August 2008 Archives

It's now getting towards fall and that means crush time. The real action (part 1) is about to begin.

 

I procured barrels from 3 different sources, all through Wine Business Monthly. Since I'm getting between 8 and 9 tons worth of grapes; that translates to roughly 630 cases, using a very optimistic figure of 70 cases per ton. This is on the high side, 65 or so per ton is more realistic. Still, you don't want to be short of barrels, so I have 31. There are 25 cases per barrel so I have over 750 cases worth of capacity - as usual I over shopped.

 

I purchased 8 barrels from Meza barrel Company in Santa Maria. Since I was in Santa Maria frequently (Allan Hancock College is in Santa Maria) it was easy enough to go take a look at what they had. The ones I was interested in were $90 each and the manager was uncertain whether they had been used once or twice. I took this to mean they had been used twice. Normally barrels have 3 to 4 uses in them before they stop imparting oak flavors to the wine and become "neutral". Neutral oak is still useful, as wine aged in oak will be different than wine aged in, say, stainless steel, mostly due to micro-oxygenation.

 

There is a funny sequence in Mondovino, a highly biased film that laments the homogenization of the wine industry. Although Mondovino makes some good points the film goes out of its way to make buffoons out of wine industry figures it disapproves of. One of those is Michel Rolland, a Pomerol based "flying winemaker" who is in great demand the world over. Rolland has attracted tremendous criticism from many sectors for creating wines all over the world that taste similar (I can't vouch for this yea or nay since I can't afford his clients' products). His other accomplishment is usually to increase sales of the clients' wines, sometimes very dramatically. In the film he is shown running in to 2 or 3 wineries, screaming "microoxygenate!" and then running back out to his chauffeur-driven Mercedes, presumably off to the next winery to repeat the process.

 

Meza Barrel Company is outside Santa Maria, about 10 miles past the airport. The barrels are housed in an enormous hangar, stacked 30 high - there must have been over 5000 barrels there, most for sale but some ready to be broken up for wood. The wine world is up to its ears in used barrels and most any winery will let you have all the old barrels you want if you haul them away.

 

I was more interested in the somewhat newer barrels, so we strolled through the dark unlit building. It's a great setting for a horror movie, perhaps a deranged killer living amongst the barrels in the dark corner of the warehouse, picking off unsuspecting winemakers looking for a few good barrels.

Armed with the tiny flashlight I keep in my car I inspected the inventory. The ones I was interested in were near the front thankfully, so there was a bit of daylight helping me out. The truth of the matter is that I knew I wanted French oak but beyond that I have no idea how the various barrels would affect my wine. Some looked less used than others but I felt this might be misleading, although of course I didn't want any falling apart at the seams.

 

As with all things in winemaking there is much ongoing debate about barrels and cooperage. French oak commands the highest price and is considered the best product. At this writing a new French oak barrel will cost $1100 in the U.S. An American oak barrel is considerably less, and they are widely used for certain wines (e.g. zinfandel) and not at all for certain others (e.g. pinot noir). Eastern European oak is also gaining a following, most notably Hungarian but also Russian, Rumanian, Slovenian, etc.

 

The French have by far the most comprehensive oak program. There are several forests, replanting has been regularly undertaken since the 19^th century and the oak is usually aged from 2 to 3 years before being sold to cooperages. There are many cooperages. Some common wisdom says that the cooper has a greater influence on the taste of the wine than the forest used for the wood, others say it's a subtle nuance at most. The barrels are toasted (charred on the inside) after construction: there is light, medium and heavy toast. There is also medium+ toast, which I guess is between medium and heavy. The great majority of barrels used for red wines are medium and medium+ toast - I have never seen a barrel marked "heavy" toast.

 

In the winemaking class Norm brought in barrel samples of the same pinot noir that was aging in 3 different brands of new French oak. It was quite a revelation, as the wine from each barrel tasted noticeably different. Norm explained what he looked for in each barrel e.g. tannic structure, oak flavor, more gradual aging, etc. I had a similar experience when Norm brought in a guest speaker who was a rep for several French coopers on the West Coast - sure enough the same trial was repeated, also with pinot noir, and the whole class noticed distinct differences across the different barrels.

 

So what does it all mean? It means experience counts and it means I'm winging it. Since all of my barrels are at least 11/2 years old (in terms of use) it's a double edged sword. The oak flavors I'm going to get will be muted at best but it's possible I will gain little in experience as to how a certain barrel tastes.

 

At Meza I selected 8 barrels - 4 Saury, 2 Quintessa and 2 Roberts and Sons. I took the Saury since Saury is widely used and I've seen it everywhere - how much damage can it do? I took the Roberts and Sons because it was from Nevers, one of the smaller French forests. I've never heard of Roberts and Sons but I liked the exotic aspect of using Nevers oak. And I'm sure I took the Quintessas for some good reason but I can't remember why.

 

After shaking hands on the deal I looked up Nevers, seeing that it was a robust flavored wood generally used for heavy reds. Hmm, heavy red is not the style I'm going for but on the other hand, maybe that means they'll have more left after 2 vintages. Or maybe it means nothing. Or something completely different - for all I know the "heavy reds" presumably aged in these barrels soak up all the oak early on.

 

Roger quoted me $200 for shipping to Solano County. I have an old Nissan pickup truck but that will only fit 2 barrels. After exploring alternatives I had to pony up the shipping costs - the barrels are now in Solano County and my "miscellaneous expense" line item has taken another hit.

 

I returned to Wine Business Monthly for more barrels; I figured I needed 20 more and sure enough Signorello, an upscale winery in Napa had plenty of 3 and 4 year old French oak barrels. The 3 year olds were $30 and the 4 year olds were $25, so I sprung for the 3 year olds. I called Pierre, the winemaker at Signorello and asked him what make the barrels were. Now, I've been stressing that the various brands don't mean much to me in the context of my wine, nor would it matter that much for 3 year old barrel but you never know, I might learn something. Pierre chuckled and replied "what does it matter with 3 year old barrels?"

 

Fair enough, but it never hurts to ask. These are my neutral oak barrels.

 

I had also been in contact with Larkmead, an even more upscale winery in Napa. At this point I had 28 barrels, but not a lot of oak flavor. Larkmead had a whole assortment of nice barrels, used "1½ times". What this means is that Larkmead ages their red wines for 18 to 22 months, roughly double what you would expect, thus they were used once, but for a long time. I ordered 2 Sylvains and 1 Damptos. I had read somewhere that Sylvain was a sort of highly regarded secret weapon among French oak cooperage. I got the Damptos because Roger at Meza had sold a lot of Damptos the right before I got there and they just looked so nice, so what the hell.

 

I did more research on Sylvain and luckily they were widely considered superior for syrah in particular and reds in general. Larkmead later informed me the Damptos was gone, so I got an additional Sylvain. The 3 Sylvains are my "new" barrels, as silly as that sounds. It's all relative when you're doing it on a shoestring.

 

I had Sal arrange to pick up the 2 additional lots, so everything is now at the Solano County facility. When you have barrels you need racks, which the barrels rest on, allowing them to be stacked and transported via forklift. Sal charged me $175 to pick up the barrels and $300 for 15 double racks. What was that about miscellaneous expenses?

