News from NW Grapes—June 2, 2008

NOTE: This update contains general information from our recent trip to California. Another update on specific varieties and their availability will follow soon. We are still working out some procurement issues, in part because of our decision to switch our processing from Paso Robles to Santa Maria, close to our main freezer.

The main topics of this report are:

May trip to Coastal California

We were away from May 10 for 19 days. At least 8 of those days were primarily highway travel—just so you know that not all our trip was fun and games. John Taylor and I were making this trip for the fourth time. This year Don Graham accompanied us on a non-subsidized basis. At the end of the trip, we were all still speaking to one another despite our life together in the close quarters of John’s diesel pickup and fifth wheeler. In truth, we were still enjoying one another’s company as well as the wine and food. We prepared nearly all our own meals and spent our money instead on good wine!

Besides providing an extra pair of hands to help with chores and driving, Don Graham added a useful third voice to our discussions of the options available to us. Don also used his iPod to bring along a series of podcasts from Napa Wine Radio and Winemaker Radio. This meant we could use some of our travel time to learn more about winemaking.

Napa, Sonoma, and Brehm Vineyards

The early part of our trip involved two full days with Peter Brehm and about 50 other home winemakers, touring vineyards and meeting grape growers in Napa and Sonoma from whom Peter sources grapes. Despite hot Santa Anna winds and unusually warm temperatures (100º plus F) this was good fun and very educational. Not only did we see where many of our North Coast grapes come from, we learned to appreciate the relationships Peter has with his growers and the dedication these growers lavish on their vineyards.

The first day was centered on the Russian River and we visited the sources for Windsor Zinfandel and Alexander Valley Syrah. The afternoon was devoted to the Windsor Oaks Vineyard and Winery, from which Peter gets a number of Russian River and Chalk Hill varieties. Windsor Oaks is a large, diverse property and uses the Chalk Hill or Russian River appellations depending on the soil type of the block. Peter gets specific rows from blocks in various parts of this vineyard.

The second day with Peter was spent farther south in the Carneros area. In the morning we met Steve Sangiacomo and toured some of the family vineyards, including the Home Ranch, where Peter Brehm gets his Carneros Chardonnay (this is a more prized Chardonnay source than the other Sangiacomo ranches). We also visited Francis Mahoney and his Las Brisas vineyards and learned of his new love for Italian varietals (which has meant the end of the Las Brisas Merlot that Brehm Vineyards carried for many years).




Photo: Francis Mahoney explaining his new-found love of Italian varietals at his Las Brisas vineyard in Carneros. Note the NW grapes agent trying to appear inconspicuous in the background.


Lunch at the Carneros Creek golf course was a highlight as we were entertained with stories and wines from Francis Mahoney, Justin Laird, and John Caldwell. Winemaker golfers would love this golf course, which is part of the Laird empire. Hazards include vineyards! The afternoon ended with a visit to John Caldwell’s Napa vineyard and winery. John Caldwell is quite a character and entertained us with wines and stories of how he got his caves built. He even had a beer ready for us as we left his caves to return home in the intense heat of the late afternoon.

Santa Barbara County—and the new processing option

The second major stop on our trip was Santa Barbara County, where we got our Pinot Noir from Louis Lucas last year and where we also hope to get Nebbiolo this year. This year, Louis showed us his home ranch vineyard, a more easterly (warmer) vineyard devoted to Bordeaux varietals. He also poured Bordeaux varietals in his tasting room—all of which were very good, without any of the vegetal notes that we have often experienced with Santa Barbara Bordeaux varietals.




Photo: Louis Lucas showing us some Cabernet vines at his home ranch.


We mentioned to Louis that it would be a lot easier to do more business in Santa Barbara if we had a local way of processing grapes, rather than sending them north to Paso and then back to Santa Maria to the freezer. This led Louis to refer us to a small winery (McKeon-Phillips) to which he sells grapes. We checked this out and liked what we saw. The winery is less than a mile down the road from our Santa Maria freezer and it has a high quality destemmer that works for our scale. We are now in the process of finalizing our arrangements for this year.

Incidentally, the McKeon-Phillips winery is producing some excellent Nebbiolo from Louis Lucas’s grapes. We tasted an outstanding 2002 from the library and barrel sampled the 06 and 07 vintages.

