490: Patrick Campbell Pruned Mountain Vines on Crutches

[00:00:00] Ill Drink to That, where we get behind the scenes of the beverage business. Im Levi Dalton. Im Erin Scala. And here's our show today. In this episode, you'll hear from Patrick Campbell. He's made a distinct impact on the wine world, but sometimes in subtle ways that aren't necessarily

[00:00:33] flashy or obvious. For example, Patrick briefly mentions in the interview his involvement in a Supreme Court case that subsequently really changed the business model possibilities for many wineries in the United States. But Patrick doesn't go into it that much.

[00:00:48] So here's some background for you to truly better grasp what those stakes were. The 21st Amendment, the repeal of prohibition essentially, was passed in 1933. And this repealed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. The 18th Amendment had prohibited the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.

[00:01:08] And notably, the 21st Amendment also left it up to the individual states to form and maintain their own alcohol regulation systems. It put the bulk of alcohol regulation in the state realm rather than the federal realm. And over time, each state evolved their own alcohol codes.

[00:01:27] Some states allowed direct shipping from wineries in that state to consumers within that state, but prohibited direct sales to state residents from wineries located outside of that state. So for instance, if you were based in Michigan, you could have Michigan wines delivered to

[00:01:40] your door, but not wines from California. The Michigan-based wine collector, Eleanor Heald, and a group of plaintiffs pushed back in court and claimed that this was unconstitutional because states need Congress to approve anti-competitive laws that discriminate against sellers in other states.

[00:01:57] Companies realized that by galvanizing the consumer desire to order wine direct from multiple states, they could rethink their business models and the small-to-midsize winery would have a better chance at success by selling direct and keeping more margin without going through a distributor.

[00:02:12] This all culminated in the Supreme Court case of Granholm v. Heald, and this was heard in 2005. But the lead up to the case and the talk of direct shipping had a big place in the national conversation from 2002 to 2005.

[00:02:26] At that time, sometimes to their own detriment in retrospect, some winery organizations were taking stances against direct shipping because they did not want to ruffle the feathers with the distributors, upon whom they depended so much for out-of-state commerce.

[00:02:42] Distributors typically perform many roles, including the importation of wine to various states, they usually file the legal and the tax documents in various states, they employ a sales force to introduce wines to restaurants and wine shops, and they deliver the cases

[00:02:56] from warehouses to restaurants and shops, they move all the products. In the U.S., by law, distributors cannot sell directly to consumers. They can only sell to restaurants and retailers. Distributors are the second tier of the three-tier system in the United States.

[00:03:14] Distribution is definitely beneficial to many wineries because it's a vehicle to sell wine, but it's also costly because distributors take their margin off of sales revenue to finance everything they do. Over time, distributors have gained a lot of power in the U.S. market, and if a distributor

[00:03:29] drops a winery in a particular market, or if the distributor goes out of business, it can have dire consequences for a winery. Several decades ago, wary of this power dynamic, Stony Hill and A. Raffinelli were two wineries

[00:03:42] that were both very successful at direct marketing in California, at a time when distribution was still the dominant model. In episode 83, Mike Colini, previously of Stony Hill, remembered how successful their early mailing list model was at that winery.

[00:03:58] No, you know, we, again, back when I first started at Stony Hill, there was actually a waiting list to even get on a mailing list. And that was back in the day where there weren't a lot of Chardonnays.

[00:04:12] Around the same era, David Raffinelli was hired as a young winemaker at Lambert Bridge. And later, when he started his own winery, he took heed of the lessons that he'd learned there. He set up his business model with two distinct branches.

[00:04:26] One would employ distribution out of state, but within his home state of California, he took cues from Stony Hill's business model, and he deeply focused on developing strong direct sales. Here's a conversation that David shared with Levy back in 2018 about his early championship of direct sales.

[00:04:49] The restaurants were very important because one case of wine usually got out to 12 different parties. And so, where you don't have the distribution, that's a nice place. If you have it in certain restaurants and it gets out there.

[00:05:02] So, what we did was dropped all our retail accounts in the 70s and early 80s, went to direct marketing and basically direct marketing to restaurants. Out of state, unfortunately, you have to go through distribution channels, but at least

[00:05:18] you can control that distribution and tell those distributors, we would only like the wine sold in restaurants if possible. And so, even though I had no marketing knowledge, I mean, times forced us to do that.

[00:05:33] I mean, I knew we didn't want to hand over all our product to a few distributors. And so, the winery visitation was very important. So, we developed that over a quarter of a century of developing that following of people buying wines direct.

[00:05:53] Whenever I speak to a small to mid-sized winery in California today, they all tell me direct sales are super important. We want to increase how much direct sales we're doing because you can get a little bit more margin. You don't have to work through distribution.

[00:06:07] You have more control over who you sell to and you have a relationship directly with your customers instead of not knowing who that is. And so, you were kind of ahead of the game on that in a way that, you know, maybe Stony

[00:06:18] Hill a generation before you was also ahead of the game on that, but you were doing it at a period of time when everybody else was pretty much doing the opposite. You mentioned Stony Hill and yeah, we sought their advice at the time, them being a very

[00:06:35] small winery doing direct sales. So, yeah, we patterned ourself after a very few people that knew that they liked the lifestyle and if they could make a living off of the vineyard by converting those grapes into wine, direct marketing was so important.

[00:06:57] And the reason we can keep to it because we're not growing into a 25 or 50,000 case winery. We're keeping our production very low and thus a handle on who we sell the wine to.

[00:07:10] It may seem kind of basic to mention it, but that's really the difference between you and a lot of other wineries that really caught fire in the 90s because a lot of those other California wineries expanded their production during the good times.

[00:07:24] And then as the foreign imports really took hold later in the domestic market here and as people started to move away from maybe drinking domestic wines a little bit in terms of markets like New York and also as California pricing went higher, a lot of those wineries

[00:07:40] were then later really challenged to sell all of those cases and had to really kind of change what they were doing either by hiring dedicated marketing staff or regional salespeople or really looking at what their production could do to meet certain price points.

[00:07:59] I think what you did was avoid all that. Yes, I think you saw that wine explosion in the 90s and wineries saying, okay, we're going to start out at a 15 to 20,000 or 25,000 case winery. But when you do that, you tie yourself into permanent growth because if you're a 25,000

[00:08:22] case winery, you're going to have to be very involved in marketing throughout the country and maybe even out of the country. And then when you do that, you better have a supply because if that distributor wants

[00:08:37] more wine and you can't give it to them, you might get lost and there might be somebody else taking your place. So what happened was a lot of these smaller wineries started out as this 20,000, 25,000 ideal position where we said 10 to 12,000 was our target because you can handle that

[00:09:00] much. That's probably the maximum. If you go to 15 to 18, you're right in the mid zone. You're going to have to keep growing. So many wineries did that and I could name some but I won't.

[00:09:12] But I can name some that have actually got to that 25,000 case level and said, no, it was more profitable and more enjoyable to be at the 10,000 case level. And so they actually scaled back, which is very expensive because you put out the outlay

[00:09:28] of capital to make that much wine and then you're not using the equipment and so forth. So through trial and error, I think a lot of people have learned now what their goal should be.

[00:09:39] And their goal should be, the first thing getting into the wine business should be how am I going to sell the wine, not how am I going to make the grapes or grow the grapes or this.

[00:09:49] Have a plan on because when your wines do mature and come to market, you have to market that vintage. If not, you have double storage left in your winery and then you have to add space just because you can't move that wine.

[00:10:05] So it's so important to know what you're going to do with the wine after it's made. And so many people just start growing grapes, oh it's fun and now let's make wine and then they make wine, now let's sell wine.

[00:10:18] I think that should be done in the reverse order. Know where and who you're going to market your wines to. You know, I don't have any problem with wineries getting bigger, especially successful wineries that want to grow. I don't have any bone to pick with that.

[00:10:34] But what I have seen is that some of those wineries that did grow then later sold out of family hands and you've managed to avoid that. And that to me is kind of a key thing for how California is going to develop over the next couple decades.

[00:10:50] It's all on what you perceive as success. And so many very successful wineries have been truly successful as far as growth and reputation. However, in most cases they end up selling. In family winery instances, that's, you know, I could name a lot of families that have developed

[00:11:15] a brand and grown and then sold. And then started again and developed and sold again. It's when you reach that point where you're not going to be a giant in the wine market, you're going to have to sell because you can't compete with the constellations of the world

[00:11:36] and, you know, the board of directors making wine somewhere else. But everything's predicated around growth. And so the families' wineries that have disappeared, unfortunately, have been by the third generation. And because it takes more wine to support more family members, to support more spouses

[00:12:00] and their spouses, the family grows. And so does the winery have to grow to divide that income up. And that's where the death spiral seems to begin because everybody has positions to take and you're growing and then it's not a family winery anymore because then, again, you're

[00:12:22] not marketing your wine. You're expecting someone else to do all of that for you. In our case, we've said, okay, we've gone through, we're in our fourth generation and it's worked. So why make more wine and jeopardize that growth?