 

My preliminary plans for the barrels are:

 

For the Grenache:

 

I'm getting between 1 and 2 tons, which means between 2 and 4 barrels

 

1 Sylvain, 1 Roberts and Son, 1 Saury and the rest neutral

 

For the Mourvedre:

 

1 Saury, 2 neutrals

 

For the Syrah:

 

Everything else.

 

How have I come up with these formulas? It's a combination of about 20% common sense and 80% winging it. The Grenache was originally meant to be my flagship, so it needs some oak. I don't want an oaky Mourvedre, as it's probably going to be a blender.

 

The syrah is where I can play around. I'm getting six tons, which by itself is almost 400 cases. I want to do 2 barrel fermentations, just to see. Barrel fermenting syrah is fairly unusual but not unheard of, and I've had barrel fermented pinot noirs that are terrific, so I can try an experiment. I may leave one of the barrels on its lees (the dead yeast cells) until bottling and rack the other just to see the difference there as well. I'm not sure if you're supposed to barrel ferment a red in new or old oak so I need to research that issue. I'm sure I'll find a variety of opinions on the subject.

 

The lees thing is usually used for a certain style of white wine (it's widely used in Alsace, where mostly whites are made) but I've seen it used for reds. There is a mad scientist winery in California called Scholium Project that does all kinds of things with lees - leaving the wines on the lees for a year, even aging them on lees from another red, etc. It's premature for me to try that, and it's not my winery so we'll be going more straightforward.

 

My original plan was to have the Grenache be my flagship wine. I think there is only one winery doing a 100% Grenache from the vineyard in Amador County. I ordered a bottle of their wine after I had made the deal for the grapes. It tasted fairly good, but in a very over the top style. The alcohol was over 15% and you could really feel the alcoholic heat. It did not in any remind me of an elegant southern Rhone wine. It reminded me of a big zinfandel you'd slug down at a barbecue.

 

So the strategy's changed. I'm now thinking a GSM blend - the classic Grenache-Syrah-Mourvedre blend found in the Cotes du Rhone. The syrah vineyard from Solano County is technically in a cool climate so if it reins in the fruit bomb Grenache I could have something. My initial thinking is maybe a 50%-40%-10% blend, but it's all in the tasting (more than one industry person has assured me blending trials are the most fun part of the winemaking process)

 

There of course will be a syrah, maybe 2. If the barrel fermenting thing works out there might even been a reserve variant, for a few extra bucks. Will I blend in some of the other 2? Uhmmmm.

 

And then there's the mourvedre. Mourvedre in California is inconsistent as a primary grape and it's usually a blender in France as well. It makes a nice rose but since roses sell for less than reds, that's not interesting to me. I'm hoping it can stand on its own, as there aren't that many California mourvedres but it's all in the tasting. Repeat ad infinitum.

 

The depreciation of barrel stock is unbelievable: you go from $1100 to $125 to $30 to pretty much nothing in the span of 4 years.

 

 

The bottling finally took place this weekend. To me this marks the closure of the school winemaking, and the signal to concentrate fully on the pro thing. Complicating things is an influx of software work that has failed to capture my interest. Which is too bad since I could use the money.

 

Most of the class was expected to show up, 13 out of the original 18  Of the 18 people that started the class back in August 2007, 15 had stayed for part 2, and 13 would probably show up for our final activity as a class. Everyone in the group gets along well, from my perspective.

 

Of the 2 no-shows one was Josh, my partner in the Sangiovese, and Robert S., who had to work but would be along to the party later.

 

There had already been two bottling sessions: Norm had wanted to do a Rose so we would have wine in the first semester and thanks to the generous Merlot allotment from Buttonwood a Merlot Rose it would be.

 

The class had a large amount of merlot and in fact Buttonwood seemed to happy to allow us to take as much as we wanted. They have a huge amount of Merlot planted and I'm not sure it's right for the area. I remember back in the old (i.e. early 1990's) days Buttonwood Merlot was well thought of and I personally enjoyed several bottles. I've lost track of Buttonwood Merlot but I think they still make some. I'm sure  the Sidfeways movie hasn't helped sales.

 

The Buttonwood Merlot vineyard is quite picturesque and expertly farmed. The class swarmed the vineyard like locusts and within an hour we had over a ton of nice looking grapes. It was a relaxing picking experience.

 

To make Rose you take red grapes and press them off the skins (like a white). The skins provide the color in red wine, so voila, you get rose. We fermented it dry, filtered it and bottled it all within the span of 3 weeks. Someone printed some fairly nice labels and there it was.

 

The Merlot Rose is not bad. It has no flaws and tastes clean but in my opinion tastes somewhat diluted, almost watery. Nevertheless, we'd made and bottled wine, no matter what happened from here on in.

 

The second bottling experience was the Chardonnay. We had received Chardonnay grapes from North Canyon Vineyards, the benefactors of the beautiful pinot grapes. The Chardonnay grapes were also beautiful but the Chardonnay tasted so bad I had lost interest.

 

Shortly after the class started Norm decided it was time to rack the wines, essentially transferring the wine among barrels and leaving the sediments and lees (dead yeast behind).

 

This worked wonders with the Chardonnay, which went from tasting like white wine flavored mud to tasting like good Chardonnay. I missed the Chardonnay bottling session, where the wine had been filtered before bottling. I was shocked at how good the wine had become. It was a real eye opener in the evolution of a wine throughout the process. The chardonnay was bottled in April and I've had a few since. All very good.

 

We would bottle 5 barrels: my Sangiovese a la Toscana, Cabernet Franc donated from Bien Nacido Vineyard, the brown Pinot Noir and 2 Cabernet based wines from Steinbeck Vineyards in Paso Robles: a field blend with Cab, Merlot and Petite Sirah and a straight Cab that John B. intended to buttress with the Franc and ubiquitous Buttonwood Merlot.

 

There was no separate Buttonwood Merlot. Most of it had gone into the Sangiovese. The Sangiovese-Merlot blend was about 50-50% and John and I had talked about goosing it with some Steinbeck Vineyard cabernet.

 

John was the keeper of the Cab. He had arranged the acquisition of the Steinbeck Vineyard grapes, which happened very late in the firs semester: John and his wife picked the grapes after all the red wine was in barrel; he had talked about it for so long I was wondering if it would happen.

 

John is an affable man, who also runs 2 grocery stores and plays in the local symphony orchestra. Like everyone in the class he likes wine. He had recently converted his swimming pool into a wine cellar (his stores feature an eclectic wine selection)

 

The Steinbeck vineyard is a large operation in Paso Robles that supplies several hundred tons of grapes to many different wineries. It's also machine harvested, which meant that the grapes at the end of each row were there for the taking (the machine pick skips the last few vines on each row). John knows Howie Steinbeck, proprietor, and Howie  offered John the unpicked fruit. John had shepherded his 2 batches of cabernet himself and was in charge of those 2 barrels.

 

My situation was more complicated. Although Josh and I had picked and paid for the grapes, inoculated the wine, done some punchdowns and made the decisions about aging, which essentially consisted of whether to add oak chips. (I decided yes and added a heavy dose to the wine, since we had been give the crappiest barrel in the school's small inventory, a barrel that I knew would impart zero oak flavor).

