479: Christopher Howell Doesn't Want It To Be About Him

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[00:01:20] Chris Howell of Kane Vineyard and Winery is the guest for this episode of Ill Drink to That, and the interview covers a lot of ground. We talk about Howell's time in France and in the United States and the developments across several decades of his career.

[00:01:33] And to better understand some of those subjects that are discussed in the interview, let me play for you some clips from other Ill Drink to That interviews. Kelly White, who wrote the book Napa Valley Then and Now, joined me for episode 307 of this show,

[00:01:46] and at one point she spoke about the diversity of different terroirs within the Napa Valley of California. The Napa Valley is incredibly geologically diverse. Jonathan Swinchett wrote a great book called The Winemaker's Dance, and he writes a lot for World of Fine Wine

[00:02:00] Magazine and does these regional profiles. And the reason why he wrote a book about Napa is not because he's rah-rah Napa wine, but because geologically it's a really fascinating place. So you have the two mountain ranges that were formed by two very different kinds of events,

[00:02:14] a lot of volcanic activity, and it's a fairly young earth as opposed to some place like Bordeaux or Burgundy where the slopes are gentle and the soils are a little bit more uniform, just speaking generally. California's coastal mountains are really young. They're probably what

[00:02:30] I think between only three and seven million years old, so that's baby. That's new growth for in terrestrial terms. So what's happened is that things haven't settled out. There hasn't been enough of the erosion over time or just the settling forces of time. I'm talking, you know,

[00:02:46] millennia of settling. So everything is still very striated. It's interesting. Within really small stretches of land in Napa, you get this huge diversity in soil. And then of course, then you have very craggy mountains, two very different ranges, and between the combinations

[00:03:03] of aspect and elevation and soil, I mean it's really endlessly complex and very interesting. So Kelly White is referring to a lot of diversity there. But in the same interview, she also said this about the dominant role played by winemaking style in the Napa Valley.

[00:03:20] You know, truly I think that generally speaking, the Napa Valley is the wines are very style driven. You know, so for me, I taste more similarities within a particular winemaker's portfolio than I will within a brand's history over the course of several winemakers. And whether that's good or

[00:03:40] bad, you know, that's a whole other topic of conversation. But I think the winemaker makes a huge mark, generally speaking, in Napa wines maybe more than other places. Kelly White further identified winemaking style choices that were, for her, associated with

[00:03:54] different decades in the history of the Napa Valley. You can see big shifts in kind of philosophies of style across the decades. Like the wines from the 80s can be sort of lumped

[00:04:05] together stylistically in a certain way versus the ones from the 70s and then the 90s go in a certain direction. And there is a real measurable across-the-board shifts in style. Obviously, exceptions abound, but that's been very interesting to chart.

[00:04:22] I will say that the wines from the 60s and 70s have aged incredibly well in talking to the people that were on the ground making those wines and drinking them when they were released. By all

[00:04:32] accounts, they were really monstrously tannic wines, like almost crude and needed aging. And that was even, I think, maybe a little bit more accepted than it is now. And then in the 1980s, when you had the rise of UC Davis and these winemakers were flooding the market,

[00:04:49] and they were very clinically trained to make clean, perfect wines. And you also had a movement of food wines, etc. The wines got pretty restrained. Unfortunately, there was a lot of acidification, which I think is part of California winemaking in general. It seems like people still

[00:05:06] do it a lot. They were doing it even in the glorious wines of the 70s and the 60s. But in the 80s, it sort of seemed to take a bigger hit and filtration kind of rose up. So a lot of the

[00:05:17] wines from the 80s can be a little hard and a lot lighter than the flanking eras, talking about like the 90s or the 70s. There are still great wines in the 80s, but in general, they tend to be a

[00:05:30] little bit more light embodied. And then of course, you know, in the 90s, we all know what happened, the rise of the cult labels and just things getting steadily, steadily riper and more extracted. Kelly White talked about changes in equipment over the decades, and that was something

[00:05:44] that Kathy Corson of the Corson Winery addressed in episode 251. Kathy Corson had worked at the Chapelet Winery in Napa Valley at the beginning of her career, and that's what she's talking about right here. You know, the equipment we had in those early days was from the Central Valley,

[00:06:01] and my crusher at Chapelet in those days, I used to call it the wearing blender. So we're bringing in much gentler equipment from Europe and have been for decades now,

[00:06:12] but it made a huge difference in the quality of the wines. But back to the key question that was raised by what Kelly White said. If the terroirs of the Napa Valley are so diverse, why are the

[00:06:23] differences between the wines so seemingly dependent on winemaking style? Why wouldn't that be more tied to the differences between the individual vineyard sites? And one answer to that question may hinge on vine age and the fact that there are so many wineries in Napa today

[00:06:38] that are still working with fairly young vines even now. And there have been waves of replanting in the Napa Valley, as Corson referred to. When I first moved to the Napa Valley, everything was planted everywhere. There was Riesling in Calistoga, and there was Cabernet in the Carneros,

[00:06:56] and it was true of Chapelet as well. We had Riesling, Chenin Blanc, Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Merlot all growing in the same place. The whole valley has learned over time what blancs were, and as difficult as Phylloxera coming back through was, it was an opportunity to start

[00:07:16] moving things more where they belong. Kathy Corson had brought up Phylloxera, which is a louse that kills grape vines, and subsequent replanting in the Napa Valley because of it. And that is

[00:07:27] something that Kelly White also talked about. One of the things I found so interesting in your book is that you chart how Phylloxera really changed the valley and how it changed the grape makeup

[00:07:38] of the valley and really led to the dominance of Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa. Yeah, I was shocked when I started looking through the old grape grass reports, because they're all online, mostly, that Cabernet wasn't the dominant grape of Napa Valley until the early 90s.

[00:07:55] Because I think a lot of people would think it was earlier than that. Yeah, I just think now Napa has become so synonymous with Cabernet that people aren't aware of the big history of

[00:08:04] because prior to Cabernet was Chardonnay because the 80s were so white wine crazed, which you may or may not remember. And then prior to that, obviously, it was Zinfandel and Petits-der-Ras for a variety of reasons. But yeah, when Phylloxera, which had been present in the soils,

[00:08:18] there was big flooding in the late 80s, sort of spread it widespread. This timed with the early plantings from the 80s had been largely on AXR1, which is an insufficiently resistant rootstock.

[00:08:32] And so there was a widespread replanting in the late 80s and early 90s of vineyards. And that was what put Cabernet in statistical dominance. Prior to that, it wasn't, it was there and it was

[00:08:43] present, but it wasn't the majority of grape. Now it is by far. Kelly White mentioned the susceptibility of the AXR rootstock to Phylloxera. And while that susceptibility is well known today, it wasn't widely acknowledged within the Napa Valley for some time. Kathy Corson differentiated

[00:09:00] in her interview between AXR1 and the St. George rootstock, which had been commonly used in Napa Valley before AXR1 became really prominent there. That's what was planted in the 60s and 70s was all

[00:09:14] St. George. It's a rootstock that doesn't set fruit very well, it shatters. And so crops are always small in St. George. So over time, St. George was supplanted by AXR, developed by UC Davis,

[00:09:29] and it was a rootstock that produced much better crops and really good wine. Fabulous wines were made, but they just, it just wasn't sufficiently resistant to Phylloxera. So it all had to go over about 15 years. It's very expensive. Because AXR1 was so widely used within the Napa Valley

[00:09:50] and because Phylloxera did eventually affect those vines, the grape landscape of the valley significantly changed and many vineyards were torn up for replanting. This contributed to a change in the percentages of grape varieties planted there, really favoring a replant of

[00:10:05] Cabernet Sauvignon, and it resulted in a younger average vine age there as well. Many people feel that vines really need some time to express their site. They need some age. But vine age alone can't

[00:10:17] really explain the kind of dominance of winemaking style over vineyard site in Napa. Another reason that's a possibility might be the divorce of winemaking and vineyard management within that area. And to that point for a moment, when Kathy Corson attended the University of California Davis

[00:10:33] in the late 1970s, she encountered a situation where the two disciplines were taught entirely separately. Unfortunately in those days it was two different departments, two different buildings, and in fact I could have gotten a master's degree in winemaking without taking a single

[00:10:51] viticulture class. Somehow I knew it was important so I took them all anyway, but in those days it was very much departmentalized and it was true out in the wineries as well. Vineyard managers grew

[00:11:04] the grapes, winemakers made the wine, and they sort of intersected when you received the grapes. That's one of the most important changes I think over time is that more in the European model,

[00:11:15] winemakers that are making good wine know how important it is to be involved in the vineyards. I can't make the wine any better than the grapes that come in the door. I don't think we'd be making

[00:11:28] wine that is as good as it is if we hadn't figured that out. We were on a really steep learning curve all those years for the last 40 years. Corson discussed the separation between winemaking

[00:11:43] and vineyard management as a long-standing problem in the Napa Valley that had largely been overcome, but the division between winemaking and vineyard care was still readily apparent many years later

[00:11:53] to John Lockwood as he began his career. And this is what he told me in episode 337 of this show. One thing that was sort of immediately obvious to me about the California wine industry was

[00:12:06] the gap between wineries and vineyards. So what do you mean by that? Just that there's very few people that do both. And that's not to say that there aren't, but just sort of

[00:12:19] the industry in general, you know, there tend to be winemakers and there tend to be vineyard managers. But Corson did specifically note how one aspect of vineyard management changed a great deal in the 1980s, and that had to do with vineyard trellising and the ripening that can result.

[00:12:37] We learned so much about growing grapes. That's when all the canopy management work was being done all over the world, in Australia, in New Zealand, at Davis. And that I think is the biggest change. We've learned about the balancing the growing parts with the fruiting parts.

[00:12:54] We've learned about getting air and light in, not too much, but enough. We've learned that we're not Europe. It's hot and we have heat spikes and we need to protect from sunburn. We've just learned

[00:13:09] a lot. And I think that has translated directly into better wines in California, Napa Valley specifically. All of these topics also come up in Christopher Howell's interview, and that's what you're about to hear. Hopefully the interview clips that you've just listened to will provide

[00:13:26] some context for what he has to say. 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.

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[00:15:19] Chris Howell on the show today of Kane Vineyard and Winery. He is the wine grower there. Hello, sir. How are you? Levi, I'm really happy to be here. It's nice to see you. And thank you for the work that you've done.

[00:15:30] Oh, that's super nice of you to say. So you were born in 1952 in Seattle. Yeah. Seattle was a pretty small town. Then a large proportion of people were not native to Seattle. They were coming there for various reasons. My father came from New Jersey and my

[00:15:48] mother from Santa Barbara and they came to Seattle. My father working at Boeing. But the wine part wasn't really that big of a part of your life until you met your first wife, Sanda.

[00:16:01] You know, it wasn't a significant part, but I was interested in food and wine even when I was in school in Chicago. But certainly with my first wife, Sanda Manuela from Geneva, I got deeper.

[00:16:19] And I would say also thanks to her father who shared some amazing bottles of wine. Sanda was teaching languages at the college that you attended. Yeah, she was my French teacher. And of all the courses I took, it was the one elective I took

[00:16:35] for absolutely no purpose. And she was an outstanding teacher to what you would call French 101. She pitched every question to a student at the level that they could answer and she knew the names of all our students.

[00:16:52] And she actually knew Larry Stone because he had been a college teacher as well at one point. Yeah, well, they were at the same time both grad students. And when you're a TA, you share

[00:17:02] classrooms. And so he was leaving a class and she was coming in, and there was a fight about to break out. And Larry, as you know, is not very tall. And his class was remedial English for the

[00:17:19] football team. And University of Washington was a pretty good football team, and these guys weren't very good at English. And I don't know what trouble Larry had gotten himself into, but for whatever reason, Larry has always said that Sanda saved him from getting beaten up by his students.

