474: Rod Berglund Is Not Just A Swan Clone

[00:00:01] The interview you'll hear later in this episode is with Rod Bergland, who had already been making wine at other California wineries when he married into Joseph Swan's family in the 1980s and began to take on more responsibility over the wines made at Swan.

[00:00:30] Eventually Joe Swan passed away and Bergland and his family oversee the Swan Winery today. Back in episode 460 of Ill Drink to That, I interviewed Joel Peterson, who worked with Joe Swan for a few years in the 1970s.

[00:00:43] Here's what Joel had to say about Joe Swan when I asked him in episode 460. Joel Peterson I would go up to his house on the weekends and all my vacations and we built his steel building and I helped him sort of equip it

[00:01:00] and I thought, okay, well this is a chance to learn something about making wine. He was planting a vineyard so I learned about planting vineyards and training vines and spent from 1972 until 1976 working with Joe in all my spare time, still did my work at the hospital.

[00:01:21] Mike Goudzwaard How old was Joe at that time? Joel Peterson He had retired, so he probably was in his early 60s. You know they retire you in the airlines when you're 55 and he'd been retired for some time

[00:01:35] by the time I met him, so I would say he's probably 62, 63 at the time. He was a tall, imposing man, had these piercing blue eyes and this chalk of white hair. He was a handsome man.

[00:01:51] He was an artist, painter, he would do landscapes, he had a self-portrait of himself hanging in the living room. He loved wine, he loved food, he loved working in the vineyards, he'd been doing this for a long time.

[00:02:07] He ran into Andrzej Cieliczew somewhere early in his history, I'm not sure exactly how that happened, but at one point Joe and I are doing a racking and June comes down to the winery and she says, you got a call?

[00:02:22] And Joe says, you know I don't take calls when I'm working. Because he was, he was like a pilot. He would start things in the beginning and he'd very carefully check things off and you didn't stop a project until it was done.

[00:02:32] I mean like that was just his way, it was very systematic. And June said, I think you'll take this call. So he walked back up to the house and he came back and he said, okay let's empty that

[00:02:46] last barrel and fill the lines with sulfur and would you like to go to lunch with me? And I said, yeah absolutely. But where are we going? He said, you'll find out. And he never stopped things in the middle.

[00:03:01] I mean this was like, it was so totally bizarre. So we got in his old panel truck and we headed out and we started going across Petrified Forest Road and I said, we're going to Napa Valley? He said, yeah we're going to Napa Valley.

[00:03:14] And I said, well where are we going to go? He says, you'll find out. So we go down Napa Valley and we get to Rutherford and we turn to the right, right across from Bollew. And I said, wait a minute, this is the road to the DePans house.

[00:03:28] And he said, yes. We pull up into the DePans house and waiting in the parking lot is Andre and Maynard Monaghan who was their marketing guy at the time. The DePans, they were Andre's boss. They owned BV and they would go back to France every year.

[00:03:46] And it turned out that these boys would raid the refrigerator when they left. And it appeared to me that the DePans had gotten wind of the fact that they were raiding the refrigerator so they would stalk the refrigerator.

[00:03:57] So like they began unloading the refrigerator and it was like foie gras and like caviar and multiple different kinds of breads and cheeses. And like Joe had brought wine and BV was flowing like mad.

[00:04:09] And so sat around the table with Andre and Joe and talked and told stories. And it was, I mean, I was really a kid in a sense. I was in my mid-twenties. I was totally white-eyed.

[00:04:22] So basically I got the tutelage of Joe Swan, but Andre came over to Joe's house quite frequently and he acted as Joe's consultant. So I really ended up getting to know Andre fairly well and getting a lot of good information from him about sort of winemaking.

[00:04:40] He was a pretty safe winemaker and he used American oak at BV. I think he wanted to use French oak, but he advised Joe on French oak and the use of it. And French oak barrels, like new French oak barrels were like a real novelty.

[00:04:56] And so you had to think about how you're going to utilize them. I mean, I remember Joe Swan got convinced to use French oak after he had barrel fermented a Chardonnay in whiskey barrels. The result was pretty dramatic. I have to say, whiskey flavored Chardonnay is pretty interesting.

[00:05:15] I think for Joe it was like one of those never again moments. And so he went to all French oak, but you know, you had to soak them up. You had to sort of get rid of the rough edges in Joe's wine.

[00:05:30] Joe used things like gelatin fining, which I don't use, but he was very much about smoothing the wine out and making it balanced as was Andre. So those were part of the things that were going on.

[00:05:43] And I think that Joe Swan got really well known for making Zinfandel and as did Ridge. I mean Ridge got really well known for making Zinfandel in about the same era. Joe Swan's first Zinfandel was 1968, unbelievable wine, came from an old vineyard on his property.

[00:06:03] But I think they really were the core of the Renaissance of Zinfandel. They didn't want to make Zinfandel. They wanted to make Cabernet in Ridge's case and Joe wanted to make Pinot Noir.

[00:06:20] Neither of them had the grapes really at their disposal, had to plant the grapes, had to wait for the vineyard to come in, but they wanted to practice winemaking. So Joe basically said, well, I'm going to make the Zinfandel here on my property just

[00:06:32] like I'm going to make my Pinot Noir. I'm going to think about it the same way. I'm going to barrel it the same way just because I need to know how that all works.

[00:06:42] And the Zinfandel, which had of course up to that time been going into Gallo Hardy Burgundy or jug wine and had been since Prohibition, responded and made really magical wines, really interesting stuff.

[00:06:57] So they played with these wines in ways that they were going to make their finer wine. And that influenced me in ways that became more profound as time went on because the wine was so good. And I thought, well, why aren't more people doing this?

[00:07:13] Why aren't people thinking about Zinfandel? And as I began investigating Zinfandel, I began thinking, wow, if you look at it, it has a trellising system, which is totally appropriate for the style of grape that it is. It's a bigger clustered grape, more Mediterranean.

[00:07:29] And so Gobelet or head pruning is exactly the right system for that. So the clusters don't sit on top of one another. It is dry farmed. You know, like how many dry farm vineyards are there in California now? Not many.

[00:07:45] And the crop levels were in that two to two and a half tons an acre, which is kind of where they legislate in Europe for crop levels depending on the region is slightly different.

[00:07:55] But the crop levels were at a level where you could make very high quality wine out of it. And I was like, wow, this is pretty amazing. You have all these elements, but nobody's doing it except for Ridge and Joe Swan.

[00:08:06] And so I basically jumped into the Zinfandel boat as a result of that. The thing about Swan's wines for me was that on the Zin's, they seem really ageable and they seem lower alcohol. Now, of course, he worked with different vineyard sites, so there's different eras.

[00:08:22] When I was working with him, he was primarily working with the Teldeschi vineyard. And he was working with Mike Teldeschi's vineyard, which is really, there's a dirt road that separates the Frank Teldeschi and Mike Teldeschi properties.

[00:08:35] They were brothers who had some kind of a falling out and divided the property with the dirt road. So when we went and visited Dry Creek and visited the Teldeschi grapes, they were some of the best grapes you could get in California.

[00:08:52] Tuscan Red Hill series soils, bench land, really many ways the perfect climate for Zinfandel being farmed in a very, very traditional way, cross cultivated, herbicides used. But Joe and Mike were always kind of at each other. But that lasted for five years or so.

[00:09:13] And Joe made some of his best wines. I'll drink to that where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. I'm Levi Dalton. I'm Erin Scala. And here's our show today. I talk to winemakers all the time and something they tell me is that oxygen management is

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[00:10:50] That's D I A M dash closures with an S dot com forward slash IDTT for more information. Rod Bergland, the co-owner of the Joseph Swan Vineyard in Sonoma County. Hello sir, how are you? Just fine, thank you. So you actually grew up in Petaluma?