 

The additional problem is that our Sangiovese allotment was so meager we ended up with under 400 pounds and didn't have enough wine to fill a barrel (the birds! The birds!). It made sense to Josh and myself to fill it out with merlot to fill out the barrel. The idea of making a "Super Tuscan" style wine was romamtic. The Sangiovese was an over the top fruit bomb with very little acidic structure (I had to blitz it with a large dose of tartaric acid prior to fermentation) I felt that the low alcohol and acidic merlot would be a nice match for the boisterous high alcohol Sangio.

 

 Chris had warned us that preliminary lab results showed the Sangiovese grapes were "out of balance" and had an "acid problem" (i.e. not enough of it). Later I ran into the Margerum guy who had been at the Vandale Vineyard and we both laughed about how much acid we had to dump into it. Poor Chris. What a trainwreck. In the final accounting Josh and I were severely shorted on our grapes.

 

The class would have to vote on whether to combine the Merlot and Sangiovese. If they voted no Josh and I would be hosed, as the Sangio would have to be gassed regularly to prevent oxidation, something he and I had no chance of keeping up with.

 

I had to be in Los Angeles the day of the vote. The vote to combine the Sangio with Merlot won by one vote, my absentee ballot carrying the day. It was a big relief. I was a little surprised at how readily my classmates would hang us out to dry.

 

Thus the class owned half of our potential Super Tuscan. Briefly the "Super Tuscan" category arose relative recently in Itlay. Super Tuscans are wines from Chianti and thereabouts that are primarily Sangiovese based, but also combined with "internatonal" (i.e. Bordeaux) varieties such as Cabernet, Merlot and Cab Franc. There are in fact some Super Tuscans with no Sangiovese or very little.

 

The top "Super Tuscans" are very prestigious and sell on the basis of their widely-recognized brand names (Sassicaia, Onellaia Tignanello, etc).

 

After John revealed his Steinbeck Vineyard project to me we both agreed that we would try to add some cab to the blend, thus creating our own Tuscan, super or otherwise.

 

Bottling day really was bottling weekend. Based on the previous rose and chardonnay experiences there was universal thinking that it would take two days to do all five barrels, 1500 bottles total, all manual labor. What we didn't full appreciate was the new bottling apparatus.

 

The class had spent the first semester based in a defunct refrigeration plant near Vandenberg AFB. It's way out in the sticks, on an obscure road that dead ends at Vandenburg, off an obscure highway that runs between Los Alamos and Orcutt, 2 towns that total perhaps 15,000 people. There's not much in between. On the way to the winery/refrigeration facility it's farms, vineyards and the occasional rancho; past our place on the approach to Orcutt to the North it's mostly nothing. A very nice drive I might add.

 

The facility near Vandenburg was great. There was an indoor area we used as a classroom and an enormous warehouse type room with a 50 foot ceiling. We were making a few barrels of wine in this room; there was easily enough space to make 1,000. Our petite inventory of home winemaking equipment was dwarfed by the cavernous, cool space. There were additional warehouses there of similar proportions that were being used for barrel storage. The owner had (and may still have) plans to create a custom crush facility (they're spreading like wildfire) but for now it was a barrel storage facility. The only people we ever saw there unconnected to the class were the occasional crew leisurely unloading old barrels and slowly moving them inside.

 

Alfredo had big plans for the school viticulture program. He had already started restoring the vineyard; his ultimate goal was to have a bonded winery on campus and even perhaps a small scale commercial wine program. There was plenty of space next to the vineyard to build a winery. Whether or not the funding was there was unknown.

 

At one point late in the first semester Alfredo had invited our Friday viticulture class to inspect the future home of the campus winery (there was a large overlap between the students in both classes). I was dismayed to be led into an abandoned office style classroom at the end of campus that was filled with dusty blueprints. The room had a high ceiling but the floorplan was barely larger than a standard classroom. After the capacious winery in Vandenberg this looked a little cramped.

 

I don't know if the school was evicted from the Vandenberg facility or if Alfredo decided it was time to bring things in-house. In any case by semester 2 of winemaking everything had been moved into our new "winery": 6 barrels of wine, all the heavy winemaking equipment (crushers, presses, pumps, etc), racks of supplies, bins, spare barrels, storage containers. There had been room for everything, and fifty more of it at Vandenberg; this room was severely cramped. I later found the campus setting to be both an advantage and liability in terms of the winemaking.

 

The conclusion to the story of Alfredo's Move to Campus is that right at the end of semester 2 we entered the "winery" to find all kinds of new goodies planted inside: there were 2 large (at least 400 gallon) steel fermenting tanks and one very large (1000 gallons+?) steel fermenting tank. There was a brand spanking new Italian crusher/destemmer, still in its carton (I believe I have neither seen a crusher/destemmer not made in Italy. Just like espresso machines). A brand new French oak barrel. Several ½ ton picking bins, stacked high. Oh, and a new bottling machine.

 

Where the room had been cramped before now it was almost impossible to navigate. In fact, doing any work in the "winery" involved spending time moving all these gigantic dormant fermenting tanks around, and then moving the wine barrels outside. It was ridiculous. The theory was that Alfredo had received some funding and decided to go for some acquisitions. Like any good bureaucracy, the administrators at AHC knew if they didn't spend it they would lose it.

 

The presence of all this useless equipment caused grumbling from the time it appeared. After the pinot noir was ruined I initiated a campaign to move the bottling up from mid-August to right now! On the last day of class we all signed up for topping duty. Wine steadily evaporates in barrel and must be replenished regularly, usually every week or 2 when the weather gets warm. This is very important, as allowing any degree of oxygen to enter the barrel will result in an oxidized wine, very undesirable, very bad tasting. Of course when class was going we would all go over to the winery (next door to the classroom) and top the wines. We would also frequently taste them and getting a little tipsy became a Saturday morning custom.

 

It was my turn to top in May. There was a searing heat wave right before and when I topped the pinot noir it was over 2 bottles low, much more than the other barrels. I then poured a taste for myself. Oh Oh. It was brown. And tasted, um, oxidized. I had mentioned to a few others that the pinot was oxidized. I had even called Norm on his cell phone to0 enlist his gravitas in trying to move up the bottling. Norm was sympathetic but not seem as emotionally invested in the wines as my classmates.  This was his last class and has very busy with his own wine stuff, i.e. his livelihood.

 

Laurie topped after me and sent out this email:

 

Those of us who have tasted and smelled the pinot noir several times over the last two weeks think it has taken a sharp turn for the worse.

We ran a free SO2 test on it (you got the results) and it showed 20 ppm, which is still pretty good.
John Beck added more SO2 to ALL of the wines last Monday (the 5th), and several of us in wine analysis are going to gather samples from every container of wine in our winery after our (last!!!) class this Wednesday and I'll trot more samples over to Vinquiry Thursday morning.

When I sniffed the pinot after class last wednesday (two days post SO2), it seemed better, but still stinky.

Two days later (Friday), I pulled a sample of it and took it to dinner with me in order for a winemaker friend to sample it. He did, and pronounced it full of TCA (cork taint, or, in this case, barrel taint). I trust his opinion because he's a chemist and has a great nose and palate.