[00:17:37] And so I met Larry at a grad student party. And grad students, what do they drink? Beer and wine. Actually, a lot of wine, but not necessarily good wine. And Larry and I, I think, bonded over the wine.

[00:17:51] And he was, at the time, the sommelier at the Red Cabbage or no? Yes. But, you know, I think the idea of sommelier was a kind of a new idea in 1979. The owner of the Red Cabbage was really interested in Burgundy. And so for that reason,

[00:18:10] he had somebody to help him manage that collection and serve the wine to his customers. And I suppose that was the title, sommelier, but Larry certainly didn't have one of those silver ashtrays around his

[00:18:22] neck or anything like that. And the Red Cabbage was down on Western in Seattle, which was a transitional warehouse district and a wonderful restaurant. It's a huge wine destination. And I'm sure that that led to Larry getting the job at the major hotel in Seattle, which was

[00:18:43] called the Olympic, which had an impressive collection that had been virtually forgotten by the management. They had a massive collection of 1961 Chateau Lafitte, and Larry found himself in possession of these wines that he would serve to what I think we would today call high rollers,

[00:19:06] coming into town just for this wine. And Sanda liked a glass of wine too, right? Growing up with her parents in Geneva, food and wine was something they just loved. And her father had a collection of wines literally from 1947 and 49, 1964, just malingering in his basement.

[00:19:31] And he kind of let you drink a bottle? He let me pick my way through it and took us to a restaurant where we had an amazing, for me, unforgettable bottle of Clos de l'Ombre, 64.

[00:19:43] And it sounded like he kind of needed a drinking buddy and you became that for a while. He'd sort of gone through the wine thing and he wasn't doing it as much, and he appreciated having somebody who cared about what he had cared about.

[00:19:55] And so this was kind of a light opening moment for you, where you started to think about wine. I mean, loving wine is one thing, and then having those moments where you have a wine that catches your attention in a way that is not just an everyday wine,

[00:20:10] that was certainly an experience for me. What was also distinct in this is an interest in wine in the United States, you know, it could be either a hobby or an affectation, but it wasn't necessarily

[00:20:28] pursuit of a career or a profession. And although even my father had taken me to visit wineries that were created and run by enthusiasts, the idea that I might go off and study wine

[00:20:42] wasn't high on his list. It was really not at all. As an engineer who, first of his family to go to college, the idea that I would study wine was not a high thing. Whereas Sanda's parents could see that as a rational choice. And they encouraged you?

[00:21:02] Well, they encouraged and even financed. And even, I won't say pulled strings, but it helped me find a way to get to the school I wanted to attend. Because the thing was that you had been doing home winemaking just as kind of for fun.

[00:21:19] And they said, well, why don't you turn this into a career? Actually, I did the home winemaking almost as a challenge, because I had been working in a laboratory as a chemist and I loved wine. And my lab partner there said, you love this stuff so much,

[00:21:34] why aren't you making it? And home winemaking doesn't have a high reputation among wine snobs. In the 70s, homemade wine didn't even necessarily mean grapes. And certainly didn't mean something you loved or had any great finesse. But just pure chance. I was just adjacent to a group of

[00:21:59] older guys, maybe second or third generation Italians who were making wine truly for their household and for the pleasure of continuing a tradition that they'd probably learned from their parents during prohibition. And so their approach to wine was very simple. And I loved that.

[00:22:19] And I bought my grapes from them and did what they told me to do. But these guys were basically selling grapes out of a boxcar at the rail yard, and you were crushing the fruit in your bathtub? Yeah. Yeah. Well, and de-stemming on the dining table.

[00:22:34] You did this for a few years, this home winemaking. And then your father-in-law said, we'll support you while you pursue analogy. And what do you think was going on in his mind at that

[00:22:46] time? He was very supportive of me, and I think he could see somebody who was searching. And I think at the same time, he also wanted a way to get his daughter closer to home. Seattle's pretty

[00:22:59] far away. Yeah. Well, maybe you could live closer to home for a couple of years. And indeed we did. We would visit regularly. Because eventually you ended up studying in France.

[00:23:11] Yeah, I had the textbooks from UC Davis and also from Philip Wagner and books that were in the English language. And I was curious about the whole process, but I won't say I understood it

[00:23:28] as I do today. I definitely saw wine as winemaking. And you begin with ingredients, and then there's a process. And these are the things that I think I've evolved away from.

[00:23:39] But at that time, I saw that, and I saw these textbooks, and I thought, why not talk to the winemakers that one could visit? And I visited winemakers up and down the coast, from Washington

[00:23:52] to Oregon to California, and asked them, each of them, their career advice. How they got where they are. You know, whether it was John Parducci in Ukiah or Michael Martini in St. Helena, or Bernard Poitier, who obviously came from France, but there he was in Napa, or Walter

[00:24:10] Shug, who had gone to Geisenheim. It's fascinating to hear these people tell their stories and then think about what would be an appropriate preparation to enter this. And at that time, I

[00:24:23] was still a little conflicted. I believed in the academic part of it, but I also really believed in the practice and the tradition, just like the old Italians. And I really kind of clearly wanted

[00:24:34] both. And you weren't going to get that in the United States or any New World, Anglophone country. At least, I didn't think so. And so then the question is where to go? And of course,

[00:24:47] with my parents-in-law in Geneva, which is really right next to France, that was an obvious place. And I knew a little French. And then I had read about a school in Montpellier that was supposed

[00:25:01] to be the school for all these people who were getting prepared, like Bernard Poitier's father, who was a registrar at Lafitte, had gone to this school. So I thought, well, that's the school.

[00:25:11] But it was David Lake who had said, look, if you study in the States, you're going to kind of get a secondhand version of it. If you want the real deal, you need to go to Europe.

[00:25:19] Yes, David is Canadian, but really grew up, I think, in England. He was the first MW in North America, and he said, potted knowledge. He basically meant recycled information, and it's all going to be derivative. And in essence, it's sort of like a synthesis of what

[00:25:39] other people have said. And if you look from the outside at a school like UC Davis, and they're not alone, I think Roseworthy as well, drew a lot of inspiration from not just France, but Spain and

[00:25:55] Italy and Germany. And they served as a meeting point. A place like Davis was the one place where a German viticulturist could meet a French or a Spanish or an Italian viticulturist and actually

[00:26:08] trade notes, because they were not doing this back in Europe. But even so, it was all new. And it was not tradition bound. And that's both in the positive and the negative sense. So you went to Montpellier, and it wasn't immediately obvious where you should go.

[00:26:29] So I took the train down there, and I don't think I was really conscious of the fact that I was showing up, you know, at the winter break, the winter of 1881, after Christmas, but before school

[00:26:43] had resumed. The place was dead. This is in the old town, and it almost sounds Dickensian, the snow on the streets, cobblestones, and damp and cold. And I sort of wandered around, and I found

[00:27:01] a door with a brass plaque that said Laboratoire analogique, and knock on a door, and nobody answers. And open the door, and there's stairs go up this dark stairway, and there's a light behind

[00:27:13] another door. And look at that door, knock on it, and there's a guy in a white lab coat. And he gave me directions to the lycée agricole, and as you probably know, these are the equivalent

[00:27:25] of vocational high schools. They're really highly focused and really good schools, but they're aimed at kids who are 16 years old or 14 years old. And here I was, 26. So anyway, I visited the lycée

[00:27:41] agricole. I got their brochures. They had some printed material, and they showed me a whole path that indicated that I needed to go to a particular elementary school before I could get to their place.

[00:27:53] And since I hadn't followed that path, it was too late for me. But I also saw in their same brochure that ultimately, after graduating, there was a potential of going to this other school

[00:28:05] they called Supérieur Agronomique du Montpellier, and that was the school I wanted to attend. And I didn't know the name, but now I did, and I found the address. And of course, I'd been just

[00:28:18] told, no, you won't be able to go there. So that left me with seeming defeat, except I knew the name, and it was really through friends of Sanda's parents who said, well, maybe I can help you

[00:28:34] be introduced. And carried my poor little dossier to the professor of enology at this school who accepted me without any further review. But the one thing he said is, the professor of viticulture wants to see you. And this is kind of the oh shit moment, because I had

[00:29:02] no background in agriculture whatsoever. Here I was at a top school of agronomy. I was there to learn enology, and I thought, I've got this pretty much wired. I've read the text in English. I know

[00:29:12] chemistry. I know microbiology. I know biochemistry. I can do this. And now I have to go study agriculture and viticulture. That was a little bit of a shocking moment, but I did go see Professor Bubals, and he is a very warm-hearted, embracing guy who just said, you're in.

[00:29:37] I was like, oh no. After a week in my classes of enology, literally I sauntered up to the professor and asked for the syllabus. I asked for, in essence, the reading list. I wanted the course

[00:29:52] outline. I wanted this whole thing, because I thought I can do this work at home, and at least I'll know what's going on. And he replied, well, there's no text. There are books, of course,

[00:30:03] but there's no text. The class is what I present. And then suddenly I understood how all these students were taking notes with four-color pens and rulers, and every chart that was put on the wall

[00:30:17] they copied religiously. They were creating their own textbook right there in front of me, and it's like, I had no idea. Nobody took attendance. It didn't matter. You either learned

[00:30:30] it or you were there or you weren't. I saw that same thing in the School of Viticulture, and about halfway through, I was meeting with Professor Bubals, and he had received a letter from the

[00:30:45] new professor of viticulture at UC Davis who asked for his course outline. And he looked around his office, and it was lined with books and file cabinets and everything. He said, this is my

[00:30:59] course. What is she asking for? Because we in America had no understanding, back to the potted knowledge, of what it could be. This is his whole life, and his class was everything that he'd ever

[00:31:14] done. There was no way that this could be transmitted by fax machine or put it in an envelope or mail it off. Completely different approach. What you saw in class was that they would present you with a situation and then different approaches with potential upsides, downsides.

[00:31:34] The French call this the advantages and the inconvenience. The advantage is disadvantages. And so there was no right answer. As an American, I really thought I was looking for the black and white, and I wanted the correct answer. Today you might hear the expression best practices.

[00:31:55] And I was shown all the alternatives without a value judgment applied. The class in Conduit de la Vigne, in the way the vine could be trained. We were of course shown cordone, we're shown griot, we're shown various versions of cane pruning, we're showing various

[00:32:14] versions of trellising, both high and low, as you might find in Italy or in Spain and in Greece. Completely different methods, right? We see all these things. And in the end, I remember his

[00:32:27] closing slide, because in his days they used slides. He showed a vine trained in the shape of a pretzel, a classic pretzel. And he said, see, you can do anything. A point that you've made to me before, and I thought it was a pretty insightful thing to say,

[00:32:42] is that there is a French school of agriculture, and the French school is to present these choices with associated advantages and disadvantages to each, as opposed to saying, this is the deal for this. These things have been pretty much laid down just like a classic book of cooking.

[00:33:00] And there's certain methods, and you just know those methods. They won't tell you which is right, for example, cordone or griot, cane pruning or spur pruning, but they'll explain how they work

[00:33:12] in a very functional way. And this is a moment in 1982 when we're starting to look at the rest of the world and places like Australia. They were asking themselves, how can this be mechanized?

