502: Matt Dees Likes How Grapevines Think

[00:00:00] Coming up in April, I, your host, Levi Dalton, will be leading two amazing wine dinners in New York City. On April 7th, I will be opening up two of the greatest vintages for Wright Bank Bordeaux of our time, 1998 and 1989, and I'll be serving the wines over at dinner in the private dining room of the esteemed Gramercy Tavern Restaurant, which is one of my favorite places.

[00:00:25] On April 28th, I'll be pouring a vertical of Chateau Margaux back to the 1983 vintage, alongside Chateau Palmeire vintages back to and including 1989. Go to alldrinktothatpod.com and click on the wine dinners tab for all the information about these dinners in April.

[00:00:45] That's I-L-L, drinktothat, P-O-D, dot com, and then select the wine dinners tab to find out all the details and to purchase seats to attend these really fabulous wine dinners in New York City. And I look forward to seeing you there. I'm Levi Dalton, and this is all Drink to That, where we get behind the scenes of the wine business.

[00:01:26] Matt D is on the show today. Matt is the winemaker at Honata, The Hilt, and The Pairing. Hello, sir. How are you? I'm well. I'm honored to be here. Thank you for having me. So you work in California today, and you have for some decades, but originally you grew up in Kansas City. I grew up in a place where you kind of learned how to enjoy the small things in life, kind of the peaceful moments. There were no oceans nearby, no mountains. So you learn to find pleasure in the simple things.

[00:01:55] And I've really kind of taken that and moved that with me everywhere I've gone. In Kansas City, I was a kid who was fascinated by everything kids are fascinated by. I played sports. I did okay at school. I did all these things. But I also was really fascinated by plants, by dirt, by worms, by bugs, you name it. Everything that was in the world, the ground I was into. Plants spoke to me in some ways more clearly than people, which was a funny thing.

[00:02:22] And to be fair, I loved food from the time I can remember. I was always an avid, adventurous eater. I mean, I was blessed to grow up in the finest barbecue city in the United States. But beyond that, I mean, I grew up in a world of really wonderful cuisine. The Midwest and Kansas City specifically was really a haven for exceptional food. And again, an appreciation for good food for being good, for lack of a better adjective. It wasn't really ostentatious. It wasn't anything pretentious.

[00:02:52] Still is not. Drinking in the same way, you know, I didn't have my kind of mind-blowing wine moments for a number of years after I got to college. But, you know, I ended up at the University of Vermont to study trees. I thought that was, you know, forestry was my thing. I was going to go to New England. I was going to learn to manage forests. You realize very quickly when you get into the world of forestry that to make a living, to put food on the table, you got to manage the destruction of forests in a slow methodical management pace, you know.

[00:03:21] And that did not, it didn't appeal to me at that point as a lover of trees, as someone who was interested in agriculture and just kind of learning my way. I decided to switch to plant and soil science at University of Vermont, which at the time and still to this day is one of the finest centers of study for that field in the world, to be honest. Really rather, in a wonderful way, radical teachers. You know, we were learning, you know, a very sustainable approach.

[00:03:49] You know, the living machine had been created there a couple of years before I got there. It was a very alternative, progressive view of soil science, which exists. I was at my first year at Groovy UV and loving life and loving my courses and was contacted by a gentleman, Ken Albert, who had planted vines at Shelburne Vineyard.

[00:04:16] So Shelburne Farms, the home of the Vanderbilt's actually, the summer home. And just right on the lake there, we grew, you know, he contacted me to help him plant, to help him prune, to help him ferment, to help him manage his winery. And he was older than you by quite a few decades. Yeah, I mean, part of the reason he hired me is that, you know, I had a stronger back than he had. He had me by about, you know, 35, 40 years. So I was able to do some of the physical work.

[00:04:46] He's still up there doing it. And I recently opened a bottle of one of his early late harvest wine. I think it was a Vignol and poured a blind for a bunch of my wine making friends in a group. And everybody thought it was Vendors Tardive of Alsatian. I mean, just amazing to me, but a great place to learn. You know, we were making wine in a, in a climate that is not friendly, is not conducive really, if you think about it, to vinifera for sure. We were growing hybrids.

[00:05:14] We were growing, as I said, Vignol, Cerval Blanc, Vidal Blanc, wines with real sexy names like Chardonnay and Tremonette, you know? But Megan killer wines. And it was the perfect place to start because you realize very quickly in those conditions that the romance you see in wine making on film, that you, that you think of when you're drinking bottles. In actuality is a whole lot of hard work. Everyone always talks about it, but you got to work your ass off. You got to show up early. You got to give a shit.

[00:05:44] You got to, you have to care and you have to be willing to, to, to sacrifice your free time to really get in there and hustle. And so I fell in love with it. And I made wine with him for a number of years. I basically would taste wine. I ended up helping to manage a wine bar. You know, once you get bit by the wine bug, you fall very quickly head over heels in love.

[00:06:08] And I was really lucky to fall in love with the grapevine first and then wine second, which I'm not sure is always the case. There are certainly examples of that, but the grapevine, grapevine physiology, the, the, in some ways to me, the psychology, the way a grapevine, you know, quote unquote thinks is what always really astounded me and fascinated me. How rational, how logical, how they, they react to their environment in such a way that, that I've always found incredible beauty to that.

[00:06:38] But I ended my time in Vermont. I was, I was a little tired of making wine, you know, when your eyes freeze open and your nostrils freeze shut that real special Vermont winter charm, if you call it that. And I was kind of itching to see something else.

[00:06:56] And I happened to be in New York with my brother, who was a banker and, uh, nine years, my, my senior, and was kind enough to sponsor a lot of my early forays into drinking unforgettable wines. Found myself a Sherry Lehman and purchased two wines, just, just kind of randomly. You know, I, I think, I don't even remember what it was. I think I liked the font on the Chateau Sertens de Me de Sertens.

[00:07:21] And I think I loved that statue, the winged woman walking on the, you know, the Stephen de Stabler, uh, on the Stagland family vineyard cab. And my brother bought the bottles. We went home, we drank them in his apartment on like what, second and 18th, something around there, I believe it was. And they changed my life. They were profound in a way that no wine I'd ever tasted had been to that date. I will never forget.

[00:07:46] I think the Chateau Sertens de Me was, I mean, it was pretty animal. It was pretty savage. It was pretty, uh, you know, how, how a Pomerol can be at once, I would say tender and succulent and also very gamey, very, uh, savory, surprising. You know, a lot of things going on in the wine and the Stagland 1995, I'll never forget was just silk.

[00:08:13] It was that kind of suave Napa fruit of the nineties. And that 95 Stagland was just really impactful. You know, this came from California. This is a wine from the U S I had really been consuming more European wines at that point. And the Staglands put their phone number on the back and I was really driven. I was really ready to get, to get out of Vermont. I had booked a ticket to California.

[00:08:38] I knew that, you know, the West coast was going to be the best coast and was ready to start learning. And I called the number on the back and it actually was their house. It was Garen and Sherry's house. And I spoke with them and they were utterly confused. What this, you know, ding dong from Vermont, you know, you know, just getting ready to graduate and calling, looking for a job. And at the time they did not have a winery. They were building the caves. Caves were completed.

[00:09:06] That would have been may probably maybe April of 2001. And basically I said, you know, I would love to come work, see, you know, whatever you're doing, meet with you, anything it is. I'm, I'm, I'm really desperate to get out there. And they laughed and said, we don't have anything available. We make our wine at Napa wine company. And I said, basically, you know, well, I have a ticket. I'll be there tomorrow. You know, they must've been just so confused when they hung up that phone. And I flew out to Oakland.

[00:09:36] I rented a car. I drove to their place on Bell Oaks and I pulled in behind a black Audi. And I pulled up to the top of the hill. And the gentleman in that car, I mean, talk about serendipity, right? I mean, you have to put yourself in a good position to be lucky. But the man in that car was Andy Erickson, who became my mentor, dear friend, you know, kind of my surrogate family in Napa. And to this day, one of my dearest friends. And Andy got out of the car and he said, are you that idiot from Vermont?

[00:10:07] I said, I am indeed as advertised, my man. And we hit it off. They weren't sure what to do with me. And I ended up meeting very early on. I remember Celia Macheski was leaving. Andy was coming in. And I met with the Staglins, with Andy, with Celia and with David Abreu. I mean, for your first day in Napa, that's not bad. Honestly, if you look back on it, it's just ridiculous.

[00:10:34] And showing up that day and basically the end of the meeting, they were like, we still don't know what to do with this guy. But would you like to go out in the vineyard and work with Ricardo Villasenor and the team at Staglin Family under David Abreu? Abso-frickin-lutely. Like, yes. And so I showed up and that entire summer I worked with Richard and a better teacher. I mean, I can't imagine anyone better than Richard. He's patient.

[00:10:59] He was an incredibly brilliant viticultural mind. I think he got there in 86 or 87. You know, after Celia chef the whole deal, I think he had been the original person and was still there when I was there in 01. And I believe was still there until, I can't assume, but I think it was 15 or 16. And I loved the model of one person being at one place for a long time.

[00:11:27] A big part of my winemaking philosophy is the long dance. It's learning, you know, spending a lifetime with a property. Because you can't learn a vineyard in five years, I don't think. I don't think you can learn the ups and downs of a vineyard in 10 years. I think you're talking 20, 30, 40 years to really, really fall in love with the property and really understand it backwards and forwards and to contribute something lasting to a property.

[00:11:52] You know, I met a winemaker in Bordeaux and we were talking about vintages and I was talking about, how do you feel about this year's vintage? And he said, you know, it takes me back to 1978. That's winemaking. Because then you're building on lessons you got, you know, 40 years ago. And that you've had time to develop and you've had time to experiment with, with the same substrate, the same land, the same soil, the same vines, the same selection, the same clonal material, whatever it might be. That to me was winemaking.