We still need to run the tests this week, but, armed with those results, we may need to decide, as a group, to 1) make some "fixes" to the pinot (whatever that may be -- i haven't a clue, myself), or 2) go ahead and bottle it 'early' to get it out of that barrel, if that barrel is indeed the culprit. Sterile filtration may help this wine recover, or so I've been told. Or, 3) we can do nothing and leave it be.

The winery itself has been much cooler since the heat spike of April 26th/27th, but temperatures are forecast to be heading up again this week.

Does anyone recall if the pinot barrel is one of the older ones??

 

Here was my chance to revive my plea for an accelerated bottling date:

 

IMHO the pinot noir is a write-off (it is in the 1 year old barrel and I
still belive it is oxidized rather than TCAed).

IMHO part II the next heat wave may effectively destroy the remainder of the
wines, so I think they shhould all be bottled ASAP. Young wines are more
sensitive to temperature fluctuations or high heat and that room is
enventilated and uncooled. The only realistic alternative is for the class
to pool some cash and buy a portable A/C unit to try to keep the temp below
75 - I am willing to contribute.

M "Your Humble Servant" S

 

 

I did not get much support for the early bottling date. I did get some offers to chip in for an air conditioner. I subsequently discussed it with John B, who was dead set against early bottling and in fact he felt the pinot was not especially damaged. I played my (only) hole card and remarked I might bottle the Sangio early simply due to my heat paranoia. John didn't want to hear that; both he and I wanted to try that Super Tuscan thing, if I pulled the plug it would just complicate everything. He brought up the air conditioner idea again and I agreed to drop my early bottling campaign if air conditioning was installed. Personally I wanted the wines to age longer anyway, plus everyone had already made plans for the mid-August date.

 

Sure enough there were 2 air conditioners installed, in the last bit of available floor space. One was a modern unit, more suited to a living room, that was set to run continuously. I believe John may have bought this himself but I don't know. Some weeks later, not long before bottling a gigantic, weathered "solar-powered" contraption appeared that officially was an air conditioner. I'm sure this was salvaged from some remote corner of the school by Alfredo, who of course had blown all his funding on shiny new equipment for the near and far future. No one had any idea how to use it (it looked like simply turning it on might cause an explosion), and it had to be moved out first before anything else could be accessed. At one point I suggested simply leaving it outside; although people will steal anything, I couldn't see any downside in someone stealing this thing. As luck would have it the rest of the summer has stayed fairly cool.

 

The bottling went smoothly on Saturday, It went better than smoothly - it exceeded everyone's most optimistic expectations. All due to the bottling machine. The previous 2 bottling runs had been bottlenecked by the previous bottler, a small trough that fed 6 nozzles. Not just home winemaking but crappy home winemaking. The trough reminded me of a miniature urinal and it had only a rough fill level control, which led to much eyeballing and manual adjustments. Terrible.

 

The new bottler had a precise level adjustment and a trough that held several cases of wine, so we could run the pump smoothly into the trough, and then watch it cascade prettily into the bottles, which were filled at the exact preset level. Home winemaking, but now way up in class.

 

 

Early on we knew it was going to be a luxury ride. The first barrel was done in an hour. By the end we were running so smoothly the 2 barrels bottled after lunch took 1½ hours. We took a leisurely lunch break. We drank wine at lunch, We drank wine after lunch. We drank beer before lunch. It was all done by 3:30 and cleanup and loading was done by 4:30. We had 150+ cases of wine and a good feeling about life and winemaking classes. Alfredo, reviled for being an acquisitionist buffoon, was a hero. My labels looked so-so but they worked. And the best thing was there was a post-bottling party at Terry's that night. I had been a little worried over everyone's work ethic the morning after a typical class party, but now it didn't matter. The work was done, and the ethic would be drinking wine all night.

 

I ended up with 5 cases of my Sangio Tuscan-a-rama, 2 cases of the Cabernet Franc and a case each of John's 2 Steinbeck wines. That's in addition to 2 cases of chardonnay, so it's a nice haul. I left the Pinot Noir behind, which had been adulterated with enough acid to turn the color from brown to maroon as well as improve the test results. It now tastes like tartaric acid fortified with alcohol rather than oxidized pinot noir.

 

I've had a Sangio and Cab Franc since the weekend - how could I resist? The Sangio blend is already tasty and I think will be a solid winner. I was by far the most involved with this wine so it's gratifying. Am I the winemaker of record? Maybe slightly more than anyone else but although I made many of the decisions regarding the process, it's hard to say there was a "head winemaker" calling the shots. Over time I may fudge that fact a bit.

 

The Cabernet Franc has good depth of flavor and a nice mouthfeel. Those deep flavors don't taste that good at the moment but there's some stuffing here. I'm optimistic. 

 

The party at Terry's was a typical class party. Lots of very good wine was consumed, as well as lots of food. The winemaking class was, to a man and woman, a serious bunch of winos. As a bonus we were cracking our own wines tool, which held up well versus the "real" wines.

 

Tomorrow is bottling day for the AHC winemaking class. I foolishly volunteered to print the labels for the whole bottling, which is roughly 1500 bottles, meaning over 2000 labels printed right here in my office.

 

There are five different wines being bottled, in varying blends that I'm sure will be adjusted right up until the last minute. The situation is even more complicated since John Beck (one of the alpha males of this group) and myself (formerly an outsider but now heading for co-alpha status) each have financial interests in the wines. In fact John and I have some degree of propriety over 3 of the 5 wines (all red) that are left to bottle.

 

I never meant to buy wine grapes or anything like that during my initial school year. But after 3 weeks of the winemaking class we still didn't have a line on grapes, excepting the possibility of some pinot noir and chardonnay grapes from a home (as Norm calls them "vanity") vineyard. And even that wasn't certain.

Norm assured us that even if we couldn't get grapes we could always get bulk juice and make wine from that. I found this even more distressing, as the fact Norm mentioned made the threat of no grapes seem very possible. Low end, man! Making wine from bulk juice sounded like a cruel distortion of real winemaking.

 

I had made friends with a nice surfer dude guy named Josh from Arroyo Grande in the class and one day after the bad grape news we were commiserating about the bulk juice downer. Josh had already taken the intro class the previous semester; in one of those friend of a friend of a friend scenarios I suddenly had a line on some Sangiovese grapes.

 

It turns out that a class member from that class had taken on management of Vandale, a vineyard planted 98% to Sangiovese (there are some whites but I was told they didn't work out. They were intended to coferment with the sangio). Bruce Vandale, a multi-million dollar retired yacht maven had died recently and his widow needed someone to see the current crop through.

 

Bruce Vandale had a love of Chianti (I think both the region and the wine) for much of his adult life. It was his dream to grow his own grapes and make a Chianti style wine. Bruce, by all accounts a terrifically nice guy, enjoyed tremendous success in San Diego County during the eighties boom years and did well enough to buy a 5 acre estate just outside Los Olivos, tucked away in a beautifully rustic neighborhood that still featured cows and goats as well as grapes.

 

3 acres of the Vandale Estate were turned into a vineyard. It's actually 2.8 or so but Bruce fudged it so he could get into the Vintners Association (vineyards must be at least 3 acres to be in).