[00:12:40] Yes, we could grow and we could sell for a greater amount of money. But if we're all happy doing what we do here in the same place, then what's the perception of success? Success is happiness. Success is just making what you need to make.

[00:13:00] And that seems like a key insight to me and I say it because of how uncommon it is. I mean, I'm really looking at a California wine industry that is moving out of family hands.

[00:13:09] Yeah, it has been for the last 10 to 20 years and everything's working against that family winery. There's so many things working against it. The price of the land, inheritance taxes. So many things work against that.

[00:13:26] But if you can plan correctly and if you have the right next generation with the same ideas that have been successful up to that time, I think you can make it work. But it's becoming rarer and rarer.

[00:13:45] From the viewpoint of a winery, distributors get your wine to a wider market, but they also eat up some profit margins. And wineries that grow past a certain size find that the three-tier business model will

[00:14:01] not work for them as a midsize business because they need to either grow much bigger to be able to be financially solvent with the lower profit margins and the higher overhead, or they need to remain small and nimble with low overhead to stay viable.

[00:14:16] This business ecosystem places quite a bit of power with distributors who can make or break you as a small to midsize winery if you get caught up in this. Now back in the early 2000s, this was a time when the internet was reshaping business worldwide.

[00:14:31] And when U.S. wineries who didn't care so much about upsetting distributors saw an opportunity to use the internet and direct sales to be more self-reliant. Several people got involved in the Granholm v. Heald case, including the late Jess Jackson

[00:14:45] of Kendall Jackson, Ken Starr, yes that Ken Starr, and Patrick Campbell, who you'll hear in this episode. And the case is fascinating. The case found a libertarian ethos on both sides. One side standing for free trade on a national platform and one side standing for free trade

[00:15:04] on a state level. The case eventually went to the Supreme Court and it saw a noteworthy split among the court. One of the instances when Justices Scalia and Ginsburg, with their famously diametric interpretations of the law, they actually sided together. And Justices Scalia and Thomas sided differently.

[00:15:21] The case split the court in a unique way. The ruling ultimately found that it was constitutional for a state to either prohibit direct shipping from wineries in all states or to allow direct shipping from wineries in all states.

[00:15:35] But states cannot pick and choose which states can direct ship and which cannot, because that goes against the constitutional commerce precedent. This ruling made a small splash at the time, but has had an enormous impact since.

[00:15:49] And if we look back over 2020 and 2021, many wineries transitioned much of their business to direct shipping during the pandemic when it was harder to make other kinds of sales. Direct sales drove increased sales for many wineries when lockdowns and restaurant closures

[00:16:04] made other types of wine sales more difficult. And even before the pandemic, the direct-to-consumer model was pursued as a goal by many wineries. For example, here's what Randall Graham told Levy back in 2013. I'm certainly famous enough. That's okay, accomplished, check.

[00:16:22] What I really need is kind of a better financial model for the company. Just produce wines where we can make a living and still sell them at a fair price. We're just trying a lot of different things.

[00:16:40] Obviously, we're trying to enhance our direct-to-consumer business because that is a little bit of the holy grail these days. Wholesale distribution is very difficult. Everyone on the planet has more or less simultaneously decided that they need to become a winemaker.

[00:17:01] Every rock star, professional athlete, dermatologist has decided that dermatology isn't making it anymore and that they've got to be a winemaker. So the level of competition is insane. It's just crazy. You have to be very quick-witted these days to figure out how to make it work and really

[00:17:24] produce a product either on such a vast scale that you're doing it very efficiently or on a small scale and so special and so extraordinary that you've got a product that everyone wants. The 2005 Supreme Court case opened the door to more direct shipping within the United

[00:17:44] States, and its effects changed the business model for many wineries. You can hear in Episode 460, in a 2018 conversation, Joel Peterson touched upon this with Levy. Joel brings such unique perspective to the table because he has experience selling wine at all levels of winery size.

[00:18:02] He went from tiny to large when he made wine for Ravenswood, and then he took his experience with him working for Constellation after he sold Ravenswood to Constellation. So he's been a part of wineries of all different kinds of sizes.

[00:18:15] So his thoughts on growth through direct sales are particularly interesting. We have an opportunity currently that we haven't had, and that's called direct shipment and direct to consumer. It means that you make 80 cents on every dollar instead of making 50 cents on every dollar.

[00:18:31] So I would say be really wise about the choices of the way you sell wine. Do everything you can to sell direct to consumer. Choose your accounts wisely. If you're lucky enough to be in California, you can sell direct to accounts.

[00:18:46] You're going to have to do more footwork. Be prepared to work really hard. But you can make money in this business now in ways you couldn't before. And Ray Korsen, previously of a lease winery in California, also noted the importance of

[00:19:02] direct shipping in his 2017 conversation with Levy in Episode 442. You know, as with everybody else, we're trying to get more direct sales because the consolidation with all the distributors, it's just making a nightmare out there. You know, as a little guy, can the distributor pay their bills?

[00:19:22] Do they have trucking? You know, the big guy is do I get lost? And so those are the real problems with the distribution business. There's a lot of problems. But you know, how long will the three-tier system really be the way that it is? I don't know.

[00:19:38] We built our business on three-tier, and I would like to keep three-tier, but I would like to keep more direct back home. You know, it's a money thing. We make a lot more money if we can sell a direct. It's opening up.

[00:19:52] You know, interstate shipping has opened up a huge amount. So all that stuff is changing. So it's kind of fascinating to look back and think that if you're someone at a winery who

[00:20:03] has ever shipped wine to a private customer, or if you're a consumer who has ever received wine directly from an American winery in a different state, you can tip your hat in the direction of Patrick Campbell, who you'll hear from in just a moment.

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[00:21:25] Go to dm-closures.com forward slash IDTT to learn more. That's D-I-A-M dash closures with an S dot com forward slash IDTT for more information. Patrick Campbell of Tierra de Vina. Hello, sir. How are you? Very well. Thank you. Very nice to be here.

[00:22:04] Very nice to have you here. So, you actually grew up in Southern California. So from 19, I guess, 57 to when I was 22 years old, I lived in Southern California about 40 miles east of Los Angeles. So was there a wine culture there at that time?

[00:22:22] Well, yeah, there was, which is interesting. It was the Cucamonga area. And the Cucamonga area in its day was the biggest appellation in California. As I recall, it's about 35,000 acres of mostly Italian people, of course. And they did Swedish, sweet-ish wines, Zinfandel, and sort of fortified things.

[00:22:49] And it just sort of fell out of favor really over the years. And development came in. And now there are a few wineries there and some vineyards. And in fact, I've actually made wine from some of the very old Zinfandel down there recently.

[00:23:05] But it was a very thriving area in its day. And I think probably by the 50s, the demise was clear. Did you get a chance to go around to some of those wineries at that time? Yeah, I did. When I actually went to college undergrad there in Claremont.

[00:23:23] And I used to go out to the vineyards. And I recall very clearly that they had the regular wine for 90 cents and the reserve wine for a dollar. And I thought that one for 90 cents was just as good. And I bought tons of that.

[00:23:38] And that's for a fifth back in the day, of good Zinfandel. Really good, solid stuff. And when I couldn't afford that, I went to Hardy Burgundy. That was probably pretty good back then too. It was very good. It really was good.

[00:23:52] Your dad and mother, did they drink wine? Yeah, they did. My mother is English and she had this penchant for sherry that had been sitting in a decanter for three years. And I never really liked it. But we did drink wine at home, yeah.

[00:24:09] And I've got to say probably the one thing that got me onto the wine train was my dad had a second cousin twice removed or something, one of these distant relatives, who during

[00:24:22] the First World War joined the ambulance corps and stayed in France the rest of his life. Your dad was related to Ernest Hemingway? Yeah, right. Well, anyway, when I was older, I would stay with my uncle Josh, not uncle, whatever he

[00:24:37] was, cousin Josh, for two or three weeks and try to learn French. And he was quite the gourmet. He had a wife. In fact, it wasn't even his wife. It was something of, I found out later, of a family scandal.

[00:24:50] He'd been shacking up with a very nice lady for years and years and years, and they were really de facto husband and wife. And she was a fabulous cook. So I really had a better sense of wine at that point. This was when I was a teenager.

[00:25:05] I mean, you know, I was not allowed to drink wine as a teenager at home probably. Probably didn't even want to. Certainly not that crappy sherry that we had around. So you ended up studying English literature in Pomona, right? Yes.

[00:25:18] I studied in English literature and sort of got tired of it after a while and morphed over into philosophy. I realized what I liked about the literature was the thoughts behind it. And so my senior year, I sort of moved over to the philosophy department.

