Notes From The Winemaker

• I was not able to do as much with dried stems this year as I had hoped. When we brought the Pinot in I added a moderate percentage of green stems to half the fermenters, and set aside an equal amount of stems to dry before adding them back to the other half of the fermenters. This was instructive. The green stem fermenters developed a pretty perfume, but had less color and developed a bit of a reduced funk at the end of the ferment (which went away at pressing) while the perfumed aroma persisted. In contrast, the dried stem fermenters had a more complex briary aroma and showed no color loss. What was a bit of a surprise – when I added the dried stems later in the ferment it actually cleaned up some reduced characters. Unfortunately, the weather and timing of the rest of our picking this year did not cooperate for me to dry any more stems for the Rhône varietals.


• Taking a page from the notes of a few other Rhône producers, I experimented with green stems in the Syrah and Mourvedre. Several years ago I was tasting Copain Syrahs from barrel with Wells Guthrie in their cellar. I was astounded to learn that he makes at least some of these wines 100% on stems. Here in California it it the rare Syrah vineyard that does not yield clusters with nearly-fluorescent green, non-lignified stems at harvest. This bothered Wells not at all, and tasting the wines I could understand why – I would have had to use my imagination to pick up any sort of "green" notes, and the wines were pleasingly complex and deeply colored. This experience took away my fears of green stems and put the idea in my head that Syrah on stems could work for our wines as well. Then this vintage as I was preparing to pick our Syrah, I got a call from my friend Alex MacGregor while he was actually treading the fruit on stems in a tank of his Syrah. That was the push I needed – this year one-third of our Syrah went into the wood fermenter on stems and we treaded it down before crushing the rest of the fruit on top of it. I followed the same protocol for the Mourvedre this year – I have yet to chat with anyone else who has tried Mourvedre on green stems. So far I am liking the results – a lot.


• The character of the 2008 vintage wines fits the even year – odd year pattern I have observed. So far the 2008 wines are very deep and concentrated, but are showing softer and more forward than the 2007 wines did at this point. Going all the way back to 1995 I have noted that our wines in odd-numbered years are hard and closed, while the wines in even numbered years are softer and more forward.


• My conceptualization of "tannin homeopathy" continies to evolve. For a number of years I have been kicking around the idea of managing tannins through the approach of treating like-with-like. The process started years ago, before I understood seed ripeness. I noticed that some deeply-colored red wines, our Syrah included, would throw a lacquer of color on the inside of the bottle as they aged. At the same time I was trying to understand why some old-world producers co-fermented reds and whites together: what benefit derived from mixing Syrah with Viognier, or Sangiovese with Trebbiano or Malvasia. Researchers were talking about "co-pigmentation" (c.f. Boulton) but could not show persistence of the phenomenon during aging. At the time I believed that Syrah and Sangiovese seeds were deficient in some unspecified phenolic compound(s) that historical winemaking had shown could be supplemented by adding these white grapes. At about this time purified enological tannins, primarily from the South American hardwood Quebracho, became available. With the idea of supplementation in mind I experimented with these tannins in our Syrah and – presto – no more lacquer in the bottle. Later I came to understand that Syrah and Sangiovese may not be deficient per se in particular seed tannins, but are perhaps more likely to be picked before the seeds are ripe than other varietals. Now that I have a better handle on harvesting when seeds are ripe, I have a different take on winemaking with exogenous tannins – whether from a bag, from added stems, or from co-fermentation with white grapes or pomace. Now I'm looking at the broader tannin picture: subtleties in seed and skin flavor, stem lignification, and the hard year/soft year alternation. Generally, I am likely to add more exogenous tannin when the fruit comes in more "tannic." Recently I have extended my thinking to encompass general acid levels – if acids seem low or pH's high I am also more likely to supplement the phenolic structure. This idea continues to evolve. We will see where it takes the wines as time passes.


• We will all be happier with more Grenache, less Mourvedre in the Rosé. I love the complexity and depth of our 4-Part Rosé but the 2006 was really outside the mainstream – far meatier and sweatier than most people are comfortable with even in a bone-dry Rosé like ours. I addressed this in 2007 by upping the Grenache content – it helped a lot. This year I dropped the percentages of Mourvedre, Syrah and Counoise further. The 2008 wine is lovely, with fresh strawberry and mineral notes from the Grenache complemented by more animal characters from the Mourvedre and Syrah, and peppery aromas from the Counosie. I will never add residual sugar to this wine. I will continue build the mid-palate with lots of lees stirring, and to finish it 100% malolactic to be able to bottle it unfiltered. It is extra work for a wine that – deriving as it does from saignée de cuve on the reds – is essentially a by-product, but worth it as it produces something unexpectedly complex and with the ability to age.