[00:11:08] Well, I tell people I never actually grew up but I was raised there. I was one of those irritating kids that adults either really liked or just didn't want to see coming because I was totally insatiably curious about everything.

[00:11:21] I had a friend from kindergarten, he was gone a number of times growing up because his father was an engineer stationed in Baghdad or places where there were rocket bases and things, but their home base was always Petaluma. Growing up we always competed.

[00:11:35] We even did a thing, I think it was in third grade, who could collect the most ologies. We got the biggest dictionaries we could find and we looked for every word that ended in an O-G-Y.

[00:11:44] I didn't mean to cheat but when I picked apology it was a big discussion whether that had counted or not. But everything we did the other one would try to do better. And because he had traveled there was probably nothing he couldn't talk about intelligently.

[00:11:58] He collected stamps, he had a collection of stamps from Iraq from the early colonial days all the way through. The government wanted to buy it from him because it was the most complete collection in the world. He just did a lot of neat things.

[00:12:09] Well anyway I came to visit him. I was getting out of the Navy and just before my last leave I came home and went to see him. And we had a great time and he said, you know, I was at a party with my mother who's gone

[00:12:19] to social services the other night and there was this guy there, this wine snob. And in those days a wine snob was someone who knew one thing more than you and let you know. And he knew nothing about wine. It was something he had never even thought about.

[00:12:32] The next day he went to the library and had maybe five books on wine. He checked them out, he read every single one of them, he bought a few more. And by the time I left that afternoon I had a case of wine and several books.

[00:12:43] And when I got out he, I and another friend who grew up with wine in his house formed a little impromptu tasting group. And we would buy wines and get together, read all about them, mostly European wines, try

[00:12:53] to understand what they're supposed to be and taste them and try to figure out why what we had in the glass came from that place. It really fascinated me. Here was something I had never much thought about that connected my interest in farming,

[00:13:08] the outdoors, science, arts, basically everything I had been interested in, it was combined in this and it was a slippery slope after that. And that was the 1970s? Yes, early 1970s. I graduated high school in 69.

[00:13:24] We went into a lot of cellars, especially up in the Geyserville, Healdsburg area, a lot of old Italian cellars. They didn't bottle their wine, they sold it in bulk, Gallo generally being the customer.

[00:13:35] And we tasted Zinfandel's from a place made simply just because that's how they did it. And before long we could identify by smell alone where old Zinfandel vineyard came from. We went up and down the Napa Valley, there weren't many tasting rooms, we visited them.

[00:13:50] Some years later, but it was still during what I call the golden era when people were still a little bit naive about what they were doing and they were doing it for passion. We went to a tasting room of a new winery called Camus.

[00:14:01] And the guy in the tasting room took one look at the three of us and he went, God, here's some young guys, obviously have no money, they're not driving fancy cars, it's a waste of my time to even have them in here.

[00:14:10] And he was being very condescending and rolling his eyes about questions. There was a guy standing in the corner with a cowboy hat on, he was listening to us, sort of his head cock. He said, you three, come with me.

[00:14:20] We went, oh crap, we're getting shown out the back door, we don't even get to go out the front door. And we went back and said, have you ever done any barrel tasting? And he said, no.

[00:14:28] So he went and grabbed a wine thief and he started pulling wine and he said, I really like your questions. And we spent at least an hour there, tasting wine out of a barrel and talking and absorbing everything was the most exciting thing.

[00:14:39] And he sent us back into the tasting room, the guy behind the bar was looking at us like he couldn't believe this just happened. We asked him who that nice man was, he goes, well, that's the owner, that's Charlie Wagner. What did you see technique-wise in that era?

[00:14:53] Most wine made then was made a combination of classic California industrial winemaking standards, same equipment, they followed routines for sterilization or whatever. But on the other hand, there was a lot of just let wine be wine. Barrels of course were used, but that wasn't the big thing.

[00:15:11] A lot of wines were aged in redwood still, especially the simpler, older wine museum in northern Sonoma County. But there was a real honesty I think to the wines. Most of these people, including Andre Tellesheff, they were making wines just to make wine.

[00:15:27] They'd made huge numbers of different wines, everything from sweet white wines to the more expensive $4 Cabernet instead of the 90 cent Cabernet. What was planted where and what seemed successful in California back then? Well at that time Zinfandel was I believe still the most widely planted grape in the

[00:15:44] state, it was planted everywhere. And if I remember my statistics correctly, white wines outnumbered red wines for a long time. And they weren't all sweet, but they were not the kinds of white wines we have now.

[00:15:57] We still had things like Johannesburg Riesling and Pinot Chardonnay, which is funny now that we know that Chardonnay actually is dry from Pinot Noir, at least partially. Eau Sauterne and Rhine Riesling and Chablis and just wines with names that really had nothing

[00:16:13] to do with what was in the bottle, it was just an accepted name for that style of wine. I remember when Fumé Blanc came along and that was a sophisticated new thing.

[00:16:23] There was a lot of Riesling in those days, a lot of Gwerchtriminer, a lot of things that are getting some cachet again, but Chardonnay moved very quickly from very low acreage into the King of Whites and it basically pushed almost everything else aside.

[00:16:37] Chardonnay was what you had to drink. We saw a similar thing with Merlot years later. And then you started a winery of your own? Joe Swan is the one who told me I needed to become a winemaker.

[00:16:50] There was a Zinfandel tasting in Calistoga and I was there and Joe Swan was there sitting next to me and I'd met Joe Swan a few years before and spent a fair amount of time tasting with him. And we were ready to unveil the wines.

[00:17:06] He looked down at it and saw my score sheet before I could cover it up and he asked me why I rated the wine number one. And I go, well, this second wine here, the one I rated second, is my favorite one tonight. I would drink this anytime.

[00:17:17] But I keep being drawn back to this other wine because I think someday it's going to be the best wine of this whole group. And he looked at me kind of quizzically and said, why? I had no idea what to say.

[00:17:26] I didn't know enough about anything at that time. I said, well, it's because it's got perfect balance and I think someday it will have outlived all of the other wines. It'll reach its apogee after the other wines are gone and it'll be a beautiful wine at that time.

[00:17:42] He looked at me, covered up his score sheet so I couldn't see it, and he said, you need to be a winemaker. And I told him, Joe, I can't be a winemaker. You're a winemaker. And he came up with a couple of reasons why I could be.

[00:17:52] Then they did the ranking. The wine I ranked number one was the group last. Everybody rated it last except me, including Joe. The wine I had second was the group first. Turns out they were both his wines. 74, which was a glorious wine.

[00:18:07] But the 75 was the wine everybody rated last because it just wasn't big and gnarly. It wasn't a big wine. Joe looked at me and he said, it just goes to show you can't legislate intelligence. And he told me he agreed that I was right.

[00:18:20] That would be a much better wine than 74 with time. That wine taught me a lot about what it means for a wine to be balanced. Oak and fruit and alcohol and tan and all those things were things I was led to believe

[00:18:35] had to be there to make a wine great. And I realized at that point I'd had old burgundies that were a color of pale rosé so you could smell the glass for an hour after the glass was empty.

[00:18:45] There was so much more to wine than just trying to narrow it down to four or five parameters that were obvious. There was nuances and complexity in things. So that was the path that got me on to making wine.

[00:18:56] My friends got tired of hearing me wax poetic about it all the time. And they either decided to run and hide or, well, if you're going to do this we want to be a part of it.

[00:19:05] So we pulled our meager resources and rented a little space in Petaluma. And that was the beginning of the end. And that was actually La Crema, right? La Crema Venera. I was originally going to school and working nights at Safeway at the same time because

[00:19:22] I bought a house and trying to pay the bills. I was doing essentially three full-time jobs simultaneously until I had a car accident. After 36 hours of being awake I was going home to take a shower and go to work. Driving into the sun on Bennett Valley Road.