[00:25:36] And then I did philosophy in graduate school. But it was like philosophy of religion, right? Yes, it was. I think I was just trying to study my religious feelings. You know, I was dragged to church every Sunday and I hated it.

[00:25:48] Well, I didn't wouldn't say I hated it, but it was just boring as anything. But something must have rubbed off. I must have thought, boy, there's something subliminal at the very least sort of must have rushed off on me.

[00:26:01] And then, you know, you look at the great cathedrals and listen to really great music. And if that doesn't give you religion, I don't know what will. So what's that like to study philosophy of religion at Harvard? I mean, what's that like?

[00:26:13] Philosophy of religion is a subset of philosophy. There are a lot of subsets of philosophy of religion. And the one I was sort of drawn to initially was logic. I mean, how do you make sense of something that's spiritual?

[00:26:23] You know, you can't touch it, you can't feel it, you can't prove it, you can't do anything. So I was interested in trying to prove it. And I realized that that was really a sort of a sterile thing to do.

[00:26:34] So I probably really ended up more in what does it mean as opposed to how can I prove it? And I think it probably all tied in with my vineyard. How do you think so? You're trying to get some sort of truth.

[00:26:51] And you know, you can get the truth through logic or truth through drinking wine or truth through a lot of different things. And I think you can get truth through a vineyard because you can start at the beginning and

[00:27:03] of the season and grow grapes and then prune them and start the cycle again. And you're dealing with a series of unending cycles until you decide to give it up or you die.

[00:27:16] It's a way of truthfully exploring and engaging in life in a way outside your own body. So how did you get from Harvard Yard to Zen Buddhist community in Sonoma? Well that was easy, I followed a girlfriend back. She was much more serious about Zen than I was.

[00:27:38] And she went into the San Francisco Zen Center with sort of the hardcore people who really worked it to death. Whereas the community I was in was on Sonoma Mountain and it was known as a lay community. You weren't a monk. I was definitely not a monk.

[00:27:57] And it was a way of participating in a community which was of course a big deal in those days in the early 70s. So it wasn't frivolous at all but it was definitely a way of being focused on the practice without doing it 24 hours a day.

[00:28:16] So I was able to hold an orchestra job at night and on the weekends. Music's been kind of a constant in your life, right? Yeah, for sure. I realized I eventually sort of got that religious yearning out of myself.

[00:28:31] Well I mean I feel like there's a part of Zen that's almost anti-religious. It's anti-big deal about religion. Yeah, yeah. Yeah it is. If you're really good at it and get something out of meditation, which I'm not sure I ever

[00:28:45] did despite spending a lot of time sitting supposedly in meditation but probably actually my mind wandering to everything and its brother and the girl next to me and everything that could possibly distract me I was distracted by. But I tried hard. I really tried to get it.

[00:29:04] But I think if I had really gotten it I would have been more, you know, less type A I think. But I don't think I could ever really overcome my desire to do things and accomplish things and do well at things.

[00:29:18] I mean I would have been much better if I could just relax with things and let it go. But anyway, let's leave it at that. Coming up in this conversation, Patrick is surprised to find some Palomino vines in Sonoma.

[00:29:34] To explain why Palomino vines may have been planted in the area, let's return for a moment to David Raffinelli of the A. Raffinelli Winery in Sonoma whom we heard from earlier in this episode.

[00:29:47] David's mother died of polio when he was a young child and he was raised by his grandparents until his father remarried. David's grandmother had immigrated to the United States in 1903 in California and made homemade wine in the pre-prohibition era. David explained it to me like this.

[00:30:08] When my grandmother landed in San Francisco she got a job at a cigar factory. That's where she met my grandfather who also was from the same area but they met in San Francisco and both enjoyed wine from their families in their past in Europe.

[00:30:25] And so they sought out grapes from northern Sonoma County to make their homemade wine in North Beach area. And what kind of grapes would they have been working with at that time? You know, at that time they weren't making 100% Zinfandel although the major portion

[00:30:44] of their wine was Zinfandel but most of them found that the Zinfandel blend, typical blend, consisted of some petite Syrah, some Keraginan and maybe a little Grenache. And every once in a while if the acidities weren't right they'd add one or two boxes

[00:31:01] per ton of what they called golden chaslers which we know now as Palomino. We'll return to the Patrick Campbell interview and Patrick's own encounter with Palomino vines right after this message. Would you like to hear more new episodes of All Drink To That?

[00:31:19] Consider making a gift donation to support the program. You can donate from anywhere by making use of the PayPal or Stripe links on the show website and that website is alldrinktothatpod.com. That's I-L-L drinktothat P-O-D dot com to directly support the show.

[00:31:37] Look for the PayPal or Stripe insignia. Direct donations are the number one reason that this show continues to exist. Do your part today. So one thing that's interesting about that Zen community is that they had a bunch of Palomino vines, right? Yeah. That was curious in retrospect.

[00:31:57] Palomino grapes are from southwest Spain and they go into sherry a lot and there's no trace of the original grape really in sherry for two reasons. The alcohol and the sherry, you know, flavors would overwhelm it.

[00:32:13] And the main reason is there probably wasn't much there to begin with. They're very, very neutral grapes. So there are these great big clusters and great big berries full of juice. And why they were planted on Sonoma Mountain is hard to conceive because it's probably

[00:32:30] the most polar opposite grape growing area you could imagine. Clay soil, not that hot, not flat at all. But anyway, that's what we had at the Zen Center. We had three acres of that and I took one look at that and something just hit me.

[00:32:47] They were really, really cool vines. Very, 100 years old, no kidding. And this is in the early 70s. And they were just gnarly and sculptural and just really beautiful. So I started pruning them with the other folks there. And nobody knew what we were doing.

[00:33:06] I mean, then somebody said, well, I've got a guy, a buddy who has a vineyard over on the other side, on the Mayakama side. So he came over and showed us how to prune and it was pretty much a hatchet job that

[00:33:18] we did on the poor old vines. But I really got into it. Then I started taking the professional vineyard managers class at the Santa Rosa Junior College. And this was just a fabulous class run by a guy called Rich Thomas, who is locally a

[00:33:37] hero of anybody in the vineyard business. And he said on the first class, by the second class, probably 50% of you will be gone. And there were only like 20 people on the first day.

[00:33:50] And he said, I'm going to tell you this once and I'm going to tell it to you because you got to do it. Bring a rain suit. And by that, I mean rain pants, rain hat, rain jacket. I'm not talking about Gore-Tex and plastic.

[00:34:03] I'm talking about real work, working rain suits. Because every Saturday we're going to get on the bus and we're going to do a three hour work session. Well, the next weekend, the first day of work, it just poured. I mean, it was deluging.

[00:34:21] And he said, okay, everybody off the bus. Some folks said, well, I didn't quite get around to getting my rain suit. Okay, either off the bus or you're getting an F. And he was right. We ended up with 10 people. It was a two year course.

[00:34:35] And I could make a list of the number of well-known grape growers in Sonoma County who passed through that course and Napa as well. It was just a seminal course. And I think really put the Sonoma Napa areas on the wine map, international wine map. Wow.

[00:34:54] Well, not single-handedly, of course, but I mean it was a major component in the growth of the two counties in terms of grape growing excellence. You kind of went back and translated what you'd learned at the course to the people at the monastery, right? Oh yeah, absolutely.

[00:35:10] But by the time I'd really gotten my chops down in the vineyard, a child was married and had moved away. So I was in the Zen Buddhist community for three years.

[00:35:25] And what prompted the next step of my life was, number one, I need to get my act together. But number two, a vineyard came up for sale down the road. And there was a very nice and very smart elderly lady who'd been farming the three-acre

[00:35:44] vineyard on it for a number of years virtually by herself. And she would have to have been in her mid-70s, I'd say. And it was too much for her. It was way too much for her.

[00:35:57] So I had a newborn, very cute little baby girl and my wife at the time, Faith, and I visited her with Aria, our little girl. And this lady, Carmen Taylor, just fell in love with Aria.

[00:36:13] And she said, you know, I knew I was going to die here, but I think you folks should take it over. You should buy it from me. You deserve it. And I want my vineyard to fall into good hands. And that was very sweet.

[00:36:27] And we took her up on it. And it was a seven-acre property with a house and all the farm equipment and a three-acre vineyard. So we bought it for, I mean, virtually next to nothing. Today it would cost, I mean, multiple millions of dollars.

[00:36:46] In those days, it was quite inexpensive because it was up in the mountains and people wanted big production down in the valley. They didn't want to hack out two or three tons of the acre up in the mountains when you

[00:36:58] can get six, seven, eight, nine, ten down in the valley. So I just felt very, very fortunate. I don't think probably I would have been in the wine business if that hadn't happened.