[00:12:22] And part of that came from watching Richard being in the center of that property and take it on like his own and be so loyal to that property. Andy eventually introduced me to Andy Smith. Of Dumont. Of Dumont, yeah. And he said, you should go meet my friend, Doug Weiser. And he's a crazy man making wine in New Zealand.

[00:12:48] And so after the vintage 2021, I hopped on a plane and flew over and started working with Doug at Craigie Range in Hawke's Bay. And you did three vintages there. I did. I bounced back and forth. I came back to help Andy and team make the 2002 at Staglin. One of the finest wines I've ever had the pleasure of carrying hoses to. You know, that's, I was dragging hoses and helping him make that. And I'm so proud to have been there for that wine. And Andy's first vintage was like a one, right?

[00:13:17] It was a new chapter for him too. Yeah. And you were right there for it. After working with Andy and learning his lessons has been a massive part of my career. It's worth hearing how Andy Erickson recalls the same period of time. And I have interviewed Andy and happened to have that clip right here.

[00:13:36] And at that time, the Staglins were just breaking ground on their new winery, which is now the Staglin Winery, looking for someone to come in full time. And I mean, God bless them. They took a chance on me. I was a young guy with some experience and, uh, and ended up working with them in 2001, 2002, and into 2003 as their winemaker.

[00:14:03] And, uh, that was a really amazing stretch because the winery was designed. I mean, I didn't design the winery, but I got to outfit the winery. I got to oversee the finishing of the construction. And at the same time we were making the wine. So I always think it's amazing to be making wines with a, what kind of a bootstrap situation where you're kind of having to figure it out.

[00:14:32] Um, it's also nice to make wine in a, in a great finished winery. But when you, when you're sort of dealing with a situation where you don't even know where to unload the tractor because the ground is all ripped apart is a pretty interesting kind of situation. So, worked there 2001, 2002, still excited about those wines. I mean, I, I have a little stash, which I try to keep my hands off of, but, um, I love, I love both of those vintages.

[00:14:59] Andy speaks further in episode 353 of All Drink to That about his approach to ripeness levels in 2001 and two, and the influence that Michel Roulon, John Kongsgard, and Bob Levy had on his career and winemaking style, which he says he was still figuring out. Around that time. Andy also explains how after working at Staglin, he and his wife, Annie Favia went on to found the Favia winery.

[00:15:25] We'll hear Matt Dees tackle a discussion of the Favia wines in comparison to his own after this brief message from a sponsor. I talk to winemakers all the time and something they tell me is that oxygen management is a key to aging wine. Finding the right balance is crucial. And that's why I recommend DM's revolutionary cork closures.

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[00:16:38] 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. They're really in different places and it's sometimes different grape varieties. But if I were to compare the Honata wines with another winery, one of the cognates that would come up for me would be Fabia.

[00:17:06] And I don't know if that's a certain approach at a certain time in the winemaking process or, but the way that the fruit handles and the weight of the wines and how they kind of go across the palate, the finish, that's a cognate for me for the wines you make today. Yeah. I think it's interesting you say that, you know, having learned to blend with Andy and with Michelle, to be fair.

[00:17:29] In those early days, learning to blend for texture, learning to blend for that wonderful silky feel, but also remembering how important structure is. You know, I think I've always in Andy's wines been really blown away by structural finesse, but definitely a structure that is unforgettable and unmissable.

[00:17:53] You know, it's, it's, they're never soft to the point of just being kind of these squishy, you know, fruit driven wines. They're always built around this remarkable structure. And that's, that's something I learned from Andy very much, very much. And then you did work, especially on blending with Michelle Rolland. To sit down and at one winery or another winery and, and understand the core of the blend.

[00:18:19] Uh, I think I took from him again, the approach to texture to mid palette, which is something that's, that's unbelievably important. Again, I, I, I focus in our blending now very much on structural elements, on structural integrity, because I find that to be the overwhelmingly dominant part of a pleasure for me in a wine. But, but Michelle was just such a brilliant teacher. I basically had a college degree in blending from Michelle.

[00:18:48] And I can't tell you how thankful I am to him and for the opportunity to do that. You know, his, his approach with press wines, his approach with barrel aging, his approach with racking or actually a lack thereof quite often has still inspires me. And, and, uh, I would say is insightful into what we do in the cellar. We've made changes for sure, but, but he's a huge part.

[00:19:11] Just for example, is keeping press wine lots separate because there's always unexpected beauty and being able to go and blend them back later. Blending late is a big thing for me. Letting wines become what they are before you blend them. You know, a big part of it would be, we would sit down to blend, let's say in January after the vintage, right? And if I were to make a list of, let's say my 10 favorite wines at that point, and we were to make that blend, you know, a year later, if I hadn't touched those wines, they wouldn't have been my favorites.

[00:19:40] You know, they're showy, they're, they're extroverted. They may not have the substance underneath underlying as far as tannic structure. They may just be reclusive at that time, but long-term they're, they're far more, there's far more potential in those wines. And just learning to be patient with blending, to never rush into it, to take your time, to always be willing to take some press wine back into the blend, to always focus on, you know, and little things like blending power with power.

[00:20:07] You know, you can't, from my experience, you can't really soften a wine by bringing a soft wine to it. You, you end up just creating an imbalance in a hole in the wine that can't be refilled. Um, something along the lines of aromatics come with time. I don't blend for aromatics ever because that's just a small piece that changes. It's ethereal, it comes and goes, you blend for texture and you blend for structure. Just, just, you know, lessons along those lines.

[00:20:35] For three vintages, you were alternating between Craigie Range in New Zealand with Doug Weiser. And then you were back in Napa at Staglin, alternate seasons. Correct. What was that experience like and what really stood out to you as the differences between those two locales? Yeah, of course. I mean, the first thing would be Doug. Doug Weiser and Adrian Baker were these two young winemakers who had been kind of loosed upon this, you know, this, this big winery.

[00:21:02] And they were dreamers and they were like, they took calculated risks. They were open-minded, but they were so brilliant. Like Doug and Adrian, they were this wonderful kind of one-two punch. You know, Adrian was very quiet, introverted, deeply in thought where Doug was just here and there and everywhere. He was on a forklift and then he was, you know, had a wrench and he was, and then he was welding and then he was running down in the vineyard. And then he was complaining about the yields. And then he was making you practice prepping barrels.

[00:21:31] You know, the guy was a, a cyclone of energy and wonderful madness and vibrancy, vitality. And Adrian was just behind him thinking things through, maybe questioning occasionally some of the, you know, shotgun approach and learning from those two, learning how to make Pinot in Doug's style, learning how to make Syrah, you know, and then working with Adrian to talk about, let's talk about finding whites.

[00:21:59] Let's, let's talk about, about proper CO2 levels going to bottle. Let's talk about the glory that is understated Riesling, right? And to have that as kind of like my two dads in New Zealand was something that, again, I can't tell you how blessed I've been to work with these people. And just the overall experience, you know, working with those, those, those two dear people who are gone far too early. You know, they were just, they were exceptional friends.

[00:22:29] And you went through a difficult harvest together. Oh, four was a difficult one. Yeah, we did. So New Zealand was a perfect fit for me with them and at Craigie because of the focus again on, on quality. They were making the greatest Sauvblanc, Syrah, Merlot. We were doing everything with full attention to detail in the vineyard and the winery. And they kept getting, like we talk about mother nature throwing curve balls here. Mother nature was like throwing change-ups and pulling the string. Like we didn't stay at a chance, you know?

[00:23:00] I have jokingly said about some of those vintages that it was almost like biblically bad. You know, like 30 days of rain. Not really kidding or exaggerating. There were no frogs in the sky. There was no blood in the rivers, but there was a little, pretty close. Like there were locusts, you know? We had like aspergillus, like we had green mold on the berries. And I loved taking from the, from the Kiwis and from the team there. Just, yeah, she'll be right. Like, it'll be all right. We'll make great wines. And we did. And they're, I'm so proud to have been there for that.

[00:23:28] But coming back to California and it rains and everyone runs for their shelter, you know, and puts on raincoats and, you know, we're buying, you know, sugar and going crazy. So it was nice to see the other side. But I found that for my style, I was still searching for a home, you know, figuratively and literally. And I think that New Zealand, the wines were so, so fresh and so full of energy, kinetic energy. They vibrate, they had tension.

[00:23:57] And Napa for me in those days, the wines were, they were really big in the early 2000s. A lot of fruit. Thank goodness. I mean, Napa is a, is a force of nature and I adore it. But for my personal taste, I think bouncing back and forth between those two countries, between Napa in a warm year, like 02 and getting New Zealand, say in 04 and seeing, you know, cats and dogs falling from the sky. I think that, you know, when I got that call from Andy and, you know, I was sitting on the

[00:24:26] crush pad after harvest of 04, I didn't know where I was going. I was a little footloose and fancy free. It felt good. Where do I go? Do I go to France? Do I go to Hungary? Do I go to Italy? Do I go back to New York? Do I, you know, and Andy called and he said, I found you a head wine making gig. And he said, it's everything you're dreaming about. And it's in Santa Barbara. And I was a total schmuck. And I was like, I don't know, man, is Santa Barbara nice? And he hung up, you know, as he should have.

[00:24:54] And so I had to call him back and be like, I know it's nice. I'll take the job. And so I showed up and it was the best for me and my palate at the time and my sense of adventure and freedom. It was this perfect world where it took some of the fruit of California, some of that Napa of just incredibly pure focused fruit, which I still adore to this day. And it combined it in Santa Barbara County with that tension from New Zealand.

[00:25:24] You know, people forget that Santa Barbara County is actually an incredibly cold place to grow wine, to grow grapes. I did not know at the time. I mean, needless to say, I said a Santa Barbara nice. So you can tell how much I knew about the region. But showing up here and tasting, you know, Greg Brewer's wines, a Bribe Babcock, Rick Longoria, Richard Sanford. Good God. Lane Tanner. You know, these wines, the second I got here and the taste of the wines, I knew I was home.

