better than I had when we were crawling through Fairfield ten minutes earlier. A large figure was getting into a pickup, who turned out to be Roger; we had just caught him, he was about to leave.

 

Roger loves to talk, mostly but not exclusively about wine, so we chatted in the parking lot for a while. He had brought the bottle of wine so I suggested we go inside and try some. He produced a bottle of the homemade (or I should say non-commercial) wine, which had been blended with 10% cabernet sauvignon. The tasting room attendant opened it and the moment of truth had arrived. I deeply wanted this to be a revelatory moment, when classic aromas of anise, pepper, leather and smoke would caress my olfactory lobes, and the rich, seductive glyceriny mouthfeel would make images of the Rhone Valley swim through my mind.

 

OK, it wasn't quite like that. But. There was something there, as the wine had a nice aroma, with a certain degree of complexity. I would agree with Roger that the wine was cleanly made, and actually I could happily drink it with a meal, but honestly it was very average on its best day. All things considered it was what I expected when I was being honest with myself in my anticipation of the tasting, visions of Purple Rhone Angels circling my head notwithstanding.

 

On to the vineyard. Roger took off, we followed in Jason's car. On the way we stopped at Roger's syrah vineyard, which he claimed had produced several 90 point wines He didn't elaborate on who were assigning the points. Perhaps Roger was. It reminded me of a winery website I had seen some time ago, in which the winery had rated their wines themselves. They all scored very high.

 

Apropos of awards and ratings, a recent email from Roger informed me that the wine I had tasted at Wooden Canyon had received a silver medal at the Orange County Fair in the home winemaker division.

 

Anybody who has spent much time in California tasting rooms will recall a lot of gold medals from the Orange County Fair. In my experience this event seems very free with its awards, and there is no apparently no limit to how many medals they hand out in any given year. In other words it's not a competition where there is only one gold, silver, etc per division, more a case of any wine that has any merit receiving a medal. So I took the silver medal news with a grain of salt, but I guess it's better than not winning a medal, although for all I know every wine entered at the fair wins a gold or silver.

 

We stood around Roger's syrah vineyard, which was indistinguishable from most other vineyards, especially in its pre-veraison state (veraison is when the grapes turn from green to red. It's marked by several pagan festivals and a 4 day non-stop feast. OK, not really). He remarked on the trellising system, which I believe he said was the same as in the Wirth vineyard. In my viticulture class we had gone over various trellising systems extensively; sad to say I remember none of it. As with so many things wine-related, it's remarkable how many ways there are to train a grapevine.

 

After chewing on some hard green syrah grapes and standing around a bit we resumed our drive to the Wirth vineyard. I had already decided I was going to buy a batch of grapes, mainly because it was time to be a player, damn it. The price was right although, in my eagerness and naiveté I didn't realize that the cost of processing the grapes would be the same regardless of the tonnage cost of the raw material, and that the initial cost would in fact be less of a portion of the total cost of producing a bottle of wine. I actually did realize this implicitly but I was talking myself into getting into the game, like right now. Plus, I didn't know how many more of these sorts of grape expeditions I could really go on.

 

The vineyard looked exactly like Roger's, only bigger. We chewed on more hard green grapes while Roger expounded on the trellising system, canopy management strategy (the canopy is the green leafy part, which needs to be arranged to provide optimum sunlight and shelter for the grapes themselves). It all looked copasetic and I was excited. As I mentioned, unless the vineyard had been overrun with mildew, or was dotted with abandoned tractors and huge weeds I was in.

 

"I'll take six tons", I said.

 

We shook hands on the deal.

 

 

Last Saturday was blending day for the Allan Hancock winemaking class. The class has lasted 2 semesters and has now stretched into the summer. Bottling day (probably bottling weekend) is August 16th which will mark the end of the class, and most probably the end of my academic career, wine-based or otherwise.