[00:37:09] It sounds like the best thing that ever happened for you twice is that you got away from sherry. That sounds like part of the key. I love a good sherry, but God, not this garbage my mother used to have. I don't know why.

[00:37:22] She seemed to drink it every night, so how could it have sat in the decanter for three years? I mean, it tasted like it had sat in the decanter for three years. So what was the history of that property that you called Laurel Glen?

[00:37:34] She had planted it in 68 or? I think it was 68, yeah. Sonoma Mountain was an interesting area because in the Sonoma Valley, the southeast part of Sonoma County is Sonoma Valley and there is indeed a valley that runs through it.

[00:37:51] And of course, mountains on either side, otherwise it wouldn't be a valley. So the east side is the Mayakamas side and the west side is the Sonoma Mountain side. The Mayakamas is angled to the west and the Sonoma Mountain side is angled to the east,

[00:38:09] for all intents and purposes, north and east. So if you think about it, the afternoon sun is going to strike the Mayakamas side directly. So the Mayakamas side gets very hot. The Sonoma side is angled away from the afternoon sun and doesn't get these big temperature

[00:38:28] spikes that you would get on the other side. So interestingly enough, almost without exception, the German immigrants settled on Sonoma Mountain and the Italian immigrants settled on the Mayakamas side. So we had neighbors, a guy called Herb Bruning, who was this giant of a guy.

[00:38:47] I mean, he was really, really big. I mean, he was a big bulky guy, probably about 6 foot 10. And his story was he had been descended from Kaiser Wilhelm's bodyguard. Anyway, I don't know if it's true or not, but anyway, this was Herb Bruning's story.

[00:39:05] And there were a lot of characters up there who were like first or second generation Europeans, but mostly from the cooler countries. Like temperature wise. Temperature wise. Not like they're super hip over there. So Sonoma Mountain and the Mayakamas side, the whole Sonoma Valley was really the origin

[00:39:24] of the North Coast California wine industry. Count Errasti planted the first vines, et cetera. So there was a history of at least 100 years on Sonoma Mountain. There have to be because those vines were 100 years old, so it's probably before that.

[00:39:39] And Jack London was up there, come to think of it. He had a big vineyard on Sonoma Mountain. There was a lot of, I was going to say ferment without trying to make a pun.

[00:39:49] There was a lot of ferment on Sonoma Mountain when I got there because people were starting to discover it. It had this long history of people growing and making wine there, but not all that distinguished for some reason. I don't really know why.

[00:40:06] And when I started getting involved in the early 70s, people were really starting to figure, you know, younger folks like me were starting to figure things out. And I had probably six or seven folks, young fellas who I used to work with and we'd all

[00:40:24] prune each other's vineyards and share ideas, do all sorts of experiments. And really tried to figure out more than a lot of the older folks who'd been there for a long time and just done the same thing year after year because that's just the way they did it.

[00:40:41] They weren't interested in making anything particularly significant because they weren't going to get paid for it and they probably weren't all that interested in spending the time and effort to figure out things.

[00:40:52] So by the late 60s, early 70s, there was a big number of people who were starting to get into the wine business who were very interested. In fact, a couple of the guys who were in my class started in it. Phil Coutury, for example.

[00:41:07] So Carmen Taylor started this in 68. So I guess you could say she was one of the early adopters of the modern era. Her husband had been an academic and she'd spent a lot of time in Europe and she had

[00:41:21] this place on Sonoma Mountain, well, let's plant some grapes. What the hell? So she planted Cabernet and she got some cuttings from University of California at Davis, planted them out and farmed the vineyard for 68 to 76 when I took it over. So eight years.

[00:41:43] And it turned out that the vineyard was really good. It was facing east, a lot of rock, enough clay to hold rainfall moisture in the soil. And it was just a terrific location. One of the reasons was that facing east, it had a much more stable climate.

[00:42:05] It didn't get so hot in the afternoon and it was actually warmer at night because it was high enough above the valley that when the fog pushed in in summer, it seemed to push the heat upwards.

[00:42:18] So we had this rather narrow temperature range, which is something I've always wondered about since, because a large thermal dynamic, high highs and low lows can also be very good as in Argentina, for example.

[00:42:31] But anyway, it seemed to have this sort of compressed temperature zone during the growing season. So every morning pretty much the fog would blow in in the valley and we'd look down at

[00:42:42] the fog a couple hundred feet lower and maybe get a lemon off the lemon tree that survived during the winter because we were basically in a banana belt. Didn't freeze. Very rarely froze up there. So I took it over in 1976.

[00:42:59] And as I said, all the farming equipment was there. We had a very narrow gauge crawler tractor and she used a rototiller of all things, which was really a terrible insult to the soil. It really wrecks soil.

[00:43:12] Through my classes, I'd figured out that a disc was the way to do it. So I changed over to a disc and did it the way the folks up in the mountains had been doing it. Joe Miami and some of the old timers who were our mentors.

[00:43:25] Who was Joe Miami? Oh, Joe Miami was an Italian guy who farmed what is now the Moon Mountain Vineyard. And this guy, Joe Miami, would bring us down, you know, the young guys who were sort of learning things together.

[00:43:41] He'd bring us down and he'd give us his homemade wine, which was really awful, but we pretended we liked it. And he'd tell us stories and give us ideas. And you never knew if he was a bullshitter or not.

[00:43:54] He was a consummate bullshitter, but most of what he said was actually worth listening to. He used to say that, you know how I get this baby skin? He really didn't have a wrinkle. He was in his late 60s.

[00:44:08] He said, it's because I don't wear a mask when I sulfur. I like the sulfur dust on my skin, which is just the opposite of what should be happening. I mean, he should have the most weathered, leathery skin.

[00:44:23] So whether it was because of the sulfur or not, I have no idea. But I mean, you know, he'd come up with these things and he said, you don't need a roll bar on the tractor. You know, they never tip over.

[00:44:33] And if they do, you just jump off, no big deal. He had this big, low gravelly voice. But anyway, he basically taught us all how to prune. So anyway, we got the vineyard in 76. I very quickly realized I needed more fruit. Three acres wasn't going to cut it.

[00:44:51] So the next step was I leased six acres of adjacent bare land and planted that out. Then I took over a neighboring 15-acre vineyard, then planted out another six-acre vineyard. Anyway, we eventually and quite quickly grew up to about 35, 40 acres. And then it was a viable situation.

[00:45:16] But in the early couple of years, we only had this one vineyard. And we had a contract with Chateau St. Jean. Carmen Taylor had negotiated this contract with Chateau St. Jean. And at the time, they were making vineyard-designated Cabernets from Glen Ellent Vineyard, Laurel

[00:45:34] Glen, Carmen A. and Jack London Vineyard. And these were the top mountain Cabernet vineyards of the Sonoma Valley. Well, 77, I didn't have a contract, but I assumed everything would continue as normal.

[00:45:52] So I went down to Chateau St. Jean and said, well, you know, do you want the grapes? Oh yeah, yeah, I love them. They're terrific, definitely. He said, well, you know, I think we ought to have a contract. Yeah, we'll get it. We'll draw it up.

[00:46:01] Anyway, it got right around to harvest time. And I mean, we were just about to pick, and we were informed by Chateau St. Jean that they weren't going to make any more red wine. So I said, oh great, now what?

[00:46:16] You know, I'm about to pick these damn grapes. And I went down to Kenwood Vineyard, which was owned by a guy called John Sheila at that time and said, John, you know, I've got this vineyard up here. He said, yeah, I've tried the wine, it's great.

[00:46:29] Sell us the fruit. I said, cool. So let's get a contract. He said, you don't need a contract, just bring them in. And I sold to Kenwood for their artist series label for five years. And that was how business should be done. The 77 was pretty warm, right?

[00:46:48] That was like a drought year? Yeah, it was as a matter of fact. Yeah, it wasn't the greatest year. 78 and 79 were terrific. But 77, yeah, was very alcoholic and tough. So it was a bad year to get started with them.

[00:47:04] But anyway, John was a gentleman and a terrific guy, and we had a really good relationship. So you know, these were the things that maybe they still happen today. I don't know if they do or not, but it was a real good lesson in business, which I had

[00:47:20] zero experience in. You know, I had no idea what I was doing business-wise. So that was my first lesson. It's the people you deal with that's the starting point and probably the ending point. If you're dealing with the right people, everything else flows.

[00:47:38] And at the end of five years, I said to John, I want to start making my own wine, but I don't want to leave you hanging. So I'll give you half the fruit this year if it's okay if I have half the fruit.

[00:47:48] And he said, yeah, sure, no problem. That would have been 1981. I took just a little bit of fruit and made an 81 vintage, and I still have a few bottles. And it's actually still tasting pretty good, even though it wasn't a very good vintage.