 

 

At some point the Vandales retired and moved to the Santa Barbara estate. Bruce Vandale became the full time vineyard manager (although it sounds small, 3 acres is plenty for one person). He really was living his dream. He later started his own wine label (estate Sangiovese only of course), and employed Bruno d' Alfonso to make the wine. Bruno has been a fixture in SB wine circles for a very long time: he was the winemaker during the Sanford glory years and now has 2 labels of his own. There were some years without a Vandale Sangiovese, and Bruno took the groups those years and made diBruno Sangiovese, which of course was markedly similar to the Vandale brand (Bruno still makes this wine but I believe he stopped using the Vandale grapes some years ago).

 

The last vintage of Vandale Sangiovese was 2005 I believe, but you can still find it some wine lists in the area. I like to order it due to my relationship with that vineyard and it rarely disappoints. It also rarely enlightens, being what I would call a reliable red food wine. My roommate Tony in Solvang however, thinks DiBruno Vandale Sangiovese is a landmark SB County wine. So there you go.

 

So Chris had taken on the vineyard management of Vandale. And it looks like they had some extra grapes to sell. And we might be able to buy them. Josh didn't have any real details so we left it at that until he knew more. Alfredo had told us that we could make our own wine within the class, so we felt we were in as far as facilities.

 

I floated away from our talk, completely psyched up. I thought the idea of buying my own grapes was about the best twist in events I could imagine. Two hours ago I was hearing about bulk juice and now not only were grapes in hand, but I could own a piece of the raw material.

 

Now, despite my absolute youth and naiveté regarding the inside of the wine industry I knew enough to realize that a tiny vineyard with a commercial track record that suddenly had plenty of extra grapes had some problems going on. Especially with a virgin vineyard manager, over-confident after sailing through the introductory wine class at Alan Hancock College; it was the best class he ever took in his life, he later told me. Although at this point all I knew about him was that he had been in Josh's class.

 

An unexpected thing happened right after our conversation. The class suddenly started getting grapes. Lots of grapes. Through the steadfast cajoling of Alfredo and Norm some of the local vineyards had agreed to donate grapes to the class (hey, it makes a nice tax write-off)

 

First up was the vanity vineyard, formally known as Mary Jane's Vineyard. Mary Jane had donated grapes to the school for years; in return she got a few cases of wine, a good deal all around.

 

 

Mary Jane's is out on the remote side roads between Buellton and Lompoc, a wild and beautiful area that has managed to still remain mostly empty of people. Many of the ranches and farmlands are now being planted to grapes.

 

The class descended onto Mary Jane's (I got lost on the way actually); her vineyard had a spot of mildew: nothing like the school vineyard but still discouraging. I wrote it off as marginal quality at the time we picked the grapes and tasting it since then has not changed my mind. In fact of all the wines made in class, this is the one that is never discussed. Nor has anyone ever expressed an interest in owning any. Nope. It's all going back to Mary Jane. As I said, a good deal for her.

 

The whole vineyard was about an acre, split between pinot noir (40%) and a combination of Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay, Since more than 10 class members showed up we finished in 45 minutes. My kind of grape picking.

 

I had picked grapes before and I have to say it's my least favorite part of the wine producing process, I have promised myself that I will be willing to take part in any aspect of winemaking as necessary except picking grapes. It's no fun and hell on your back. And boy can it get hot in those vineyards. Little did I know what fate awaited me at Vandale.

 

There were real wineries on board now in winemaking class. We picked Buttonwood Merlot a few weeks later. We received, practically gift wrapped, a ½ ton each (or was it a ton?) of chardonnay and pinot noir from North County Vineyard. Delivered! Both North County and Buttonwood are established commercial operations (fun fact; I'm drinking some of the class's North County chardonnay at this moment). When the grapes from North County arrived I thought they were beautiful. Impeccable, Immaculate, pristine. Wow. The pinot grapes looked perfect.

 

In the midst of this endless grape bounty the Sangiovese plan suddenly reemerged. Josh informed me that we could get in on it. The deal was $500 for a ½ ton. 50% off the list price! The proviso was that we would have to harvest the grapes (3, er 2.8  acres worth. Again I must stress that it's a lot bigger than it seems when all the labor is strictly handmade).  The mysterious Chris would work alongside us and of course supervise the festivities.

 

Despite my deep dislike for picking grapes (at the time it was deep dislike; it's now beyond that), it sounded great. We'd end up with at least a barrel's worth, we could make it ourselves after hours and I could actually point to My Own Wine right out of the gate.

 

 

 

 

 

I went to Norm to discuss the Sangiovese venture with him. He expressed severe reservations about the endeavor and debunked some of my ideas immediately. First off, Josh and I would not have access to the facility to carry out our own mad scientist project. Secondly and corollary, any wine made at the facility would have to involve the whole class. My feeling was that he was not hot on my venture, and did not share my excitement about the Sangiovese project.

 

The Sangiovese plans were made: we would rendezvous at the Vandale Estate at 6:00 and pick pick pick. At the end of it all Josh would go home with the grapes and deliver them to the class the next morning, where we'd all crush them in the school's cute and petite red Italian crusher/destemmer. Joining Josh, Chris and myself were classmates journalist Laurie and Terry, a nice guy who liked to remain involved in an unobtrusive way. We all were in the Friday morning viticulture class and since we'd all had enough of slaving in the mildewy vineyard it was an easy call to cut class and pick some Sangiovese.

 

There is not much romance to picking grapes. It's backbreaking work, farm labor at its most basic. I woke up at 5:30, staggered into the kitchen in Solvang and managed to make enough coffee to get me out the door and towards the vineyard. The Vandale place is about 15 minutes from my former digs in Solvang; during the drive I swigged coffee and cranked hard rock. Amazingly I showed up ready to go to work, gleefully riding that first crush of a really strong coffee high hitting when you wake up really early.

 

It was still dark when I showed up and fairly chilly. It was so dark I had no idea where I was, as I had pulled into a long driveway with no sign of activity. I called Josh and he instructed me to drive to the end of the driveway and park in front of the garage; the vineyard began where the garage structure ended.

 

I parked the car in the darkness and finally made it top the vineyard, where my 3 classmates and a few others were milling around. There were a few flashlights available but it seemed to me it was too dark to pick grapes. Bad planning guys. I felt grateful I was a little late. It finally got light enough a few minutes later and we hit the vineyard. There are actually 3 vineyards (plus a really dinky 4th one with the bad white varietals), all planted to the Sangiovese piccolo clone (used in Chianti). This first vineyard is on relatively level ground compared to the other two but it does have a decided slope to it.

 

We hit the vines. I met Chris and would speak to him frequently the rest of the day, he was (and I'm sure still is) in the wine biz big time, starting as a high end tour guide (he boasted to me about flying sheiks in on helicopters from Los Angeles direct to the wine country), and had since expanded into wine distribution (Chris distributed some very respectable brands and was apparently doing well) and had even invested into a very high end vineyard operation - Rio Vista in the Santa Rita Hills. The Santa Rita Hills appellation came from nowhere 10 years ago to quickly becoming the top pinot noir appellation in the county. It's quite a phenomena and the reputation is deserved. Chris was a minority owner in the Rio Vista venture and did not actually do any work there.