[00:19:36] I thought I was still driving to the sun but I closed my eyes and didn't realize it and I was up in a ditch. That was sort of a wake-up call so I decided to do the wine thing full-time or not at all. That lasted up until 84.

[00:19:50] And what did you take from that experience? I learned that wines are made in the vineyard, not in the winery. I learned that all the experimentation I did was incredibly valuable because I wanted to

[00:20:02] learn what it was like to have a wine made from one end of the spectrum all the way to the other so I could decide where in the middle was probably the best place to be.

[00:20:10] 95% is cleaning up and most of what was left was wishing you'd done a better job. What grape varieties were you working with in those days? Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Did make a little bit of Cabernet Sauvignon from a vineyard on Summa Mountain but otherwise

[00:20:24] it was all Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Those are kind of early days for the Pinot, right? It was very early. I remember an article coming out talking about the class of 79, Acacia, Kistler, and La Creme of an Era.

[00:20:37] And Joe Swan asked me, he said, what are you making? I told him, he says, what, no Zinfandel? And I'll never live this down in my own mind. I said, but Joe, you make Zinfandel.

[00:20:46] Of course, he also made Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, but he was known as the master of Zinfandel. It seemed like he's got it locked up. He and Ridge own Zinfandel. There's no need to even try. Pinot Noir was still wide open.

[00:21:01] People had made good Pinot Noirs, but it was a place to start which I didn't think was owned by anyone. When did Joe Swan become your father-in-law? 1986. I helped him finish 87 Harvest. 88, he became, that winter he became ill.

[00:21:17] He became progressively worse through 88 and he made it to the YMCA, I think twice during Harvest in 88, but I basically took over in 88. And he passed away that January. He didn't quite make it to Super Bowl Sunday, which was sort of a religious holiday there.

[00:21:32] They had a really crummy little TV on a roll-around cart. They could swing between the kitchen and the den. And on Super Bowl Sunday, a bunch of people, including a bunch of people from Chez Panisse would come up.

[00:21:43] They'd drink great wine, watch the Super Bowl on the stupid little TV, eat great food. That was an ongoing ritual. It was sad that he made it through the holidays, but didn't make it to Super Bowl Sunday.

[00:21:52] So Super Bowl Sunday, we had a wake and celebrated Joe's life. What was Joe like? Joe was a very generous person, but he didn't suffer fools. There were people that would come and worship at his feet and kiss his boots and he'd have

[00:22:07] nothing to do with them because I think that bothered him. His fellow travelers included some very famous people who at the time didn't realize they were going to be famous, but they were all passionate like he was.

[00:22:20] I didn't realize at the time, but he was a great classical pianist. It wasn't until he was dying I even knew he ever looked at a piano. Sunday was football day. Monday was opera day. He read all of the time.

[00:22:31] He knew tons of artists because he had been an artist himself. He would go to France and see the greatest producers and wander the vineyards and do things with them. Go with people like Kermit Lynch, who Kermit said he was the translator because he spoke

[00:22:43] eight words of French and Kermit spoke none in the early days. Go to Chez Panisse regularly because he and Alice were very close friends. He traveled in those circles, but the people that were in it because they had money and

[00:22:55] they thought it was the right thing to do really didn't interest him. He wanted people to love wine for wine. With those kinds of people, there was no limit of what he would do.

[00:23:08] But if it was somebody else just coming to bring money to try to buy his wine because they were told they're supposed to like it, he would find a polite way of saying he had to go to the hardware store and be done with it.

[00:23:17] He didn't make a lot of wine and there was a lot of demand for it? Yeah. He only made four wines a year, Zinfandel, Pinot Noir, Cabernet and Chardonnay. He started out, sold it to friends and fellow airline pilots because he was a former airline pilot.

[00:23:34] And then I believe it was a tasting at the Vintners Club early on where his Zinfandel—I've heard this both ways. I've heard either it was almost unanimous first or it was almost unanimous last.

[00:23:47] The people that say it was unanimous last was because they didn't want anybody else to know about it, but he instantly had a waiting list for a mailing list so all the wine was on subscription. And he was very loyal.

[00:23:56] He kept a typed out list of everybody on a number. Generally it was strictly seniority. You couldn't buy your way up the list on that. He bought the property in 67. There were late 19th century Zinfandel wines on the property he made Zinfandel from, which

[00:24:13] is still—I wish we weren't down to our last bottle or two because I'm sure it'll outlive me. But 69, he was bonded that spring but he showed me papers later that the TTB or BATF allowed him to label and sell at 68.

[00:24:30] So that was really his first commercial wine. He replanted the vineyard in 69 because Zinfandel was everywhere and Andre Toll, a chef, told him he should plant Burgundy varieties, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay there because it was a cool sight.

[00:24:43] The reason he started the wine, he'd been making homemade wine since the 40s and it was just a logical extension of doing that. That's what he wanted to do as he neared retirement. He said he would only make wine—he made wine for himself, not for a market.

[00:24:58] And if it wasn't selling, it wasn't because the wine was bad, it was because there were not enough people that agreed with what he thought wine should be. And where do you think he formed that view of what wine should be?

[00:25:08] He made a visit to University of California, Davis in the 40s and met a graduate student there by the name of Maynard Monaghan who went to work for Bouilloux afterwards. He gave him advice on winemaking and stuff. They became very dear friends.

[00:25:23] In fact, Maynard made some wine at our place. He called it Monaghan's Folly. Anyway, Maynard was a good friend and Maynard introduced him to Andre Telleschef. So Andre became a friend and mentor too. Joe always thought that wine should be balanced in all their components.

[00:25:40] Too much of anything was just too much. He had this idea about being this complete composure and he liked European wines because they weren't overdone. Though I think it was a long gradual thing, but that was just his view of what wine should be.

[00:25:58] Coming out of the Prohibition era and then into when he was making wine, it seems like he had a better grasp of refrigeration and maceration as two ideas. And maybe also the harvest time. Coming up with wines that tasted fairly supple but with some grip.

[00:26:21] Less rustic than some of those contemporary 60s and 70s wines. I think it's very true. He believed in using barrels and after experimenting with some scraped out bourbon barrels, he gave up the idea of ever using American oak again.

[00:26:39] Paul Draper, for years, they'd get a Christmas card from Paul. I saw Paul a few years ago. I said, I found a couple of the Christmas cards you sent Joe. And he looked at me and goes, every single one of them says, once again Joe, we tried

[00:26:50] some experiments with some of those French oak barrels you like so much and decided they just won't work for us. So it was always a standing joke between them. But Joe was really one of the first proponents of French oak barrels.

[00:27:02] They were used, but he was very, very much, he said American oak was just too aggressive and he didn't like what it did to the wine. He didn't like a lot of new oak. He liked mostly older barrels.

[00:27:12] He believed in longer aging than I currently do on most wines. But I think in the context of what he was doing, it made sense. He believed that crops should be very severely reduced through pruning and or thinning.

[00:27:27] He thought the California sprawl jungle system of vine training was just absolutely absurd. He tried to emulate some of the French ideas, but using our wide spacing and things, which was kind of interesting. He didn't embrace close vine spacing and partly because it's nearly impossible to get equipment

[00:27:43] to work it. But he tried to adapt some of the European things that he saw. He early, fairly early on started using stems as opposed to whole clusters. He would do the mesh bag immersion thing. Oh, so they're separated stems in a bag.

[00:28:01] Yeah, that was something that came along. A lot of things that he got, it was advice from Andre, Andre Teleshev. Andre was asked, and I don't remember if it was Joe asking him or what, but I remember his response very clearly.

[00:28:15] I made one and a half great Pinot Noirs, the 47 or whatever vintage it was that Joe said was the best wine he'd ever had or California. So I know it was great. The other one, only time will tell.