[00:48:03] Then by 1982, I was completely on my own, and that was a really poor vintage. So the first vintage I had to sell, you know, after I'd made the wine, was a tough vintage. And then it was followed by 1983, which was just a disaster.

[00:48:19] I mean, it was really a terrible vintage. So I got started on my own in some pretty tough times. And I think probably if the wine I'd made out of those two vintages were what I had

[00:48:34] started out with in today's world, I would have been out of business quickly. But you know, there was a lot of demand for wine then, not as much knowledge about what a good wine is.

[00:48:48] And I sort of made it through, and then came 1984, 85, 86, which were three probably the best string of vintages I've ever had. I mean, they were great. And that really put us on the map. And it was all Cabernet or mostly Cabernet? It was 100% Cabernet.

[00:49:07] She had a somewhat unique vine material that she'd planted, right? She had a clone, and I forget what it was called, but it was one of the UC Davis clones. And I think it was something that I'd never really heard of subsequently.

[00:49:21] And what I did over the years was when I planted out new vineyards, there was one original vine in that three-acre vineyard which was just terrific. And I mean, it's beautiful. You know, you taste the fruit. It was just really good stuff.

[00:49:36] I mean, it was really a beautiful vine. And that was sort of the mother vine. And I planted, I think, subsequently about 10 vineyards. And they were all...you could all trace them back to this particular vine.

[00:49:51] So by that time, my guess is that by 10 generations later, the Cabernet we had was not terribly closely related to what was planted in the original vineyard because it had just been selected out.

[00:50:08] You know, I mean, the second vineyard, we'd take the best vines of the second vineyard, plant it to the third vineyard, and take the best vines of the third vineyard and plant it to the fourth vineyard, etc.

[00:50:16] So there is a Laurel Glen clone at UC Davis in the UC Davis collection, which you know, you can buy if you want to use the Laurel Glen clone. What did it seem like functionally in terms of like berry size and leaf?

[00:50:30] Small berries didn't produce prodigiously, you know, maybe two to three tons of the acre. Of course, that was largely due to conduction and how we pruned it, etc. But it just had a very intense berry, spicy, maintained acid very, very well, thick skin,

[00:50:50] quite tannic, but very racy sort of taste to it that it wasn't the modern style of big jammy, giant alcohol, syrupy sort of Cabernets that certain people seemed to like.

[00:51:05] So in a way, the style of Laurel Glen that I think of from your era was kind of predetermined by the grape in a way. I mean, there's site too, but that's the material you were working with. Yeah, I think that's part of it.

[00:51:18] But also people really weren't making giant alcoholic wines in those days. It just wasn't part of the culture, I don't think. I mean, there's always been this tension between a grape grower and a winemaker.

[00:51:31] The grape grower wants to get the grapes off the vine and out of the vineyard sold as quickly as possible before the next rain or next disaster comes. The winemaker is always saying, well, let's wait a little bit longer, you know?

[00:51:45] Can we just hold it a little bit more, get a little more flavor up? So there's always been that tension, and there always will be that tension between the strictly grape growers and the strictly winemakers.

[00:51:55] But I was in the position of making wine exclusively from my own grapes. I suppose I would have that conversation with myself. Well, gee, it might rain tomorrow. Maybe we better get them off. No, no, no, it won't be that bad.

[00:52:12] So there's always this sort of white hat, black hat discussion in my head. So I think probably early on, given my background and training as a vineyard guy as opposed to a winemaker, probably erred on the side of the vineyard guy who wanted the insurance

[00:52:33] policy of getting them in the tank quick. So we weren't really dealing with high alcohols. But generally that was the culture in those days. You didn't start seeing the high alcohols until the later 80s, I think. What did a typical fermentation setup look like for you?

[00:52:50] I figured early on that open-top fermenters were the way to go. I'm not quite sure how I ever really figured that out, but it certainly bucked the common way of doing things in those days.

[00:53:04] What most people did was you'd have a large stainless steel tank that was narrow and tall, and you'd fill it with grapes, and then you'd put a pump down in a valve at the bottom, and you'd pump the juice over the top.

[00:53:18] And it would circulate and get the skin contacts into the wine, which was, of course, what you wanted to do. Well, there were several issues with that, which I would pat myself on the back for having figured out on my own.

[00:53:32] One was that during fermentation, the solid materials, the skins, rise to the top because they're pushed up by the carbon dioxide. So you have this cap, it's called, on top of the fermenter. So the taller and narrower the fermenter, the more material you're going to have sitting

[00:53:54] up at the top. And the narrower it is, the thicker that cap is going to be for obvious reasons. It can't spread out, it has to go up. And therefore, the interface between the wine and the skins is much smaller.

[00:54:12] And it's the skins that gives the wine the flavor, for the most part, and color and intensity and interest, flavor interest. So that was negative point number one. Negative point number two was putting a pump on and pumping the wine over the cap, because

[00:54:31] skins would start getting into the pump, and the pump would start sharing skins and releasing bitter flavors. So that didn't seem to be a very good idea. Also point number three is when you did that back in the day, you'd sit on top of the fermenter,

[00:54:46] pointing the hose down a manhole and try and soak the cap with the juice. And generally what would happen is the liquid stuff, fermenting wine, would find a way through the cap. They would just eventually find a channel through the cap, and it would all go through

[00:55:06] this channel and wouldn't really wet the rest of the cap. So anyway, I went down to visit a bunch of wineries and saw them doing this, and I thought there's got to be a better way.

[00:55:16] Because if the theory is that the quality and interest part of the wine is generated by the skins, then you want to get more skins in contact with the liquid stuff.

[00:55:27] So what I did was I got low and very wide fermenters, which of course let the cap spread out and increased the interface between the liquid and the skin. So that was good.

[00:55:43] Well then, next issue, eventually after a couple hours, all those skins are up at the top. So how do we get them back into the mix? Well, we could either do the pump over deal or we could stand on top of it and punch it

[00:55:57] down, punch down the cap. I devised this sort of plunger type of mechanism on a pole, sort of like a toilet plunger really, except made of aluminum. And you'd stand on top of the... on a catwalk in my case, and punch down, push the skins

[00:56:16] down into the liquid. And it was a lot of work. I mean, I'm not even sure I could do it anymore. I mean, it was tough work when the whole thing was boiling like that. All this massive amounts of CO2 were pushing the skins up to the surface.

[00:56:32] You know, you might have an 8 inch, 12 inch thick cap on it that you had to push down. So anyway, basically we had maximum interface between the liquid and the skins. And the way of punching it down was very gentle and very thorough. It really got a huge mix.

[00:56:54] I mean, by the time you were done, there was liquid on top. Now, a couple hours later, it was a solid cap again. It really turned the whole thing over that I really don't think you can do with a pump over.

[00:57:08] So it tended to give the wines a lot of flavor without increasing the tannin, because Mountain Cabernet tends to have thicker skins, which gives it flavor but also gives it tannin. So the issue is how do you not have the tannin overwhelm the eventual wine?

[00:57:28] At the end of a fermentation, you want to have gotten everything out of those skins you possibly can with the exception of tannins. So you want to treat incorporating the skins into the liquid as gently as possible.

[00:57:42] But you want to make sure that you get as much skins into the liquid, because thereby you'll be extracting the flavors. So what was a typical length of maceration? How many days are we talking about? In the early days, we would probably do about 10 days, something like that.

[00:58:00] You know, do it more to taste. We'd pull it out as soon as it was bone dry. In other words, there was no sugar left. I think if you're going to make really good wine, you've got to take risks. And the risks in making red wine are multiple.

[00:58:15] You can end up with vinegar at the worst. You can end up with off flavors. You can end up with all sorts of different things. So you do have to be careful. You can't just be a cowboy.

[00:58:27] The basic fermentation process is a spoilage process, and you've got to know when to stop it. So the longer you leave the wine just sitting there on these sort of exhausted skins that eventually fall down to the bottom because there's no more CO2 pushing them up, and they're

[00:58:45] just waterlogged, I mean literally waterlogged, they fall down to the bottom. And then you've got this wine that's unprotected by CO2. CO2 keeps the oxygen out, and oxygen can be the source of spoilage basically.

[00:59:01] So what we did was we covered the open-top fermenters with plastic sheeting and pumped nitrogen into the top to expel the oxygen. You put it in physically at the bottom and it pushed the oxygen out. Did you use delistaz? Yeah, we did later on.

[00:59:19] What did you find doing that? I think it seemed to soften the tannins a little bit. I was never a university-trained winemaker, and I never fully understood the chemistry of it. So it's very difficult to quantify what you do.

[00:59:36] And you only get one crack at it a year, except in my case later on when I went to Argentina. It's a very slow learning process because you're not making wine all day long. You make it once a year basically at fermentation time.