[00:33:26] How can we not be dependent on humans to do this work? And they even presented the possibility of not pruning at all. And as an American who traveled a long ways to come to France to learn

[00:33:40] this story, of course, I didn't want to hear that. But those possibilities exist. The whole issue of mechanization of vineyards were out there, and of course I'm there to learn the tradition, and

[00:33:49] that, you know, the idea of not pruning didn't even seem like a possibility. But all these things were presented. You made the reference to cooking already. It's kind of like that idea of, this is

[00:34:00] how you would make a bernese, this is how you'd make a sauce americaine. And then it's up to you to choose which sauce you would put on this dish that you're making, right? Exactly. The family

[00:34:10] connections of the sauces, how a berenese comes from a hollandaise, for example. You see how these things relate, and that's the way you can understand how it all fits together. And it seems that both

[00:34:23] in terms of students and in professors, you had some people coming through that became quite prominent. The person I think I told you about was Miguel Torres, which really impressed me. And so the deal with Miguel Torres is that after 20 years of making wine at the family winery,

[00:34:42] he decided to go back to school. He'd been to school before at the University of Dijon, but he decided to go back to Montpellier, and then you in your 20s meet this older gentleman who's gone

[00:34:52] back to school. If you see the situation, we're in a school of high, high-achieving students, really the top of the French academic system, and they might be interested in wine, but these were not the kids of the famous wineries who were actually not going to these particular schools

[00:35:16] for the most part. These were really academic kids, but they're 20, 21 years old, and Miguel is 40, and I'm 28. So I'm already, you know, sorted out of the group of students, and of course I'm a foreigner, and I can barely speak French. Miguel's French was good,

[00:35:39] but he's much more international and much more open-minded, and you want to have somebody you can talk to about what's going on. And he had brought his notes from Dijon that he had taken

[00:35:53] 20 years earlier, and he was comparing his enology class to the class he was getting now, and he could compare what he was taught, and then I could be a study partner. And he was basically taking a sabbatical from the family winery to do this?

[00:36:08] He had chosen to step away from the day-to-day operation of the winery, though he was actively engaged every week. He stepped away because it was a transitional moment for him with his father as well. He needed to take over. Dad wasn't quite ready to let go,

[00:36:27] and Miguel had already created the wine that won the Olympiad of Goymido, the 1970 Torres Corona's black label. He was taking the winery and the vineyard into a new direction, but there's still that tension father and son, and so this was also a way to step out of that.

[00:36:49] And it's only a three-hour drive from Barcelona, so he was able to go to school, and exactly what I was studying, viticulture and enology. The only difference was he knew it, and I didn't. You've mentioned to me before that he was already interested in higher elevations

[00:37:05] and in alternative grape varieties at that time, in the 80s. Absolutely, yeah. Part of it, of that story, was that his wife was being German. He had an interest in Riesling Gewürztraminer, and it was obviously too warm in Villafranca to really develop the aromatics that he was

[00:37:27] looking for in those wines, so he was going to higher altitude specifically for cooler climate varieties. He had not yet gotten where I think we all understood and would go that what is needed

[00:37:40] are, if possible, if you're in the old world, you want indigenous varieties. You want the varieties that are, in his world, Catalonian. You don't want international varieties that come from France. Ultimately, Cabernet, Pinot, Chardonnay, these are not what you want. I think in 1982 we didn't

[00:37:57] see that yet. By the mid-90s, that was just painfully obvious, and Miguel had his own nursery where he was propagating varieties that had been almost forgotten. So not only was he going to colder climates, he was looking for traditional varieties that were no longer being cultivated.

[00:38:18] I think climate change is one additional thing that he's picked up big time on that I think of all the people in our world, he's been the one who's most ahead of asking what is our impact,

[00:38:31] but also how will we adapt. And then who are some of the professors that were coming through? I think the name that we know best is Pierre Gallais. Pierre, who had written a whole series of books, but was best known for ampullography. He'd written the most exhaustive ampullography,

[00:38:51] certainly of French vines. Gallais used to bring razors to do cuts of grass in the classroom, right? Gallais taught propagation of grapevines. Among other subjects, he taught ampullography, which is identifying grapevines basically by looking at the leaves. We do not look at the

[00:39:10] grape cluster, we look at the leaves, the shoot, particularly the growing tip. And he had a whole series of attributes to help us differentiate varieties and also, of course, rootstocks. But he also wanted to teach us grafting. And it was really a painful thing because

[00:39:28] the traditional grafting method is either done in the field, field grafting, or bench grafting, which is you prepare a graft and then you let it heal and then plant it. And this method involves making a diagonal cut across both the rootstock cane and the scion cane,

[00:39:50] and then fitting the two together. And for that they use a razor blade. A classic straight razor is what it really amounts to. It's super sharp. And you're supposed to hold the cane between the blade and your thumb, and then pull the cane across the blade,

[00:40:09] hoping not to slice your thumb wide open. And Gallais delighted in bringing bandages and first aid gear to the class. And his kind of bigger project was this idea of how grape varieties have spread kind of since the Crusades under different names and often been misidentified.

[00:40:28] We can now look, for example, to Jose Vouillamos, who's done the ampullography with Chances Robinson. And we can now look at it genetically. But the idea that there are 10,000 grape varieties in Europe, where did they originate? Or was it somewhere in Mesopotamia

[00:40:48] or perhaps in Georgia? And then how have they differentiated amongst themselves? How have they traveled and then mixed and matched over thousands of years, literally thousands of years? And you can imagine humans carrying these bare sticks from one place to another, hoping to recreate

[00:41:08] the wine that they had tasted from some travel far away, as you say, the Crusades. And if you had gone to Cyprus and you tasted in this moment a magical wine, and I think you and I have had

[00:41:19] experiences like that, and you say, how could I ever taste this back home? And you sort of think, I'll take the stick with me, and as we all know, good luck. That might not work out. But people have

[00:41:29] been doing this for a long time, and that's fascinating. And that's how he was able to tell stories of how a variety like ferment could have had many different names, and how the same name

[00:41:40] could have been applied to many different grape varieties. You can picture the Crusades taking off from the south of France, you know, and ending up in Cyprus. And how would that variety find its

[00:41:52] way to Tokai? But yes, all possible. Your study in Montpellier ended up sort of being the introduction for you to then work at Mouton-Rothschild. It was. And the most important gift in going to Montpellier

[00:42:07] is I went to study oenology, and they told me I had to learn grape growing. And, you know, for an American, a new worlder, thinking of winemaking as a process and grapes as ingredients, suddenly I

[00:42:22] was made to learn about the vineyard. And the truth is, I had gone wanting to learn what we might consider the best academic technology science, but I also wouldn't go to the old world without

[00:42:37] wanting to know tradition. And so, of course, I wanted to see both. I wanted to see how the science was applied and how the tradition worked. And so I was looking for a school that I could

[00:42:47] go to that would do that, but then quickly I knew I needed a practical internship. And I realized I wanted to see all the seasons in the cellar and then in the vineyard.

[00:43:02] And then the question is, where could I go? And Americans told me, you better go someplace you've heard of because you won't get a job back home. And it turned out that was absolutely true.

[00:43:14] But also, there were few places that could afford to take an intern and even pay minimum wage for a whole year. And I just got really lucky with the case of Mouton because they'd started their Opus

[00:43:27] project, and they had an interest in an American. Obviously, I didn't turn out to be the right one for them, but there was an opportunity for me to work both in the cellar, but I got to work

[00:43:40] in the vineyard too. And that was an enormous, incalculable gift. My interest was in learning the vineyard as quickly as possible before the harvest. There were like a hundred blocks, and I worked hard on memorizing them and walking them and trying to understand them and getting to know

[00:44:00] the people I would be working with. And this is Patrick Leon era, or who was in charge at that time? Lucien Sienot and his son-in-law Christian Prudhomme. Patrick Leon had not yet arrived.

[00:44:13] He was working for Alexis Lechine. And then what was it like in the vineyard? The vineyard was managed by 30 full-time guys and many of their spouses on a part-time basis. There was a crew who drove tractors, and they didn't use herbicides. So we're talking about

[00:44:40] plowing and spraying. And most of the guys were pruning vines, and each one had their specific areas that they pruned. And the guy who taught me to prune had pruned the same rows for like 20 years,

[00:44:54] and he could prune a thousand vines a day and then go off and do more work for which he'd be paid extra. So the rows are about 100 vines long, and he could knock one off easily in less than an

[00:45:07] hour. It's just very methodical and continuous and very demanding, physically demanding job. Some people could keep up with it, some could not. Everybody pretty much knew everybody and shared lunch together and shared, of course, special meals like the Saint Vincent.

[00:45:29] It was a collective activity, but it's still a company, not a family. You met the old cellar master as well, right? I was lucky to meet this old guy that people didn't seem to be as interested in because the last of the true cellar masters were basically

[00:45:50] being put out to pasture by the new crop of university-trained oenologists. And the really serious chateaus in Bordeaux wanted to have somebody with a technical degree, and the University of Bordeaux would be the place to get that degree. The professors were Ribereau-Gayon and

[00:46:10] Emile Pénaud, and then Denis DuBourdieu. And so this guy was a traditional cellar master who had been raised in the trade of working in the cellar. The original apprenticeship for a cellar master was

[00:46:25] tonnelier, a barrel maker, in Bordeaux. That's what you really had to do, learn how to build a barrel. And you worked in the cellar. This guy had done this his whole life, I think 60 years,

[00:46:37] and he no longer had a job. It was in the fading years of his life, and he felt neglected, and nobody was interested in what he had to say except for an American like myself.

[00:46:51] And his comment was almost cutting. I don't think he meant it, but the fact that I'd gone to a school of enology, he said, oh, you enologists, you're trying to fix everything. A little bit of VA could

[00:47:08] be a good thing. A comment like that, I was left without a response or a follow-up question. I didn't know what to ask. I just could not forget that. And of course, also, I was lucky enough to

[00:47:23] get to know the family at Les Hautes Villes-Las Cases who were running the cellar, and they were working very hard on getting a wine with the lowest possible volatile acidity. And again,

[00:47:35] their consultant had been Emile Pinot, and it's like, well, what do you want? If you go to a place to learn tradition, and you have somebody tell you something, and you never forget what they say,

[00:47:48] even if you are not sure that's right. Because that was probably one of the strengths of France for you, was that you saw this different approach in terms of you could do this,

[00:47:57] and this might be what would happen, but then at the same time, you got a brush with some of these traditional people that were there before kind of the dawn of the enologist age.

[00:48:09] Yeah, and I don't really know how to describe how important that is. They weren't really pre-enology, but they had an arm's-length relationship with enology, because a prior generation had only taken wine to the enologist when the wine was quote-unquote sick. And often enough, the enologist

[00:48:35] they went to was the local pharmacist who had a laboratory in the back to do wine, and they were only there to fix problems. So there was that aspect of it, but there's also another aspect.

[00:48:49] I was being forced back to think more about the vineyard and less about the winemaking. And in the schools, even in Montpellier, there was a real separation between the vineyard and the winemaking. This is not seen as a continuum. And in the schools, it's always

[00:49:08] going to be about science and technology. It doesn't matter where you go. They just had a background of tradition that they couldn't neglect, that in the new world we didn't have these traditions so we might not necessarily know. You did see some more kind of industrial scale

[00:49:26] viticulture when you went with some cultured yeast to the cooperatives in the Herald. Well, yeah, you could call it industrial enology. I went to these Cov cooperatives in the Lancadoc. I just was very lucky to have been given a harvest job in a microbiology lab

[00:49:48] that was actually selling yeast for the first time in France. But again, it was only to solve problem fermentations. It wasn't to quote-unquote make a better wine. It was to fix a problem

[00:50:01] wine. And so I got to see the massive Cov cooperative really in the heart of harvest, if you can imagine, with hallways and many floors and houses and walkways. And all the tanks, of course, are concrete and they're all rectangular, and you have very little access to the

[00:50:18] tank at all. And they're pumping the grapes in from God knows where. And then you have a stuck fermentation that is probably 20,000 gallons or more. Hard to believe that I could have really

[00:50:31] solved any of their problems for them. Contrasting with that, you went a couple times to Chateau Reus and you went to Prieur-Saint-Jean-de-Bébian in the Lancadoc. Yeah, I didn't initially connect

[00:50:43] the dots between those two. I went to Reus because I really loved Chateau Neuf, and my lab TA said, go to Reus, I think you'd like that. And what a gift because it was such a traditional place

[00:50:59] and it was a shocking experience as much for what I saw as for how amazingly good the wines were. I thought I was going to Chateau Neuf and I really didn't know much. I knew about 13 varieties,

[00:51:16] and I knew about the Galets Roulees, these are the round rocks that you see in all the photographs. And I found myself at a road with almost no signs, and remember there's no GPS, and an almost abandoned-looking house and a vineyard looking almost abandoned too.