 

Which means, I guess like for all of us, that a man feels the need to get his hands dirty and start working directly with his livelihood and his passion. For Chris, this time around, this took the form of becoming vineyard manager for the Vandale Vineyard. He had taken the intro class at Allan Hancock: the class talked about plant physiology, vineyard techniques, you know, lots of that kind of stuff and so Chris was ready. Since he was an experienced and successful local wine pro he was taken seriously when he offered his vineyard management services to Mrs Vandale; on top of that he was friendly with the family and clearly had a deep affection for the memory of Bruce Vandale. Chris was hired.

 

It can be exasperating. It can be amusing. It can be financially ruinous. But it's almost always interesting. I am talking about the permanent attitude of dilettantes, newbies and winos concerning the ease of getting into the wine producing business and doing well at it. Chris admitted to me at least twice that his partner in Rio Vista had warned him that a three acre vineyard was not as small as it seemed, especially since Chris would usually be going either solo or plus one.

 

And this is exactly how it turned out. The vineyard manager gig had proved to be completely overwhelming to Chris. In addition to his regular jobs he now had to travel out to the Santa Ynez Valley from Santa Barbara frequently (a 45 minute drive).

 

There were many factors that Chris hadn't counted on:

 

Most damaging were the hordes of birds that had attacked those juicy Sangiovese berries. After a significant part of the crop was gone Chris had belatedly put netting on the vines. His description of this chore was very vivid, portrayed as a death struggle between relentless bluebirds, encroaching darkness and Chris wrestling with increasingly heavy and cumbersome netting.

Just pulling the netting back to get at the grapes made him shudder at the memory.

 

There had been problems with the irrigation system. Chris didn't know how to care for a Sangiovese vine; in fact he when he started really knew nothing about at all about managing a vineyard. He had learned quite a lot by the time I showed up for the harvest but those lessons were very hard earned and he was a tired man. Chris was determined to see it through at any cost. I think he felt he owed it to Bruce's widow, who perhaps wanted a vintage that year as a commemorative gesture.

 

 

 

There hadn't been a Vandale-labeled wine in 3 years and Bruno d'Alfonso did not want the grapes. Whether or not this decision had been made on the basis of Chris's appointment as vineyard manager is conjecture but not an unwarranted theory. Bruno did call Chris occasionally with tips on what Chris should be watching and working on. But Chris had to find someone to buy the grapes. This was where Josh and I came in.

 

The first batch (one or two tons) would go to Margerum, a newish and successful winery run by former restaurant honcho Ken Margerum. These would not end up in Margerum labeled wine however - Margerum was making it for a friend privately.

 

The next batch would go to two guys at the vineyard, also presumably promised a discount in return for their picking prowess. They were veteran home winemakers and worked hard at the pick.

 

Josh and I got the third batch, said to be a ton or more.

 

So the Vandale Vineyard, in the span of one short year, had been diminished to a vineyard solely used for home winemaking. There would no wine commercially released from Vandale Vintage 2007. 

 

We proceeded to pick. It was hot slow work. The sun had come out and I was feeling it. By 9:00 or 10:00 the Margerum lot was picked and the Margerum guys took off. We didn't finish Vineyard 1 one until shortly after that. It was time for a break. We agreed to do Vineyard 2 and then break for lunch. I had a haircut appointment at 2:00 which I was grateful for, as it appeared this could be an all day thing. I was already exhausted. We'd been picking for four hours and were 1/3 finished.

 

Vineyard 2 is the steep vineyard. The descent down the vineyard rows is a constant steep downhill. What this means is walking back up the vineyard to dump the gapes in the bins was a grueling uphill (made more strrenuosu by the weight of the freshly picked grapes).The chilliness of the morning was long forgotten and the sun was blazing overhead.

 

Vineyard 2 turned out to be an ordeal, not helped by the effort expended on Vineyard 1. We finally finished, ironically helped by the fact that vineyard yield was so diminished by the birds.

 

It was time for lunch. Standing in the shade submitting our sandwich orders was a certain small pleasure in itself, after toiling in the vineyard.

 

Chris and I made the run into Solvang for sandwiches. We had been invited to eat at the kitchen counter by Beth Vandale. Chris and I returned with sandwiches. Beth brought out a bottle of Vandale Sangiovese. I vaguely felt like I was working on a Tuscan villa 50 years ago, where the owner would bring out the house wine for a communal lunch.

 

The sandwich was delicious, the wine was delicious and there was quite a bit of lingering and wine sipping in the sleek and comfortable Vandale kitchen.

 

It was almost 1:30 by now so I had to leave. I was so tired that I couldn't imagine going out to Vineyard 3, the largest of the three.

 

The haircut felt good, better than a massage.

I contacted Terravant shortly after returning from the grape buying journey. Their website at the time (and possibly still) was fairly rudimentary, but it did a good job of explaining what they were about, which was essentially Custom Crush Deluxe. Terravant would shepherd the grapes from crush to bottling for a pre-arranged price, which seemed to be by the case rather than by the ton. They also pitched the Alternating Proprietor Program, which classifies their customer (i.e. myself) as a winemaker/producer rather than a wholesaler. This would mean I could actually get in there and mess with the winemaking. An AP is also allowed to operate an independent tasting room. CCWS I believe requires all of its clients to be APs, as everyone I've met who uses CCWS is very hands on in making their wine and essentially uses CCWS to rent facilities, storage space and equipment.

 

I emailed Alan Philips, the Director of Winemaking and briefly explained that I had 6 future tons of syrah burning a hole in my pocket. We ended up talking on the phone a bit where he emphasized the boutique nature of the operation (any size client was welcome) and the turnkey pricing i.e. we would decide on the process beforehand and then a price would be quoted that would place the wine in bottles. We set up a meeting for a couple of weeks hence, when I would be up in the area.

 

Terravant is located in Buellton, a town on Highway 246 in the SYV. Buellton is about a mile from Solvang, a heavily touristed little town that is known for its Danish motif - the style is all Danish within the main tourist area (there are strict codes governing architectural styles) There are lots of Danish language signs and references and it is very easy to get a fresh Danish pastry, as well as mediocre Danish food (and mediocre American food). Opinions of Solvang range from kitsch to charming; my personal opinion is that it's a lot nicer when not thronged with tourists, although not the most interesting spot in the world. In recent years Solvang has also become known for being a gateway to the wine country; the town, which is barely 2 square miles in size has become home to numerous tasting rooms and you can do a weekend's worth of wine tasting on foot without leaving the city limits.

 

Buellton does not have the slightest whiff of tourist attraction to it, unless you count the Anderson Split Pea Soup operation, which is nothing more than a restaurant and gift shop. In many ways Buellton is the anti-Solvang: where Solvang is all about small squares and cutesy gift shops, Buellton features a mall with a corporate grocery and drug store, as well as the full range of American fast food options. The west side of town also features a burgeoning spread of master planned communities whose prevailing style seems to be blandness and expediency.

 

Terravant is on Industrial Way, a small dead end street just west of

Highway 101, which bisects the town. I rolled up at our appointed time to a large warehouse emblazoned with the Terravant logo. There was nobody there; Alan had mentioned he would make a special trip in, as they were closed on weekends.

 

After I walked around the facility for a few minutes seeking a way inside I noticed a man in an SUV idling in the middle of Industrial Way, talking to someone in an adjacent car. I surmised that might be Alan and I was correct. After introductions on the lot he told me that the winery was actually at the end of street and that the large warehouse type building was offices and storage.