[00:59:51] So how can you separate out the uniqueness of a certain year when you're constantly fiddling around trying different fermentation techniques? You know, you have no basis. So you've got to have enough experience to say, well, I'll try this and that.

[01:00:12] And if it sort of works three years later, you say, well, that's probably a pretty good idea. You went to a lecture that some professor said, oh, let's try delistaz. And the first reaction is, well, that's a crazy idea. That's just asking for trouble, spoilage trouble.

[01:00:30] And then you try it on one tank and say, well, it does seem to soften the tannins. But you never know. I mean, that's the thing. So you were doing Malo in tank? Well, we did it first. Yeah.

[01:00:44] And then we started doing it in barrels and it's messy, but it seemed to work better. Malo in barrels? Yeah. At first we did it in tank, but I think it is a better thing in barrels.

[01:00:56] Brand new French oak barrels that I think was a good thing that we started off with very, very good wood. And I had this feeling that the wood itself was contributing to high tannins.

[01:01:12] So I tried an experiment very early on with some of the barrels to leach them out. We'd run hot water through them for five or 10 minutes, each barrel, and a lot of brown water would come out.

[01:01:27] So we were washing out a lot of the stuff we'd paid big bucks for. But I think it was a really good idea because nobody ever commented about a Laurel Glen wine that I made, that it was oaky. Nobody ever picked up oak in it.

[01:01:45] And we put them in brand new barrels for 24 months. And that's a compliment to the vineyard because the fruit was so intense. But I think it was also that we took the rough edges out of the barrel.

[01:02:00] If you're worried about tannins, how did you approach the pressing of the Cabernet? Well, when I was making homemade wine, I just had a basket press with a crank and you'd walk around it and squeeze it. That's a great system. That's terrific.

[01:02:16] But you can't do it on a large scale. You'd need a lot of them or... Anyway, it's just not practical. So we went to a... it was two discs that pushed in from either end into the middle and just squeezed the juice out.

[01:02:32] And I realized that was pretty aggressive. So I eventually moved to a bladder press, an old Wilmus bladder press, got a used one. And it was a much more gentle situation. But if you're listening carefully, you'll realize that tannin management is really what

[01:02:50] I've been talking about the whole time. Did you use the press wine or did you discard it? We might've put a little bit in, but most of it we discarded. Yeah. We also had another thing out in the vineyard that was a very interesting machine.

[01:03:02] It was called a Mörtl, M-O-R-T-L. It was a German machine and it was originally made for fire suppression. And it's a tank that you pull behind a tractor and it had a destemmer in the front of it. So you'd run it through the vineyard.

[01:03:21] The pickers would pick their 40-pound lugs of grapes, dump it into the destemmer and the slurry, you know, the mashed up stuff with skin seeds and juice would go into this thousand gallon tank in back.

[01:03:38] So the grapes were not sitting around sort of exposed to oxygen and the sun and everything else. They were put to bed very, very quickly. And it had a pump system that was so loose that it never sheared any skins at all. It was a very interesting thing.

[01:03:58] And as far as I know, there were maybe three or four imported into the United States and I used it for years and years and years. It was a great system. So between the early 80s and then 2011 when you sold Laurel Glen, what are some of the

[01:04:12] vintages that really stood out for you? Maybe as learning moments, maybe they were super challenging. Well, 83 was super challenging and it was a lousy wine. And I still have a few bottles and I swear, I don't know how I ever made it through.

[01:04:25] I mean, it was really pretty poor wine. 84, 85, 86 were great. 89 was good. 90 was probably the best vintage hands down I've ever had. I mean, it was really good and I don't have any more of it, damn it. 92 was good. 94, 96.

[01:04:45] I never liked 97, everybody else did, but it was too heavy and overdone for my taste. 99 was great. 2002, 4, I don't know. I remember the old ones, I don't remember the more recent ones. Well, I think I was more engaged towards the end in Argentina and Chile and moving into

[01:05:07] that whole phase of my life. So that kind of started when you got interested in bulk wine in California though, right? Yeah. I had a revelation that in the early 90s that there was a lot of very good wine available in bulk, meaning not bottled on the market.

[01:05:31] Most of the coastal folks like me didn't really understand that there was a huge world of wine out in the Central Valley that was traded, purchased and traded and sold through brokers. And the big wineries, that was their source of fruit.

[01:05:49] Somebody would make some wine, big winery would make the wine. They didn't like this particular lot or it didn't fit in or they weren't even a winery, a commercial winery in the sense of selling it.

[01:06:00] They were just set up to bring in fruit and make some wine out of it and sell it to a winery that had a label. So I got sort of wind of this whole vast underbelly of wine out in the Central Valley.

[01:06:16] And I began to realize that by the late 80s or early 90s, there was also a component of coastal wine, you know, Napa Sonoma in those days, wines that the higher-priced wineries like I never did it, but like my winery Chateau Maddalena or whatever, were selling wine sort

[01:06:39] of semi-secretly out the back door on the bulk wine market. Because if they'd had made their full production, they would have had to have lowered their prices to sell it because there was a market downturn and people didn't have enough money to buy the wine.

[01:06:57] That would have damaged their image as a label. Exactly. Exactly. So winery X was normally selling 10,000 cases of a Cabernet. Well, their sales went down. So the next vintage, they made their 10,000 case equivalents, sold half of it on the bulk

[01:07:14] wine market and had 5,000 cases that they could maintain the price for as a bottled wine. Well, what happened to this wine? You know, is it just going to go into jug wine or into a bag in a box or whatever?

[01:07:27] So I started poking around with asking the brokers, you know, what happens to this wine? So what's for sale? Cool. How much is it? I realized I could make a $10 Cabernet that was literally from juice that some of the

[01:07:43] top wineries were selling surreptitiously on the bulk wine market. So I actually started a label called Terra Rosa, which was a $10 per bottle retail Cabernet and it was really good. And it got big reputation. I mean, we were selling 50,000, 60,000 cases a year.

[01:08:05] So I thought, well, this is great, you know, because I mean, Laurel Glen's fun, but if I have a lousy vintage, then I'm stuck. And also I was getting to the point where I really just was not that interested in selling expensive wine to rich people.

[01:08:18] It just sort of always bothered me. So I thought, well, you know, I can still do that part, the Laurel Glen part and have a wine that regular folks can enjoy. And this is really before two buck shock. It's a different era.

[01:08:33] So it was kind of ahead of the curve. Way ahead of the curve. I think a lot of people thought I'd sold out my principles, but I don't think I did.

[01:08:42] I think I gave the market a good bottle of wine and you couldn't afford to do it at that price from the ground up. Well, eventually the supply and demand came back into equilibrium and that whole source of very good wine dried up.

[01:08:59] So I was faced with the decision of a sort of a three-part stool. One was price, one was quality, and one was origin of the grapes. So I decided if I stayed in the Napa Sonoma area, the price would be too high. So it wouldn't be economically feasible.

[01:09:18] I realized if I went to the Central Valley, the price would be there, but the quality wouldn't be there. And one of the wine brokers who I dealt with, with the Terra Rosa label, said, why don't you take a look at Chile?

[01:09:33] So I went down to Chile in the mid-90s, I guess it was, and poked around and said, boy, this is great. The grapes are cheap. The quality's really good. And I can continue the Terra Rosa project there.

[01:09:47] Well, of course, not being in California any longer, I took a big market hit. I went from 50,000, 60,000 cases down to, I can't even remember, 20 or something like that. But the wine was pretty good. I remember that one. Yeah. No, it was good.

[01:10:03] It was just as good as we were making up in California, but it just didn't have the cachet and Chile was just beginning to get any sense of recognition at all in those days.

[01:10:16] It's fairly unique for someone from the California wine industry at that time to go down to Chile. Oh, extremely unusual. I mean, Kendall Jackson and I were probably just about the only two people down there. So we kept the Terra Rosa label going at $10.

[01:10:33] And then a few years later, I took a trip over to Argentina with a friend, got a rental car, drove over the Andes, which was just an unbelievable trip. If you haven't done it, do it. It's just a fabulous trip.

[01:10:48] And got down to Mendoza late at night, and the lady I was with, who's a wine broker from Texas actually, who was working with Chilean wine and Argentine wine, said, let's go eat. I know this place called Trevi Restaurant in the Palace Hotel in Mendoza.

[01:11:05] Well, this was like going back into some place the godfather would have eaten in. Italian from the 50s. It was great. It was a really cool restaurant. And we had a bottle of Malbec, which I never had before. I said, God, this stuff is great.

[01:11:22] You know, where do we get it? She said, it's all over. It's all over the whole Mendoza area. You know, to make a long story short, I eventually moved over to Argentina, but not before I

[01:11:33] was making Terra Rosa in Argentina and Terra Rosa in Chile and confusing the market completely. I was confused. I was a buyer at that time, and I remember I had ordered Terra Rosa, and it was Chile,

[01:11:46] and then I ordered it again, and it came in as Argentina, and no one had told me that that was going to happen, like from the distributor side. And I was like, wait a second, this is a whole other country. I was like, what is happening here? Right.