 

In August of 2007, having secured a place to stay in Solvang, I signed up for three classes: Introduction to Winemaking/Enology, Viticulture Operations and Basic Winemaking I. Although the Intro was listed as a prerequisite to the other two there didn't seem to be an hard and fast rule against taking all three at once, so off I went. The intro class was being held in the AHC "Satellite campus" in Solvang (actually 4 rooms in an office park), so it would only be a 5 minute commute from where I was staying, very welcome after driving up 2 hours from L.A. The Friday morning viticulture class would take place at the college (and the campus vineyard), and the site for the Saturday morning winemaking class had yet to be determined.

 

Going into these classes I had a good idea, of course, of how the winemaking process worked. You brought in the grapes, crushed them (for reds) or pressed them (for whites). Shortly thereafter they started fermenting and eventually, after the fermentation was complete and all of the sugar in the juice had been transformed into alcohol, you had wine, which then was transferred into barrels (usually), where it aged for between 6 and 24 months, and then was bottled. But I did not know how these steps were achieved, what kind of equipment you used, how you used it, what decisions were made at each stage. What is the wine had low sugar? High sugar? Low acid? High acid? Or what if the fermentation was stuck? What was malolactic fermentation? What happened if things got screwed up? The winemaking class was all about the students making wine. The intro class would give me some theoretical backing. The viticulture class would let me get my hands dirty in a real working vineyard, where I would supply the grapes used in my winemaking class.

 

My initial assumptions about my nascent real life wine education were accurate in spots and inaccurate in others. I learned very quickly that the picturesque campus vineyard visible from the highway was actually run by Kendall-Jackson, who controlled all the grapes that were produced. AHC students were strictly forbidden from working this vineyard, although there would "possibly" be a field trip later in the term to have a look around. Whenever I questioned someone in the Agbus (shorthand for Agri-business, the department's formal name) department about the ownership and history of the vineyard no one seemed to know for sure, All anyone knew was that Kendall-Jackson called the shots, which may or may not have always been true. I believe at some point AHC had owned all or part of the land/vineyard and that they may receive part of the revenues, but it all seems mysterious.

 

Which left us with the campus vineyard, a roughly 3½ acre parcel at the furthest edge of campus abutting an unused parking lot, a vacant lot and a seemingly unused softball field, all owned by the school. Certainly the vineyard was large and varied enough to provide a bountiful crop and a rich learning experience but there was one problem - the vineyard had been overrun by mildew and was in a state of extreme neglect and disarray. The vines were scraggly and competed with a dense and varied population of weeds, many of which were the same height as the vines. Whatever grapes were hanging from these vines were sorry looking specimens, and nothing you'd want to make wine from. The vines also had huge suckers pushing up from the rootstock, some over 2 feet long (all the vines were grafts onto different rootstocks).

 

It turns out that the Agbus department had recently been in a state of flux and had just hired the new department head after a long search. His name is Alfredo Koch and he is the scion of a wealthy Argentinean wine empire. Although Alfredo was the owner of the family estate in Mendoza (the prime wine area in Argentina), he was pursuing his Enology PHD at UC Davis, and had transplanted his family to California. He was currently commuting between Davis and Santa Maria but assured us that he was committed to building the department into a world class operation; since he was in the last phases of creating his dissertation, he could soon move permanently to Santa Maria.

 

Alfredo would teach the viticulture class; he had conducted the Intro class the previous (spring 2007) semester, but he had recruited Mike Larner, a fellow Davis PHD candidate, to teach it this semester. Mike Larner is the name I had dropped regularly as my future source of grapes, since his output was well-regarded and Larner Vineyard was a widely known producer in the area. He had inherited a 33 acre vineyard from his father, which he co-owned with his mother and sister; I believe he lives there as well.

 

The teacher of the winemaking class was Norm Yost, a well known winemaker with deep roots in the area. Norm has his own wine label, Flying Goat, which specializes in high end pinot noir and he also consults for some other wine operations in the area. He had taught the class for a few years. When I started the class I had never heard of him or Flying Goat actually so I my knowledge of Norm was limited to a brief bio on the Flying Goat website, where I learned that the winery was named after the dexterous airborne capability of pygmy goats, and that Norm made some pricy pinots from a few different vineyards.