[00:25:52] And it was a very funny feeling for me having traveled and bounced around East Coast, Midwest. You know, I studied in Australia for a bit. I bounced around searching and to taste a wine and know your home. I mean, not to sound too, you know, ooey gooey about it, but it felt good. You've been at Honata for over 20 years. 20 years. Yeah, I showed up spring of 2004 and they haven't been able to get rid of me yet. It's sort of amazing that Andy was like, I think I got a gig for you.

[00:26:21] And then it turned out to be your lifelong gig. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it again, right place, right time. Right person for the job and the right job for the person. The relationship I formed with the Honata property over the last 20 years is, you know, I have dear friends. I have my wife. I have my children. But it's one of the most meaningful relationships I've ever created. It's just remarkably rewarding. And the connection I feel with those vineyards is, would probably strike some people as weird if people aren't plant lovers.

[00:26:51] You know, I just, I feel a real kind of kinship with a vineyard, which is a strange, it's a strange thing. So Honatas and Ballard Canyon in the Santa Ynez Valley. Yeah. Yes, indeed. It's about 25 miles inland from the sea. And for those who know Santa Barbara County, the whole reason we make wine in Santa Barbara, like, you know, you close your eyes, you think Santa Barbara, you think, you know, palm trees, surfing, you know, beaches.

[00:27:21] You know, you don't necessarily think Syrah shivering on the vine struggling to ripen. In fact, we have this odd east-west, you know, transverse maritime throat, this oddball east-west mountain range. Right? Who cares? It's kind of a geological footnote in some professor's book. But it makes a huge difference because we draw all of our weather off the west coast and none of it off the south coast. South coast is a swell coming up from Mexico. It's a warm, warm current.

[00:27:48] The current, the big uplift we have off the west coast is ice cold. If you surf off Lompoc, you're going to see great whites. You're going to be wearing a big, big, thick weddy, you know. And so Honata is a funny kind of creature in the valley in that it does warm up because we're 25 miles from the sea. But it also gets very frigid at night because it's inland. And, you know, it's just a strange, the diurnal shift is very massive.

[00:28:19] And the ocean is massively important, but it's just in between those two worlds. Inland and coast. Inland and coast. I was saying today that the fog comes in from the sea and it very politely waits at the gate at Honata. Yeah. And I mean, it's not even an exaggeration. We've got to give it the gate code and get it in. But still, the ocean touches us. Every day at Honata, about one o'clock, you can set your clock by it. You'll be out there. You're like, ooh, it's getting pretty warm. You look at the grapevines. They're curling their leaves.

[00:28:48] They're moving away from that sunshine. Their stomata might be closing. Whatever it might be, they're reacting to that weather. And that cool breeze comes in. And it drops at 5 to 10 degrees. And all of a sudden, you're photosynthesizing again. And those vines are metabolizing. And you are phenologically ripening grapes. And it's sand. Oh, yeah. It's a beach. It's the sandiest soil I've ever seen. It's quite reminiscent of if you've ever bought play sand.

[00:29:17] Like the big bags of play sand at the hardware store. And that's exactly what it is. And I saw it. And I had the same reaction a lot of people before me had had. Which one famous French consultant told us we should grow asparagus instead of grapes. The next French consultant we got out said, It's good for golf, but it's not good for wine. Which is my favorite, actually. But talk about lighting a fire under your ass.

[00:29:42] I think hearing that you shouldn't grow grapes, you should grow asparagus is powerful locker room material. You know, we're getting after them. And, you know, it's such a young region. You know, I think that you can look at the brilliant Richard Sanford and see they planted a vineyard in the Santa Barbara County. And, you know, the 70s, there were a couple of kind of outcast wild folk that had planted in the 60s.

[00:30:09] And by the time I got there in 2000, it was still a baby in 2004. And so we looked at the sandpit. It's about 600 acres. It was really just raising skinny cattle. You know, that was it. And we looked, we saw through the claims that it would only grow asparagus or be good for bunkers on golf courses. And we decided to approach it as doing our diligence, right? As a young region in Ballard, Kenya being even younger. Let's see what works.

[00:30:39] You know, and our neighbors told us to grow Syrah. They would say if you look at the historical record, Syrah is the grape that works the best here. And being a, you know, gigantic history nerd. You know, like if the Romans built your terraces or the Crusaders brought your grapes back from the Holy Land, it's history. If your neighbor grew Syrah 10 years before you got there, history is a bit grandiose. You know, and they were right in some way because Syrah is amazing. As is asparagus, Jesus.

[00:31:05] But we grew everything else because we didn't want to miss something. And it's worth pointing out what you grow there because it's, for California, it's a quite wide amount of grapes from different parts of the world that most people wouldn't consider would be even planted in California. It's a little unorthodox. But, you know, we looked for initially, so the original 10 varieties that were planted were really based on that diurnal shift.

[00:31:30] Things that loved the sun but would really benefit from a cold night as far as keeping structural integrity and also keeping acidity high. So it was Sauvignon Blanc, Sémillon, Viognier, Grenache, Syrah, Saint-Gervais, Merlot, Cab Franc, Cab Sav, Petit Ferdot. So we didn't get too crazy then. Pretty crazy. But we still were within the realm of quasi-normal. And they all worked. And it wasn't rocket science. It was very simple approach to winemaking.

[00:32:00] We've always really had a philosophy that is we're very good listeners. And very good observers. And we could see the flavors. We could taste the flavors. We could hear what the vineyard was trying to do. And we followed that path. And by following that path, not by putting on a hat and saying, we're going to try to emulate Hermitage here. Or we're going to make Bordeaux here. No, we're going to make some Ballard Canyon wines off of this sandy dune. And that's what we're going to do.

[00:32:30] And in 04, everything worked. Except Merlot. But that's another story. In 05, everything worked. Except Merlot. Right? And 06, rinse and repeat. Everything worked. And it made it a challenge to decide what had a voice loud enough to demand a bottling is how we viewed it. And over time, we moved to, I guess it would have been 05. We were tasting the 04s. And Sangiovese, lo and behold, had a very loud voice and demanded a bottling.

[00:32:59] Cabernet Franc, the most wonderful loud voice in the world. Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah Sauvignon Blanc. And that was kind of our beginning. And then we had a blend called Todos, which was everything put together. In my experience, the wines from the mid-2000s, you know, the 6, 7, 8, those wines are often shown pretty well today. Which is not true of every California wine. Like, oh, 15 years later, it's going to be pretty good.

[00:33:30] And I would say one of the things about Honato that can be a little deceiving is when the wines are 2 or 3 years old, maybe they're not as showy as some California wines, just writ large California. Sure. They hold a little bit back. And they often play at the kind of medium weight ring in the boxing match, where a lot of people would maybe make a bigger, say, Syrah or Cabernet Sauvignon or Cabernet Franc from California.

[00:34:00] Yeah, no, I think you're correct. And I think the mid-weight, I think our wines are very surprising for that. But they have something I call the chameleon effect, which is aromatically, you smell our wines, you see our wines, you see this brooding color, you see this brooding aromatic attack, right? Even sometimes literally on the attack on the palate, your mind takes you to, oh boy,

[00:34:22] we're going to get into a big, massive, you know, fruit sweetness, you know, really big tannin, all these things. And our wines have this funny way of suddenly becoming very formal on the back end. I always jokingly say they tighten up their ascot and put the monocle on. And I don't know what it is about the wines that do that. I don't know what it is about the vineyard, but I believe it has something to do with, you know,

[00:34:49] very low yields from the sand, very, very small vines, balanced crop, but very small yields, very small berries. So there's a concentration and intensity to the fruit. There's also a high quantity of very high quality tannin from the sandy soils and higher acid than you would expect because those freezing cold nights, like we joke about like frost during the hottest day of the year. It's not far off.

[00:35:16] And so they have all these funny, kind of different than California, like you were saying, writ large. It stays a little bit more reserved and elegant. And like the Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, instead of being boisterous fruit, really are that kind of high cacao chocolate. There's a floral edge to them. There's an herbaceousness to them.

[00:35:39] I've long believed in, and not to be on a soapbox, but to me, Cabernet Sauvignon is just the noblest of noble grapes. It expresses itself clearly across the world. Any vineyard, almost any soil you put that grape in, now we're talking Cabernet Sauvignon. And to me, one of the joys of Cabernet Sauvignon and defining characteristics is a dusty herbaceousness. I'm not very fond of like blackberry pie filling.

[00:36:04] I really like Cassis as Cassis really is, which is green, then black, and then kind of surprisingly drying and tannic, but still full of pleasure. You know, there's still enough meat on the bone in the cabs we make. There's still enough forgiving nature to the tannins that we're able to pull off a wonderfully austere Cabernet Sauvignon. I would imagine you're aiming for these wines to be better with bottle age.

[00:36:31] Like the goal is not that this wine is supposed to peak at age four. No, absolutely, yeah. And I would say that in white and red. Yeah, white has been very funny for us. It's been a big surprise. We were opening the 05 Sauvignon Blanc last week. It was a bottle that was a low fill from the bottling line, so our expectations were below the ground. And it was a stunner, and it was fresh. And like the name floor suggests, it was a flower. And it had just taken a long time to open.

[00:36:59] You know, when I came up first couple of years at Honada, my first years as the head winemaker, there was this common refrain. People were talking about like 75-year wines, right? There was this kind of lingo, this dialect people were exchanging, which was like, oh, now that's a 100-year wine. And I kind of lost my mind a bit when I'd hear like, I was 25 at the time, right? I'd hear like a 25-year-old be like, now that's a 50-year wine. And I was like, hey, jackass, you're 25.

[00:37:28] You've been making wine for two years. Why don't you pump the brakes a little bit? You know? And so I've always been very sensitive in discussing longevity and drinking windows. But finally, after making Honada for 20 years now, I'm really pleased to be able to talk about it on an eye contact level where I can say, I know that this wine will be improving for 20 years. And next year, hopefully, 21 years and 22, you know?