[00:28:25] So he was not really a Pinot Noir producer, but I think his overall idea about wines being understated greatly influenced Joe as well and the wines he liked from Europe.

[00:28:37] I think it was based more on the wines that he drank from Europe gave him an idea of what kind of wines he wanted to make. And coming from that time, some of the things he thought were actually pretty quaint if

[00:28:51] you take them out of context at the time. But in the context of the time, they were pretty revolutionary. And even though not everything always worked and now some things he wouldn't do at all,

[00:29:03] they were very much out of the mainstream for most people in California at the time. So what are some examples of that? Well, he took wine from Pedrancelli, he bought wine from 68 and 70. Immediately after fermentation, he barreled it down a barrel.

[00:29:17] And there was a vast difference when he had it in the Redwood aged Pedrancelli wines. Both good wines, but very, very different. Early on he did skin contact with Chardonnay and got a little carried away a couple of times.

[00:29:31] I remember one year he harvested on Saturday and a little 500 gallon Redwood fermenter and he coated the inside with this liquid wax kind of thing he'd paint every year on them. So it weren't picking up any wood, it was just a container.

[00:29:41] So he put it in there to get some skin contact, but then Sunday came along, well that was football day. And oh shoot, Monday is opera. Crap, Tuesday I better press this stuff. It was pretty big and gnarly.

[00:29:53] Turned out to be a great wine after a number of years, but he realized, I've gone too far, we've got to back off on the skin contact time with whites. So there are a lot of people who really just getting into the skin contact time and did

[00:30:05] it as a regular basis, but he decided he liked more delicate white wines. He didn't put a Chardonnay through malolactic until 1980. That was his first one, they were all non-malolactic. He loved acidity. Extended fermentations for red wines.

[00:30:23] By and large, most people wanted to get things fermented and pressed. If it was dry or near dry, you press it, that's just the way you made things. He spent time in Burgundy there with cold cellars and grapes coming in cold and higher acidities and lower pH.

[00:30:37] There was a lot of differences, but he liked the results and he was trying to extrapolate from the wine he liked and what they did. So he experimented with a lot of the early Burgundian techniques. He became friends with Jacques Sesse of Domaine du Jacques.

[00:30:49] In fact, in 1988 when he was very near the end, he asked me how I felt about whole cluster. I go, well, there's a lot of reasons to do it. He says, how about my vineyard?

[00:31:01] I go, well, I think we could cure some of the tannin problems if we did 100% whole cluster and able to extend the fermentation. So he said, well, you should do it then. So I did. I did 100% whole cluster and I did that for three years.

[00:31:14] It really helped in the 80s. He had pruned the vine so severely, he insisted on picking really low sugar levels. He wanted to make van der Garde. He didn't have this concept it could be really great young and age well. There weren't a lot of examples of that.

[00:31:29] There was either or. Tannin was always a big issue and had to get an egg white finding of things to make the wines drinkable. But he was already looking at those things they were doing.

[00:31:42] Some of the people in the forefront of the modern era Burgundy, it had been done historically, but there was a whole new way. He was constantly looking at what these new wave people were doing.

[00:31:51] He would start picking at lower sugar level because he didn't like alcohol and he was looking for more background, more tannin. He thought a couple of the wines he made in the 70s, he had gone too far and they're over the top.

[00:32:03] The 76 Zin being an example, I think it was the 74 Pinot Noir where my late mother-in-law told me the story so many times it had to have been true. She said Joel and Joe were building the winery.

[00:32:14] It was a tin shed but they were putting it up and weren't in the vineyard enough. Andre came over, Andre Teller's chef came over to walk through the vineyard. So he walked back up the winery and being a lot shorter than either of the two of them

[00:32:26] stood before them and Joe was wearing one of his recycled airline shirts with big lapels. Andre reached up grabbed him by the lapels, gazed into his eyes and said, Joseph, the grapes are crying out for their maker.

[00:32:40] She said at that point both he and Joel dropped their tools, ran to the phone, started going through the Rolodex and calling anybody they could to come and pick grapes. The wine was over 15% alcohol which pissed Joe off to no end and despite the fact that

[00:32:56] he didn't like what it was because of the numbers and things, it turned out to be an amazingly great wine. So sometimes your expectations on wine don't always fit the wine but he vowed after that he would never allow that to happen again.

[00:33:10] How has your use of whole cluster evolved over time? My earliest La Crema vinera I went all the way to 100% whole cluster on a lot of wines because I wanted to drop the Domaine DuJacques model. Joe Swan was really enamored of it.

[00:33:26] I did a lot of experimentation with it and then I backed off and then at Swan, tannins in the grapes were a real big problem. Joe would prune the vines so severely that they had a lot of potential growth, they were trying to put it somewhere.

[00:33:43] The trunk would be covered with stuff he'd have to sucker off. Second crop, they were just trying to put their energy somewhere. He didn't want it to, he didn't want to have low production.

[00:33:53] And then he would want to pick it at lower sugar levels so the wines with age became great wines. The first 10 years they were almost undrinkable, they were so backward and hard and nasty. And I was determined to fix that issue.

[00:34:09] But in the winery having to fix shortfalls is a lot more difficult than if you did it correctly at the source. So the first three years I did 100% whole cluster and I didn't do it for a whole cluster effect.

[00:34:23] In order to keep the fermentation going as long as possible, because I did trials early on with Pinot Noir and found that shorter fermentation, press it fairly early, get off the skins, everything would be just fine except you'd have this overtly fruity character.

[00:34:38] Leaving it very long time would go from overtly fruity to be a more complex fruit. And the aromatics would change, we'd get a different feeling in the tannins. They may be the same quantity but it would be a rounder mouthfeel. In between was the dead zone.

[00:34:52] It would be tannic and yet it would be neither fish nor fowl. So I made the decision early on, I was going with longer fermentations but to get it to go longer you had to do something.

[00:35:02] And I still wanted warmer temperatures at peak so it was all these trade-offs and I found that by using whole clusters, the juice being released more slowly, you could extend the fermentation and keep an intact cap without having to worry about protecting and closing a tank up.

[00:35:16] So it evolved into longer and longer fermentations. And so I went to longer at Joe's but in order to get even longer for those three years, in order to try to get the tannins softer, we went right to 100% whole cluster.

[00:35:29] In 1990, we changed the vineyard practices dramatically and the tannin problem seemed to go away. What were some of the changes on that vineyard practice? Joe had planted the vines, he originally bought wire and stuff, was going to trellis them but he hated what had been happening in California.

[00:35:48] So he tried to emulate in a strange sort of way a Burgundian thing but it wasn't. I never quite got out of him how I thought it was Burgundian but he was trying to achieve an end result by doing something differently.

[00:36:00] He trained them up a stake, a high stake and then cut them off at the top. Old Zinfandel vineyards they would generally cut them off low and it was called head training, not head pruning but head training.

[00:36:10] And then where the buds grew out, you'd get canes coming out below that point and each year you would cut those back to two buds for the next year and that's called spur pruning, so head trained spur prune. He did a variation on that.

[00:36:24] He let them grow high and cut them off but he had what he called three stations, low, middle of the vine and the very top where he would leave the spurs. Then the canes would come out each year but he would kneel before the vine and observe

[00:36:36] it and it was as if he was a sculptor and looking at a piece of material rather than saying I'm going to go and sculpt or whatever. He looked at material to see what was inside it and that's where he approached the vine.

[00:36:47] You look at it and say, okay, what's its growth potential? Where are the bud positions I can leave that won't shade each other and next year we'll grow new ones that won't shade the other lower level.

