Syrah watch 2008 continues. The national events of the last several weeks have roiled the economy and placed the entire wine venture in jeopardy. With the collapse of the financial system credit markets have frozen. This impacts me two ways: first, the software work has completely dried up, and it happened fast. 6 weeks ago I was confident that I would make enough money from consulting to sail through a second round of grape purchases and custom crush charges, in addition to other requirements, such as eating and paying the mortgage. Now I'm wondering if my soon to be dwindling savings account (which includes funds earmarked for Ritual Wine Company) will be used solely for living expenses.
The second fun fact is that my chances of getting some sort of a loan have dropped close to zero. A bank will not take a flier on a barely capitalized wine venture in a time of economic contraction and unavailable credit. This has me depressed and distracted instead of focusing on the issue at hand, the current crush. It almost seems pointless if I can't do another crush next year, and that's the way it's looking in my worst case scenario.
Speaking of the issue at hand, my fears about the syrah failing to ripen also continue to fester. During the period between committing to the syrah and beginning the various expenditures (barrels, additional grapes, etc) I seriously considered abandoning the venture while I still could. I have been glad I stuck it out but if this unknown syrah vineyard bites me I may be back to weighing an exit. Yes, I share the national malaise, as well as my personal syrah malaise.
This past weekend I attended the bi-annual SB County Vintners Association wine festival. The vintners association puts on two of these events every year - the spring festival is called the Vintners Festival while the one in fall is called "Celebration of Harvest". The format and participants are largely the same - there are a number of local wineries and eateries proffering samples, there's a silent auction with rare bottles (usually large format) and other goodies (dinners, tours, etc). Bands play. People drink and eat. People drink some more. My friend AJ and I go every time; it's always fun and I get to meet up with a lot of friends and acquaintances in Santa Ynez Valley, as well as sample the latest wine offerings from both the established producers and new upstarts.
I had a chance to talk with Blair Fox this time around. Blair Fox is the head winemaker at Fess Parker (recently hired I believe), which didn't interest me. What did interest me is that he also his own label and is known as a syrah specialist. I made my way over to the Blair Fox Cellars Table; there were three vineyard designate syrahs on offer.
Blair Fox himself is a burly, somewhat biker looking guy, but in a very clean-cut way; he was happy to talk to me about syrah, a topic that has been on my mind for some time.
I asked if all his grapes were in - it turns out his last lot had come in just the previous day. Were they shriveled? Yes indeed, although I think "puckered" is the word we syrahistes prefer. So there are some other late ripeners out there.
Blair works with pretty small lots, enabling him to pretty much hand make everything and do manual punch downs for all the syrahs. It's nice when you have the day job supplying the cash flow (and winemaking facilities). Something to keep in mind, since 2/3 of my syrah will be in a big tank with electric pumpovers. Luckily syrah loves abuse.
All three of the Blair Fox syrahs were great, possibly my three favorite wines of the festival. Usually a pinot noir gets my best-in-show award but the Blair Fox syrahs were just that good.
In the midst of my wine venture I have continued to be much the same wino I've always been. I like to go fairly long periods without drinking much. I get into shape, I feel clean, I'm a little bored. These are offset by periods of intense consumption. Such as the last 6 days or so. Naturally I have considered my potential lifestyle change. If the wine thing works I'm not going to wake up, have a strong cup of coffee and diddle my computer all morning. It will be off to the winery, vineyard, sales call ("Please buy a few cases of wine, Boutique Wine Shop Person") or who knows what else.
Darren, one of my teachers in my final wine class, Lab Analysis, remarked often that since becoming a wine industry professional his taste for fine wine had gradually waned; He is in fact a spirits man at this point. Naturally he offered the qualifier you would expect: "I still like wine". This wasn't convincing; the fact that he needed to say it implied the opposite.
This alarmed me a bit. If the price of success in the wine industry is the loss of my general interest in wine, that price is too high. It was curious hearing Darryl say it and I realize that there must be quite a few wine pros who don't like wine. Why should they? It might make them even more effective if they didn't like it - no sloshed tasting room employees stealing sips all day, or even better, no sloshed winery staff.