 

The winery facility at the end of street was a recently constructed building that looked like a large warehouse. We walked over to it and Alan pointed out a huge cylinder lying on the ground on the side of the building that resembled a Saturn 5 rocket.

 

"These are custom designed fermenters", he explained. "It's open top as well as pumpover. Two separate compartments."

 

Whoa, trick.That meant you could have 2 independent fermentations going on in one of these monsters (I each compartment had a very large capacity) - open top for pinot noir and enclosed for, say, syrah. We went inside and there several more fermenters of this design, in various sizes. Alan gave me the tour of the facilities, showing particular pride in the mobile press, which could roll up to each fermenting tank and press off the wine directly using no pumps, just gravity.

 

"These cost $1,000,000 each. In fact we just assume everything runs about a $1,000,000: the bottling line, the crusher, the tanks, etc."

 

He showed me the room with the bottling line, which was directly below the public tasting room, where the wines of Terravant's clients would be poured, A great idea, and a nice bonus.

 

I had two thoughts at this point: that this place was a shrine to winemaking technology, and that they might find it difficult to make money at this venture, at least for a few years. It was certainly the most impressive winery I had personally been in, although of course not one drop of wine had been made there yet and certain pieces of equipment were still absent (e.g. the crusher)

 

Following more chitchat we retreated to his office in the first building, where he fiddled with the custom Terravant software program that would determine what it would cost me to process my grapes. He walked me through my options:

 

Did I want a cold soak period? Would I filter the wine? Fine it? Barrel age? Length of time in barrel? Barrel ferment? And so on. The process for making syrah is straightforward (at least in my orbit, where I was trying not to screw things up first time around), so I had sufficiently advanced in my knowledge (or bullshitting ability to provide competent answers. After some more fiddling by Alan the program spit out a sheet showing my decisions along with a price: $47 per case. This included a 15% "Founding Vintners Discount" if I signed up by August 15.

 

I thanked him and left, promising to get in touch shortly. I told him the price sounded good, but when I did the math I realized that the price did not sound, look or feel good.

 

Let's take a look, using our $650 per ton rate from GV winery as a comparison.

If I would process the wine at GV here's the breakdown:

 

6 tones @ $650 per ton	$3900
15 barrels stored for 8 months @ $10 per month	$1200
15 barrels racked @ $5 per barrel	$75
Topping fees (estimated)	$500
Bottling	$3000

 

This comes out to about $8700, so let's call it $10,000, as there's always other stuff (in/out charges, lab tests, winemaker consultation, etc)

 

Terravant estimated 391 cases would come from my 6 tons, so if we multiply that by $47 we get ...

 

$18,377!

 

Ouch.

 

So that sure was a nice facility, but priced like it too. GV suddenly looked a little better, and they were closer to my grape sources as well. I was still not totally convinced.

 

My next contact was a facility close to my home in Los Angeles: Camarillo Custom Crush. I had heard about this company initially when looking around for crush operations. CCC seemed to cater to both pros and amateurs; they were oriented toward small lots. The owner also ran a home wine and beer making supply outlet and they had been in business for over 20 years. I had called them some time ago but no one ever answered the phone and my messages were not returned. Nevertheless I decided to try again, as Camarillo is less than an hour from my house, meaning I would have ongoing access to my wine, a strong lure. I also knew they would be much less costly than Terravant, as I doubted they routinely wrote $1,000,000 checks for equipment acquisitions.

 

I called and, per usual, no one answered. I left a message. The next day I called again, impatient with these guys and yet somehow fascinated by an operation that could survive without returning phone calls or answering the phone. This time someone did answer, an affable man named Norm, who acknowledged he'd gotten my message and mentioned he had planned to call me today. I briefly outlined my requirements and we arranged to meet at the facility.

 

Camarillo Custom Crush (CCC) has been around a while and they evolved very differently from Central Coast Wine Services. There are a lot of little vineyards in the mountains by the Southern California coast. Most of these are vanity vineyards, or small vineyards trying to move some cases commercially. My gut feeling is that most of them are owned by pretty well-heeled CA landowners rather than grizzlled scions of vineyard families scratching out a living from their estate vineyard.

 

CCC had recently moved into a new facility when I visited. The mood was very relaxed. Norm was in charge, a genial guy in his late fifties. As I strolled in and said hello, there were 4 employees gathered in the lab/tasting room. The three besides Norm were in their late twenties or so and everyone seemed to be hanging out. There were some half-filled glasses of wine on the table; it was both lunch break and a tasting session.

 

Norm explained that the staff regularly tastes the clientele's wines, for quality control purposes ostensibly. And also so they could taste them. Norm took me out to the back of the building, where the winery proper was. It was a decent sized warehouse, but in a way it was an expanded version of the AHC college  facilities. There wasn't much equipment I'd grown used to seeing in commercial wineries. There was indeed a press, a crusher, barrels, etc but it was all so small and cute. Norm admitted that they weren't set up to bring in lots of more than about 10 tons and even this amount seemed stretching it to my nascently-trained eye. I couldn't keep from flashing back to the Fess Parker operation, where they wanted at least 20 tons at a time, a humming facility with big equipment and big capacity.

 

I casually mentioned some of my requirements. I wanted to barrel ferment some syrah but that was out. Not enough space. Norm suggested oak dust, the preferred method at CCC. With this process you dump some oak dust into the fermenting bin and voila - barrel fermented! Oak dust is available at all home winemaking outlets and the owner of CCC also runs a home wine and beer making supply.

 

So I sensed the orientation here. Honestly, oak dust may be more effective than the actual barrel. I don't know. What I do know is that when I talk about how I age my wine, I have to be able to say "barrel fermented" not "fermented with oak dust additives".

 

Business is good at CCC. There are a lot of semi pro operators who use the facilities and in fact I saw several barrels from a local label labeled as "LL Syrah". I asked Norm if it meant Lucas and Llewellyn. He admitted yes. LL is by no means a dilettante or vanity operation; they farm several hundred acres of high quality grapes throughput SB County. So LL Syrah guy was making a substantial investment (I also couldn't help admiring his impeccably new French oak). Still, I couldn't help feeling that CCC was for either dilettantes or vanity operations.

 

As we were touring the warehouse/winery the owner of the entire operation showed up, a skinny man named John in his sixties or seventies wearing shorts. He was good natured and seemed to be enjoying having this nice new facility to hang around in, especially tasting wine with the kids in the lab/lunch room. The new facility even has plans for a tasting room in the front, featuring clients' wines. This was in progress when I was there, i.e. it was strewn with various cases of wine but did not look like a tasting room then. It was just a disheveled room in the front entrance.

 

It was all very affable, and I like hanging around with wine people and discussing winemaking. Naturally Norm and John had their own opinions on my preferred winemaking path, and I wanted to hear their input. They've been making wine for a while, vanity vineyards or not.

 

On the way out Norm again mentioned the tasting room plans and gestured toward several cases of wine stacked against the wall in the front room. Stafford. Norm gave me his card. Norm Stafford. So Norm had something of a semi-pro wine operation himself? He sure did, and in fact had been making a whole lineup of 6 to 9 different wines for a few years. There they were, the Napa Cab, a Rhone blend, some whites and a bunch more. There must have been at least 30 or 40 cases of various Stafford wines hanging around that room, from 3 or 4 vintages. Go Norm!