 

There was a marked contrast between the three teachers - Norm Yost is an industry lifer who relied on winemaking for his livelihood and was very clear eyed and practical about what it took to make wine, and make it profitably. Alfredo Koch is also a lifer, literally born into it, but Alfredo had never really had any serious economic concerns, as he oversaw a vast operation that was already running smoothly by the time he took over, giving him the luxury to commute between Argentina and California and pursue advanced academic degrees. Mike Larner bridged the gap between the two; he also was sharply tuned to the harsh economic realities of the wine business, but at the same time his father had planted the vineyard and laid the groundwork that Mike was now benefiting from. Like Alfredo, he had pursued an advanced degree at Davis but like Norm he had to show a profit from his wine industry involvement.

 

The Intro class evolved much as I thought it would: Mike Larner gave us a good grounding in basics of winemaking and viticulture, complete with grapevine physiology, a quick look at wine over the years (it's been made for over 5,000 years, etc) and due to his affinity for chemistry, a sprinkling of some cryptic equations on the blackboard that went right past me, as most of wine chemistry does. I enjoyed talking to him after class, where I would quiz him over the logistics and economies of grape growing and winemaking, which he was happy to answer, invariably stressing that it can be a brutal business. In short, this class was similar to one you could find in most every college that had any sort of an enology program i.e. I possibly didn't have to travel 130 miles to take it.

 

The vineyard aspect of the Santa Maria adventure had turned out to be something of a bust. The class met every Friday, theoretically at 8:00 AM. Early on Alfredo changed this to 8:30 AM and most people, including Alfredo, didn't show until close to 9:00. After the usual chitchat and getting settled, there would be roughly 30 to 45 minutes of lecture, followed by a 10:00 AM decamp to the mildew-overrun campus vineyard. The 10:00 AM time was strictly enforced, as another class took over our class room at 10:00, whereupon our class (which numbered from 6 to 10 or so, plus Alfredo and Alice, the vineyard manager) would make the 10 minute stroll to the vineyard. Our duties in the vineyard consisted essentially of clearing away weeds and cutting off the numerous suckers that had sprung from the rootstock. Although there were some good tips on pruning and training methods for the most part the class began to resent a large part of the vineyard activity - it was hard work and the vineyard was not going to be yielding any grapes anyway. Clearing a path for future generations of viticulture students was perhaps a noble endeavor, but not one I was too interested in.

 

That left the winemaking class, meeting every Saturday Monday from 8:00 until 12:00 or so. The winemaking course is an abbreviated session, only lasting eight or nine weeks instead of 12, although it does span two semesters.

 

We got off to an inauspicious start. Previous classes had made wine at CCWS, a great place to make wine both in terms of facilities as well as observing a great deal of  activity by professional winemakers. Unfortunately CCWS had decided to discontinue their association with the AHC program, thus we didn't have a meeting area / classroom set up until very close to the beginning of the term. Finally someone had come up with a facility near the Santa Maria airport (not too far from CCWS).

 

The winemaking facility was a new winery, whose clients were unknown to us. The classroom was actually an empty room (possibly intended for storage or office cubicles) at the entrance of the building, where we set up folding chairs and a whiteboard - Norm talked a little about himself and then each student introduced themselves and explained their motivation for taking the course.

 

What was striking to me was that the median age of the students was around 50, the youngest being early 30's and ranging from mid-70's. Many people had land they wanted to plant, one person already had vineyards and made his own wine. The students without land wanted to get into the wine industry, whereas the landowning types seemed more interested in planting some grapes and making their own wine.

This morning I sent off the deposit for 1 ton of Grenache and 1 ton of Mourvedre. I'm hoping to get more than the one tone of Grenache, and originally we had agreed on 2, but it looks like I may get closer to one ton than 2.