[00:37:54] And I'm very proud of that track record we've built and to have a Sauvignon Blanc that is now 19 that is fresh, but not like obscenely primal like fruit. You know, it's actually gone and evolved, right? A lot of wines age in that they survive. I'm very proud that the wines from Honada evolve. They mature. They go into a cocoon and they come out like butterflies, right? I think that wine should do that.

[00:38:24] If you're going to age it, it's not enough to just be alive. It's got to blossom into something. You're looking for different flavors from the same grape variety. You want to pick at different ripeness points. You want to pick this part of the vineyard at that time, blend it with that part of the vineyard that tastes at a different part of the ripeness curve. The Sauvignon Blanc is a very good example, I think. Because a Sauvignon Blanc could be grassy. A Sauvignon Blanc could be yellow melon.

[00:38:53] It could be peachy. And I feel like your goal is often to get all of those and have them in the same wine. Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's important to also acknowledge, actually, when I came down to Santa Barbara, my view of grapes and viticulture was slightly different. In that when we were in Napa, vineyards looked like they had been vacuumed, right? Everything was so pristine and perfect. And you would pick the sun side and the shade side and the top of the hill and the bottom of the hill.

[00:39:21] And you would keep them all separate, which is amazing in Napa. And I get why they do that. And when I'd worked with Doug and AB, they had started to question whether that kind of picking was proper with their specific grapes. Or whether you had to pick this side versus that side. Or whether, you know, sorting was necessary. All these things had come into question. So we had done trials.

[00:39:45] And I find now in our winemaking that a purity at Honada, for example, we find overrated. As far as like, Cab Franc, let's put some Merlot in that and let's co-ferment. Let's try these different things. Let's pick the whole row together because some of that kind of crunchy freshness on the bottom will do well blended and fermented together with some riper, slightly shriveled Syrah from the top of the hill.

[00:40:10] It's that balance you get by a lack of homogeneous fruit, right? Like if you're getting into like the Sauvignon Blanc conversation where we pick everything separate from green to yellow to, you know, almost shriveled. There's so much more joy for me in that now. And not sorting out little pieces or making these straightforward wines. Really kind of working in the cellar and in the vineyard to create more layers. The Sauvignon Blanc specifically, the floor, is something I learned from Adrian and Doug.

[00:40:41] And their whole move was sequential picking. I mean, it's not like, again, it's not rocket science, but it was a wonderful novel approach to taking Sauvignon Blanc, a grape, which is often not taken that seriously. And what we do is we have a five acre block of Sauvignon Blanc. And we will pick the first, let's say, half acre when it's green. We're talking the color of a leaf green. You know, those grapes are hard. They're very acidic.

[00:41:10] There is the beginning of fruit flavor, obviously. They're not unpleasant to eat, but they're tart. And you won't forget eating one once you do. And we make that wine and it's a laser beam. And as Sauvignon Blanc starts to ripen, it ripens at this remarkable clip. And we'll pick this next half acre three days later or two days later. And we're moving from dark, dark, dark green to Granny Smith apple skin. And we're getting into Malik development and that green apple, green apple, green apple purity. Make that wine.

[00:41:39] Pick it two days later. Pick it two days later. You're getting a tropical. Pick it two days later. The color is changing. The translucent turning yellow. Pick it, you know, you're getting into mango. You're getting into passion fruit, green melon. And by the time you stop picking two weeks after you started, you're picking shriveled, not raisiny, but they're all dimpled. The South Africans call it old man's faces. You know, that kind of where it just starts to dimple and your sugar has risen up. Your acid level is down.

[00:42:05] Your flavor profile has gone to what I like to talk about with candied ginger or candied pineapple. You make all those wines. You make them straight. And then you put them together after the fact at about 11 months. And you have this Sauvignon Blanc that takes into account all of those different levels. And you have something where you've just created this massively complex wine out of one vineyard block. What we then do is we take Simeon and use it as a silk pillowcase in essence to wrap the Sauvignon Blanc up.

[00:42:34] After we come back, Matt shares some surprises. So it goes to barrel in a bubblegum phase. And I mean that. I mean it goes in a barrel and I think, boy, we might have missed this one. And it is just kind of puffed up and the fruit is so silly and just odd that you have to wait for it and you have to be patient. You just can't look at it. That's after the break. Would you like to hear more new episodes of All Drink to That?

[00:43:05] 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. Look for the PayPal or Stripe insignia. Direct donations are the number one reason that this show continues to exist. Do your part today.

[00:43:34] Another grape variety like Sauvignon Blanc that you spoke about being different on different pick days is Sangiovese. A majority of our grapes, we pick on flavor. Right? It's a million things. Like anything in winemaking, any decision, any reaction is based on a million different factors that are beyond our grasp. What makes a grape taste good? What makes me taste a grape and decide to pick it? It can be color extraction. It can be the seed crunch. It can be separation of pulps and pip. It can be any number of things.

[00:44:04] Visual signs. Birds. You know, I take cues from animals sometimes. Are the pigs interested in our fruit? Time to get out there and start paying attention. Right? Are the birds circling this block? Something's going on. We better get it off the vine. But there are two grapes. Merlot, I do not pick on taste. And that was a lesson from Michel. Merlot is picked at a sugar level. In certain years, I mean, again, we're not dogmatics. There are certain years where we go out at that sugar level and I say, nope, that's not going to work.

[00:44:33] But if you wait for Merlot to taste like Merlot, you miss it. And all of a sudden you have a raisiny thing that is difficult and almost unusable. Merlot needs crunch. And if you wait for that taste where I wait for Cab to taste like Cab, you miss it. Sangiovese is another one. And what we finally realized with Sangiovese is we wait until there's a shift in Malik. And it's one day. So we'll sample, sample, sample, sample, sample every day.

[00:45:01] And the Malik will be 1.9 or 2 grams. Sample, sample, sample, sample. All of a sudden it's 1.3. Pick it. It's some invisible switch, you know, towards ripeness, towards phenological ripeness, where that Malik shift happens. It's been as early as September 11th. It's been as late as October 11th. Let's say it's been within four weeks. And we just watch and wait. Sangiovese doesn't stop there. It's kind of color and shape-shifting. Comes into the winery.

[00:45:30] We don't crush very much of the fruit. So we get a great deal of whole berry carbonic maceration. So it goes to barrel in a bubblegum phase. And I mean that. I mean, it goes in a barrel and I think, boy, we might have missed this one. And it is just kind of puffed up. And the fruit is so silly. And just odd that you have to wait for it. You have to be patient. You just can't look at it. And then one day you come into the cellar and, oh, Sangiovese's gone.

[00:45:57] And it goes down this deep, dark hole towards earthiness, towards leather. It doesn't give you any warning signs. It likes to get reduced. It likes to give you headaches. But you learn to just go for the ride. And you kind of learn to surrender to the nuance and the kind of vagaries of Sangiovese. And then the fruit comes back. And then the fruit goes away. And then you bottle it and you're in love with it. And you taste it. And it's pure earth. And then the fruit comes back.

[00:46:26] We opened in 2004, the first wine we ever picked. The fruit was very present today. The fruit had come back. It was on an upswing. And the earth was still latent in the wine. Thank goodness. Otherwise, it wouldn't be Sangiovese. But, you know, it was all framed by those perfectly kind of rustic tannins. Something I personally think you've been very successful with, often blended with other grape varieties, but is Cabernet Franc. Franc is a frenemy. A faux ami, right? It's like this grape.

[00:46:56] You know, I think people talk about Pinot Noir being the heartbreak grape with good reason. You know, people say it's hard to grow. It's hard to do all of these viticultural plans. It's hard to make in the cellar. I don't necessarily agree with it, that sentiment, because I think it's easy enough to grow Pinot. It's impossible almost to find a site that gives you the magical Pinot Noir that we're all searching for. That holy grail. That holy shit. Like, there's earth. There's subwa. There's so many things. I don't even know where to begin describing it.

[00:47:26] But for me, Cabernet Franc is actually the heartbreak grape. Cabernet Franc is a tremendously difficult grape. And it's ornery. It's stubborn. It's selfish. It's like, you know, the worst qualities of a kid sometimes. It's, you know, it's having like a grumpy kid in the vineyard. And it won't ripen. Or it gets sunburned. Or it goes pink one day. And you don't know why. And there's nothing you can do about it.

[00:47:53] And the biggest challenge to me with Cabernet Franc is getting the pick date correct. I like to equate it to like, if you're in a giant room, Syrah, if that whole room is the ripening range, the spectrum of Syrah, you could pick Syrah on the far edge of the room on one side at cold, vintage, and corn-ass. And somebody somewhere, probably me, is going to find it to be the most delicious thing in the world. You could waltz all the way across that spectrum, all the way to the other side of the room.

[00:48:23] And you're making like an Aussie Shiraz, like a big, ripe, hot vintage down under. And the world's going to love it. And everything in between there is going to be wonderful. The blue fruit, black fruit, red fruit, green fruit. You know, everything is going to be out. Peppercorns, everything. Cabernet Franc, if the room is the entire spectrum of Cabernet Franc, the picking window is like a paper held sideways. If you pick it before that, you can honestly be in like Jalapeno City.

[00:48:49] If you pick it after that, kind of without any explanation, you're suddenly in this like pickled jalapeno and prune world. Pick your poison there, right? If you get it right, and those diamond, jagged tannins are just soft enough, those big, thick skins with those big, crunchy seeds are just ripe enough, the pyrazine level has come down just far enough, you make something that, to me, is the greatest wine in the world.

[00:49:16] But when you don't, it's the worst thing in the world, you know? The risk on that is huge. We've been very blessed. We have, I think, over time achieved an understanding of our Cabernet Franc and what it means to be ripe and what it means to pick it. And how to handle it. I think when I came down from Napa, I came down from a world where we were dealing with melted tannins in Bordeaux varieties, where, you know, you would literally taste these grapes and the tannin structure was there, but it was so soft and so silky.