Louis has not been able to commit yet to our purchase of Nebbiolo this year (crop levels are still in doubt), but we are optimistic. We also tasted Louis’s Barbera (excellent) and Dolcetto (very good). If we can’t get all the Nebbiolo we want, it might be possible to get some of these other varieties. After tasting them, the three of us on the trip would have no trouble shifting to one or the other of these alternatives, especially as we seem to be building relationships which could see us getting Nebbiolo on a regular basis if we want it.

Paso Robles

Our visit to Paso was about maintaining relationships and preparing for change. We delivered a few bottles to growers (some of whom were not home).

We informed the people at Vintner Vault that we would not be using them this year for crushing. They understood our reasons and were not particularly concerned. They are more than busy with their own projects—opening new stores, the first releases from their Nacimiento Cellars winery, and an expanding custom crush and storage facility that already is home to 15 other small wineries. We parted friends with the option to come back if we needed them.

Our visit with Paul Hoover of Still Waters was delightful. He hides nothing and is very helpful. We will not be able to get Viognier from him this year because of the frost, but are on target for the Hillside Cab and probably most of the Malbec we want. We are now a preferred customer with Paul and are the scale of client he wants to deal with. We talked about getting his grapes to Santa Maria for processing, but he foresaw no great problems. The downturn in the construction industry means there are lots of people around willing to do smaller-scale, short-haul transportation.

Our visit to Fred Esposito and his Cira vineyard produced some surprises. First, Fred is back to looking after the vineyard himself and it looks great, as does Fred, a very youthful 71. Second, Fred has leased the vineyard to a winery which wants the entire crop. It is possible we can still work something out, but we are exploring options for the Petit Verdot. The orders for Touriga Nacional are too small this year to be viable anyway.

We had quite a bit of time with Don Ackerman. This went well, and Don’s is prepared to get us what he can and to accept that we are sourcing more grapes elsewhere. He realizes the wine industry is unstable and things change quickly. He even said that if he were us he would be lining up alternative sources of supply. We are in line to get his Petite Sirah and to get Pinot Gris and some Chardonnay from the White Hills vineyard in Santa Barbara County (this comes from tanks at Meridian in Paso).




Photo: Some of the oaks and Petite Sirah vines in the Tower Oaks vineyards owned by Don Ackerman. The "Tower" comes from the name of the Road the vineyard fronts on, not the size of the oaks. Oaks are heavily protected in California, so vineyards are developed around them.


As we were leaving Paso Robles, I reminded John and Don of my oft-repeated remarks about how often NW Grapes changes gears. In my experience, I have seen even the most promising arrangements last not much longer than three years. Partly we drive the changes because of our search for better grapes, but partly the change comes because the grape world around us changes. After three years of processing in Paso Robles and the shift now towards Santa Barbara, the pattern is holding.

There may be even more changes in the near future. We are doing a lot more business this year with Brehm Vineyards and have begun to think that one day not too far hence we might be dealing almost exclusively with Brehm Vineyards and his North Coast sources.

Coastal winemaking trends

As far as we could learn during this trip, there is no backing off the trend to picking grapes at ever higher Brix. “If 25.5 gets you a 92 from Robert Parker”, John Caldwell explained, “why not go for 27 or 28 Brix or even more and try to score 100.” The conclusion of almost everyone we heard is that higher Brix mean better flavor, more intensity, and smoother tannins. And if you worry about higher Brix adversely affecting the wine chemistry, John Caldwell doesn’t. “I pick ’em on flavors and ripe seeds for smooth tannins. I don’t worry and acid and pH. Then I tell my winemaker, ‘Fix this fucking mess.’”

But this is in Napa, where you often can expect to get both high Brix and good numbers. In areas like Paso Robles (in any California area except Napa and Sonoma, really), the higher Brix almost always comes with a higher than desirable pH. John Taylor had a long talk on the phone with Don Ackerman about this a few weeks ago. John expressed hope that we would be able to get both full ripeness and good numbers from Paso red grapes. Don said that this just was not feasible in most years and if we wanted these kinds of grapes we should be looking to Napa and Sonoma where they can do this on a fairly regular basis, albeit at much higher prices.

These high Brix, of course, produce very high alcohol wines. The “dirty secret” of winemaking these days we were told on a couple of a occasions is de-alcoholization. Commercial wineries are routinely using osmosis to take some alcohol out of their wines and bring them back into balance, while preserving the intensity of flavors. The home winemaker usually has no alternative to the balance problem but adding water, which sacrifices intensity. Home winemakers will increasingly have a tough time approximating what premium commercial wineries can do.