Grenache and Mourvedre, along with Syrah, are the most ubiquitous red Rhone varietals in California. Although I believe there may actually be more Carignan planted than Mourvedre, Carignan is a fading star, both here and in France. At one time Carignan was firmly entrenched in the number three slot in the Southern Rhone region (behind Grenache and then Syrah) while Mourvedre was largely confined to the Provence region where it was frequently made into some fairly notable roses, such as Tavel, and also made into some relatively "serious" wines, usually from the Bandol region. However a few growers experimented with Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley, and it took to the area readily, proving itself superior to Carignan in its assigned role, which was as a blender in a typical Cote du Rhone style blend, which usually features from roughly 40 to 60% Grenache, the remainder being divided between Syrah and, now, Mourvedre. It was actually illegal originally to grow Mourvedre in the Rhone Valley but this regulation was amended long ago, and most winemakers have never looked back.

I have never knowingly had a wine from the Rhone with Carignan in it (although it is likely that a few I've had might have contained some). I have had California Carignan. I was a member of the Ridge wine club for many years and they would usually send out a California Carignan at least once a year. I have had many California Mourvedres, both as standalone 100% Mourvedre wine and in (usually) Rhone-style blends, and in my limited experience the Mourvedre trumps the Carignan fairly handily. The Ridge Carignans (over the years they sourced from several different vineyards) shared an annoying attribute, which was that they would be fairly nice when the bottle was opened but would fade badly by the time you got to the last glass, even if a few people had consumed the entire bottle within a half hour or less. The California Mourvedres are all over the map - they can display a distinctive fruit-driven elegance, they can be jammy and overly fruit forward or, in the case of cool climate areas, they can be underripe and a little weedy, with excessive acid. These last features contribute to its value as a blender, as Mourvedre is a late ripener, so if you throw it in with some fruity high alcohol Grenache and/or Syrah it will lend some nice structure to the finished product.

I have had two well-regarded wines from Bandol on a few occasions: Domaine Tempier and Chateau Pibarnon. I have always found the Tempier to be a tannic beast, with a typically (for the southern Rhone) earthy, even "dirty" feel to it. I far prefer Pibarnon, which provides an elegance and breeding that is really pretty rare for this grape. I have to stress that my Bandol experience is very limited, and the way prices are going, will continue that way.

I bought the Grenache and Mourvedre mostly because I have a lot of Syrah coming in - 6 tons to be exact. Committing to buy this much Syrah was a move I already recognize as a freshman mistake but I'm going to run with it as well as I can. My original idea was to buy a limited amount of grapes in Santa Barbara County  and base my operations there. I haven't made many contacts on the inside, as I had hoped, but I was certain I could buy some decent grapes from somewhere, make the wines there (at the time I didn't know where), and at least have a workable commute between LA and the Santa Barbara wine country.

If you do not have permanent access to a winery (like me and many others) obviously you have to rent space, time and equipment. Usually (mandatory in my case) the equipment will come with the space and time. The options are to use a custom crush facility or contract with a winery whose primary focus is to make their own branded wines.

Custom Crush is also a legal term, and it refers to any winemaking service performed by a bonded winery for a wholesaler (which is what I will be), or even an end user. Being a wholesaler means you can sell the stuff but you can't make or bottle it. However you can buy grapes and supplies and have the bonded guys make it.

The Custom Crush heavyweight in Santa Barbara County (they are in Santa Maria, at the northern tip of the county) is Central Coast Wine Services. It is owned by the Miller family, who are wine heavyweights in general. The Miller family owns Bien Nacido Vineyards, a huge ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley which has extensive vineyards and a huge annual grape tonnage output. Bien Nacido is not just huge; most of its grapes are considered absolutely top drawer and go into many highly coveted wines, usually pinot noir and chardonnay, but also quite a bit of Syrah, and many others. The wine class at Allan Hancock College received a gift of ½ ton of cabernet franc grapes from Bien Nacido, which were terrific. There are also two wineries on the property, one of which is shared by Au Bon Climat and Qupe, two relatively early pioneers of winemaking in the area (they are both now well-established with substantial annual outputs).