[00:49:47] And you would, you could extract everything. You could extract, there's no harshness in those grapes. You could do a pump over all day if you want. Literally, you could probably pichage 24 hours, get someone to hop in there and jump around. And you wouldn't extract any harshness because there was no harshness. And you, obviously, you'd have to be careful with alcohol and extracting something from seeds at low sugar high alcohol. But so I came down to Honada in 04 thinking I had the world all figured out, right? And we picked Cabernet Franc.

[00:50:16] I waited for melted tannins and I waited and I waited. And, you know, fall turned to winter, you know, and I'm still out there. And finally, I was like, screw this. We got to bring this in. Brought it in about as jagged as tannins can be and real diamond shaped. And we fermented it. And then I just beat it up. Long pump overs, delastage, extended maceration. Let's warm that tank up. Let's get after it, right? Let's get all the meat off the bone on this thing.

[00:50:45] And it was hard and lesson learned. And since that time, we haven't been dogmatic about anything. And that's really kind of the beginning of our evolution as winemakers down here. But Franc was kind of the leading cause of that. Walk me through what tends to work. Having a cold soak and working the cold soak to our advantage where, you know, four or five days, we pick at night. So cold soak is already happening. You know, we pick it.

[00:51:15] It can be 40 degree, 45 degree fruit coming in cold. So we'll soak. We will pump over regularly during that time. And then once the ferment begins and once we start to really get active and the CO2 is moving and the sugar is going and the alcohol is part of the presence in the mix. And heating up, we back off very quickly. So to under, you know, from about, I would say, roughly 20 bricks to 10 bricks, we're pretty active.

[00:51:44] We're doing very aerative pump overs. We're really trying to work out that juice a little bit, give the yeast a little bit of energy and push. And then under 10 bricks, there are days where a tank won't get a pump over. We'll wet the cap to avoid aldehydes toward the end. But we really step away once that alcohol is there. And we rely on a lot of whole berries. Whole berries are quite wonderful for the fruit expression, but also they're softer tannins. And so the pressed wine is very, very important.

[00:52:12] But I would say from beginning to end, we're a five-day cold soak and probably a 13-day ferment. We press at dryness, if not a day before, because I'm a big proponent of actually finishing ferment in barrel just for oak integration and general softening of the edges of Cabernet Franc. And also an increased level of lees in the barrel. I've become a bit of a lees fanatic. So that's part of our process as well. You know, you do Syrah and some people like to blend a little Viognier into their Syrah.

[00:52:42] I am not a member of the Viognier Love Collection. I am not a member of that club. I am not a – I think there are beautiful versions in the world. I just don't happen to enjoy making it, growing it, or drinking it, to be fair. The older I've gotten, the grumpier I've gotten, I really kind of demand a lot of acid in our white wines. And what I drink, what crumbs across the table, and really the varieties we're growing. I just don't have much time for low acid whites.

[00:53:11] So we do oftentimes throw a whole cluster of Viognier into Syrah, but usually about under 5%. I do like the floral notes. What I've found over time is a large part of the Viognier presence and addition that I admire is the stems. So there have been years where we've actually de-stemmed Viognier and thrown the stems into the ferment. And that makes a big difference. There's a wonderful aromatic lift. They're very floral. There's a jasmine quality, a green peppercorn quality.

[00:53:40] Yeah, it really, when it works, is perfumed, exotic, and highly impactful. But as our Syrah has matured in the vineyard, and as we've grown a little bit and watched the vineyard grow for 24 years now, we have taken advantage of the sand. So we're starting to replant a lot of blocks own-rooted. And that's changed the whole dynamic. We're really not including much Viognier anymore at all with the own-rooted stuff.

[00:54:07] It, own-rooted is an interesting conversation. People can be of two minds. For me, there's a seamlessness. There's a translation that doesn't need to happen. It's mother tongue. It's the same language from the root to the scion.

[00:54:24] That lack of an impediment between rootstock and scion, the free flow of xylem and phloem, the free progress of moisture through the soil column, through the roots, through the leaves into the atmosphere, is something that you can't shake a stick at. I mean, that's something that, as I like to say, you can't teach. You have it or you don't.

[00:54:46] And own-rooted Syrah, own-rooted Cab Franc, some of these grapes seem to be at home and seem to give us wines of more depth, more of a silky satin texture. And tannins that are just, they're very powerful. But again, they're very forgiving. There's something resinous and sappy about them, but that leaves you ultimately with a saltiness, a tartaric kind of salt on your tongue and freshness.

[00:55:14] And we see that with own-rooted Syrah specifically. So, Vignet is not much of the story anymore. The reason that you can get away with own-rooted, which you've been playing with for a few years now, is that it is sand. Correct. Yeah. Phylloxera doesn't jive on sand. And something you've seen is that the alcohol and ripeness curve is different on own-rooted. Absolutely. They seem to, well, one, the fruit is shaded.

[00:55:41] You don't get as much shrivel, which is a, you know, that's a difficult acid-alcohol balance when you start getting shrivel. And tannic kind of phenological ripeness issue as well. But I think also we see ripeness at lower sugars for sure. You know, we're seeing ripeness at our Syrahs around 13.5% in the own-rooted kind of head-train goble. Something else you've done over the time is you've shifted what is planted where.

[00:56:09] You've torn out blocks or you've torn out majority of blocks of certain grape varieties. And then you've brought in grape varieties that not everyone would associate with California in anticipation of possibly more drought or climate changes in the future. Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I think there's this story from the early days. And I eat crow on this one. And, you know, vineyards mature and winemakers become less stupid, I think, over time, to be fair.

[00:56:37] And 0405-06 Merlot was garbage, like garbage water, like hot garbage water. It was, it just, it didn't know its place. It was sticky and weedy and lean and improper and imbalanced. And so being this young idealistic schmuck, I was like, all right, you know what? Enough with Merlot. Off with its head. Literally, right? We're going to top graft it all to Syrah. We're going to make the 07 vintage.

[00:57:05] We're going to put it in barrel because it's already too late. Let's go ahead and have the fruit. And then in the spring of 08, we're going to top graft it. No more. We're done with this. Of the 10 grapes, Merlot is the sucker. It's the loser. And made the 07. Tasted the 07 in the spring of 2008 on the day that we were top grafting, you know, chainsaw crew, the whole deal, like getting after it. A lot of hatred for Merlot that day. And lo and behold, you know, we pulled the sample of Merlot and I tasted it and had that real oh shit moment where I was like,

[00:57:35] this is the best one we've ever made. And I'm currently killing it all. Could you excuse me for a moment? You know, ran outside, tried to call the Tractorista, tried to call everybody. And by the time we stopped it, you know, we had taken about 60% of our Merlot out. And that hurt. And Merlot, we realized, is not an early bloomer. It's a late bloomer. And once it shows up, hello world. Like it can make some of the great wines anywhere. And we took that lesson to heart.

[00:58:04] Which is that the vines need enough age to make the good wine. And to stop making these rash decisions. There's not a lot of room for rash decision making, I don't think, in proper viticultural work. I think it has to be the result of data points that become trends. It has to be the result of time spent watching a vintage, a hot vintage, a cold vintage, learning how to change in the cellar, learning how to adapt. And so the whole reason I'm saying that is we're now at a point where we've seen this vineyard grow for 24 years.

[00:58:34] And I'm comfortable saying, that block's not good. Let's stop spinning our wheels. It doesn't work. Not everything works. And so certain rootstocks, certain combos, certain scion, certain selections, you know, the clonals material we used, whatever it might be. Something was planted J-rooted, God forbid. We're now happy and confident to say, pull it out. Let's shift our energy maybe to try on some of this 8x8 foot spacing.

[00:59:01] And I think also we're starting to look around us and see this climate where you're warming, where you're dealing with these warmer conditions. Wherever you might be. You know, everybody's, this isn't just a California thing. And we're starting to question why people are continuing to plant lower acid grapes. And maybe we need to start looking at other grapes that grow in places where they get scorched by the sun, but have undefeatable acid.

[00:59:27] You know, like, like ferment, like, uh, acertico, like picolit and like petit monsang. Um, grapes in the world of red, like exinomavro. But we're really interested in the whites. And I just think it's smart. I, the older I get, and again, the grumpier I get, the more I think successful winemaking is finding a grape that expresses the sight soulfully and truthfully.

[00:59:52] But does so in a way where you can make a stable wine with almost no inputs, right? Where the acid is such, the pH is such, and the TA is such that you can express that fruit. You can trust that wine to maintain its integrity and bottle with almost no sulfur. Not because you're trying to make a style that's natural or anything like that, but because that's what the wine and the site call for. And this unadulterated approach where you're not adding acid, you're not adding, you're adding just the bare minimum of sulfur. I love sulfur.

[01:00:20] We're going to add the bare minimum of sulfur to help the wine age and proceed in the right direction. But why not work with grapes that, that make that a seamless move? Um, and I think something like Assyrtiko is a big part of it. As kind of obscure as it might be to our ears in California, it's, it's such a incredibly high quality staple in, in so many places in Greece that the more we tasted, we thought this kind of tastes like home as well.

[01:00:48] And so we made our first barrel of that. This next year, we'll start working with Petit Monsang. Ferment is just a dream right now. We've got 10 cuttings, you know, and Norella Mascalese is also a red that we're going to be working with in the next couple of years. Also just a two bud stick we have right now. But these are questions that we're asking, and these are things we're paying attention to. And we're always on the lookout. We don't want to come off as, as, as lacking focus. It's quite the opposite, actually.

[01:01:17] We have incredible focus. We know what we're focusing on. We're just considering a lot of options. And I think there's a big difference there. Well, especially at this historical moment where climate change is real. Yeah. You're thinking about the next hundred years. Yeah. And what might work here. We might as well start. We're a little late in the game, uh, you know, and, and we're thankful for grapes like Sauvignon Blanc. We're thankful for grapes like Sangiovese, which is a naturally acidic grape. You know, there, there are clones and, and combinations we're working with that, that we're thankful to have.