So I've thought about it. I think about all the successful and dedicated wine pros who have kept their enthusiasm and wonder for fine wine, and discovering more of it. I'm convinced they're in the majority. I will be one of them. I also plan to be a totally sober winery employee, assuming the as-yet theoretical winery. That's important.
One of the funny things about my college wine experience is that when I moved to Solvang part-time I consciously decided I would not drink wine regularly. Even though I was in the heart of my favorite wine region, I was here to learn, and study, and not to blow a ton of cash on Mike's wine fantasy camp.
I did it too. I was so worried about falling into one of my bad wino habits that I didn't have so much as a glass of wine for several weeks after starting school. I dropped some weight, I started jogging once a week (this was big, believe me), my attendance and attitude at class was impeccable. What drinking I did when in Solvang was mostly reserved to various class functions. By class functions I mostly mean various tastings or parties by the winemaking class, all of which were great fun (I was around 18 people who at least equaled my own wino proclivities).
I should mention a wine soaked class "function" that really was a scholastic learning experience: the intro class took a field trip to Sunstone Winery, a very chic family winery, and they lined up their whole catalog for the class to taste. That's right,18 tastings coming right up, with the assistant winemaker there to tell us about them. We then took a tour of the winery; they were in middle of crush and Sunstone's generosity was really something. A field trip like that just makes you feel good.
I completed my first semester with straight A's (Should not be overestimated. Most everyone got an A), minimal wine consumption and a welcome expansion in my wine knowledge.
There was a huge gap between the first and second semester. This was the holiday season, meaning I changed from a lean, mean learning machine to a, yes, partying guy. By the time the second semester started I had also contracted a vicious case of the flu that took me 2 weeks to recover from. In the meantime, I had gone from 2 ½ courses to one (actually ½ semester courses). The winemaking course was only 8 weeks, and the Lab Analysis course was 8 weeks as well; they overlapped slightly but what it meant was just one course active at a time. I was dead set on completing the winemaking course, so I was going to resume my part-time residency. I could only find the Lab Analysis course as an additional wine course to complement the Saturday morning winemaking class. Lab Analysis was Wednesday night, so in the weeks that they overlapped I would have serious downtime. And in any case I would leisure time on my hands in any case, since just going up and coming right back down was too grueling, plus I liked hanging out at the Solvang house.
The main thing someone like me does with leisure time in the Santa Ynez Valley is drink a little wine here and there, so I gradually got into the habit of visiting wine bars and restaurants much more frequently than the previous semester.
The unanticipated wine consumption came about from the winemaking source. While we had spent the first semester visiting vineyards, tasting grapes, bringing in grapes to process, we now had 5 barrels of finished wines, happily aging in casks right next door. Part of the class, naturally, was to occasionally taste what we had, and proffer predictions on ultimate style, further winemaking strategies (Filter? Fine? Blend? Throw out?) and anything else related to dealing with our inventory.
Here is what is most interesting about being next door to all this wine. Not only did the class own the wine, but there were at least three classmates entrusted with the key to the winery facility. They were liberal with loaning the key or providing and it soon became common for a late morning barrel sampling session for those of us so inclined. The morning drinking is not a good habit to get into, but I enjoyed it. It was really the only time in my life I have drunk alcohol before lunch. And honestly the tastings were frequently directly related to the class curriculum and I learned a lot. Frequently but not always of course.
The Lab Analysis class was on the second floor of AHC's spanking new science building, about 100 yards from the winery. The Lab Analysis class was two hours or so. The first half was lecture, the second half was lab time. There was a 15 minute break between each half.
You can guess what started happening. There were about 10 of us from winemaking class in Lab Analysis and ... we needed to check our wine. It's right there. What helped our justification for essentially drinking during school was that the lab time was chaotic, with the whole class (about 25 people) crowding around the instructor demonstrating a typical lab panel for wine or grape juice. These demos left a lot of us completely confused, so there were even a couple of occasions towards the end where we stopped going back to class and just lounged around the winery facility enjoying our barrel samples. It was great camaraderie, and those lab sessions were driving me crazy.
It was funny how I went from sharpened idealist ready for knowledge to a tipsy part time student who was drinking during each of his (admittedly wine-based) classes. Will the same arc occur in a winery - starting a crush working hard, eagle eyed, focused, only to be lying around 6 months later experiencing the inventory firsthand more often than not?
Nah.
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