The Millers also own Solomon Hills Vineyard, down the road near Los Alamos, a pinot-centric vineyard that, in my recent experience, accounts for better pinots these days than the venerable Bien Nacido spreads, French Camp Vineyards near Paso Robles (another sprawling holding), as well as probably a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting or don't know about. So they're players from way back.

Central Coast Wine Services (CCWS) was for a long time really the only serious custom crush facility in the area, and made it possible for many small maverick winemakers to make their wine themselves in a well-equipped environment without trying to raise the $500,000 or so it takes to start a winery facility (current estimates put this number at more like $1 million). I figured I would start with them and least get an idea of what it cost to make wine; I had no idea what a crush facility, and figured I should find out before trying to buy grapes.

By this time I had casually begun remarking (usually to classmates or when I got drunk enough, to most anyone) that I had handshake agreements to buy grapes with Michael Larner and Doug Braun. Mike Larner was my teacher in the intro to viticulture class; he runs a 33 acre vineyard inherited from his father, mostly planted to Rhone varieties.. Doug Braun is a well established grower, winemaker and entrepreneur who had given my viticulture class an interesting tour of his vineyard, one of the first in the area to be certified fully biodynamic. Both of them are terrifically nice guys, and both of them had no idea that we had a handshake agreement - this was possibly because we did not. In fact I had never spoken to either of them regarding buying grapes. I was hoping my bullshit did not come back to haunt me, as I did not want to poison the waters before I even got started.

I'd decided I'd try to get about 2-4 tons of grapes. I was focused on Syrah; it tasted great, it was widely planted, and most importantly, it was probably the easiest grape to make wine from. Common wisdom dictated that Syrah even liked to be handled roughly, as opposed to, say, pinot noir, which would roll over and die immediately if not handled tenderly.

So that was my story - I've got 2 to 4 tons of Syrah coming in, I want to make wine at your facility. I emailed CCWS with the good news, at least hoping to get a rate quote out of them so I could at least have starting point. Thankfully I was smart enough not to do my namedropping thing in the email.

I never heard back from CCWS. Shortly thereafter I emailed Mike Larner, asking if he had any grapes for sale. I never heard back from him either. Hmmmm, I was clearly not a player at this point.

Shortly thereafter I purchased some wine futures from a new wine brand called Municipal Winemakers, 6 bottles of "Bright Red", a Rhone blend. I did this, as I do very often with wine purchases, strictly on a whim, and without prior tasting. Every year The Wine Cask wine shop (and restaurant) in Santa Barbara holds a futures tastng and sale. They publish a nifty catalogue which has a large cross-section of most of the Central Coast big boy wines, as well as a lot of obscure stuff they're showcasing. The big boy wines include a lot of very limited edition stuff that can run upwards of $100, which of course is fun to read about, but absurd to buy (at least for mid level consumers like me). They hold a huge tasting where prospective customers can taste barrel samples of the futures offerings.

I had never gotten futures before this year, but this Bright Red stuff seemed interesting and it was only $14 a bottle. Since I had been in a band called Bright Red Universe I decided to go for it.

Municipal Winemakers is Dave Potter, an assistant winemaker at Fess Parker Winery; through his website I contacted him to ask if his other wine ("Bright White") was available. He offered to let me taste it down at the Fess Parker Wine Center, where he made it.

Dave never made our appointment when I showed at the Fess Parker Wine Center but I was informed by one of the employees that it was a custom crush facility. Ah, another custom crush facility. Interest rekindled, I called her shortly thereafter and set an appointment with Armando, one of the managers of the facility. OK! I'm getting on the inside. At the least I can find out what this custom crush process costs.