[00:51:35] And eventually finding Raynaud, Jacques Raynaud, a small man and not a judgmental man but rather shy, timid, approached my wife and myself and talked to us a little bit and explained the vineyard,

[00:51:56] how simple it could be if you have old vines with low yields. You don't have to spray very much, you don't have to do very much, you prune it relatively short every year, and it's not all

[00:52:08] about a lot of chemicals in the vineyard. And then you go into the cellar and there's almost no technology. The second time I visited, he took me upstairs to his office where he had clean carpet

[00:52:21] and he had a fax machine, but downstairs, you know, the glass he gave us to taste from had a broken shard of a stem with no base. You couldn't set it down, the glass itself was more or less filthy.

[00:52:38] The cellar, same, but the flavors, you know, if you could use the word elixir this would be appropriate. And suddenly you realize that all the technology in the world isn't going to create

[00:52:52] this wine and how this wine came to be was not at all damaged by these relatively primitive methods. He clearly knew what he was doing. Saint-Jean de Bebillon, I don't know if you know any of the

[00:53:05] stories of Alain Roux. Alain Roux was a wild-eyed visionary who had decided he wanted to create a great wine, and just prior to Domas de Gassac. And he wanted only local varieties. His reference was literally Reyes, and he was fermenting in concrete tanks, no modern technology for him.

[00:53:33] And really, really rudimentary what he did, but he was a difficult guy. And in the end, he sold the place. If you contrast and compare that situation to what I as an American saw when

[00:53:51] I visited Masques de Gassac in literally the same year, 1982-83, you know, here looked like a winery just as it could have looked in Washington or Oregon. New barrels, French barrels, Beric-Bartolais and varieties that were not indigenous, you know, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.

[00:54:13] The finest consultants, Emile Paynaud, a whole other approach. So as an American coming to the old world, of course, you can see where my heart fell. But I have to acknowledge the success and persistence of Domas de Gassac, and their deep engagement with their terroir as well.

[00:54:35] So you come back to the States, and what's your first job? I needed an internship, and I was told I really, since I'd done Cabernet, you know, sort of fell down this rabbit hole. I didn't choose Cabernet, I would have easily chosen

[00:54:48] Seurat. I went to Napa, and then it was Cabernet, and I went back to one of the people I'd interviewed at the beginning, Bernard Portet at Clos de Vos, who had graduated from Montpellier, and who had grown up in Pauillac, where his father was running Chateau Lafitte.

[00:55:06] So I had a harvest in 1984 at Clos de Vos, and one thing I remember from that harvest, several, was at the end there was a reception honoring their 10th anniversary of having been there. I think Bernard's first harvest was 72 actually, but maybe the winery had its

[00:55:25] 10th anniversary, and people who came to the reception were talking about how many wineries there are in the Napa Valley, because in 1984 there were 100, and people thought that was a lot. It's interesting to see how things go, because now the number is closer to a thousand.

[00:55:43] Bernard Portet was in Carneros, which was a little unusual. Bernard had definitely planted Chardonnay and Pinot in Carneros, but his Cabernet was in the Stagsleap District, and he had just developed his Carneros vineyard, and I think you could credit

[00:55:59] also Andrei Chalischev and René de Rosa for developing vineyards in Carneros. It was thought at the time that Carneros was too cold for Cabernet Sauvignon in Merlot. I would just add my opinion was having seen the viticulture I saw in Bordeaux, and then the viticulture you

[00:56:21] could see in the Napa Valley in that period, and realize how radically different the two approaches were, that Carneros did not at all seem to me to be too cold without any technical measurements. But the method of grape growing in Bordeaux had the vines spaced one meter apart

[00:56:42] and trained 20 inches above the floor, a lot of heat being radiated from the soil. The vines were, you know, a lot of leaf surface area, relatively low yields. And in the Napa Valley the rows were 12 feet apart, the vines were 8 feet apart between the rows, the trellising was

[00:57:03] almost non-existent. It seemed to be calculated to ripen grapes much more slowly, and in that context, yeah, Carneros was too cold if you were going to grow grapes utilizing this method. But if you used cool climate viticulture, you could have easily ripened, in my opinion, Cabernet and

[00:57:20] Merlot in Carneros. So Carneros was identified as an area for Pinot and Chardonnay, I think only in reference to the fact that up valley is certainly warmer, and perhaps too warm for

[00:57:35] those varieties in general. And I'd like to point out that some of those methods that I thought were so primitive in the Napa Valley may actually turn out to be the best suited for that specific

[00:57:48] environment, because I'm jumping ahead, but in the 80s I was certainly among those who absolutely believed that, you know, despite what we said about advantages and disadvantages, that the French knew best. And we had not only the wrong rootstock in AXR, which was subject to phylloxera,

[00:58:07] but we also had a very poor viticultural technique because we had no trellising, we had this ultra low density, and what I thought was very crude pruning. What I didn't appreciate was the extent

[00:58:20] to which we want leaves to shade the grapes in a way that conventional vertical shoot positioning, VSP, does not. And so VSP trellis actually creates a problem. It was perhaps solving a problem in a

[00:58:36] colder, wetter, more subject to mold, vitritis climate, but for us we need shade on the grapes. And when we go to a vertical shoot positioning, we've really shot ourselves in the foot. An obsession with vertical shoot positioning, which leads to an obsession with row direction.

[00:58:58] The two go together, you see, you're stuck with... if you have vertical shoot positioning, then you have to consider the angle of the sun. Now I think if we see even warmer climate coming,

[00:59:10] this issue of shade on the fruit just is that much more important. And where I initially certainly believed training the vine close to the ground was a smart idea, today I'm less

[00:59:20] convinced that that is the appropriate method. I'm also not as clear on the issue of vine density, that a certain density is the ideal density. I do believe the more the vine roots explore the soil, the better. Period. That is like... there's no discussion. Keeping the roots confined

[00:59:41] through irrigation is the antithesis of exploring the terroir. And the vines that develop the most profound flavors almost always come from vines that have thoroughly explored their environment with their roots. On the valley floor of Napa, in much of it, it is possible to dry farm. And

[01:00:03] you have to remember that 100 years ago we didn't have the expression organic or dry farm because they were all grown that way. Grape vines in the hills need a certain amount of soil depth to hold

[01:00:13] enough water. What's distinct in the Napa Valley and all of California is no rain in the summer at all. But it does rain a lot in the winter, and if there's enough water holding capacity, it's

[01:00:26] possible to make it through the summer with no rain, with deep enough soils. This is what the Napa Valley has. My European friends, when they visit the Napa Valley, are always shocked and

[01:00:37] outraged to see grape vines on the valley floor. And although that's not where I work, I'm nonetheless defensive, and I always need to explain to them it doesn't rain at all during the summer, and it's

[01:00:49] because of this growing grapes on the valley floor can make sense. Just to get back to Bernard Portet at Clos de Vos, what do you think you took from him? He was interested in balanced wine. So he was

[01:01:02] not going for overt ripeness per se, and he didn't push extraction. He wasn't interested in wine that tasted like a new barrel either. I think he has a delicate, refined palate. And this is a guy I

[01:01:21] still know and admire and respect. But I also would say that I experienced the engineer and the technologist in Bernard as he was trying to grow the winery, and to reduce the manual labor. And

[01:01:38] to give you a classic example, I guess I was there the first year that when they emptied the tank, to get the pommes out of the tank, they had a pump. This is a pump, a big, massive, multiple

[01:01:55] horsepower pump, and a big hose that you had to wrassle with like a big snake to get it to a press outside. And so this beautiful Cabernet that had been macerating for a couple of weeks in the tank

[01:02:09] was now having to be not just shoveled out, but hosed out into the maw of this churning machine that was attempting to pump solids down a hose, which could only be done by adding liquid to the

[01:02:24] press. And I asked how they used to do that, and only the year before they used a wheelbarrow, and they had to push the wheelbarrow up a plank to get to the top of the press. They didn't have

[01:02:39] a forklift or anything like this for this purpose. And again, you have to look at a kid who's only a couple years into this and asking himself what's going on here, and definitely I did not

[01:02:52] come to learn how to do that. And I think today there's almost no exceptions that I know of in a small or medium-sized winery. We rake the grapes out into a bin, and we move the grapes out to the

[01:03:06] press manually, or else we move the basket directly under the tank. I mean, we would never do that, but that was a moment of trying to, I think, somehow simplify the winemaking through mechanical means. And I think in fact we found ourselves going exactly backwards.

[01:03:24] And that was that. And so it's interesting, you know, these are the sorts of things one can learn. Bernard, amazing palate. Maybe... and again, he created his own nursery too to grow his own

[01:03:36] rootstock no less. But still, I think, and I'm not that person either, but the best vineyard is a gardener at heart. You mentioned cellochef there briefly, and he had some thoughts about Malo that kind of stood out for you, right? My generation learning about wine in the 70s,

[01:03:57] malolactic chardonnay was considered a new radical idea. It was really being promoted by Dick Graff at Chalon, and there were others who had already done it, Martin Ray notably. But malolactic was essentially prohibited from white wines, and examples of that would be

[01:04:17] Hansel, Stony Hill, Souverain. Nobody did malolactic on chardonnay. On the other hand, malolactic was now popular with red wine. It was essential with red wine, but back to my Italian friends in Seattle, they knew nothing of this. And it was Andre, in my opinion, who brought the idea

[01:04:37] of malolactic to fine red wine in California, and he brought it directly from the Institut Pasteur in Paris, where he was studying enology and working in a laboratory, where I think ironically, the French had rediscovered the virtues of the lactic bacteria

[01:05:01] after two generations of forgetfulness when Louis Pasteur had discovered the harm that those same bacteria could cause and attempted to prohibit them. LBW Through pasteurization. RW Through pasteurization because of the wine problems they had run into transporting Burgundy to foreign countries like England and having wines re-ferment,

[01:05:22] and so his solution was yeast good, bacteria bad. We move forward and we get to California, and at the end of Prohibition, the very first vintage, the wines were made without SO2 and

[01:05:35] they were made without refrigeration, and they had a lot of stuck fermentations that all went through a bad lactic ferment, creating a whole lot of VA and a lot of wine that had to be thrown out. So in California, again, malolactic was essentially prohibited, but Andre comes

[01:05:54] in the late 30s to say, well no, for fine Cabernet you need it, and re-taught a new generation of enologists how to manage malolactic fermentation. LBW That's kind of a branching off point, because if you look at wines that were made prior to that,

[01:06:10] people were actually blocking malo with a lot of sulfur, and he came in and said, no you can do malo. RW Right, and again I think we were also, this really precedes me so it's not about we, but there was a great concern about preserving acidity,

[01:06:25] particularly say in the Central Valley in Modesto and Fresno, very warm nights there and low acid and malolactic fermentation would only soften it more, and so I think it was a desire to stop

[01:06:39] malo for that reason. At that time, the first method to stop it would be both SO2 and then eventually cooling, and I think that, again I'm speculating here, when sterile filtration became

[01:06:56] a practical reality, there was I'm sure a desire to bottle a stable wine. But again, this is sort of the manufacturing approach. By the 80s, malolactic was almost everybody was doing it in

[01:07:11] red wine, but of the whites, malolactic was being discovered only for Chardonnay and only for certain Chardonnays, and when you visited winery they would like to tell you about it. So that was the 80s,

[01:07:24] and again the focus was definitely in the cellar, and it was definitely on technology, even on chemistry, and very little focus in the vineyard. We go to the 90s, a lot of people will point to Phylloxera as their turning point for replanting the vineyard, but there was already

[01:07:44] a rediscovery of trellising which had not been going on. There was a very important consultant named Richard Smart, he's Australian, but he was really coming out of New Zealand where he was really the English-speaking person bringing to us thoughts about trellising.