[00:36:58] He had this whole three-dimensional two-year plan for each vine in which drove everybody nuts because there was no consistency. He couldn't train people to do it because every vine would be different but that was

[00:37:08] his thing and that worked actually pretty well if you want to put the time and labor in it and pick vines individually and do all the other things necessary. It was hard to get a crew to figure it out because they couldn't and it also allowed

[00:37:22] him to go too far I think in punishing the vine and making it produce less because he still had this Grand Cru idea, any vine produced over X fruit was overcropped. His thinking based on the examples around him made sense. There was low production old vineyards were cool.

[00:37:40] There was California sprawl which is bad. He was trying to approach what old vineyards or extremely low vigor sites got but he was also suppressing the vine growth too much.

[00:37:52] So I decided I had to get rid of that so I put a trellising system in and after lots of consultation with growers I respected, decided to put them on a single fruiting wire

[00:38:01] and a bilateral cordon where I laid a cane down and let it become basically a horizontal trunk halfway to the next vine and then continue with a spur pruning where the canes would

[00:38:11] grow spaced out far enough apart not to shade each other and then use what's called a vertical shoot positioning. Have two sets of catch wires above and we train the shoots between them and move them

[00:38:20] up to keep a narrow plane of the leaves so the leaves weren't shading each other and get maximum sunlight on them. It was fairly new at the time but now it's just one of the normal ways of growing grapes.

[00:38:32] I still like whole clusters for extending the fermentation period a lot. So we'll range in a typical year 20-30% whole cluster. I will occasionally do 100% whole cluster a lot just for jollies and since we don't

[00:38:46] crush any of the fruit, I should say we don't crush, we try not to crush the fruit. We have a de-stimmer not a crusher so it's almost all whole berry anyway but I think they're yielding the juice more slowly over time.

[00:38:58] In general we have a 2 or 3 day passive cold soak period before we get much activity. I like to see a temperature up around 92-93 degrees Fahrenheit at peak. I don't want there the whole time but I want it at peak because I like the change in aromatics.

[00:39:15] And I find that with colder fermentation temperatures you get more of those pure fruity aromas. With warmer fermentation temperatures it's still fruit but it's moved into a different kind of fruit. To me it's a more complex, more interesting component. The kind of aromatics that I find intriguing.

[00:39:34] I find the combination of time but also needing to be a higher fermentation temperature in order to get that. But we generally reach a plateau where it gets fairly warm and then it levels off and it starts to drop in temperature. The cap will soften a little bit.

[00:39:53] Once it reaches about 21 days I'll start tasting it every day to see what the mouth feels like, to see if we reach that magical point where I think it has the proper mouth feel.

[00:40:02] And it doesn't matter if we have a strong cap or not, that's the point we press at. But it gives us that ability to extend the time. When it comes to Pinot Noir a lot of times a name that comes up is Swan because there's

[00:40:14] a Swan clone of Pinot Noir and it's in a number of different vineyards in California. What is the history of the Swan clone of Pinot? Technically it's not a clone. Grapes are like people. You cross two grapevines, you get very different offspring. They're not true to the parents.

[00:40:35] If you want to reproduce a grapevine that carries the characteristics of the parent you have to take a cutting from that grapevine. However they will have variations within the vine. I remember apple trees, they called them sports.

[00:40:48] Gravencine apples, a gravencine grower once said, oh your apple tree, we had old graves, that's a black grave. I said what's a black grave? He goes that was a sport of grave that had much redder color and a lot of people thought it was better.

[00:41:00] And it's really nice. He's had these variations of gravencine apples. They're all sports, people cut cuttings from it, plant it, and they had variations on the gravencine apple. With a Pinot Noir vine you can within a vine have variants. That's how Pinot Blanc arose, Pinot Meunier.

[00:41:16] They're all genetically identical but they were pigment phenotypes of the parent grapevine. You can have Pinot Gris and find clusters that are all black and all white on the same vine sometimes. So if you take cuttings from a vine it doesn't guarantee it's going to represent what you

[00:41:32] think of as a vine, it represents what that particular bud has produced. So if you want a clone of a particular cluster you take a bud from that cane and over time propagate it into new vines so it can be traced back to that single bud.

[00:41:46] That is a true clone. In Burgundy you have often plantings of what's called selection mausole where they go out and look at things and they pick vines based on characteristics they like or the fruit they've liked and take them.

[00:41:59] So they are a selection from that vineyard but they're not identical. Joe's came from a planting UC Davis experimental vineyard advisor did back in, must have been, well it had to have been in the 60s because that's when Joe got the cuttings.

[00:42:14] He had gone to the original Palmasson Martin Ray plantings down in Saratoga and found vines there that he thought had desirable characteristics. He found three vines, he flagged them, followed them for three years and then took a selection,

[00:42:29] we don't know if it was one vine, one bud or all of them, I have a feeling it was probably from all of them. We have a recording somewhere of Joe answering a question of an interviewer and talking about

[00:42:39] this so we're pretty sure that what he told me was accurate because we have it on tape as well. But he planted them up there to further evaluate because Pinot Noir was not well understood

[00:42:48] or well liked in California, there wasn't a lot available and Joe and Andre Teleshef went to look at these vines because Andre had heard about them and was quite fascinated with them so he arranged to get cuttings and that was the basis of what Joe planted in

[00:43:02] the vineyard. He planted in the vineyard, he liked it because the clusters were small, they were without wings or shoulders, they looked like little pine cones, they produced almost no fruit, all the things he thought was desirable because that's what the Grand Cru vineyards in Burgundy had.

[00:43:15] Those very same attributes are what led to the demise of the Rove that apparently was ripped out not long afterwards because no one cared about vines that didn't produce any fruit, they wanted things that were productive and if it was good that was okay but they

[00:43:26] had to be productive first and foremost. So as far as we know he was the only one that took cuttings from there. It wasn't until Francis Mahoney who started Carneros Creek Winery wanted to plant Pinot

[00:43:36] Noir and Carneros but didn't know what to plant so he collected all the nursery selections that were available and then went around and collected cuttings from various vineyards in California, somewhere now like Shalom and Mount Eden and other places and planted those

[00:43:51] and he got cuttings from Joe and he just labeled the rows by where he got them. And apparently he was the one who put the name Swan Clone on that thing and people came

[00:43:59] to look at his vineyard and they picked up on it and Joe had never called it that. But as far as we know we are the only mother block of it and there is diversity in the

[00:44:09] vineyard but Joe every year would walk the vineyard, always carried flagging tape on his belt and if he found a vine that displeased him, either it had too much crop or was too

[00:44:20] vigorous or didn't droop so it wasn't true Pinot Noir or it had a shoulder or wing or it had some other offense that he had been told in Burgundy was an offense, he would

[00:44:30] flag it and then that winter off would go his head and he'd graft it with a cutting from another vine so the vineyard's been selected over many times. Cuttings from there are taken over time and depending on who got what cuttings from where

[00:44:43] they could have been picked for different characteristics. There is a Swan Clone however out there that FPMS has cleaned up and propagated and it's known besides its number as the Swan Clone, it is a true clone and I have never worked

[00:44:59] with it directly but our next door neighbor is doing a huge replant of missing and weak vines in his vineyard. He has three Dijon clones there and he's putting all the other ones in as a true Swan Clone so we'll actually get to work with a Swan Clone.

[00:45:12] From what you just said there's probably a few different kinds of Swan out there in the world or a few things that have the name Swan but when Swan comes up as a Pinot Noir

[00:45:23] some attributes of it tend to be light pigmentation, little bit of a thinner skin, smaller berry, smaller bunch and what seems to be a lot of perfumed juiciness on the palate when you make wine out of it. Would you agree with that or?