[01:11:59] They were both good wines, but as I said, I was never a businessman. I mean, you know, no sane person would move from California to Chile to Argentina and then have an Argentine one one time in Chile and the other time, but I did.

[01:12:15] And I mean, it was fun. Well, it is an alternative harvest, right? You can be in one part of the world at one time of the year. Oh yeah, no, I'm not saying it wasn't smart to be in the southern and northern hemispheres

[01:12:25] sequentially, but it probably wasn't a very good marketing idea to have it from two different countries at the same time. But eventually I settled in Argentina, and I did that, made wine in Argentina for, God, I can't even think, I mean, 25 years or something like that.

[01:12:41] What was that like? It's a long way down there. It takes a lot of time. I flew mostly United Airlines and I have, I think 1.8 million miles or something like that, but it's been just a wonderful experience.

[01:12:56] So when I first got there, I met another gringo down there who'd been living in Buenos Aires for a long time. I made wine at his place and it turned out that that was, it was just a terrible, terrible vintage.

[01:13:10] Which is kind of in keeping with your luck for first vintages. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Anyway, the next vintage was terrific and it was fine from there on. But I mean, Mendoza was just barely starting to get an international presence.

[01:13:27] The Catanas were reaching out to foreign winemakers for help. Everybody else had very old-fashioned ways of making wine. I mean, you know, multi-level wineries, ancient equipment, you know, brought over from Italy in the 20s. There was, you know, very difficult economic times then.

[01:13:49] People were driving cars with no paint on it because, you know, the hail would just knock the paint off them. It was a very, very different time than it is now. No tourism, you know, you never saw another gringo down there. It was palpably Italian.

[01:14:06] Because of the immigration. Because of the immigration in the early parts of the century. But it was just old-fashioned. There was nothing modern, there was nothing new. You know, you wouldn't see a single barrel. People were doing cement tanks? Oh yeah.

[01:14:21] And it turned out the cement tanks are great. You know, you line them with epoxy, they're just terrific. I mean, they're cubes. So you get lots of skin contact. They're terrific. And then, you know, on the multi-levels, you didn't need to pump.

[01:14:33] You could just gravity feed until it got to the bottom, then you had to bring it back up again. But at least you got a couple of shots at moving the wine without having to pump it. So yeah, it was a real pioneering effort, I'll say that.

[01:14:45] I mean, you know, how do you get the wine from there up to the United States without it spoiling? How can you make sure that the wine you made is the wine you actually receive? Argentina had had so much economic problems, and continues, you know, cyclically with economic

[01:15:04] problems, that there's a very short-term way of thinking. There was a big Malbec boom, right? Yeah, I think probably five or six years after I got there, Malbec started to be known as a delicious wine that wasn't expensive.

[01:15:20] And it kind of knocked Australian Shiraz around a little bit in the market, in the United States. Yeah, yeah, it did. I mean, those were definitely the glory days. And then it started to get, you know, like most wine regions do, as soon as they start

[01:15:35] getting some recognition, rich folk come in and build ego wineries. Americans would come in, British, lots of people from all over the world, wealthy people, and they were realizing they could buy land cheap and cash in on this Malbec boom.

[01:15:52] So you'd get this production from, you know, in the early 2000s, say, of, you know, delicious Malbec, but nothing world-class. I mean, just good, solid, saleable, drinkable wine, Malbecs. And eventually, you know, year by year, wealthier folks came in, and I'm sure some money laundering people came in.

[01:16:16] And they wanted their ego wine. So you started to get this rash of overly processed Malbecs in gigantic, heavy bottles, you know, with fancy labels. And it was sort of a bummer, really, for me.

[01:16:30] You know, I'd sort of come in through the back door, and now these people were coming in through the front door with money falling out of their pockets. Was there some currency fluctuation that you had to deal with over time? Oh, yeah.

[01:16:43] In those days, and probably even to some extent today, if you wanted stability in the wine business, you do not go to Argentina. A lot of really terrible things can happen. Strikes, electricity breaking down, contracts broken or ignored, spoilage issues, falsification,

[01:17:06] taking one wine, substituting another, and economic fluctuations of currency. It's amazing that you stuck with it for so long, but I guess you found good partners. I mean, 25 years is a long time to deal with that kind of situation.

[01:17:18] But maybe you kind of like that, or maybe it's an interesting challenge for you. I liked it. It was really fun. I mean, you know, it was frustrating, but the people I dealt with were great. It was always an adventure.

[01:17:30] You get off the plane, you never knew what you were going to see. I mean, you could see people marching in the streets with cazorraderos, they call them, beating their pots and pans in a strike.

[01:17:39] One of the first times I went to Argentina, they had what was called the Corralito, which is a corral, little corral. And the president at the time, Menem, had decided he wanted to de-link the Argentine peso from the US dollar.

[01:17:56] It had been one to one, it had been convertible one to one for a few years. And he said, okay, you're going to get three Argentine pesos to the dollar now, which means

[01:18:06] that if you have money in a savings account, you're just a regular person in the bank, you have one third of what you had the day before. And you know, there were people weeping in the streets. I mean, it was just awful.

[01:18:18] You know, people beating on the doors of the banks. I began to understand economics at that point. I feel like you've always had a sharp eye for a deal. It feels like most of the time you've come right side up when it's come to finance.

[01:18:32] I mean, from my distant perspective. I don't know how, yeah, but it's true. So learning Malbec, what did you learn? I really respected what the local people did. I realized that if they'd been doing it for that long, at least they're doing something right.

[01:18:51] It doesn't mean you can't do it better. But some very large North Coast operations came down. The first one that came down said, we know how to do it. We're going to put in stainless steel tanks and we're going to do this and that, and we're

[01:19:03] going to modernize it. We don't want to do anything the way you've been doing it before. We're going to show you how it's done. And they were out of business in 10 years in Argentina. It just doesn't work, number one. It culturally does not work.

[01:19:18] But probably more importantly in terms of winemaking, why not start with the base of local knowledge and expand on it? You're coming into a very different growing condition. It's a thousand meters high. It's gravel. It receives six inches of rain a year at best. Irrigation is through canal.

[01:19:37] There's no drip irrigation. There's no phylloxera. The sun is very intense. The nights are very cold. And it's a growing area unlike any others that I'm really familiar with. So why wouldn't you suck it up and say, well, maybe these local people have learned something?

[01:19:58] Let's start with that base. You came from some experience of working in a situation like you spoke about where you're dealing with mountain Cabernet and one of the real challenges is dealing with the tannins. And then you're going and working with Malbec.

[01:20:12] And from having tasted that wine that you made, I mean, not very tannic as I recall. So it seems like a whole different challenge. Yeah. Well, Malbec grapes are not large grapes. So the smaller the grape, the more skin you're going to have in relation to juice.

[01:20:30] So the more skin you have, probably the more flavor, but also the more tannin in very simple terms. So again, this cap management situation is critical and that's where the local concrete tanks were cubical. And you had a very wide interface of the skins with the juice.

[01:20:51] So you could extract a lot, but you didn't need to manipulate the cap very much because it was thin enough. You could just sort of punch it down or even just roll the wine around in the tank and it would mix up nicely.

[01:21:06] And you can probably get it out of wood before two years. Like you're probably not 24 months in wood. We weren't using barrels. You can't make a $10 wine in new French oak barrels. If you do it, you're going to be out of business in short order.

[01:21:23] And in Argentina, there wasn't even a source of barrels in the early days. I mean, you couldn't get a good barrel to save your life. A few years later, Tarasov started coming in and the major coopers started coming in, but they're expensive as hell.

[01:21:35] And you still, for the wine I was making, you couldn't afford to put it in barrels. So we used wood products, you know, staves, not with Laurel Glen, but we use micro oxygenation. We did all the things available to modern winemakers that can emulate what barrels

[01:21:55] do without putting it in barrels. I'm not saying it's 100%, but it's pretty darn good. You can do some really good stuff. And we did all of them. So was the goal always to sell it to the United States market or does it sell somewhat in Argentina or?

[01:22:12] No, we didn't sell it in Argentina. That's again, another one of those things that is iffy in Argentina. Even to this day, trucks carrying wine across country can be diverted and the wine stolen. It happens every now and then.

[01:22:28] I didn't want to get into the Argentine wine business, but what I did was I made the wine there. And when it was finished, I would ship it up in containers up to the United States and bring it into a winery that I used in Sonoma County.

[01:22:45] And we'd finish the wine with the micro oxygen and staves and things like that in California and then bottle it here without having to worry about, God, I hope there's not an electrical worker strike down in Mendoza for the next month, you know, type of thing.

