The Adventure Begins

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.