The Fess Parker Wine Center is a large monolithic building near the Santa Maria Airport and almost right next door to CCWS. It has a lobby area with the usual displays of wine labels, newspaper articles and photos of vineyards in a large lobby are with a hallway that branches off to a series of offices. Most of the building, though, is a massive winery.

I showed up for our appointment thinking about what bullshit I would drop on Armando to get taken seriously. I decided that I was the representative of a group of family investors and were doing a pilot project. I don't recall if I namedropped Mike Larner again (it would be the last time if I did) but I represented that I'd have somewhere between 4 to 6 tons of grapes, with an upper limit of 10 tons. Sounded good, I guess, especially since I had no grapes, no experience and no idea whatsoever about what it all might cost me. In other words, I was most likely wasting his time.

Armando turned out to be a nice guy and we talked for a while about not much in particular, He gave me a tour of the winery facility, which clearly was set up for large scale production. The bottling line was running, bottling some Grenache Banc for local winemaker Kris Curran, and since I love watching a bottling machine in operation I stood there mesmerized for a few minutes until Armando moved me along. We strolled through hundreds (thousands?) of barrels (not all full probably) stacked 10 high, huge fermenting tanks and some real large pressing equipment. Armando stressed to me that my 4 to 8 ton lot would probably not be acceptable to upper management but he promised to check. He also handed me a rate sheet, which finally gave some idea of what it costs to do this thing: $450 a ton to start, plus storage, bottling, extra services, etc. Essentially the $450 included weighing, crushing, fermenting and doing one racking up until the first of the year, after which storage charges would kick in and much of the work would then be charges on a piecemeal basis.

It turns out that this facility was originally intended for overflow storage but had evolved into a winemaking facility, primarily for Fess Parker reds - the whites would be made at the actual (as known to tourists) Fess Parker Winery in the Santa Ynez Valley.

Fess Parker, or more accurately the Fess Parker Company, is something of a controversial entity in Santa Barbara County. Fess (famous for playing Daniel Boone on television) originally gained notoriety in the area for developing a large hotel property near the beach in Santa Barbara, which was closely followed by the winery. In addition to the winery facilities there are several wine labels (Fess Parker, Parker Station, etc), a spa in the town of Los Olivos, several vineyards that supply grapes to both Fess Parker and other wineries, and various other real estate holdings. The company is always wheeling and dealing and has not always done so in what many locals would consider an above board fashion.

Several years ago I was even in the position of sending the winery a nasty email following its filing of a lawsuit against Foxen Winery, at the time my favorite wine brand. The lawsuit was widely seen as an attempt to destroy Foxen and arose when Fess Parker started labeling some wines "Foxen". Although strictly speaking the grapes were from Foxen Canyon (which runs through the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley), they had conveniently left out the "canyon" part. Foxen winery had already established a claim to the name (Dick Dore is the grandson of Benjamin Foxen, who had pioneered much of the area, and the Foxen winery is on Benjamin's old family ranch) and it was assumed Foxen Winery had something to do with the Fess Parker Wine, which was not the case. Foxen filed a suit and Fess Parker (whose financial resources outstripped Foxen's by a huge margin) filed a massive countersuit, one that Foxen had no hope of defending.

Here is the text of my friendly little email:

Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 10:57:36 -0700
To: FParker@ibm.net
From: mike stan
Subject: foxen

Sirs

I've always disliked your winery and organization intensely, especially your perverted
marketing campaigns (eg using "American Heritage" to promote wines made from grapes of
Mediterranean origin). Additionally the wines are no great shakes either besides the odd Syrah.

While you focus your efforts on marketing Foxen has been establishing themselves as
the finest producer in the county; now you are trying to capitalize on their reputation.

I am nauseated.

Shortly I will begin organizing a boycott of your products (the world can easily live without them).

Foxen will always kick your ass both in integrity and quality.