[01:23:02] But is there a reason specifically that you decided not to continue with Chile? I understand all the advantages of Mendoza, but it also seems like there were some challenges too. I realized that I didn't click as well with Chile because Chile really didn't have a wine culture.

[01:23:19] It had people who were growing kiwis and if the kiwi market went south, they'd put in plums. And if that went south, they'd put in grapes. So there wasn't this commitment to making wine. In Argentina, you had a real wine drinking culture.

[01:23:34] In Chile, you really didn't have that back in the day. I mean, it's certainly changed now. The other thing I really didn't like about Chile was Chile had almost a medieval culture until the modern era.

[01:23:50] It was a lot of very wealthy landowners who were descendants of really the Spanish conquistadores who held large tracts of land. And there was a huge cultural and economic disparity between the rich and poor. Well, Allende broke it up. Salvador Allende, the president back in the day.

[01:24:12] But in any case, it all came back together where the rich folk owned all the land. And there was a very aristocratic feeling to Chile back in those days. I think that I just didn't really like, you know, you have to deal with these sort of

[01:24:28] privileged people who for generations had received lands while the workers were killing themselves. You just didn't find that in Argentina. Argentina was a much more homogenous society, which I liked a lot better. You were also involved in the direct shipping lawsuits that happened in the United States, right?

[01:24:49] And that's had a big long-term effect in California winemaking in terms of sales. Part of the rescinding of prohibition by the 21st Amendment allowed each state to have their own alcohol beverage laws. So needless to say, the distributors in any given state didn't want competition from distributors

[01:25:11] in other states. And it eventually led to a number of problems, one of which was that the interstate shipping of wine had a number of roadblocks that were set up by individual states. So that didn't seem fair to me.

[01:25:31] And I and several other people, Jess Jackson in particular, the late Jess Jackson, started an organization to try and do something about it. And we eventually ended up with some very odd partners representing us.

[01:25:46] One was Ken Starr, who was an excellent lawyer, of course, but he had this sort of libertarian streak in him apparently. The free trade aspect of the lawsuit was very appealing to libertarian type people who don't want economic restrictions.

[01:26:04] And it went through the channels, got up to the Supreme Court. I mean, I was there at the hearing. Anyway, we won. Were there any of those strategy and committee meetings that particularly stood out for you?

[01:26:15] Well, we were very lucky to have Jess Jackson, who was a very smart guy and a lawyer leading the charge. I think the original meetings were maybe seven people, you know, because the industry at that time was concerned about upsetting the apple cart.

[01:26:33] They didn't want to piss off the distributors. And I didn't really care because I wasn't big enough. I had enough demand for my stuff that didn't bother me. And Jess Jackson was so ornery, he, you know, he didn't care who he pissed off.

[01:26:47] Almost took it as a matter of pride. And so, you know, there was a spectrum of people who were committed to the idea intellectually and commercially, you know, for the sake of their own business. And I was more on the intellectual side. It was just fascinating.

[01:27:04] I mean, it was really interesting. I spent days and days and days and hours and hours. We set up an entire new industry trade association because the Wine Institute, you know, which is the big dog wine trade representative for California wines, you know, opposed us at every angle.

[01:27:24] They did not want to rock the boat. So we set up a whole new trade association called the American Vintners Association. We had winery members from 50 states. I mean, there's at least one winery in every single state.

[01:27:37] We positioned ourselves as the national wine trade group as opposed to the Wine Institute who were manifestly the representatives largely controlled by the very big wineries. So yeah, I mean, it was really a fun time full of how can we get past this hurdle?

[01:27:57] Well, let's start a new trade association. Well, I mean, that's a big deal. I mean, you know, it took a lot of work, you know, back and forth to Washington. The reason I think it's a big deal is because direct-to-consumer sales are such a big lifeline

[01:28:09] for small wineries because you can make more margin. Well, that's right. It's hard to be a small winery in California. A lot of times the deck is kind of stacked against you for long term to give it to your kids.

[01:28:22] Direct-to-consumer, which has really emerged in, say, the last decade and a half, has really been a tool in that toolbox. It's absolutely right. And I think it's probably getting tougher for small wineries.

[01:28:35] And that's why I think it's been, as you said, a lifeline to a lot of smaller wineries and will continue to be. Because with the number of distributors consolidating, they're going to go for the low-hanging fruit. And that is not the small winery that nobody's heard of them.

[01:28:52] So in 2011 you decided, or maybe you decided before, but you sold in 2011 Laurel Glen. And why did you make that decision? It wasn't that interesting to do the same thing year after year after year after year.

[01:29:07] At first it was romantic and really fun, and learning everything and trying this and that and meeting distributors all over the country and customers. And it was exciting and stimulating, intellectually stimulating. And eventually that wore off. I sort of pretty well knew how to farm good grapes.

[01:29:25] I pretty well knew how to make good wine from those particular vineyards. And I wouldn't say there's nothing more to learn. When you approach pretty good knowledge, the margin for increased knowledge beyond that point is not very much.

[01:29:43] You're making tiny steps of improvement after you've reached a certain level. And I wouldn't say I got bored with it, but it was just time to move on. How do you keep yourself busy these days? I'm playing a lot of music.

[01:29:58] I started off playing folk guitar when I was a kid and moved into sort of bluegrass stuff. Then my grandmother had a violin in her attic and I said, well, how hard could that be? Let's give that a shot. I realized how hard it could be.

[01:30:16] And that was at the age of 18. And then when I started the Zen place, I moved over to the viola and got a job in the Santa Rosa Symphony, which for a little old Santa Rosa, it's a very, very good orchestra.

[01:30:31] So I played there for, I think something like 20 years. And then I just, you know, I was too busy with my business and I didn't have time to practice. I wasn't progressing. And I said, the hell with it. I'm going to give it up.

[01:30:44] So I gave it up for about 20 years. About six years ago, I picked up the violin again. You know, I went back to my bluegrass roots. So it seems to me that you made several smart decisions over the course of your violin career.

[01:30:59] But if someone were to come to you in their twenties and ask you for advice, what would you tell that young person? Well I think it's the job of old people to discourage young people to do what they did. Are you crazy?

[01:31:16] I could have gotten bankrupt once a week. I mean, I took more risks than you could imagine. I mean, it's crazy. And I tried all these crazy ass things that somehow seemed to work out.

[01:31:30] But I mean, seriously, if they wanted to get in the wine business, I would say don't go to winemaking school, first of all. Get a general good liberal arts degree so you can figure out a whole bunch of stuff.

[01:31:43] Don't become too specialized because the wine business, in an ownership position, you need to wear a lot of hats. If you're doing all phases of the business, as I did, you've got to be good at a lot of different things and not necessarily excellent at any one thing.

[01:32:03] I think becoming a specialist in just about anything is probably not a very good idea. You're someone with limited mobility, but it's striking, you know, we've now talked for about two hours and that's really never come up as an impediment to your goals.

[01:32:17] I had polio when I was five and yeah, you know, do what you can. If you were to talk to other people who maybe had limited mobility, what would you say to them? I was out working pruning.

[01:32:32] I mean, doing physical work outside and driving tractors for years and punching down the cap and working in the winery. I don't know, I just said go for it. You know, do it as long as you can. Wine. W-H-I-N-E.

[01:32:48] Patrick Campbell decided to make a mark in the wine industry and he's contributed in multiple continents. Thank you very much for being here today. Thanks a lot, it was really fun. Patrick Campbell of Tierra de Vina. All Drink to That is hosted and produced by myself, Levi Dalton.

[01:33:06] Aaron Scala has contributed original pieces. Editorial assistance has been provided by Bill Kimsey. The show music was performed and composed by Rob Moose and Thomas Bartlett. Show artwork by Alicia Tenoyan. T-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, and so much more including show stickers, notebooks,

[01:33:24] and even gift wrap are available for sale if you check the show website alldrinktothatpod.com. That's I-L-L drinktothat, P-O-D dot com, which is the same place you'd go to sign up for our email list or to make one of the crucially important donations that help keep this show

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[01:34:13] This episode was made possible by the Sonoma County Vintners, the leading voice of Sonoma County wine dedicated to raising awareness of Sonoma County as one of the world's premier wine regions. Visit sonomawine.com for more information. That's sonomawine.com for more information.

[01:34:36] This episode was recorded prior to the pandemic. I'd go around show the wine to people. In fact, when I was just getting started, merging from exclusively growing into making wine, growing and making wine, I made homemade wine in 78 and 79 which were very good vintages

[01:34:55] and just schlepped them all over to the fancy wine stores in LA and San Francisco. And, you know, some of the good restaurants at the time and just said, look, I'm coming up with this wine.

[01:35:07] This is a sample of what we might be able to produce in the future. Would you be interested in maybe getting something? They said, yeah, send it down, you know, as soon as you got it.