[01:08:02] There was a fellow in Cornell named Nelson Shawless who had developed a trellising scheme for La Brusca Concord grapes in Cornell, and he had found that by dividing the canopy, and La Brusca is not an upright growing variety, it dangles down, by spreading the canopy out and

[01:08:25] allowing the shoots to fall vertically downwards towards the floor, he could greatly increase production. And the physiological cause of this is there's much more sunlight on the buds, and the vines are more fruitful when there's sunlight on the buds, and the reason for this

[01:08:41] is if you think of a grapevine, its native habitat is growing in a tree, and as it climbs the tree, it does not produce fruit. When it reaches the edge of the canopy of the tree, and it sees

[01:08:52] sunlight, it produces fruit. The berries can turn dark, the birds can see the fruit, and that's when they collect the fruit. So back to Nelson Shawless in Cornell, he had two grad students. One was Richard Smart, the other was Alain Carboneau. Alain Carboneau was a student from Montpellier

[01:09:10] who was doing his postdoc at Cornell, in other words, postdoc abroad, and was learning about divided canopy, and of course, ultimately, you may know he developed the lyre trellising scheme, which was a divided canopy, but for vertically growing shoots, so now growing up, not down.

[01:09:29] So we move from Geneva double curtain to the open lyre from Alain Carboneau, and all this has to do with understanding the importance of trellising, and the importance of how the vine is trained in

[01:09:39] terms of how it will work. And so Richard Smart is coming to us from Australia and teaching us how to train our grapevine, something that we literally hadn't thought about and had been completely forgotten.

[01:09:54] Although it was new in Australia what he was doing, because this is vertical shoot positioning, it was not that new in France or in Germany, of course, these were fairly established methods, or in Italy,

[01:10:06] but I think it's important to think that there were traditional methods of growing grapes in California, but then we had Prohibition, and it was almost a vinicultural amnesia, especially in places like Napa and Sonoma. There were almost nobody left who really knew how to

[01:10:28] grow a grapevine. The people who restarted the vineyards in Napa and Sonoma had been basically growing everything. Because of Prohibition, they had been growing walnuts and prunes, probably raising cattle, doing a lot of things, but there was no highly specialized focus on vineyards.

[01:10:47] And so people were really starting from scratch. Because of that we had to, or got to, relearn everything. I didn't know the connection between Geneva Double Curtain and Lyre. So somebody else

[01:11:00] who went to Cornell was Helen Turley. Yeah. And that's somebody that you then met. I think this is just random luck that in my first visit to the Napa Valley, I made it to Calistoga and encountered

[01:11:16] Helen Turley and John Wettlaufer, her husband, at the Silverado Tavern. I mean, that was the best wine list in the valley at the time, and they had come here for wine. And Helen had already been

[01:11:30] in the valley for several years. She'd worked for Zelma Long at Mondavi. She was working at Stonegate and thinking about what to do next. And I don't know if you'll ever get Helen on your... She said no.

[01:11:44] She might not talk. But I only want to tell some of the essential truth that here's a couple who met at St. John's, had an interest in wine, and Helen went off to study viticulture and enology at

[01:12:01] Cornell. And then they came to California where Helen worked in several places, and that's where I encountered them early on, even before they'd bought their property out on the coast that's

[01:12:16] today the Marcus Hen Vineyard. And it was Helen who told me, well you need to work at a place that somebody's heard of. You may find this astounding, but in those years had I gone to

[01:12:29] work, if I had even had the opportunity to work for Chave or Reyes, that would not have been good. So I went to a famous chateau in Bordeaux that could afford to keep an intern.

[01:12:42] And so in the 90s you could say that this is when Helen had begun to be known, but she was already working for Bruce Cohn, B.R. Cohn, and then was working for Peter Michael. I think she

[01:12:57] started with Peter Michael in perhaps 86, 87, 88, and she designed and built a winery, and we started it up in the harvest of 89. I helped her get that going, and then we planted the second half of a Les Paveaux Vineyard also in 89. It's a pretty impressive vineyard,

[01:13:21] at least from the road. Yeah, it's scary and steep and amazing, and the things I could give were to simply say, well don't use AXR, we knew this. I did say use vertical shoot positioning, which today you heard me say I would probably be wrong on that point,

[01:13:41] and a fairly simplistic approach to winemaking. Almost everything was inoculated. It was the first time I said, you know, I think we could make a wine without adding yeast, and that was Mont Plaisir Chardonnay. But Helen and John both have a deep, deep abiding love of wine, and

[01:14:02] a story that hasn't been said was their deep love of the wines of Burgundy that was driven as much by John as by Helen, and I think the same wines were not available on both coasts.

[01:14:19] So we had different importers for different wines, and the wines, for example, of Henri Jaillet came in through Martine, who was based in Saint-Raphael. Wines of Dujac also came to the west coast,

[01:14:32] but there were other wines that only came to the east coast, and John collected wine connoisseurs who would swap wine and was able to put together a series of really valuable wine tastings where we could taste the same vineyard, say Richeport, from multiple different vignerons from the same

[01:14:54] vintage and see how the wines compared. I don't think we were always trying to decide which one was best, which I think is a huge problem, but to understand them. And what we could easily discover

[01:15:08] through John's work was that you could more easily identify the wine of a vigneron such as Henri Jaillet and see it as different from that of Jacques Seysse at Dujac because of different techniques. We could identify the technique more easily than we could identify the terroir,

[01:15:27] and there would be a lot of people who'd say therefore terroir blah blah blah doesn't exist, but in fact within each of these cellars you could absolutely identify a terroir, but you had to stay within the same cellar so that you have the same methods being used.

[01:15:45] And John really brought that out in a way that to me was seminal. John and Helen, what do you think the Burgundy thing brought for them? In a paradoxical way, they understood the importance of the vineyard, and I say paradoxical

[01:16:05] because Helen became best known thanks to Robert Parker, and people assumed that therefore her wines were of the style that today we know gets 100 points. But they were driven to do a

[01:16:22] good job, not to just pick riper and riper or extract more and more. I think from my perspective the wines of Burgundy teach us about red wine at a level that we don't learn with certain varieties

[01:16:39] because Pinot is a sensitive, transparent variety that reveals the choices being made. And in the context of the big Napa calves, Helen's wines were relatively conservative in balance, but they were bigger, riper, lower yield, completely different than the industrial

[01:17:04] Cabernets of the 1980s that Napa had given into the idea of enology as technology, and they were going back to artisanal wine. To me, that's the lesson, and it's more about not overcropping, careful viticulture, and I would say judicious macerations, thoughtful work.

[01:17:36] And at that time, I mean, Peter Michael was really going in terms of the market. Yeah, it was just getting going, and you have to actually credit John a lot for that too. John was key in the success of getting Peter Michael on the map.

[01:17:53] Why do you say that? Because John was the guy in the wine shop who was learning how people collected wine and how they learned about wine and how they understood what they wanted, and he was observing all of this.

[01:18:09] So while Helen was the person who was focused on doing the absolute best possible job, you know, as you know now, she's not the one who's going to tell her story. And John was the one who not only knew the story, but who to tell it to.

[01:18:28] How did your job with the Kane Winery come about? David Ramey was consulting to Kane at the end of 1989 and was about to take a full-time job at Chalk Hill, and I was working for Helen Turley at Peter Michael, and he asked me

[01:18:46] if I didn't want to take his position consulting to Kane. And at the time, Kane was a new winery. It seemed like it was kind of a flashy place, and I wasn't so sure about that, but

[01:18:59] it was on a hillside outside of St. Helena, and I thought I should take it almost as a challenge. And so I went up there and visited Joyce Kane, and she hired me to basically take David's job.

[01:19:15] And I held that job consulting for a year, and following my experience in Montpellier, I said, you know, you want me to consult in winemaking, I need to work on the vineyard too. And she accepted that, and I spent a year visiting once a week, by and large,

[01:19:33] and not necessarily learning as much as I could. I came in with a lot of ideas about, well, we need to study the soil, we need to analyze the soil, we need to do this and that. And yet my approach to the winemaking was pretty simple and methodical

[01:19:49] and didn't let anything go wrong and didn't push outside of any boundaries. We didn't do a lot of acidification, but we did inoculate. We handled the fruit gently, and I had to work hard on finding ways to handle it more gently,

[01:20:03] because we still had semi-industrial equipment with hoppers, with augers in them and all that. But a year later, the Kanes had sold their interests to their partners, Jim and Nancy Medlock, who'd been there all along, and they asked me to take over the thing.

[01:20:22] And I said, well, I don't think I'm really ready for this to be the general manager. I can tell you how to grow the grapes and how to make the wine, but I'm not sure I should be running it. And they said, yeah, you're going to do it.

[01:20:34] And so why do you think that they did that? I don't think they had time to find anybody else. And... They interviewed other people, right? I tried to get them to interview other people. I will say Jim Medlock liked the fact that I had studied not just chemistry,

[01:20:50] but chemical engineering. He liked the fact that I had experience in Europe as well as America, that I worked in a number of places. And I'd worked in other businesses before. And I think he was willing to give me that chance and figure it out.

[01:21:07] And it's been 30 years. Yes. And I told him we're going to have to replant this vineyard. It had all been planted originally on AXR rootstock, and it would be subject to phylloxera, and it was only a matter of time until we had to replant it.

[01:21:22] I told him that, and he still kept me. And then eventually we did replant the vineyard. Something that to me is important is that when I was in Europe, I knew about the winemaker, quote unquote, but I wasn't focused on that.

[01:21:42] I was focused on places, you know, famous chateaus, you may have heard of L'Eau Velazquez or Mouton-Rothschild or Figeac. But I didn't think of the person. And especially in Bordeaux, the personality in the cellar was somewhat known,

[01:22:01] the maître du chez, but the person running the vineyard was completely unknown. And I had the idea that the obsessive focus on a personality, usually called the winemaker, was probably wrong. And we needed to focus on the place. And so, you know, my thinking at Kean was,

[01:22:23] well, this place has already gotten started, and I need to continue what's been achieved and not make it all about me. And I think the irony in this long time is that eventually the choices one makes start to accumulate. They pile up, you know.

[01:22:41] We did have to replant the vineyard. We did choose to use many different rootstocks in many different selections, and we did choose to mix it up. And a choice, for example, to stop adding yeast in the mid-90s

[01:22:55] was not something that was very common, but it was a choice that was made. Or a choice to work with barrels a little bit differently, I would say that being more inspired by what I saw in Burgundy.

[01:23:05] To go to barrel with lees and not to look to have a wine that smells and tastes like a New Hope barrel was certainly an idea that I would have gotten elsewhere than in Bordeaux. But I just want to go back to this point for a moment,

[01:23:19] because it seems somewhat key. You've been there for 30 years. You don't own it, and you don't have your own label. And it's unusual. It's unusual in Napa. And so why? It's great. I love it. What has kept you there? What is it?

[01:23:36] Well, initially I said I would only last five years. And I saw everybody moving around, and I said I'll stay for five years. As it went on, I saw my friends start wines with their name on it,

[01:23:49] and I realized I really didn't want a wine that was quote-unquote about me. Because the core issue, I think, for most, not everybody, for most of us who are really interested in wine is we don't want the wine to be about ourselves personally,

[01:24:07] and we don't want it to be about a process. And in most obvious cases, who would want a wine to be about a brand new oak barrel? No. What I didn't understand when I said I would stay five years

[01:24:22] is that five years later, I would not only not be done, but the place would no longer be the same, and the job wouldn't be really the same. Because we're in the process of replanting the vineyard. You know, with 90 acres and 150,000 vines,

[01:24:36] that's not happening overnight, and I knew I didn't know how to do it, so I had to learn by doing it. And as we worked our way through it, then these vines begin to bear fruit, and suddenly you're working with what amounts to a new vineyard.