[01:01:47] But let's look and let's talk. You know, that's kind of where we are. What's your experience been with the, the grouping of Greek grape varieties that you have so far at Honata? Exino Mavro is an, kind of a wonderful alien grape to my palate. Uh, I traveled to Athens and traveled and tasted the vintage wine bar, the finest wine bar ever stepped foot in. And they opened every, basically in every Exino Mavro of, of, uh, really like top repute.

[01:02:17] And I found it to be fascinating. So many people say structurally like Nebbiolo. I'd say it's like Nebbiolo if you, if you steeped bay leaves in it. I mean, it's, it is distinctly different. I think it is going to be a grape that requires 10 years of, of vine development before we even get an inkling of what it really is. As a young vine, it's perplexing to me, to be honest. I don't know what the heck to make out of it. I don't know how to treat it.

[01:02:44] I, I don't know what it wants, what it needs, how it expresses itself. And it's been a struggle the first two years. I mean, I just tasted finally with someone who was like, oh yeah, that's right. I'm like, that's right. That's what young Exino Mavro tastes like. I'm like, man, buckle up team. Like this is going to be a wild ride. I think it has potential. I think the tannins, you know me, I'm a structural fanatic. I, I blend based on tannic structure and harmony between, between tannins.

[01:03:13] Um, it's going to prove very difficult to blend because it's like a ball. It's like a mace ball of spiky structure. And it's, I'm not sure it's going to play well with others. Stay tuned on that one. I think, uh, Asiertico is a smooth landing. The first year we made it, we were irrigating it. We weren't focusing on quality. We were focusing on vine depth. We just wanted to taste the fruit.

[01:03:38] The resulting line was, I'd say baffling and, and concerning. This last year we made a full barrel and I find varietal sincerity. I find Ballard Canyon language. So it's speaking Ballard Canyon, which I love. It's, it's true to the Greek form of it. It's all we could ask for. And I think it will be a beautiful blender. I think something about its tannic structure and its wild acid and how its acid is a little

[01:04:06] bit later pushed than Sauvignon Blanc will make it a beautiful pairing partner for that. I think there's a few things that's kind of different about you than a lot of winemakers in California. Uh, one is 20 years at the same property. I mean, it's nothing to sniff at and it's not one that you own. You know, you work for somebody and you've successfully worked there for 20 years. It's unusual. And then the background on plants and soil. Another is frequent trips to France.

[01:04:36] I talked to a lot of Napa winemakers who don't go to Burgundy twice a year like you do. Right. It's somewhat unusual. And then the other is, you just have this play box to be like, well, let's try a Sertigo. Let's try Piccoli. Let's, I mean, usually in California, what people tell you is not going to make a lot of financial sense to plant these obscure grape varieties that don't already have a market. We're going to keep the cab in the ground or we're going to keep the pinot on the ground. Why would we alter what works?

[01:05:05] But you really have this chance to be pretty far ahead of the game if one of these does pan out or three of them do pan out for your place during this changing time. A big part of that freedom is you have to zoom out and look at Santa Barbara County. One of the reasons we came down here and started Honata was that at that time, like the Cone Ranch sold, you know, in Napa was $475,000 an acre, whatever it might've been. And there wasn't a great deal of freedom either in the sense that, what are you going to grow?

[01:05:36] I mean, even Cab Franc wasn't even a viable option. Then it was cab, cab, cab. And I understand the economic reasoning. And also it's a match made in heaven. It's a good marriage. Cab and Napa is a good, strong marriage and deserves to be so. Down here, it's like, you know, there are people in Santa Barbara County, there's a wild West feel. Are there grapes that work? Yeah. You know, we've got in some cases 50 years of history now with Pinot and Chard further towards the coast. Genius. Yes. Home.

[01:06:06] Done. That's a marriage that will last for, I think, for as long as we're growing grapes in this part of the world. But then there's a conversation. Is it Syrah? Is it Cab? Is it, there's this feeling of experimentation and openness to it. And also an important aspect people don't talk about. There's an openness and a sharing of communication. That's huge. I've been to other regions where they ask where you've tasted and you say their neighbor and they stop talking to you. And there's something very funny about that closed nature. I get it.

[01:06:36] I understand how a region gets there. Santa Barbara is not there. So the information we're gathering, we're sharing with Brian Babcock, who's sharing with Chad. You know, we're talking. There's this network of communication and farming. Oh, have you tried this? Have you done this? Have you tried the echo roller? Didn't work for us. Maybe it'll work for you. Here, borrow it. You know, the spirit of kind of camaraderie here is something that's very, very strong. And I think looking back on my 20 years here, you know, when we're talking about like Asiertico

[01:07:03] or Picolit, I mean, we put 200 Picolit vines in the ground. So we're not changing our, you know, we're not, don't worry world. We're not coming out with a Ballard Canyon Picolit anytime soon. It'll be a blending component. And we're doing it very organically. We're doing it very measured. Everything we do is very measured. All of these trials. I would never throw away, you know, the baby with the bathwater. We're trying little things here. We're not, Cab is still our baby. Cab is, I would argue today, maybe the finest grape we work with at Honata.

[01:07:33] No offense, Syrah. And no offense, Cab Franc. But we're not changing dramatically or drastically. But, you know, that being said, you know, your question about Burgundy and about those travels and about traveling with your eyes open and your heart open and learning and taking not only what they do that might be useful, but also things they do that aren't going to work. And I think that's a huge thing people don't talk about. I love going to sellers and being like, what you're doing is brilliant.

[01:08:02] It is not what we need to do. You know, thank goodness. It makes the world go round. But we have, from our time in Burgundy and our time traveling in different regions, learned more than I would have thought possible. And it's so good to see what they're up to because it makes you realize we could all do better. God, there's so many things, so many people who are relentless. And it makes you come home and say, holy shit, we got to get jumping. Like there's some other stuff we got to try.

[01:08:32] And that spirit of challenge and sharing and that rare combination of the brotherhood and sisterhood of winemaking, and we're all in this together, has really shaped certainly our last, I'd say, our last seven years, I would say, when we really started working more closely with Burgundy. And the reason that that happened is the same ownership of Honata also bought Bonner de Martre and Carton Charlemagne. Correct.

[01:08:58] And sometimes people from that team come to visit you, and sometimes you go to visit the region of Burgundy. And it turns out now that you're there pretty often. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's been eye-opening for me to realize that they have so much to offer us as far as information, as far as guidance on Lees has been the main thing I've learned from them. It's just my complete obsession with Lees now has largely been fueled by my time there. But also the conversation is back and forth now.

[01:09:26] I mean, it gets warm there. And ferments can be challenging, and native yeast can be a trick. And they're a bunch of kind of young, it's a winemaking team that's very young like we are here. I guess I'm less young than I think of myself now, but we still have a spirit of adventure and a passion and a loyalty that we all share. And it makes for an amazing exchange of ideas. I think differences in red fermentation, I mean, the tannin management is so different.

[01:09:56] I think crushing white grapes versus going whole cluster. I think press fractions are something very interesting. We started doing a lot of basket press with Chardonnay, de-stemming, and then actually layering it like a club sandwich. You know, stem, grape, stem, grape, stem, grape. And then pressing has been fascinating. And that's something we learned, not necessarily at BDM, but from other friends in Burgundy. There are so many things we've learned.

[01:10:24] And the conversations go on and on. I was just there in February to talk to friends and present our wines. Nothing like taking your Pinot to Burgundy to really get the heartbeat up. You know, we took, and for the last number of years have presented our wines, Pinots and Chardonnays and Honata with a group of great winemakers from around the world. And it's been lovely feedback and wonderful conversations. And again, that camaraderie is...

[01:10:53] And sometimes they bust your balls. Oh, I would hope so. From the early days, my French was not very good. So I would imagine, yes. It was funny, the first time I got there and the rencontre, Henri Jaillet. And I was so honored to be, to have a seat at the table. And so I sat and I got my notes out and I knew 200 words of French. And when you know 200 words of French, you're really dangerous. You're really dangerous. You know, like someone asks if you want more wine.

[01:11:21] And I'm like, I know how to say it's sufficient. So I'd say, ça suffit. You know, and it actually means like, that's enough. So I didn't make a lot of friends. But I got up to talk about the 2015 vintage. And I was like, oh, I know how to say hot and sunny. So I could continually, you know, I didn't realize I was speaking. And all of a sudden they said, your 45 minutes had begun. So I got up and one of my proudest, most embarrassing moments, I got up to speak about the wines and continuously said, instead of hot and sunny,

[01:11:50] that the 2015 vintage was incredibly hot and lonely. You know, and they were all so lovely. You know, one of my heroes came over to me afterwards and put his arm around me and said, sometimes when you're a man in harvest, it gets very lonely. And I had to say, excuse me? And then I realized my mistake. But that exchange has been incredible. And yeah, there was definitely some,

[01:12:19] I think some concern with a young Californian over there, you know, because they're such classic icons in that group. But I'm very blessed to have that opportunity. I don't take it for granted. I find myself a kid in a candy store a lot of times, you know, just eyes as wide as they can be, just staring and trying to glean any bit of information I can, any sort of positive or negative feedback. When we come back, we'll find out that when the sign says, get the hell out,

[01:12:49] Matt Dees sees an invitation to stick around. I walked a property in 06, which was called Rancho Salci Puedes, which politely in Spanish means get the hell out if you can. And it's mean. And it's, it's mean. I don't know how else to say it. That's right after this. You have another project that you also make the wine for out of the same facility, but it's 20 miles away.