• I'm experimenting with long cuvaison in tank before going to barrel with the Rhône wines. Last year I followed through on a thought I had been brewing for a while: aging my Rhônes in larger vessels. Since I started working with El Dorado County fruit in 1995 I discovered that some – maybe all – Syrah can be overwhelmed by new oak. And unlike raising wine in Burgundy, where Pinot Noir rests almost exclusively in 228 liter pieces, wines in the Rhône are often aged all or in part in larger oak tanks of 500 to 3,000 gallons, called foudres. (Note that as far as I can tell, anything larger than a barrique or piece may be called a foudre.) I started wondering if part of the reason California Syrah – mine anyway – so often so little resembles its Old World cousins is a general over-reliance on our (my) part on small oak casks for aging. I don't have any foudres at my disposal but I do have stainless tanks. So last year I kept the Mourvedre, Syrah and Grenache in tanks for a full year. They developed beautifully in tank, each showing more pepper and spicy complexity than I have observed in the past. There was no evidence of reduction. Just before harvest this year I pulled off Syrah to go to barrels and blended up the redFOUR pre-blend (Mourvedre, Grenache, Counoise and just a fraction of the Syrah – perhaps to be increased before bottling) before putting that to barrels as well. This year I took things a step further, and made nearly the final redFOUR blend (Mourvedre, Syrah, Grenache, Counoise and small percentage of Tannat) which will stay in tank until just before next harvest. So far I am liking the aromas and textures – a lot. I'm not claiming that a year in inox and a year in small pieces yields the same wine that two years in oak foudre would, just that so far this change in aging strategy seems to be giving wines that more closely meet my expectations for these varietals.


• I'm narrowing down the number of yeast strains in the winery. Choice of yeast strain makes a difference. The proper, or lucky, pairing of varietal and yeast strain can make a better wine than a poor pairing would. The yeast industry pumps put several new strains a year, each optimized for some particular application. But I've always known that a good or lucky choice of yeast is not going to make a great wine. I've never been one to try a new yeast strain just for the sake of doing it, but now I'm moving toward ignoring new strains altogether - there just doesn't seem to be enough to be gained. This change in attitude came in a minor revelatory moment this year when I stuck my nose in a friend's ferment of Grenache with strain T73. Not that there was anything wrong with it, just that it did not smell at all like I want my Grenache to smell. I thought to myself "thank goodness I didn't try that combination." Thinking it through a little further, I'm now cutting out a number of strains I have used in the past: no more BM45, GRE, BGY, D254, L2226, or Syr. I'm just using AMH, RC212, D80, VQ15 and Uva43. These strains have shown the ability to do very well pretty much every red wine I make now.


• I'm finally embracing that I'm a Pinot Noir winemaker. I'm comfortable with and confident in my approach to Pinot Noir, and I humbly submit that the wines have turned out well. But as many other winemakers here in California are, I am still working toward a well-resolved and completely natural approach to making Rhône wines. For several years now I have been hearing comments that my Rhône wines are "Pinot-like." In the past I have taken issue with this assertion, but no more. I have always said that my approach to Pinot has informed my Rhône winemaking, not dictated it. This is true – the methods I use to make the Rhônes are not identical to those I use to make the Pinots. But in the fermenter especially, there are similarities – mostly in the matter of the number and timing of punchdowns, and in the approach to cuvaison. This year I decided that this is what I am confident in, and if it makes the Rhônes a bit Pinot-like compared to the competition, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

• Late pruning was a GREAT idea. In hindsight, the decision to prune late – which saved us from the ravages of the late April frosts – looks like foresight. Jean-Marie and I are thinking of pruning late every year, though maybe not as late as May.


• Yields were down, with the presumptive corollary that quality was up. Frost or no frost, we came up 15% short of predicted yield in the Pinot, just 3% short in the Syrah, and a whopping 30%-35% short in the other Rhône varietals. The Pinot clusters and berries were smaller than normal, which may suggest some damage from the frost but also could have been caused by blazing heat during berry expansion. Syrah was near-perfect in every way. The other Rhônes suffered form poor weather during flower set, which led to very uneven rates of development among the clusters. To correct this we did a heavy color thinning after veraison – once a majority of clusters were colored I said "if it is still green it comes off." It was the right decision, though it hurt.


• Leaf thinning high in the canopy to control rates of sugar accumulation – it worked. For years I have wondered if there was any way to reduce the rate of sugar accumulation that plagues the Dijon clones of Pinot Noir. Hedging was ineffective, as was irrigation. Counts showed that I had about 35-50 leaves per cluster. I figured 15-20 leaves per cluster would give better source-sink balance and slower rates of sugar accumulation (c.f. Kliewer & Dokoozlian). Last year I pushed the crew to remove laterals from inside the canopy but they didn't really get the hang of it. This year I spent a lot of extra time training the guys in what I wanted to see and the results were better, though I still had about 25 leaves per cluster. So I sent the crew through a couple of times after veraison to pull leaves from higher than 18 inches above the fruit. Average leaf count at harvest was 15-18 per cluster. Sure it was not a controlled experiment and I'm not going to draw a final conclusion from one year of practice, but for the first time ever I did not get any surprise sugar jumps in the Pinot.


• Vertical kicker canes work to control berry size. This year, our reproducible success with leaving a vertical kicker cane on strong vines in the Grenache and Counoise to give smaller berry size went from experiment to routine practice. We employed the technique for the first time in the Mourvedre, where a few of the vines are quite vigorous.


• We weathered the late heat spell better than many did. Here in the North Coast we experienced a serious heat spell in late August and early September that caused some fruit to shoot up in sugar and lose weight. Given that there were already expectations of a short crop due to the April frost, this heat pushed many producers to pick earlier than they should have. Maybe it was the late pruning, but we did not have this problem thank goodness. We picked our Pinot on October 3rd and may have been among the last producers to do so in Sonoma Valley and Russian River. But I was very happy with the balanced physiological ripeness of the fruit.


• No smoke issues with our Estate fruit. Following up after harvest with some of my friends who had much greater exposure to this year's wildfires, yes some of their fruit came in with smoke taint. Ours did not – not the slightest discernable or measurable iota. We were lucky.