Sincerely

Mike Stan
Los Angeles

And here's their admittedly good-natured response:

Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 12:55:34 -0700
From: Cindy Simpson <fparker@ibm.net>
Reply-To: fparker@ibm.net
Organization: Fess Parker Winery
To: mike stan
Subject: Re: foxen


Dear Mike:

We are sorry you are unable to appreciate our "American TRADITION"  label on our
reserve wines.  We realize we cannot please everyone and we appreciate your
colorful comments.

As for the Foxen issue, you should know that we had already agreed to cease
using the names Fluer de Foxen and Foxen Cuvee prior to Foxen's legal actions
against us.  We sincerely hope that this matter will be resolved shortly.

We do hope you are feeling better soon!  Have a wonderful day :).

Sincerely,
Cindy Simpson
Director of Marketing

So at least this episode had a happy ending.

Fess Parker also attracted outcry from an alliance with the Chumash tribe plans several years ago to annex 500 acres of land and built a casino and housing in the heart of the Santa Ynez Valley, a deal that fell apart. Apparently he tried to give 51% of his land to the tribe so it could be reclassified as "tribal" i.e. sovereign land, allowing the development to go forward.

Personally I made my peace with the whole Parker thing long ago and in fact I shared a couple of classes with his granddaughter at Allan Hancock College Additionally, my Intro class took a very informative field trip to the winery, where Larry Schaffer (another assistant winemaker) gave us an excellent tour. And now I had toured the custom crush facility. Since Fess Parker is now an entrenched part of the wine landscape I only hope I didn't get on his blacklist after my email, as I want to try to remain friends with everyone.

I'm starting to write this journal a bit late in the game. I have decided to start a winery, or more accurately, a wine company. My tentative name is Ritual, and I have a snazzy label already designed. The layout of the label came to me almost a year ago, and I think it sprang fully formed. I've created a computer image and it works great.

 

The label thing reminds of a frequent anecdote regarding wealthy people who create lavish wineries that are both monuments to tasteful Napa living, and ideally impeccable wines. The running joke is that the first thing that gets determined is the design and decoration of the tasting room.

 

I'm very far from wealthy and not interested in tasting rooms. I do want to do the wine thing, and, citing yet another aphorism, you only regret what you didn't do, not what you did. I find this flawed to the point of idiocy but nevertheless it applies in this case.

 

I've been a wino, i.e. hard core wine aficionado at least since my mid-thirties or so. It was at this time that I started to seriously explore a wine region, in my case the Santa Ynez Valley. One of my best friends lived in Santa Barbara, and as he began to get clued in to the treasure of wine-related events, so did I. The mid-nineties were a time of both tremendous growth and a certain maturation (some might say commercialization) of the Santa Barbara county wine industry, a trend that continues unabated to this day.

 

The film Sideways is widely credited with revealing the charms of the Santa Ynez Valley to the world. This is true to a large extent but the fact is the region was already adopting a reputation for world class wines. Sideways was a great ambassador for the region but just as evidently a symptom of its charms as well.

 

It is also instructive that long before Sideways there was a hugely popular soap opera called Santa Barbara, which received wide exposure internationally. Now, it should be noted that Santa Ynez Valley is an official appellation (an "American Viticultural Area" or AVA). It is smaller than the "Santa Barbara County" appellation, which it is a part of. According to American (and EU) regulations, a wine can specified as being from any appellation it is in. Thus, a "Stags Leap" wine from an AVA in Napa Valley wine can also be a "Napa Valley" wine. It can also be a "California" wine as well. An almost immutable law of wine branding and prestige dictates that the smallest (e.g. Stags Leap) AVA will be used. An exception is Santa Barbara County. Many wineries prefer to use the Santa Barbara County AVA. I've been told my more than one local wine person that "Santa Barbara" confers almost universal recognition (especially among neophytes),  solely because of the soap opera.

 

In the Santa Ynez Valley the pinot noir and chardonnay is consistently excellent, rhone varietals are tasty and occasionally hit one out of the park and you can generally find all kinds of interesting stuff well outside the mainstream: nice Cal-Itals, tempranillos or whatever.