[00:45:40] I would agree with that for the most part because I've worked with it from a number of vineyards and I think that is a true characteristic of it. You see some variation. Our vineyard has the most darkly pigmented Swan selection of anything I've worked with

[00:45:54] but that's a site. This site is very low production, poor soils, very tiny clusters and tiny berry weight vis-a-vis even other vineyards that have Swan in it. But within a range of things from a vineyard it often has lighter pigmentation despite the

[00:46:10] small berry size which you think would be darker, more like Clare or something which tends to look fairly similar in terms of cluster architecture but generally it is quite a bit more pigment from at least the ones I've worked with.

[00:46:23] One thing I've noticed with Swan and most of the ones I've worked with is pH is usually on the lower side so true acidity is usually really good with it. So where Joe purchases called the Trenton Estate now? Yes, I called it that.

[00:46:39] The wines from the estate, the Pinot Noir being the main one, were always just labeled Estate Bottled and I would get visits from Europe. We sell wine in Europe and a lot of people in France know of us.

[00:46:50] I had this question posed to me a number of times, why is your most expensive wine your lowest level wine? I just couldn't get it. I explained to them, no this is our estate.

[00:47:00] Well then it dawned on me, well estate in France doesn't mean a whole lot if you're down on the other side of the Route Nationale, maybe your estate but that's just van Ordenaire.

[00:47:10] The places even if they're just not classified by the Louis D but they're good enough they would have a name. I said okay it's time for us to have a name for this vineyard.

[00:47:18] This was the town of Trenton and it's Estate Bottled and so I on whim just said well let's call it Trenton Estate and it stuck. So it's Russian River and specifically it's Laguna Ridge. Russian River is a fairly large AVA in sort of central West Sonoma County.

[00:47:37] Fog intrusion is what is our main defining characteristic. It's our natural air conditioning, it cools us down, we don't respirate acids at night like a lot of warmer areas do. That's one reason we have typically very good natural acidity levels.

[00:47:53] What is the soil type at the Trenton Estate? We are pure gold ridge, fine sandy loam with not much clay anywhere. We'll find clay pockets occasionally but generally if you dig down through the soil maybe only

[00:48:06] a foot in some places you'll come to solid sandstone and it's hard to break up with tools but if you take and rub your thumbnail over a piece of that sandstone you instantly create almost like powder. Do you still have the original planting of Pinot Noir? We do.

[00:48:20] This year it will be their 40th vintage. What's the typical alcohol of a finished wine from Pinot Noir at Trenton Estate? We take samples and test them and I want to know what the numbers are because I think

[00:48:35] they inform decisions but at the end of the day it's the condition of the vine. The vine is losing its leaves, if the fruit is starting to dehydrate, any of those things are happening we've got to pick because there's no upside to that. There's no upside at all.

[00:48:47] Even if they're still tasting green you're not going to get ripe flavors when the vines are shutting down. So that being said if it's still within a normal conditions to where you have a bigger

[00:48:57] window I'm looking for berries to come off the cluster easily, to have the kind of flavors I'm looking for which I can't tell you exactly what they are but I can tell you when they're underripe and overripe and I want that little split down the middle in between.

[00:49:13] We try to harvest them then and the numbers have to be what the numbers are. If we were forced in extreme conditions of some year where sugars were just through the roof it's legal to add water back now.

[00:49:24] I choose not to add anything if I don't ever have to but I wouldn't be afraid to do it if it would make a better wine. We just bottled a 2016 and I believe the alcohol was 12-7 but it's not uncommon to see 14-1

[00:49:37] to 14-5 but still with fairly comparable titratable acidity and pH levels. That seems to be the major constant is we tend to have a fairly narrow band when it comes to acidity. It's a broader band when it comes to sugar levels.

[00:49:52] Oh that's interesting and you see a connection with cooler and warmer years there? I tell you Zinfandel, some of the highest alcohol Zinfandel has ever made were the coldest years and people go well it should be lower.

[00:50:06] Well you think it would but when you're growing grapes in a cooler climate you have to have a certain amount of time in the vine for the vine to develop all the flavors and things and to bring the acid back down into balance.

[00:50:18] If you're picking based on sugar numbers sometimes the acid in cooler climates will be so high you'll have to deacidulate because the wines will be totally out of balance. Color development, all of these other things are more a function of time.

[00:50:32] In cooler years you have to leave them on the vine longer normally just to get them to that place. Hot years sometimes you actually have to leave them on the vine longer because the sugar is outstripping the flavors.

[00:50:47] So it's a combination of factors, there's no one rule for every year. Again some of the highest alcohol Zinfandels I've made have been in cold years. The Mancini Ranch one year picked it in the first few days in November over 17% alcohol

[00:51:02] and the pH was, I think the grapes came in about 3.3. I sold a lot of that to the UK. When they got it they called me up in a panic and said, the guy at the barn said we have illegal alcohol here.

[00:51:14] And I said well what's wrong with the alcohol? And he says your statement says 17.5. I said well it was 17.3, I had to round it up. They said well that's not the wine we tasted. I said yes it was.

[00:51:23] I ran the alcohol, I took it to the lab, they got the same thing. I waited a week, I sent a bottle in with no label, they got the same thing again and asked the alcohol. No one believed it was even 15. The wine was in balance.

[00:51:34] The 2012, the same wine I think was 12.2 of the same vineyard. And the earlier one was of course a bigger wine, but in terms of ripeness character it tasted no riper than the 12. And that's something, it took me a long time to learn those lessons, that you really have

[00:51:52] to trust your senses as much as any of the numbers. Joe, we actually changed grape sources a few different times. With Zinfandel. And it gets a little complex, but the wines you were referring to earlier, 74, 75, that would have been Taldeschi's? Correct.

[00:52:10] He made Zinfandel from existing estate vines in 68, and in 69 he got some Zinfandel from Taldeschi. 70, by communication issue he said they forgot that he was getting grapes, he didn't get his Zinfandel, but they sold him some Gamay grapes, which we now know as Valdegay.

[00:52:28] In 71 he was back to getting the Zinfandel, which he got through 76 from Taldeschi. So all the early Zinfandels, with the exception of the first estate, was all from Taldeschi. And then it sort of moved a lot. It moved a lot. The Zinfandel moved a lot.

[00:52:42] He grew Pinot Noir, he grew Chardonnay, and he grew a tiny bit of Cabernet Sauvignon. Those were always the estate. But the Zinfandel source changed. Joe said that too many people found out where he was getting grapes, and so he would lose sources.

[00:52:55] And I think there was some truth to that, but part of it, Gallo also was buying half the grapes in Sonoma County in those early years. A lot of the early Hardy Burgundy was Sonoma County old vine stuff.

[00:53:06] And Gallo didn't like growers taking some of the grapes out and selling them to somebody else and then getting what was left. They bought the whole vineyard. That was just the way they worked. So that might have been part of it.

[00:53:17] There were other upstart people at the time, and Joel Peterson helped him build the winery and made his first vintage there for Ravenswood. He started going out and sourcing grapes too, but there were other people running around sourcing grapes. And so he had this slightly paranoid feeling.

[00:53:32] He felt he was losing sources. So he tried to disguise it, except he wasn't very good at it because he used wooden lug boxes with his name branded on it. He had a 46 Chevy flatbed truck that everybody recognized.

[00:53:43] He was sitting by the side of the road with his boxers and he was getting grapes. You got grapes in Windsor I know one year, Sonoma Valley somewhere. The vineyard that's across the street from Lytton Springs is now owned by them, one year.

[00:53:56] We know in 77 it was all from Mendocino County near Ptalmage. 78 he got some of the Mendocino fruit, but he wasn't happy with it so he went down to San Luis Obispo for some reason and got some grapes down there.

[00:54:08] San Luis Obispo to Paso Robles, I'm not really clear on which one, but he brought those back. Didn't like the results, so in 78 instead of a vintage wine he blended some of the 77 Mendocino

[00:54:19] along with the other stuff from 78 and created a second label called Trenton Cellars, a non-vintage Zinfandel. 79 back in Sonoma County up until... 85 was all from Frauti Ranch which was two doors down from us, 1910 planting.