[01:24:50] And so what appeared initially to be something that would be apparently static and repetitive was anything but. Everything was changing, not just the vintages, but the vineyard itself. And some of the choices along the way of what we were doing were changing.

[01:25:09] And again, I didn't really want a project that was supposed to be about the winemaker. And certainly I had other people offer me other positions, but I couldn't see another one that was more interesting.

[01:25:21] So the only question then is, well, why don't you just want to own a business as opposed to work for somebody? And I think if you have the opportunity to work with a vineyard like that, there's still more to learn.

[01:25:33] And there's really not a need to just go off and buy grapes so that you can say it's your wine. You know, the opportunity to work in the same vineyard for not just a couple of years,

[01:25:46] but for many years, you learn things that you could never learn otherwise. And it seems like along the way, you are allowed the latitude to be a contrarian in terms of the popular style that was desired in the market at the time.

[01:25:59] I took that freedom and I was not contradicted. And initially, I think that the choice in the 1990s to not follow what was becoming a dominant style by the end of the 90s was obvious to me that we don't need to make

[01:26:21] a wine to be bigger, to be quote unquote better. And it needed to be balanced and drinkable. But I knew I was taking a chance by walking away from what was the dominant model.

[01:26:37] And I understood that the wine, if it depended on getting a score from a critic, would not succeed. And the question is how long could we get away with that? That was an open question because people were buying and drinking

[01:26:57] Caine 5 based on the fact it was a blend of five varieties, based on the fact they'd had positive experience. But few people who wanted 100-point wines wanted this particular wine at all. And as we know well, wine is subject to fashion and fashions come and go.

[01:27:16] And Caine was definitely not of the fashion at that time. And although you're being discreet about it, we also allowed things to crop up that other people weren't comfortable with. Specifically, I could mention Reduction and also Britannomyces. But there's something else.

[01:27:35] That vineyard had a set of flavors that was quite unlike anything else we were tasting, even on Spring Mountain. Most of the mountain wines are relatively green and foresty. But there's something about the Caine vineyards, particularly herbal, aromatic, floral, citrus that's hard to pin down. Definitely non-standard.

[01:27:55] And all these characteristics could be seen as a problem or perhaps as an advantage. But one of the things that was going through my mind was if wine were only a formula, first of all, we would be bored.

[01:28:08] And second of all, most wines would merge to become one. And there would be no particular value to one versus another. And so initially, I'm sure I saw the Caine vineyard as a problem and I wasn't quite sure

[01:28:21] how to fix it or I didn't really have a plan to fix it. But it was only after, I would say, seven, eight vintages, so now by 97, 98, 99, I'm beginning to realize that it is going to be what it is.

[01:28:37] And it is going to be more important to embrace what it is than it is to try to fix it. And we really learned when we were making this wine called Caine Concept, which came

[01:28:48] from grapes that we were purchasing, what a difference the true Napa Valley is from our little vineyard up on the mountain. Two completely different sets of flavors and textures. The issue of, for example, we talk about reduction.

[01:29:04] I think this comes out of my particular interest in the wines of the Rhone and of Burgundy, where in red wine you can find reduction and it's part of what that wine is.

[01:29:15] And I still have an interest in it, but I think I was more interested in that in the 2000s and how that worked and how that could lead to a wine that would evolve in the bottle

[01:29:29] as opposed to trying to judge it and have it perfect when it was ready. To me, I see it as an element but not the key attribute. Similarly with Britannomyces, a little bizarre there.

[01:29:43] Here I'd gone to a school of enology and learned about all the flaws except for Brett because they didn't talk about Brett in 1982 in Bordeaux or in Montpellier. At Davis they were just learning about it.

[01:29:55] And so when I arrived back in Napa in 1984, I pretty much read the Riot Act about Britannomyces about those wines of Bordeaux and Chateauneuf. At the same time, of course, I was explaining to them about AXR because I had been given

[01:30:15] an absolute unremitting lesson that AXR was going to fail. And in California we were still planting AXR all through the 80s. So we had these contradictory currents here, but I got interested in Brett and I worked for a guy

[01:30:31] who absolutely hated it and wanted to make sure he could ban it from his cellar, which was a brand new cellar. He thought that keeping it out of the cellar would keep it out forever. That didn't happen.

[01:30:43] By the mid-90s I realized some of the wines I absolutely loved, Brett was in the room. It wasn't the Brett I loved, but getting rid of it wasn't going to make the wine I wanted either. So I was curious about this.

[01:30:58] And I've pursued it and we've learned more about Brett & Wine at a little winery than one might think. But in the late 90s I was actually trying to inoculate and failed. So it wasn't that easy to get it to grow when you wanted it to grow.

[01:31:15] And you didn't know exactly, and this has been always the point, you don't know where it's going to go and where it's going to end up. And I would say now we do know more or less when this ferment is complete. We can say that.

[01:31:26] It's not that complicated. And we do know that not all vineyards support Brutanomyces fermentation equally. I didn't know that. I know, nobody told us this. Everybody assumes that it's an infection that gets into the cellar.

[01:31:42] And in fact, the role of a vineyard in supporting the yeast that do the fermentation is a large area that needs to be explored further. Because every school of enology assumes, and basically their own studies show that

[01:31:56] most of the yeast in a cellar that does the ferment came in from the cellar. It came in from the vineyard in my opinion, but that's not what you hear. You hear most people say the cellar has a certain population of yeast and that's what

[01:32:10] did the fermentation, and I'm saying no. So you're saying on some vines there's Brutanomyces and on some there's not? I'm saying in some vineyards this yeast may or may not be present, but the grape juice, the must, is more conducive and supporting this Brutanomyces fermentation, which doesn't

[01:32:33] happen until other organisms have also gotten their act together. And there's other vineyards that don't seem to want to support that. And is it about the yeast, the presence or absence of the yeast? I don't believe it's that simple at all.

[01:32:47] I believe it's where the yeast find a milieu that works for them. So what are the things that would lend themselves to more of a presence of Brutanomyces? I'm talking about on the ferment side.

[01:32:59] Well, people refer to things like pH, but actually I think the things that really support or don't support Brutanomyces have not been identified. I really do believe that because at Kane we were able to work with grapes from the Bechtoffer

[01:33:13] Toclon vineyard and from other really great vineyards in Rutherford, and Brutanomyces never turned up in the same cellar with the same methods and the same equipment that was never sterilized. So what we could see is that certain vineyards like the Kane vineyard seem to be fairly supportive

[01:33:36] of a Brutanomyces fermentation, whereas these others are not. And somebody might say, oh, it's pH. Well, I don't think it's anything that simple. What do you think it is? I honestly don't know, but I know it's tied to the composition of the grapes that is tied

[01:33:52] to the vineyard. So you don't think it's an infection? You think it's an expression? I'm confused about that. Infection is an idea that comes right out of Pasteur and Cox Postulates, and it's the birth of microbiology.

[01:34:08] I think now we understand when we use the word microbiome in the case of the soil or our own bodies that there's an ecology there. And the first time I really got some context to think about this with Brutanomyces was

[01:34:22] visiting a brewer who was making a Belgian Lembic style brett beer. And what he said is, well, this yeast is fickle and it depends on the other bacteria that are in the milieu. So it isn't just one thing. It's not a presence or absence.

[01:34:39] In other words, there's a lot of potentially infectious bacteria in the air, but we don't always get sick. What causes this thing to take over is a whole unexplored area that I think people are just starting to unravel when they begin to look today.

[01:34:58] If you look at a native ferment, meaning not inoculated, we know there's a succession of organisms. We now have companies selling a staged set of propagated yeast to try to emulate this otherwise, quote unquote, uncontrolled fermentation that ordinarily just takes care of itself just fine.

[01:35:19] So we know that we're no longer talking about a single organism ever, but many organisms. And I think this was always true in the case of wine, unlike beer. You know, in beer, to create the wort, you have to boil it. And in boiling it, you sterilize it.

[01:35:37] I'm sure there will be those who wish to sterilize grapes, but right now we don't sterilize grapes. We work with grapes that are never, never sterile. We can try to overwhelm the native population by adding yeast, but that never gets rid of those that existed.

[01:35:54] You could say, well, we use sulfur, SO2, to try to inhibit or kill some of those other organisms. To a certain extent, that's true. It will work, but it doesn't ever sterilize.

[01:36:05] And so if we start to look at this as a complex population, then we're no longer looking at an organism as good or bad, but how do they interact with each other? Do they play well together? And to me, that's really interesting.

[01:36:18] Another thing that I haven't heard enough people say is that the interest in whole berries and whole clusters is not just that, but it's the fact that the berries themselves are still alive and they're metabolizing, even in the tank.

[01:36:37] They go into an anaerobic state, but the enzymes and the physiological processes in the berry are actually dissolving and digesting the berry and releasing compounds. This is why I think we were being sold enzymes, because we were stopping that process.

[01:36:54] And then we had to add back the enzymes that the normal grape would have already done if you just allowed it to do that. So I think to look at fermentation as simply microbiological, we're missing a point that

[01:37:07] the berries are doing things themselves even before bacteria and yeast can intervene. Back to that point about Brett, do you think that there's multiple manifestations? And do you think that that is because of the other pieces?

[01:37:19] I do think there are multiple, but I don't think I know enough about this to state how it manifests itself. But I will say one thing that's really obvious in the same context as a malolactic fermentation.

[01:37:33] If we go back to my generation's discovery and love of malolactic and chardonnay, there is a high value to the smell of butter, of diacetyl. I go to France, and the first thing I hear is, you don't want it to smell that way. That's not good.

[01:37:52] Well, at a direct contrast, we were just loving this flavor. And then I'm learning, well, no, we don't really want that. And so we hadn't yet learned maybe how to actually create it, but we learned to value it.

[01:38:07] And then of course I learned in Burgundy it was precisely the opposite. You don't want it. And what you could also say is when the wine is in active fermentation and maybe in a rapid and early fermentation, you can get a lot of diacetyl.

[01:38:21] But in the end, if that's not your goal, you need to keep the wine in the barrel on the lees long enough for this to dissipate. So if we look at a fermentation of Brutanomyces, the initial expression in the active fermentation is intense.

[01:38:39] And even worse, should this fermentation occur in the bottle and you pull the cork, well, this is what you're going to smell. Does that mean that's what you'll experience three, four, five years later? Not quite the same.

[01:38:52] These things begin to merge and the active character of the ferment becomes more complex. And if there's other things in the wine, you're going to see the rest of the wine and not just that.

[01:39:07] My tendency is to associate it with either warmer places like the Rhone, the Hunter, or warmer vintages like the 1990 vintage of Monrose, that kind of thing. So is it related to temperature? Absolutely. One thing about Brutanomyces is it likes to ferment in a warm cellar.

[01:39:26] There's no doubt about this. Another thing is that we know that in Bordeaux, certain cellars like Montrose, Taubo, were famous for the extent of Brutanomyces inflecting their fermentations. You know, if the cellar doesn't really cool off, that probably gives Brett a foothold,

[01:39:46] but I still think it has to do with the composition of the must. Certain musts just aren't going to support it and others do. The cane vineyard actually also smells like cannabis. And there's an interesting twist between Brutanomyces and cannabis. There's a certain strange animal note to Brutanomyces.

[01:40:07] And so what about that point about reduction in a Cabernet-based wine? I want to tell a story on a guy who's an importer of classic wines of Spain. I was asking him about oxidized classic Riojas, because I think we're all interested in

[01:40:23] classic traditional wines from wherever they come, and these wines are oxidized. And I was curious about a little bit of that backstory. And he simply explained to me, you know, Chris, you've been trained in the reductive school of

[01:40:36] winemaking, the French school of winemaking, which is more protective, I would say, in places like Burgundy and in the Rhône than it is in Bordeaux, which is a little bit more oxidative. But he said there's a whole other world of wine that you don't know about.