[01:13:15] It's in the Santa Rita Hills and it's largely a Chardonnay and Pinot Noir project. And that's called The Hilt. You also make some Riesling out there and some Syrah. And it's a couple hundred acres of vineyards between Bent Rock and Radiant. And so that's really probably where a lot of that Burgundy knowledge is directly applicable in terms of your working with Chardonnay and Pinot. You know,

[01:13:43] I think it's interesting if you look back at the history of Honada, right? Of all the grapes, what are we? 15 Cipage now, right? And, and we have two like glaring absences, right? Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Because it's so hot during the day and so cold at night, Pinot and Chardonnay don't thrive in Ballard Canyon. It's not, it's not a perfect place. And like I was saying with Pinot, you can grow it. I'm sure we could ripen it. We can make something red and fruity and probably lacking soul,

[01:14:11] but it wouldn't be happy. So we moved in in 04. I got here. We started making the wines. I can tell you that in June and July of 04, we tasted literally every wine made in Santa Barbara County. Hundreds of wines from recent vintages. And, you know, one of the first ones I tasted was a Foxen Pinot Noir. And then Greg Brewer's Chardonnay from Brewer Clifton. And then what Chad was doing, you know, some of those Inox wines. And, and it was very clear,

[01:14:39] very quickly that within our little County, the potential to produce the greatest Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays, certainly in the U S was there. Just latent. It was just obvious to me. And so as farmers, I mean, our whole program is based on being a state and we kind of went outside of it to do our diligence. We started buying fruit from the North, the South, the East, and the West of the Santa Rita Hills. And we bought from Black Sand. We bought from Botea Clay Loam. We've bought from Diatomaceous Earth.

[01:15:09] We bought from Cobbles, you name it. We bought it. We tried it. We did everything. But within, this was in 04, a beginning. By 08, we knew exactly where we wanted to be. We wanted to be on the Southwest corner of the AVA, the coldest, most windblown sites facing North. Because obviously being in the Northern hemisphere, facing North, the sun is at your back. It's not blaring in your face. It's not cooking those grapes. It's, it's just, it's reminding you it's there. It's, it's passing behind you from, from, you know, East to West.

[01:15:38] And we kept buying fruit, which isn't, isn't our forte. It's not really what we do. And we just kept looking for a home. And I walked a property in 06, which was called Rancho Salcipueras, which politely in Spanish means get the hell out if you can. And it's mean. And it's, it's mean. I don't know how else to say it. It's so wild. It's so woolly. We ended up not buying it at that time. 4,000 acre property. We chose it was not in our best interest. Someone bought it the next year,

[01:16:07] planted it in 07, and developed it, put the roads in, you know, put 200 acres of vineyards in. And, and we watched longingly from afar. And then, uh, a number of factors added up to that sale being sold in 2014. And so when we said we wanted to be on the Southwest corner, we bought the Southwest corner, a 4,000 acre parcel that is planted largely on diatomaceous earth and shirt. And is separate in those two properties, right? So there's radian,

[01:16:35] which is the Western most. It is planted on pure, what appears to be chalk. You would think from a distance it's chalk until you walk up and you pick up a boulder, the size of a car over your head and realize it weighs about the same as air. It's, it's diatom. So it's diatomite and it is so similar to limestone, but where the plankton involved in limestone are utilizing, um, calcium, the, the plankton,

[01:17:04] the algae involved in diatomite, the diatoms are actually utilizing minerals or usually utilizing silica. It's quite remarkable. These little things are, they account for like 50% of the oxygen in the world. Like these are amazing creatures and they could be thousands of layers deep as they die and settle in the ocean. They form this charmingly named diatomaceous ooze. Be a nice label, wouldn't it? But, uh, these, these soils are very rare and at radian, they are exposed.

[01:17:33] They were never compacted. So they're, they're just this white chalky, but it's silica. It's silicious. It's slightly acidic soil. It's hydrophobic. It's a very challenging soil to grow on. Add to that, the wind that howls because we're nine miles from the ocean. We're basically at radian, a giant wind block for the rest of the AVA. The clusters are about the size of a golf ball, I would say. And the intensity is so pronounced. It's, it's,

[01:18:02] it's kind of scary on occasion. And there's a, a really shocking level of acid, of freshness. Vineyard one. Vineyard two is bent rock, which had been really kind of gaining traction in the world. A lot of people who were buying the grape were spreading the gospel and they were making chardonnay from bent rock. Bent rock is a lower elevation. It is further east. It is warmer. There is a crust of cherts,

[01:18:30] which is a hardened kind of crypto crystalline form of basically the same marine sediment. It's just quartz that takes heat all day and it radiates it at night. The soils are more profound. They're deeper and more complex simultaneously. And the just overall gentle slope of bent rock, where radian is jagged, it's like a 10,000 piece puzzle. Bent rock are these long plateaus and hills. So the wines are more supple. They're more tender. They're more, there's just more flesh.

[01:19:00] There's more, yeah, generosity to the wines. That is not to say that they're these dense, big Pinot and Chardonnay monsters. They're still unbelievably driven by salt, by minerality, by acidity, by structure. And we have the pleasure of farming those properties and buying or and selling about 60% of the fruit, but really cherry picking the fruit that we keep. And I will tell you,

[01:19:30] we bought the properties as Pinot Noir havens, right? Sideways came out, the world reacted, probably overreacted. A lot of sites were planted to Pinot that should never have been planted to Pinot. And when we bought Radian and Bent Rock, we bought them with Pinot in mind. And then we started making the Chardonnay. And I'll echo what I hear from all of my peers, whether it be, you know, in the southwest corner or the northeast corner.

[01:19:59] Chardonnay is unforgettable from Santa Rita. It's unique in this world. And it's amazing to me what makes a grape in a region great. And people might disagree with me on this, but I love a grape that it doesn't matter whether you're south-facing or north-facing, or you're planted on diatomaceous earth, or you're planted on clay over limestone, whatever it might be. Whether you want to age it in barrel 100% new,

[01:20:29] or whether you want to age it in concrete tank, whether you want to go 100% ML, whatever you want to do. You can do all the art and tricks and all the things we do in the winery to make things sexy. But at the end of the day, after 10 years, you taste those two wines and they're sisters. I love that. They taste like Santa Rita Hills wines. And I think that's the sign that a grape is in the right place. I heard a really wonderful statement from Thibaut Leger-Belair. He got up and he said,

[01:20:57] he poured like his 2000 Le Saint-Georges, right? And then his 2010 Le Saint-Georges, and then his 2020 Le Saint-Georges. And we went backwards. So we did 20, which was epic. And like all of his wines, silky and pronounced and dramatic. And then the 10 was mellowed and there were secondary and tertiary. And then the 2000 was, I mean, savage and wonderful and gamey and just seductive.

[01:21:26] And his comment was, at five years old or four years old for the 2020, the winemaker defines that wine. At 10 years old, the vineyard and the winemaker are dancing. At 20 years old, the vineyard forgot the winemaker. And I love that. I thought that was just so meaningful to me. And the Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay specifically is going to follow that route.

[01:21:52] And I think that's a magical thing. I just think it's a characteristic that is so impactful. And I close my eyes and I taste blind and I taste Santa Rita Hills Chardonnay. And, you know, there are three big things that jump out. You know, it's the acid that hits the side of your tongue, the top of your tongue, like the side of your cheeks. It goes to the top of your head and then your hair stands out on the back. It's that malic and tartaric.

[01:22:21] There's some very odd combination that just lends that electric air to the wine. The second thing that screams Santa Rita to me is salt. Does Chablis have salt? Sure. Sancerre, let's talk about Sauvignon Blanc. Very salty. There are so many white wines in the world that have salt. Ours is specifically oyster brine. And a specific like, eat the oyster, happiness, put the shell down, realize you forgot to slurp the nectar, and down the hatch you go with that combination of salt water, oyster,

[01:22:51] iodine, shell. It's quite lovely. And third thing for me would be that lime citrus, kind of zest, juice, and pith, touch of bitterness, which to me, great Chardonnay needs. Basically, you've been moving to the idea that radian is more in the Pinot Noir world and bent rock is more in the Chardonnay world, as a general rule. I think so. I think there are a number of factors leading us there. Bent rock,

[01:23:20] because it's eight or nine miles from the ocean, and because of the temperature there, and because powdery mildew is such a temperature-driven creature, we'll be nice to it today. The powdery mildew pressure at radian is just through the roof. So we can grow Chardonnay there, but it's a war. And Pinot, to me, seems to manage it a little bit better. And, boy, I have a tough time with it still.

[01:23:50] I'm not at ease with the decision, but I think you're correct. I think we're grafting a lot of bent rock Pinot to Chardonnay because it's proven to be so... I mean, bent rock Chardonnay is just such a tangible thing when you're out, you know, and you're tasting other producers, and you see the tie that binds it. And it's got that, like, early season apricot, bright sunshine, that refrigerated sunshine we always talk about because it's so sunny and so cold in Santa Rita. It just,

[01:24:19] those wines are unbelievably impactful. And the radian Pinot is so vocal, and it's such a unique beast, right? Dark color, really intense perfume, floral perfume, pepper perfume. It can almost be like a young Saint-Joseph in a crazy way, aromatically. And then, unbelievably refined, elegant, and tremendous cut and crunch. Those are obnoxious words. Like, I write tasty notes and have to shower for five days.

[01:24:49] Sorry to say that, but there's something about the finish that there's a crunch to it. And that's, that's, that's something we have to make. It's our duty as landowners on that property, as the shepherds of that vineyard, we have to make Radiant Pinot. We have to make bent rock Chardonnay. We have to. We get to make Radiant Chardonnay. We get to make bent rock Pinot. And I'm so thankful every day because they offer counter, point and counterpoint. And they make bent rock even more pronounced, right? In chardonnay.

[01:25:16] And they make Radiant even more unique in Pinot. But they have unique voices and they, they demand a bottling. But over time, yes, we are, we are going to chardonnay. We are going to chardonnay at bent rock piece by piece. And at Radiant, we're really focusing our efforts on finding the right massal selection and working with the proper Pinot. Radiant is 100 acres and some of it faces in one direction or is at a certain elevation or is a certain point of the hill and, you know, top or bottom.

[01:25:46] And then bent rock, similar thing. It's in general lower down and it's more sheltered, but it's 100 acres and there's different parts of bent rock. And some of these blocks you sell to other wineries and some you keep for yourself. And we've tasted through different blocks of Radiant Pinot and the difference is pretty noticeable even to someone who's maybe not the sharpest palette on a block like myself. I mean, that range of expressions of Pinot is pretty notable.