[00:54:36] He told me if he realized at the time it was right in his backyard, some of the best grapes anywhere, he wouldn't have looked any further. But 86 there was a low production vineyard that would produce one ton an acre at most in any given year.

[00:54:48] It was even less that year. So he was short, so Cecil Deloach agreed to sell him some fruit from what's now called the Pelletti Ranch and made that that year. And then 87 a friend of his doctor's who was also a family friend, as a favor to the doctor

[00:55:06] he said to go look at the vineyard in Sonoma Valley. He took one look at it and said he thought it'd be pretty cool, it was probably in the 1880s. So he looked at it and a vineyard I had worked with, it's called Ziegler Vineyard.

[00:55:18] I showed that to Joe, he decided that was a good vineyard too so suddenly he had three Zinfandel vineyards. And that was the year he was not happy because he also had a good crop of Pinot Noir and

[00:55:28] he had to build two barrel racks and the first time ever have barrels too high. That kind of paints a picture of how small the winery production was that he didn't have two barrels stacked high.

[00:55:40] He had the tools he needed and didn't like toolboxes because you lose things in toolboxes. So all the wrenches and everything he needed regularly he would leave them on top of a barrel. And I remember seeing Joe standing at the door gazing from one corner of the winery

[00:55:56] to the other and then leaving. Where are you going? Hardware store. Why? I have to get a wrench. He said, you got a wrench? If I can't see it, I don't have it, I'm going to waste time looking for it.

[00:56:06] After he died, we found like six of each of the four sizes that fit the equipment that he had. Joe liked having simplicity and organization and things. In keeping barrels one high did a lot of things.

[00:56:18] One it made it easy to work with and two he said it prevented him from making too much wine. The danger was that if he had more room and more capacity like everybody else, he would expand to fill it. He made sure the equipment was small.

[00:56:35] The press was a really dinky little electronic press. The only thing big was he had a Demoiselles stemmer crusher, which he thought the greatest thing he'd ever seen. But Jacques Sesse had one in France so he thought he should have one too.

[00:56:49] What do you think his technique with Zinfandel really amounted to? He did look at numbers and sometimes got too hung up on numbers. He wanted to be lower bricks so he wouldn't get overripe fruit. But he tasted fruit.

[00:57:00] He really, I think, understood what fruit tasted like that would give him the kind of wines he wanted to make. He was very in tune to that. He tried to treat it as gently as possible. He would go into open top fermenters, Redwood.

[00:57:15] He had one dairy tank outside he could ferment in. Punched down by hand. Everything was always punched down. He believed very firmly in that. He would taste the wines and decide when they were ready to press. It wasn't based on numbers of days.

[00:57:31] I believe he always pressed when the cap was probably pretty sloppy but hadn't fallen yet. But the whole cluster thing came in later. That was a gradual addition. I fully embraced that when I took over and started doing about the same amount of whole

[00:57:46] clusters typically I did with the Pinot Noir. Where do you think Joel Peterson, who you referred to earlier as helping with the winery and then starting his own venture out of that winery, where do you think he fit in with the Zinfandel conversation with Joe at that time?

[00:58:01] He came to learn from Joe. Rich Vineyard was doing great things, there were other people, but Joe was a very interesting individual. He didn't talk a lot, but if you could tease out his philosophy, it was fairly basic and fairly simple.

[00:58:19] Joel I think had the science background but he was fascinated about that whole thing. They became very good friends and they came to help him. He wanted to learn the Joe magic and the Joe magic was pretty simple.

[00:58:29] It was just a very simple philosophy in sticking to it. Joel embraced that and carried it further because he started working with very diverse vineyards that all had their own voice. He really amplified that and started making, instead of one wine, he started making a number

[00:58:48] of wines with the same philosophy but they also expressed a place. They were different from each other. They weren't just, here's a winemaker making wine, I'll call it a different flavor. They were truly different wines.

[00:59:00] When we talk about Zinfandel vineyards in California, some of those would have been mixed black vineyards, right? Oh sure. Do you think that sometimes Joe was doing co-ferments and then labeling them as Zinfandel? Oh yeah. Rich for years called Geyserville Zinfandel because they thought it was Zinfandel.

[00:59:16] Now they realize it was not even 75%. You talk to these old time growers, what do you have? They say Zinfandel. I remember Angelo Fraudi one time, he said, Angelo, you said it's all Zinfandel. He said, it is. That's what my father planted. And they go, well, what's this?

[00:59:31] Oh that's Barbera. There's six of those out there. What? Yeah, an uncle brought them from Italy. Well, what's this? It was something else. And I ran down a half dozen different grape types. He knew what they all were. He knew where the vines were.

[00:59:42] In his mind, they were Zinfandel. That was almost a generic term for a largely Zinfandel vineyard but it encompassed these other, embraced these other things. It was just a different way of thinking. There's almost anything to think of somewhere in these old vineyards.

[00:59:58] You never know because some vines don't produce anything and unless you pick them all separately and weigh them, it's pretty hard to tell. There's a handful of the more common ones you see almost universally. Little Alicante, little Petite Syrah, Carignan.

[01:00:11] You see less Petite Syrah down the Rush River Valleys. It's cooler. But occasionally you'll find more Vedra out there. You'll find Grand Noir instead of Alicante Boucher, another Tenturier grape. Lots of white grapes. I don't think Joe ever allowed any of the white grapes to be picked though.

[01:00:29] And I followed that rule for the most part when we picked. I'd tell the pickers it sounded ripe. It's the vineyard that's what we pick. If you try to make just Zinfandel out of it, I remember one time we did that one year in Dry Creek.

[01:00:41] They had only the Zinfandel picked and didn't pick the others. And they said they had customers asking, well, what happened to the vineyard? Well, this is it. No, it doesn't taste like it. This isn't Zinfandel.

[01:00:51] So the concept of that vineyard had a character and part of it was a spice that was added by these other things. And I don't know where the magic percentage number with anything is. I think Pinot Noir is a lot less forgiving than say Zinfandel is.

[01:01:04] But I think a lot of those old vineyards are more complete and they're truly better examples of Zinfandel than pure Zinfandel because they have a built-in complexity that pure Zinfandel would take several years to gain.

[01:01:16] It seems like you can open up a Swan Zin today from the 70s, which that means that we're pegging it at about 40 years old and seems good to me. I just don't know of a lot of other Zinfandels that I would say, yeah, 40 years, no problem.

[01:01:31] Joe Swan had a way of approaching wine. He felt every grape he made wine from, he had to make it to be the best wine he could possibly be. He never entered with these preconceived notions, oh, Zinfandel, that's a second class grape so we'll do this with it.

[01:01:44] I think that basic philosophy or basic belief had a lot to do with it. Also, you can't put ageability in a wine. It's either in the vineyard or it's not in the vineyard. You can reduce it and oftentimes it's done because people are trying to make wines to

[01:01:59] be marketable. He didn't care if the wine was ready to drink. He would just say hold and tell people to put it in their cellars. When he died we had tons of people coming up and saying, I have this wine, when can I start drinking?

[01:02:11] I go, what do you mean start drinking? You've been drinking for the last 15 years. Joe gave me the case, he shook my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, understand these aren't ready to drink.

[01:02:21] People took it for gospel and that's one reason I think some of them are still around, which is nice. But I think Joe didn't have this idea that he had to do things to make it more drinkable.

[01:02:32] He liked wines he called van de guard, wines that would achieve great age. So if you start with vineyards that are capable of that and you don't try to do things to make them drinkable earlier, you stand a very good chance of being able to make an

[01:02:46] age-worthy wine. It's not about tan and it's not about any components. It's about balancing the wine and just allowing it to be that. I've had many great, great aged Zinfandels over the years, but most of them, the vast majority have come from the cool coastal areas of California.