[01:40:52] Just think to begin with sherry, and then go from there and ask yourself what you could do. And of course, the possibilities are just as interesting in an oxidative style as a reductive

[01:41:05] style. But I've been interested in a reductive style. What I've found is that the wines develop in the bottle. They do get a certain amount of oxygen, I think, from the cork and over time.

[01:41:19] And I just think the wines are, to me, more interesting than a wine that is simply fruity. I think that's part of the deal, right? Is that you don't want to make a just fruity wine.

[01:41:33] No, I think wine begins with fruit. And in the schools of enology, we're taught that winemaking is almost a desire to preserve the fruit. And I don't think that is unique to United States

[01:41:47] and Australia, but there's a real sense of preserving fruit. Now I see wine as part of the world of fermented things. So we could add charcuterie, we could add cheese, we could add kimchi, and all these things are transformed substances. They began something that was

[01:42:05] essentially botanical, and now it's become something else. And I think that that's interesting too. The conflict for me in this is, again, if a wine is all about process, we've lost the thread. Because the most interesting wines tell us where they came from, where they grew.

[01:42:24] And they can't be only about the seller or the winemaker or the method. A lot of people treat wine as a product, or worse, a brand. And the only wines that truly interest us

[01:42:37] are when we talk about where they grew. You're saying this as someone who works in Napa, and it probably wouldn't be unusual somewhere else. It's just unusual on Napa. Because in my experience, and there are plenty of really eloquent, very intelligent, good people

[01:42:55] who work in Napa. But what you're saying, it's not typical. I think a lot of times the Napa story is we found a style that was working, and we stuck with it. That became kind of our brand signature.

[01:43:11] Our customers like that style. And the changes have been about the scope of production. Like we increased production, or we got that new vineyard. Then the other side of it would be the changes

[01:43:26] have been, you know, that guy was here for five years and now we have a different winemaker. And I, it's just not the typical Napa story, the one you're telling me.

[01:43:36] No, and I think part of that you have to say, I should always be looking over my shoulder and saying, what would somebody else do in my place? And I'm sure that they would revisit the question

[01:43:50] of ripeness. Even despite what you hear, I think people might say, well, if you picked it riper, you know, you might have less green aromatic notes in the wine. We're already, you know, over 14% alcohol. I think that's fine. You might say, well, if you use more technology,

[01:44:08] you know, you could deal with the alcohol or you could do this. And it's like, yeah. But I think Jim Medlock, my boss over all this time, he doesn't pretend to be a wine connoisseur, but he

[01:44:19] likes to drink wine. And he could see that some of the Napa Valley wines were becoming caricatures. And he never faulted me for not going in that direction, but he didn't know enough to call me

[01:44:36] on my choices to say, first of all, our reference is clearly not Bordeaux because we're not in Bordeaux just because we have these varieties. You look at a hillside vineyard such as Caine in a Mediterranean climate, you start to think about, God knows, Bondole maybe,

[01:44:52] maybe the Southern Rhone. It's not the same, but nothing's the same. You cannot try to copy anything. And I think he understood enough to let me follow that path. Although I'm in the new world and I can't claim any tradition at all, I can see that

[01:45:13] the inspiring parts of wine are those things that we find that came long before us. And it isn't ever really going to be about technology. It is going to be about the place and it's going to be

[01:45:25] about how the vines grew and where they grew. And little by little in the cellar, one learns to let go. Even in the vineyard, one learns to let go. Let's speak about the place a little bit. So

[01:45:38] it's Spring Mountain, but it's not the Spring Mountain that I might think of. And why is that? It's not the Spring Mountain you might think of only in the sense that you go into a mountain

[01:45:50] appellation of the Napa Valley, and it's not at all like a European appellation because the elevations range from 400 feet to over 2,000 feet. The exposures are every possible direction, east, west, north, and south. And the slopes can vary from almost level to very steep. The depths

[01:46:12] of soil vary dramatically. In a classical appellation as I would understand it, we couldn't describe Spring Mountain as anything other than a cultural place. A bunch of individualists in vineyards surrounded by forest, each kind of doing their own thing. Most of the soil, I believe,

[01:46:33] is of volcanic parent material. And at Kane, none of it is. It's all of the Franciscan Melange, which is fairly common out on the Sonoma coast. And you can find it in parts of Mount Veeder.

[01:46:50] You can find it in some of the neighboring vineyards around Kane, but most of Spring Mountain and Diamond Mountain are volcanic. So there's a different set of vegetation. There's a different composition of the soil. Soil at Kane is much higher in clay, much higher in magnesium,

[01:47:05] and the soils tend to be rather thin. I think in a prior time, it would have been considered to be a place not appropriate for grapevines. The Kane Vineyard, I'm saying, because the soils

[01:47:18] were not deep enough and because the magnesium content was very different than what was found in the volcanic soils. There's another thing I got at Kane that is just an opinion, but I'm pretty

[01:47:33] sure it's true, is that at our elevation, most of the vines are 1,600-1,700 feet, which is above the typical inversion that fills the Napa Valley with cool air. So the Napa Valley cools off at night

[01:47:47] and warms up in the day. In these mountain vineyards, Spring Mountain, Diamond Mountain, and Howa Mountain, the higher elevations don't get as hot, but they don't get as cold. They have much

[01:48:00] warmer nights. And I have a distinct memory from Bordeaux of walking home at 1 a.m. from Mouton to my house in Saint-Julien. And it was like walking through a warm balmy summer night in New Jersey.

[01:48:14] Warm, pleasant, humid. You could feel the plants thriving. And the Napa Valley cools off nicely in the evenings, and it has certain characteristics as a result. But you have a different set of experiences when it doesn't cool off, which is the situation up on the mountain.

[01:48:34] How is that played out in the wine? The wine tends to have some extract on its own, right, without you doing a lot of extraction? I think there is that, but I think also

[01:48:45] the texture is different, and the tannins seem to ripen at a lower level of sugar and at an earlier aromatic state. And so one of the challenges in the Napa Valley had been to get phenolic maturity.

[01:49:05] By that we're talking about tannin maturity. But in the process, of course, other things were being lost, but the tannins were getting riper. Well, in these hills, the tannins can be riper and softer

[01:49:18] at a lower level of sugar. So there's a different structure to the wine in the mountains. I've often heard mountain wines have more acidity. This is not my experience at all. I don't really believe

[01:49:29] there's more acidity. There's just more intensity. Now why would there be more intensity? Because you have smaller berries. You have lower yield, but the berry itself is smaller, and having a smaller berry means more skin relative to the juice. So there's more intensity just from that. So you

[01:49:45] don't have to work very hard to get extraction. One of the things you've done over time is pear away some things. So you don't make Syrah anymore, you don't buy in the Sauvignon that you used to buy

[01:49:57] from the Ventana vineyard, you make less Caine 5 because you introduced the Caine Cuvée, which was like a second wine, and then the Caine concept you used to blend Caine fruit with Benchland fruit,

[01:50:11] and then you stopped doing that. So we kind of move towards clearly defined things as we move along the history of Caine. That's pretty much it. When I got to Caine, again a winery of the

[01:50:23] born in the 80s, they wanted to make many whites and many reds and many varieties, and yet they had this single wine called Caine 5. I think the obvious conclusion that I drew, and I'm sure you

[01:50:35] would too, Levi, is that it needs to be estate grown, estate bottled, and that's fine. That should be the primary focus. We created a wine called Caine Cuvée as a second wine, and then quickly I decided I

[01:50:48] really wanted it to be an alternate style and not just a mini Caine 5, but of a lighter style with a different vinification, different élevage. For that we still do buy grapes. We did buy grapes to

[01:51:02] cover the vineyard as we were replanting, and those grapes we purchased from the valley floor, they were in the Caine 5. The initial Caine 5 was a blend of both the Caine vineyard and purchased fruit, so we were back to that, especially 1997, 98, 99, maybe 2000, 2001,

[01:51:21] a significant contribution of valley fruit going into the Caine 5, and we got back to essentially estate grown, estate bottled in 06, but in 07 we were able to put it on the label. I got rid of the Chardonnay, got rid of the Sauvignon because why should we be going to

[01:51:40] buy grapes from somewhere else? We do actually vinify and bottle a small amount of Syrah. I initially had to add Syrah to the Caine vineyard only to see what it would do.

[01:51:53] We're not in Bordeaux. That was actually one of the first reasons why I thought we should try another variety, at least like Syrah, and I don't think we're done experimenting with other varieties,

[01:52:03] but the goal isn't to broaden the spectrum of what we offer, it's just to explore the vineyard. I still find that these varieties don't taste as much like themselves as they do taste like

[01:52:14] the vineyard, and that's been an interesting discovery. We will pick up Douglas fir and citrus and another note that we recognize that we call tarweed, and we just find that. Certain parts

[01:52:30] give us, you could say what we like or what we've trained ourselves to like, but what we recognize as the signature of the Caine vineyard, and you could say therefore we like it, but we're recognizing what that personality is and just saying let it be.

[01:52:47] You know, initially we in wine talk a lot about aroma, but I think texture is the driving thing, and we learn about structure in Bordeaux, but we learn about texture in Burgundy, and I think also in Piedmont, and perhaps elsewhere, I just don't know.

[01:53:04] And in composing a blend, there we do focus on the continuity of mouthfeel, and it isn't the aromatics and the complexity anymore, because generally the lots that have the best balance and fullness are already aromatically complex enough.

[01:53:24] And I will say having worked with really great Cabernet vineyard from the Valley Floor, there is a less distinctive personality. It may be for many people more palatable, more approachable, more fruity. Napa Valley Cabernet can be relatively speaking fruity

[01:53:44] and generally very enjoyable, but it doesn't have the distinct personality that we find from certain hillside vineyards. So looking back at certain vintages, do you see sort of natural contrast in the vintages? Do you see this vintage of Cane 5 is very different than this vintage of

[01:54:02] Cane 5? To my own mind, I find 2005 to be a relatively simple vintage, but 2005 is also very approachable and palatable, both on the Valley Floor and in the mountains. It was a

[01:54:16] vintage of no extremes whatsoever, and a lot of people like it, and I have tended to dismiss it and found that these wines have held together very well. 2007, more intensity, still without problems. Challenging vintages like 2011, cold. 2013 I suppose could be seen as somewhat challenging,

[01:54:39] dry. But the thing that we are mostly confronted with are hot spells, and these hot spells come in waves. The fruit isn't turning black until the end of August, and so it's really that period

[01:54:52] from when the fruit turns black that we're fearing every heat wave. And we definitely can go through a couple of those, but what I'm really afraid of is losing the aromatics in

[01:55:07] the fruit, and I would say in a simplistic sense, the energy of the fruit. So we want to see the fruit ripen, but I don't want to see the berries collapse or begin to truly shrivel. The skin can

[01:55:22] get soft, the pulp can get soft, but I don't want to wait until the seeds turn completely brown, because I think there's a lot of other elements in the fruit that we want to capture,

[01:55:36] and that's why we're picking. And we're willing to accept aromatics that others might say, oh, it doesn't smell ripe to us. It smells more than ripe. It's just a matter of perspective. So 06, not a very ripe year, nonetheless hot spells. And 03, 02, 95, we had waves of heat.

[01:56:02] When it gets really hot, the fruit doesn't ripen. It shuts down, and the solution is only to wait, and that's frustrating because we're watching the fruit shrivel. But I'll watch it shrivel before picking unripe fruit, and then we throw out the shriveled fruit.

[01:56:18] But I want to point out also that we don't do an obsessive level of sorting. We're lucky to be able to pick cleanly, and if a cluster is clearly damaged, we just don't pick it.