 

The price per case at CCC was $40.50, if I remember correctly. Less than Terravant, but it seemed high. I had to concede to myself that it was totally handmade winemaking from start to finish, but still.

 

On my way out Norm gave me a Stafford Chardonnay and his personal cell number. I left knowing I wouldn't be making wine there but also with a solid affection for the place. No commercial pressures here (subject to change without notice)

After agreeing to buy the syrah grapes Roger suggested we proceed to the local "big" winery, GV Cellars, which was embarking on an aggressive custom crush program under its new winemaker Sal. Freshly armed with my six future tons of syrah I felt like wheeling and dealing.

 

I had never heard of GV Cellars, or any other winery operation in Solano County. There are 2 appellations in Solano County: Green Valley and Suisun Valley. Green Valley is very small compared to Suisun Valley. Since Solano County is itself an AVA it seems to chop a little finely to divide dinky Solano County into more AVAs, but probably not if you have a vineyard there. Solano County has a bit of a bad rap on a general level due to its containing probably 2 of the least attractive cities in a California wine county so the additional branding makes sense in that respect.

 

GV Cellars is about a mile from the syrah vineyard and surprised me by the size of the vineyards and winery facility; there were clearly over 40 acres surrounding the winery, which included a residence, tasting room and the good sized winery. We strolled into the winery proper and greeted Sal.

 

Sal is just starting at GV, having spent time at Chateau Potelle as assistant winemaker. It would be hard not to know about Sal's stint at Chateau Potelle if you spent more than 10 minutes in his presence. He dropped that name with much more frequency than I had ever blabbered about Larner (of course he's not lying about his association. I think). He was enthusiastic about getting me in there as a client, and it appeared to me that part of the Sal regime at GV would be an increased emphasis on getting others to make their wine there.

 

I had frequently discussed my winemaking venture idea with Mike Larner after class last fall, since at that the time I knew nothing about custom crushes except that I would need one. He repeatedly emphasized that the best deals would be had at wineries with excess capacity rather than dedicated facilities. GV falls into the former category.

 

The winery didn't particularly impress me. I've been inside lots of wineries; the ones I respect most are impeccably clean and organized (2 things I aspire to but will never achieve), rows of clean (almost gleaming, if wood gleams) barrels, shiny, spotless equipment, nothing out of place, etc. GV is the opposite. It was cluttered from top to bottom with barrels (what percentage were full or empty was unclear). There was a dripping hose right outside, and a worker kept cruising in and out on a forklift. While we talked I noticed what appeared to be the lab and asked Sal about it: it was a lab, but very limited: only for testing brix (sugar content), PH (degree of acidity) and TA (actual acid content). I knew from class these were the big 3, but I also knew you sometimes need more more more testing - certainly they stressed that in Lab Analysis class, where monthly lab submissions were recommended. Of course that class was taught by the head of Terravant, who was previously the head of the lab at Vinquiry (located in CCWS and the main 3^rd party lab in SB County), so frequent lab submissions by winemakers were an ongoing justification of his job.

 

The GV lab was similar to the rest of the winery: cluttered and not exactly approaching surgery theater levels of sanitation. I have to say that overall I sort of liked the winery. It has a lived in feeling and has that certain hum of activity in a busy place.

 

Sal got me a rate sheet and informed me that my 6 tons were right at the price break. Between 6 and 12 tons were $650/ton; less than 6 tons was $950/ton, a pretty good spread. Remembering Fess Parker's $450/ton figure led me to balk at this figure, but GV would do it for $450 for over 12 tons. Sal assured me that he had brought his crew from (where else?) Chateau Potelle and that he and his team would do a good job. Although being a fairly young guy (thirtyish, maybe even younger) he seemed to know his stuff. Of course compared to me the head winemaker at any winery knows an encyclopedia's worth.

 

As I studied the rate sheet, Jason looked around a bit and Roger even agreed to buy some Sangiovese bulk wine from GV. Sal remarked that it was good wine but not up top the standards he was instituting at the winery. My gut feeling was that 1) the wine might be no good at all or 2) Sal did not want to bottle someone else's wine. Or both 1 and 2.

 

The whole time we were standing there talking a middle aged man dressed relatively formally (in slacks and a short sleeved dress shirt) was standing there, waiting his turn with Sal. As Roger and Sal discussed commerce he and I started talking. It turns out he was a winery supply salesman, repping various yeasts, chemicals, lab tools, and who knows what else. He was a nice guy and clearly knew the inside of the Northern California wine industry from a certain unique perspective. I wondered how often Sal got a visit from a salesman such as this, and I wondered how often a higher end winery (say Chateau Potelle?) got hit up. Is it like doctors' offices, where pharmaceutical salesmen frequently outnumber the patients, and are dispensing samples and lunches daily?

 

Following the GV visit it was back to Wooden Canyon Winery, Roger's winery base. We went into the winery and met Rick, who is one of the owners and I guess the winemaker. He is in the immediate family, which has owned the estate and winery for three generations. Whereas Sal had been a slick talking modern winemaker dude, Rick was clearly a farmer - laconic, dressed for work in the fields, and certainly not out to impress anybody. He assured me that they could always squeeze in 6 tons if I just called a week ahead (he was very casual about absorbing my 6 tons). We toured the winery, which was tidier than GV and much less busy. In fact there was nobody in there but us and things were very quiet. We looked at fermenting tanks. We looked at barrels. We looked at a press. We looked at a crusher. It looked like a winery. One thing Wooden Canyon has that is basically unheard of in smaller or even medium-sized wineries is a bottling line. It is very common for most wineries to hire a bottling truck, which is a semi tractor-trailer stuffed with an elaborate bottling apparatus. Whenever I'm at a winery with the bottling truck cranking away I like to stop and watch for a bit. It's amazing how intricate and precise these machines are (even more so in a small space like a truck trailer) and how fast they can bottle, cork and label the wine.

 

So Wooden canyon had a bottling line. Rick warned that it was finicky about labels and bottle shapes, but if you observed the restrictions in these areas it worked fine.

 

Rick got me a rate sheet: much less than Sal's: $375 a ton, period, no price changes with additional tonnage. And the bottling charge was much lower than Sal's (since GV had to hire the bottling truck to come around). My problem with Wooden Canyon was that Rick did not seem to care at all about whether I would make wine there and since I would be relying on him to take care of the wines (I live 400 miles away), would he care at all about my wines? My problem with Sal was his hard sell, high rates and about 50% too much Chateau Potelle in his conversation. However I am convinced of one thing: I knew he would try to make good wine from my grapes and I knew he would take care of it. How do I know this for sure? I don't but I feel it very strongly to the point where there is no doubt in my mind.

 

The upshot of my tour of the 2 wineries was that I decided to keep looking. Laurie, my frequent classmate (she was in 3 of my 4 classes) and good friend informed that Terravant, the brand new upscale facility in Buellton, was hurting for clients and would talk to anyone (even a nobody like me) because they were projecting so much excess capacity in their maiden crush. Laurie writes for a local newspaper and one of her responsibilities is the wine beat. She seems to know most everybody in the local trade so I like getting her dirt on wine industry doings. This was a good lead and I decided to contact Terravant after Jason and I finished getting sloshed in Sonoma the next day and I returned home.