[01:03:05] I've come to believe that acidity has at least as much to do with, it's not a number, it's actually the apparent acidity, has at least as much to do with ageability as any other component. Again, it has to be in balance.

[01:03:17] But coastal climate vineyards of grapes like Zinfandel, you tend to be able to harvest them with better natural balance. You don't have to acidulate, you don't have to do things to them. It's just naturally there.

[01:03:30] And those are the vineyards Joe was getting grapes from and that we continue to get grapes from. The grape variety where you've probably made the biggest change in terms of technique is in Chardonnay, right? I think so, yeah. When I first started making Chardonnay, 1979 was the first year.

[01:03:46] They were very graceful Chardonnays and then over the next few years I got more and more into skin contact, down to the point where I made a wine called Gonzo that was one of the first orange wines probably made in California.

[01:03:57] Joe Swan also did a fair amount of skin contact pretty regularly as I did early on and then I totally went the opposite direction with 100% whole cluster. And unless I'm going to make an orange wine, that's what I do with all our white wines.

[01:04:13] They're 100% whole cluster, pressed fairly gently, settled briefly and then the Chardonnays go to barrel. And you're doing Malo. Absolutely. We have high natural acidities where we are. But even though I'm an acid head, I really love acidity. The wines actually have better balance than we do Malo lactic.

[01:04:31] It's not to get diacetyl, it's a tool to bring the acid into balance. Joe also made a small amount of Cabernet Sauvignon, right? Yes. On the estate, the hill goes fairly level and then drops off and has south-facing and levels off at the bottom.

[01:04:49] He loved Cabernet and decided he needed to plant some but it was probably too cold in the area. So on that south-facing slope where the soils are very shallow, he planted Cabernet above

[01:04:59] it as Pinot Noir and below it where the soils started to deepen up, he planted Chardonnay. So there's three flavors in one row based on his idea of sun exposure and potential ripening. And it's very late ripening there but it does ripen. It was planted in 1969.

[01:05:17] Some of them are huge, thick, giant vines. You look at them compared to the Pinot Noir, it's pretty funny. Have you finessed the technique at all for Cabernet since taking over? A minor amount. Joe had more vines in, he would get two barrels a year.

[01:05:31] Now we get a good year, a barrel, a barrel and a quarter. And he would pick, partly it was because of the way he trained the vines and treated the vines. At the top of that little slope they would ripen before they would in the middle or the

[01:05:43] bottom. So he would go out and he would taste the grapes and he would pick them based on when he thought they were ripe and he'd start them in a crock.

[01:05:52] And as he got more, it went to a bigger crock and towards the end he had a little 500 gallon Redwood Fermenter, he would bucket them into them and finish it in that. So it was actually a progressive fermentation over a week and a half or two weeks sometimes.

[01:06:05] And I can't say that was bad because some of those wines are absolutely amazing. But it's also a bit of a logistical nightmare. And fortunately we found that when we changed the vine training that we were able through pruning and thinning, tighten that window up quite a bit.

[01:06:23] Most of the time we can pick it all at one pass. The most I have to do is two. That's the only real difference there. Being a very cold site you would expect to have to fight the green veggie characteristics

[01:06:36] but that's something we don't have to worry about. It tends to be more red-fruited, higher toned, lower tannin, higher acid than typical California Cabernets. And I've never had an estate Cabernet that had much in the way of noticeable tannin. The tannins are there I'm sure.

[01:06:53] It's rather interesting about how little apparent tannin there is. There have been some years in the past it had a distinctly minty character. We've never quite figured out where that comes from. 85 was that in spades. It was just, I just loved that wine.

[01:07:11] We have so little Cabernet and I just have to bottle it by itself. People have been following it forever and we used to sell a lot of it to the UK just

[01:07:18] because I didn't want to have to fight with people and say no it's not a Robert Parker Cabernet so don't expect it. So looking back on the vintages, what have been some key vintages for you in terms of learning moments?

[01:07:32] What are vintages that you really line up with a realization? 80. I learned a lot that year because we had a cool growing season and then a big heat spell. I remember Rene DeRosa telling me that, I think it was Robert Mondavi, was bringing in tanker

[01:07:47] trucks on the railroad siding up there to ferment it because there was no fermenters anywhere. People were picking grapes based on the value of the grapes versus maturity because they had to come off because we had this huge heat spell and it was frying everything.

[01:07:59] I learned an awful lot about picking to maturity and deciding to have the guts to either pick when the grapes are ripe or if they go away, they go away because you can't make great wine out of bad grapes. It just doesn't work.

[01:08:15] So that was a real moving moment. 89, we had very early rains that didn't relent and a fellow I'd known for a long time, a very famous grape grower that then was just growing grapes for big bulk wineries.

[01:08:31] He had been by, stopped by, I was out, I think my wife and I, and we were out shoot thinning and pulling leaves and he drove up and he says, what are you doing?

[01:08:39] We told him and he shook his head and he says, you spend all this time and money doing all of this stuff and thinning crop and everything. I just grow grapes, you know, spending that money on farming and hey, take the grapes

[01:08:49] every year and give me a big paycheck. The rains came that year and his vineyard got salvaged to make wine at a bulk wine rate to try and sell it on the open market and a bunch of other wineries lost everything.

[01:09:05] We had everything in except Zinfandel before the rains. Lower crops got ripe earlier. That was a big wake up moment for me too. I thought, okay, they may think I'm crazy but this year it paid off and the next year

[01:09:17] I went by and this truck was there and I looked over there. They were out in the vineyard shoot thinning and leafy and we were fine. Another year, 97, came back from Europe and we'd already dropped half the Pinot Noir pop

[01:09:30] on the ground and I was looking at the sea of grapes and I thought, oh my God, if Joe Swan were alive he would burn me at the stake. This vineyard is producing over two tons an acre.

[01:09:39] We got two and a half tons an acre and some of the best wine we ever made. That taught me a lot about giving up on what you think you know and trusting your gut sometimes. Mother Nature is really the one to command.

[01:09:54] You have to pay real close attention to what she's telling you. I don't think I'll ever be able to make the perfect wine but that would be a nice thing to try to do. I don't know how you define it but...

[01:10:05] Rod Berglin doesn't know how he would define a perfect wine but he'd like to make one. Thank you very much for being here today. Thank you so much for having me. Rod Berglin of the Joseph Swan Vineyard.

[01:10:14] All Drink to That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton. Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey. The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tenoyan.

[01:10:31] T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more including show stickers, notebooks and even gift wrap are available for sale if you check the show website alldrinktothatpod.com. That's I-L-L drinktothat P-O-D dot com which is the same place you'd go to sign up for

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[01:11:04] That's super important to see every episode and thank you for listening. This episode was made possible by the Sonoma County Vintners, the leading voice of Sonoma County wine dedicated to raising awareness of Sonoma County as one of the world's premier wine regions. Visit sonomawine.com for more information.

[01:11:42] That's sonomawine.com for more information. While conducting background research for this interview, I consulted the Prince of Pino website and I would recommend that resource to you if you would like to know more about Joe Swan and the Swan Winery.

[01:11:58] The Prince of Pino website can be found at princeofpino.com. That's princeofpino.com. Joe I think in many ways was a genius but he also was damn lucky. He found a spot that the neighbors all thought he was insane for paying $40,000 for 13 acres

[01:12:19] with a house and barns and other buildings. At the time it may have been a bit steep. It was rolling hills, very shallow soils and much of the sod. The kind of things that he thought was an attribute.

[01:12:30] He could have very easily bought valley floor soil that was 20 feet deep and planted but that was the last thing he wanted. He wanted something that resembled what he might have seen in Burgundy or Piedmont or

[01:12:40] someplace else that looked like it might grow grapes that would make great wine.