[01:56:30] So what about vintages that we hear a lot about that are maybe a little cooler? 2001, 2010? Yeah. I remember coming to Cain immediately after the 89 vintage, which was cold and wet, and feeling that on this hillside vineyard, this is the ego speaking, I could do much better

[01:56:53] because on a hillside vineyard, it will shed the water. Just wait, and just be patient, and don't panic. And in 1998, we had a cold year, and I went out of my way to sort of prove what I could do through patience, really severe selection.

[01:57:13] I didn't bleed any tanks, but I used more press wine than we ordinarily would. And after that, I thought, no, I'd much prefer... We had two more cool years, 99 and 2000,

[01:57:25] and it's just easier to let go and not try to force it, and then still make a tight selection if you have relatively dilute, undeveloped wine. You simply cannot use that. Some of the winemaking approaches that you took have been counter to what are often thought of as

[01:57:44] the market trends for Napa Valley wine. So my question is, how has that worked out for sales? That's still a challenging question, Levi, because if you have a wine that is atypical,

[01:57:57] it still needs to fit into the category, because if you have a red wine list, you have Napa Cabernet. What do you do with a wine like Cane 5? Do you put it there? Do you put it with red blends?

[01:58:08] You know, put it together with wines that are completely dissimilar. It's really an interesting challenge and makes it a wine not for everybody. It's definitely a wine for people to discover. If they are just getting into Napa Cab, probably the Cane 5 is not for them.

[01:58:27] And I would say not fitting into a standard market stereotype has clearly its advantages, as the French say, and its disadvantages. So is this the way... I guess the answer has to be no,

[01:58:41] but is this the way you saw your career working out? You know, you'd worked at Mouton, you worked at Peter Michael, you'd been with Helen Turley during a period of time where she became

[01:58:50] fantastically, incredibly famous. And then you kind of went on to Mouton and kind of did your thing for 30 years. I think that that means that this couldn't be all about me. That place was

[01:59:08] what it was, and I was going through my life, and I was responsible for, you know, 20-some people working there and for getting these vines tended and the wine and selling it. And at the same time,

[01:59:27] you know, I got married, I got divorced, you know, I got married again. I spent my first, not quite 10 years, taking care of Cane, and in the process of my divorce, suddenly I found Cane

[01:59:45] taking care of me in a way that you could not at all imagine. I've had the opportunity to tend this place for so long and evolve it away from, you know, just another standard Napa cab, but it never

[02:00:06] really could have been that, you see. It would always have depended on buying grapes to be a standard Napa cab. And then I'm in that process, then I watched the whole world of wine evolve,

[02:00:24] and I realized that to me what seems to be important is to remind people that the real interest of wine is that they should all be different and not the same, and they shouldn't

[02:00:38] be all about, you know, is this a good cab or is it a good Chardonnay or even if it's a variety we haven't heard of. But each wine needs to take us somewhere, you know, if it can capture our

[02:00:52] imagination and just take us a little bit further. And there's a value in that. I also changed the subject slightly. When I decided to pursue wine initially, I thought for sure that I was doing something that was completely, we'll say trivial, of unimportant. You know, it's entertainment,

[02:01:14] it's pleasure, it's not saving lives, there's no fundamental importance here. And over the time I've been working in this field, I realized that our sense of taste and smell and imagination and our connection to our surroundings and also to the earth, these are essential

[02:01:38] human traits. And wine embodies that and it transmits it. And so, although I don't talk to a lot of people, I want them to re-engage with themselves when they taste our wine,

[02:01:56] and not so much to worry about is it good or bad, but how are they experiencing themselves, their own ability to smell and taste. Not to judge, not to describe, but just to go there and realize

[02:02:08] that this is connecting them to the earth. And each wine is a way of connecting to another place. Do you have kids? Do you have a child? I have a stepdaughter and a grandchild, and that has been a great experience for me

[02:02:26] to see a kid and to watch him from birth. And I make sure, even though I have no ambitions for him to work in a vineyard or winery, I make sure he knows exactly what's going on in the vineyard

[02:02:40] and in the cellar. And he's now just 11 years old, but every year we go out there and I assure him that one day he's going to be pruning these vines and picking these grapes, you know,

[02:02:54] just to have a sense of all that, how it happens. Looking back, what is the thing that has made you the most pleased? It's really difficult for me to evaluate our own work. You know, when I got there,

[02:03:12] I thought, well, I've worked in vineyards that have been around for hundreds of years. What would it be like to care for this in a way that it will be here after we're all gone?

[02:03:26] And it sounds so pretentious. It sounds like creating a legacy or something. Now I don't see it that way, but the idea of doing something that persists and transcends us individually, I think that's pretty great. The idea that what is there isn't about all of our personal choices,

[02:03:42] but certainly there's an accumulation of the contributions of many, many people. And what's so interesting about wine is you can open up a bottle from 10 years ago or 20 years ago and again, it's very difficult to assess my own or our own work. Very difficult. But sometimes

[02:04:02] I can be caught off guard and find that one of these wines really tastes pretty good. Chris Howell found himself taking care of a vineyard that was then taking care of him. Thank

[02:04:11] you very much for being here today. Thank you, Levi. Chris Howell of Kane Vineyard and Winery in Spring Mountain in Napa Valley in California. All Drinks of That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton. Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been

[02:04:28] provided by Bill Kimsey. The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tanoian. T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more, including show stickers, notebooks, and even gift wrap are available for sale if you

[02:04:45] 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 our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show operating. You can donate from anywhere using PayPal or Stripe

[02:05:04] on the show website. Remember to hit subscribe or to follow this show in your favorite podcast app, that's super important to see every episode. Thank you for listening. Something which surprised me about the interview with Chris Howell is that he was somewhat critical

[02:05:35] of Bernard Portet's approach to winemaking. Portet was the founding winemaker of the Clos de Vos winery in the Napa Valley and he was also a guest on All Drink to That episode 326. His father had been the winemaker at Chateau Lafitte Rothschild and Bernard Portet was one

[02:05:50] of the very few French winemakers working in the Napa Valley in the 1970s and into the 1980s. There really weren't many. Portet worked for ageable wines of modest alcohol and he didn't hesitate to go against market trends in keeping with that. He looked for relatively cooler sites

[02:06:07] within the Napa Valley and believed in blending multiple grape varieties off of one site rather than blending grapes from a lot of different sites across the valley. A lot of those sound like

[02:06:18] views that Chris Howell might be expected to approve of. And to see what I mean, listen to what Bernard Portet said about blending when we spoke. You were thinking that it was going to

[02:06:28] be a long aging style and in fact it turned out to be. I wanted that but I was trained that way. You know, do you remember what I told you about the aroma? Okay, my father told me,

[02:06:38] you know, the aroma comes if the wine is balanced, the aroma will come out. Well, in 83 it never came out too good. In 1980 either, but some years like 79 came out, 87, 85 it came out. And for me, I was kind of educated in the long lasting type of wines made

[02:07:01] in the Médoc. I was not thinking at all the American way. I was really going for long term. And I still think I'm right, but the market is evolving to buy now, drink tomorrow more.

[02:07:23] Portet's approach of making blending decisions based on the palate instead of the aroma sounds like something Chris Howell might have told me. And Portet talks about making long aging wines as well as his own reluctance to follow the market. And again, those sound like views that

[02:07:39] Howell might share. But where the two men diverge is on the use of winemaking technology, which is what Chris Howell brought up in his interview. This clip from Bernard Portet's episode gives a

[02:07:50] sense of Portet's point of view. The big advantage of starting a winery in California in 1972 is that you start from scratch. So you don't have old equipment. All the equipment you buy is all new.

[02:08:05] The tanks, all stainless steel. You don't have to deal, I mean at my level, okay. The other, the older wineries, they had different issues. But for me, I had to buy a new crusher, a new hopper,

[02:08:18] all that stainless steel, and new pumps, new hoses, stainless steel tanks of various sizes. And all the tanks were jacketed. Okay. There was luxury as far as French winemakers concerned, it was luxury. Sure, the first three or four years, my tanks were manual control of cooling.

[02:08:40] Okay. So I mean, sometimes I had to stay late or get up early to make sure that my tanks were cooling. But that's a big advantage over those who didn't have any of that.

[02:08:49] There was a dream come true for a French, young French winemaker to start a winery at that time. So here, it's a dream. And then you bring French new barrels. So what else do you want? For Bernard Portet, starting from scratch with new equipment was liberating, exciting,

[02:09:09] and seemed like a rare opportunity from where he was coming from in France. In my own estimation, Chris Howell, coming from a New World perspective, felt that starting from scratch really wasn't so rare, but more like the rule in the New World. And for example,

[02:09:23] that's what the highly influential Robert Mondavi winery had done when they began. So Robert Mondavi didn't take an old winery in the Napa Valley and then rehabilitate it, which would have really been easy to do in the 1960s because there would have been quite a

[02:09:37] few sites around. Instead, Mondavi winery was created from scratch with all new equipment. And a lot of people saw that as the thing to do if you could do it. But by the time Chris Howell

[02:09:48] got to the Napa Valley, which was a significant amount of time after that, he had already worked in France and he had already tasted in small producer cellars in the Rhone Valley. And that

[02:09:57] experience seems to have really affected his viewpoint, as he referred to when we spoke about visiting Chateau Reus. And I have heard something similar from other New World winemakers who have

[02:10:07] spent a lot of time in the Rhone. For example, this is what Aaron Jordan told me when I interviewed him in episode 404. When you think about wine in that part of the world, I mean there were

[02:10:19] the occasional global superstar. I mean, I would put Gerard Chaveau was certainly in that mix and Chapoutier and Guy Galle. And within Cornas, I think Clappe would qualify in that vein. But really it was pretty humble folk farming small plots, making small amounts of wine in an

[02:10:43] unbelievably modest setting if you compare it to Bordeaux or the Napa Valley. I mean, stunningly modest, like dirt floor cellars, no refrigeration, no hot water. And yet there are these extraordinary wines emerging from them. And great wines are not

[02:11:05] necessarily the product of technology. Great wines come from great places that are really well farmed. And my favorite wines tend to be wines where the winemaker's print is very difficult to detect. That really sounds similar to the kind of viewpoint that Chris Howell developed himself.

[02:11:25] And here it's worth mentioning that Bernard Portet had studied in Bordeaux with Emile Pinault and not in Montpellier, which was something else that differentiated him from Howell. And there's also that reality that Kathy Corson referred to in her interview, which I shared with you earlier,

[02:11:40] that the winemaking equipment that was available in the Napa Valley throughout the 1970s was somewhat industrial. And it was only later in the 1980s that more gentle equipment began to be introduced to wineries there. And the timing of when wineries brought in new technology had a

[02:11:56] real impact. This is a reminder of how Corson summed that point up. You know, the equipment we had in those early days was from the Central Valley and my crusher at Chapelet in those days, I used to

[02:12:09] call it the wearing blender. So we're bringing in much gentler equipment from Europe and have been for decades now, but it made a huge difference in the quality of the wines. When it comes to an embrace of technology in the winery, whom do you agree with? Understanding why

[02:12:27] people might disagree on this point can help you come to your own conclusion. I'd like to mention about Jair was a guy who particularly bonded with DDA D'Aguinaldo. And how DDA got there was through a cousin of his, but it was through DDA's direct ambition to create a

[02:12:52] great wine. And it was Jackie Rigo who said, well then you should meet Henri Jair. And those two bonded pretty much like a surrogate father and son. And DDA took a lot from that. And the most

[02:13:10] important thing that Jair told him was, if you want to be serious about your wine, get serious about your vineyard. And that came to DDA early. And in the context of Puy-Fumé and even Sancerre,

[02:13:27] there were very few people who were using any traditional practices or really farming seriously. They were largely farming to reduce cost and increase yield. And DDA is very angry about this. He thought that the whole potential of what could be done was being lost.

[02:13:46] But his references were Burgundy. And the person who called his attention to it was Henri Jair.