Intensity is also the rationale behind the apparently increasing tendency to bleed off some juice at crushing. This light colored juice is then usually made into some sort of rosé. This is an old trick with Pinot Noir, of course, but we saw rosés based on Cabernet and Nebbiolo.

There is some speculation that there will be revolt against high alcohol wines. Even with de-alcoholization, wines are being left in the 14 plus range, and wines at 16% or more are now common. Some expect a move to lower alcohol to be led by women consumers who don’t metabolize alcohol as well as men, perhaps assisted by the increasing prominence of women winemakers from Davis. But this is not happening yet. And if it does happen, it will probably not mean going back to the time just a few years ago when grapes were picked at 24 to 24.5 Brix. We were told that some growers might pick grapes for us at this stage of ripeness if we had the volume to warrant getting a crew in early, but that we would probably be disappointed with the results. “There is no going back,” we were told on several occasions.

Growers are asking for a premium for grapes that are picked at high Brix. This is because they are losing tonnage. The ripening that sends Brix into the high twenties or even to 30, is partly due to dehydration. Growers naturally want compensation for the intensity that wineries market at high prices.

A big questions is, are these new style wines, crafted in the wake of Robert Parker, age worthy? The presumption of some traditionalists is no, but others are taking a wait-and-see attitude. These wines have only been around for about five years and there is just no history to say how well they will age—they certainly last five years! One view is that the wines will age quite well, especially if they came from good coastal vineyards where the grapes have lots of “stuff” in them. One factor in their preservation is in fact the higher alcohol. When these wines age, the thinking goes, they won’t taste like wines made in the older fashion after 15 years, but they may still be good wines and they will taste different than they do when young. The guess is that some people will prefer these aged wines, just like some people prefer the aged wines of a few years ago to their younger versions. But the truth is that California winemaking today is not driven by the person who is stocking a cellar.

Frost damage and grape prices

We were touring too early for growers to have a good estimate of this year’s crop. Bloom was just beginning. But the general talk went this way.

2008 was the year coastal California was expected to reach balance between supply and demand. There have been relatively few acres planted in recent years and the big surplus from 2005 has made its way out of the system. Spot market prices at the end of the season last year sometimes exceeded long contract prices for the first time in a long time. People are expecting grape prices for mainline varieties like Cabernet and Chardonnay to begin edging upwards after several years of stasis. The glut of Chardonnay is definitely over, says Don Ackerman, and some are predicting that even Merlot is making a comeback. (One sign the glut is over is that Freddy Franzia, of Charles Shaw and two-buck chuck fame, is now rapidly expanding his own acreage. He can no longer rely on the surplus of good quality wine that has been available in recent years from other wineries.)

Into this relatively optimistic picture for coastal growers came the big spring frost. Bud break had already happened when virtually the entire coastal growing area from Mendocino to Santa Barbara was hit by the worst spring frost in 30 years. All frost protection resources were deployed, but there were areas that had no protection (there had been no spring frost in living memory) or whose protection ran out (so much water was being sprayed on one Santa Barbara vineyard we saw that water ran out in the middle of the night, which made things worse). Lake Country was hardest hit (according to the stories we heard), but some degree of damage was evident along most of the coast. About 8% damage overall was the figure we heard most often, with the damage localized in parts of vineyards and certain varieties. For example, the Viognier we were expecting to get from Still Waters in Paso Robles was located in a small swale and was heavily damaged, while the nearby Merlot escaped completely.

The upshot is that the frost is expected to help contribute to a supply problem this year. This does not affect prices for vineyards under long-term contracts, but prices for people like us will increase. Growers are very optimistic about the spot market prices that will be available in the fall, so no one is running to give grapes to us at great prices. But no one really knows yet how much the frost damage will really matter this year or next. Some damaged vines are pushing new shoots, which could have fruit.

Then just as bloom was beginning the weather turned hot and windy—much hotter and windier than the normal May spikes in temperature. (We can attest that it was indeed very hot and very windy—very, very hot and windy!) The concern while we were visiting was that this would affect berry set. As one grower said, “Not enough winter rain, the worst spring frost damage in more than a generation, a heat and wind spike during bloom—just another typical year for growers.” As we left California, growers were anxious for bloom to be over so they could count clusters and assess shatter (the degree to which berries don’t set). Perhaps, most growers hoped, things will turn out fine. Growers need to be an optimistic lot.


Notes by Rod Church, with help from John Taylor and Don Graham