 

As a small sidenote I've always found the Santa Ynez Valley Cabs and Merlots to be sorely lacking. I'm not sure if it's my immersion in Santa Barbara wine life to have formed my indifference to the big boy cabs of the north, or perhaps I just don't like them that much. In any case I've had some great ones, and I can't afford most of them now anyway.

 

I've spent the last week or two searching for barrels. It should be emphasized at this point that I don't especially know what I'm doing. I have a good understanding of the flow of things of course, and I have an accurate checklist of what needs to happen and be purchased). I have grapes under contract and a crush facility lined up (I'm pretty sure) I have very limited hands-on experience and as far as knowing whether my grapes would do better in new oak, old oak (oops, neutral oak), no oak or even sitting in a swimming pool for 3 months, well. I have no idea. So I've determined my barrel lineup - I think I'm doing 20 neutrals, 4 once-used and another 8 once or twice used (the broker isn't sure. I appreciate his honesty). I have made the barrel determination with the feeling that I don't want to go too crazy with the oak (but I want some). Since the price of a new barrel is $900-$1100, going with 1 year olds is the way to go even if you enjoy a nice dollop of oakiness. A fast-rising Rhone-oriented winemaker who I respect immensely confided to me that he rarely considers purchasing brand new barrels. My grape lineup is 6 tons of syrah, 1 ton of mourvedre and 1-2 tons of Grenache. These will make up the premier vintage, hopefully 3 different wines, all great of course.

 

I spend a great deal of time thinking about my grapes, although I don't know them personally. Ironically as I navigate the uncharted territory of doing winemaking deals I am going to be bottling wines from my year at Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria, my first step into the winemaking venture.

 

This journal probably should have started a year ago as I set out to rent a room somewhere near the college, with the intent of living up there part-time and taking wine classes at Allan Hancock College. I wanted to get on the inside, not just keep doing the festival and tasting room circuit.

 

I chose Allan Hancock College due to its aggressive and well regarded wine programs. The school ran 2 different vineyards: one very prominent along Highway 101 with a proud sign proclaiming it the college's vineyard, the other right on campus. They also had a winemaking class that I was very keen on taking. I had read an article on the class in the LA Times some time back and it just seemed like a great experience. The students would harvest the grapes and tend to the wines all the way through bottling, whereupon they could end up with several cases of THEIR wine. It was just what I wanted to do. The fact that massive construction was going on right above my house in Los Angeles also piqued my desire to spend some serious time out of town, and Santa Ynez Valley was a nice place to hang around for a good chunk of the time.

 

I have been a software engineer (i.e. computer programmer) for most of my adult life. I started when I was 25 and I'm now 49. I got started in it because it seemed everyone else was doing it and doing well (programmers were red-hot in the mid-eighties, and I guess they still are in many sectors). My friend Lionel from Santa Barbara was doing well; he was a social sciences refugee just like me. After getting a Bachelors degree in Political Science from UC Berkeley, I had kicked around some terrible jobs and I was sick of having no money and being something of a fuckup with no future. But mostly it was the money thing. I had met a lot of Lionel's software cohorts and decided I could do what they were doing, whatever that was. I was right, and I liked programming for the most part too. And the money is good.

 

I'm ready for a change. Permanently. Last year I was coming off an incredibly flush 2½  years of consulting, fueled by a full time client that had paid me a a considerable amount of money to develop a custom system for them. The project had concluded and I decided I could devote some time to the wine class thing. I had some other clients with ongoing projects but I worked from home, so if I had to do some work up North I could do it on a laptop if need be. I continued to get quite a bit of consulting work through about January of this year, but now the economy is foundering and I'm getting very little work (the consultants always get dropped first). Personally, there is a shift coming, economy notwithstanding. Wine time! Of course in the meantime I wouldn't mind making a little more money, as committing large amounts to grapes and winery operations feels extra acute when you don't have much coming in.