[01:26:16] But, I mean, all tribute to your blending skills or what you're doing at the blending table with the people you work with, but when it comes together, it seems like a really defined thing in the finished product. One of the notes that I think of for that wine, the Radiant Pinot Noir, is actually a note that a mutual friend of ours, Catherine, pointed out one day when we were dining together, which is Nori wrapper, the wrapper on the hand roll of sushi. And that for me

[01:26:45] is a very Santa Rita Hills kind of note. That's a similar note to some of the Pinot Noir from Domaine Delacote, which you can see from Radiant. It's, you know, in the same general vicinity. When I think of a wine like Bloomsfield, I think of that same note. So, that's not a note that I associate with Burgundy. You know, that's a note that is distinctive for me for Santa Rita Hills. It's not a fruit note. It's a savory note, right? Absolutely. And so,

[01:27:15] I think that that's why people think of Burgundy for the cognate, besides the fact that a lot of people around here spend a lot of time in Burgundy, you know. But, because a lot of times the cognate for Pinot Noir from other parts of the world is more in the fruit world, not the savory world. But you get this kind of like peat moss or Nori wrapper kind of background note to the fruit in Santa Rita Hills.

[01:27:45] I get it in Radian. And I would ask you, is that the diatomaceous earth? Is that mildew pressure? Is that a certain way of handling things? Is that leaves? Or, is that a mystery? It is. It is the mystery. It's the seduction of Pinot Noir. It's what makes it the most seductive grape in the world. I often call those notes the hint of corruption, right? It's that which is not fruit. And it's that which makes you stick your nose in the glass again and again

[01:28:15] and again until the bottle's gone. You still haven't solved the mystery. You open another bottle and get into it, right? It's not a, you know, having kids. It's not a 25-piece puzzle. It's a 10,000-piece puzzle. You're going to struggle with it. And you should. You know, I think your comment about Domaine de la Cote, I mean, such an incredible producer and definitely in the same kind of quadrant where we are, which is all the way to the West. You know, like we both in our projects went West. We wanted that cold, cold, cold environment, that climate

[01:28:44] where the grapes would struggle to ripen, where they would maintain freshness, acidity, zip, kind of crunch, whatever we want to call it, and would potentially have that nori, that which is not fruit, the charm and the mystery. And I think the comparisons to Burgundy are natural. And I think you say Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, your mind goes there just automatically with very good reason. It's the birthplace. It's the Mecca. It's where we all want to go. It's where we want to understand the definition of what terroir is.

[01:29:15] And, you know, I think thankfully we're different. I only say that because, you know, we have the sunshine and it's something that is, I would love the minerality of Burgundy. I'm not trading our sunshine for it. I mean, that refrigerated sunshine, good Lord. I would never exchange that. And, you know, it's interesting that you bring up Burgundy and, you know, in your talk about all the different flavors coming off our property, you know, I think we are very quick to divide

[01:29:44] and subdivide based on what we see in Burgundy, right? And they have a couple thousand years on us at least. You know, you walk Maurice on the knee and it's like, oh, now I'm here and now I'm here and now I'm here, you know. I grew up in Kansas City on state line. I'm in Kansas. Now I'm in Missouri. You know, that whole like demarcation of like, and this, so we should name it something different, right? And I think we bought the Hilt in 2014 at which time all the grapes were being sold. At that point, it was a seven-year-old vineyard. People have been buying fruit for four years.

[01:30:15] Exceptional producers making exceptional wines. And we still sell 60% of our fruit, but it's funny. We came in and bought it and we did not bottle Hilt Bentrock or a Hilt Radian for the first five years we were there, basically. And people are like, you guys are crazy. And why are you not bottling single vineyards of these wines? Because they're so specific as you mentioned. And for us, it was a really funny thing. I didn't know what we were unleashing into the world yet. I wanted to understand it before we were bottling it.

[01:30:45] And we were coming in cold. And for me as a young, you know, domestic vineyard, going to the marketplace and being like, this is our vineyard. You should buy it. Like, what's it taste like? I don't know. How's it age? I'm not really sure, but grab it while you can. You know, I think we wanted to be a little bit more diligent on our end as the owners of the property. And a lot of these people had already been working with it for, you know, six, five, six years, whatever it is. And they had a better idea than we did. But we took our time. We did what we like to call the sniff test, which was, we had to prove it.

[01:31:15] It had typicity, specificity, and consistency because that's a big part of a single vineyard. We embrace vintage variation here, but vintage variation be damned. You should know that it's radiant. There should be markers and you should know that it ain't bent rock because bent rock is very different because X, Y, and Z. So we took 20 wines starting in 14, blind, with my whole team. Blind. Bent rock, radian, bent rock, bent rock, radian, bent rock, ringer from somewhere else, bent rock, radian. I don't even know that's wine, bent rock, radian. You know, you'd have to be able to do that, not because we are super tasters,

[01:31:45] but because it's clear, crystal clear. And that was part one. Oddly, that wasn't the most important part. To me, the most important part was, okay, you've proven that they're different. Great. Good for you. Right? Good. We thought they were. We've proven ourselves correct. Can you make an elegant, balanced wine that can offer pleasure? And we could. Certainly by the time 18 came around and we jumped in and we thought, okay, these vineyards,

[01:32:14] we thought they were going to be great. We thought they were going to be different. They've blown our expectations and our hopes out of the water. They're that much better. And on their own, they're fascinating and full of pleasure and balanced and elegant and refined and succulent and savory and, you know, all the wonderful things that Santa Rita Hills should be and Pinot and Chard. And now fast forward, you know, from 18, six years on the line and we've become our own worst nightmares. We've now,

[01:32:44] we've now been researching extensively with every given year, all of the 66 vineyard blocks we have at Radian and Bent Rock with sexy names like 31 and 22, you know, and we're realizing that it's not 66 blocks. It's actually like 12, probably, maybe 14 at Radian and probably seven at Bent Rock and they're Ludees, they're special places. They're special named places. And we've really started to see chemistry. So we've seen pH,

[01:33:14] we've seen TA, we've seen, we've seen aromatic profile. We've seen most importantly, texture and structure that is the same family. They're akin. You know, and if there's a whole line of north-facing slopes on the same soil, you know, you think you're probably in the same Ludee. And we've proven that true sometimes and false other times. But now we're actually starting to look at parcel by parcel, which was what we've had the pleasure of tasting together. And my mind is reeling with it. Like,

[01:33:43] what do we do with this knowledge? How do we approach cautiously and appropriately forward? How do we go? Do we suddenly bottle 16 wines? No. But what we do in the cellar is we start to treat them. We start to farm them different in the vineyard. We start to crop them different. We pull leaves differently. We approach training differently. In the cellar, we approach processing, stem inclusion differently, cooperage differently, lease inclusion differently.

[01:34:11] We start making wine based on knowledge. It goes back to the whole conversation about being somewhere long enough to actually get that knowledge and see it and understand it and process it. What do you think about whole cluster? I would say we're using slightly more with every given vintage. I love stems and I adore stems. I just think with our vineyard being as resinous as it is, we need to tread lightly and I'm proud of our approach currently.

[01:34:41] But I would say with Radian, we're about 15% on average and at Bent Rock, almost nothing. We just don't feel the need to do that there. So you make Pinot Noir from some sites that have some savory character to them, some resinous quality sometimes. And what's your thought on this idea of skin contact and juice and how it goes about itself? I love cold soaking. I really do. Letting loose some of the compounds into solution at cold temperature has a dramatic effect.

[01:35:12] I mean, not to mention also like a slight buildup of volatility, right? A slight floral note from any bacterial advancement that happens and development or apiculated yeast, whatever is swimming and floating in that mix, in that matrix. But for me, we're being north-facing vineyards in the southwest corner of the AVA, our grapes are tannic. You know, everybody, not everyone, a lot of people find Pinot Noir, this soft, thin skin, all these things, not at Radian. Not at Radian. If you take a grape

[01:35:41] of Radian and you squeeze it, like three seeds come out and then a tiny drop of very dark juice starts to come out and then it decides to go back into the skins and then you look at your finger and it's black. And that's Pinot Noir. I promise you, people don't believe it. It's Pinot. No one's adding Syrah. You know, it's Pinot. And I find that you have to be really careful. You know, a grape vine is a biological being. So what does a grape vine want to do?

[01:36:10] It wants to set fruit, you know, have flour, set fruit successfully. It wants to ripen its fruit, accumulate sugar. Make a tasty treat and protect that seed so that a bird or a pig or a squirrel or a human, whatever it might be, grabs that seed, eats it, and disseminates it somewhere else. And when the vines suddenly find themselves in like hurricane conditions, which Radian can be, you know, 40 mile an hour winds, the grape's initial response is let's thicken those skins. We're in trouble.

[01:36:39] Let's thicken those skins and protect that seed. And it's really different, a different experience. Even when we worked with south-facing fruit from other parts of the Santa Rita Hills, north-facing southwest corner, you got to be careful. So we don't do a great deal of cap management extraction, but we will take that five to six day cold soak and then about a six to eight day ferment. And the ferment, we keep the temperature very low where we're like 82 to 84 degrees.

[01:37:08] And we will only do punchdowns, only do peage maybe once or twice per ferment and only do that once we can turn the cap completely. We used to get in there and try to punch down to create juice and a whole cluster fermentation situation. And we found we were really shredding the stems where if you really wait until you can roll that whole thing, you punch down that wonderful feeling we've all done it where you punch and that whole cap turns over. It usually happens for us around 12, 10 or 12 bricks. And so we'll do one or two at that level

[01:37:37] and then we really step off. You know, we really pump the brakes below 10 bricks. We will wet the cap. We're really very careful because those tannins and that alcohol extraction, things get dicey very quickly and you're not going back. And we're not relying on press wine necessarily for Pinot Noir. I mean, with whole clusters we will, but we're not able to glean a lot out of that that would help us if we over-extract it. To move into Chardonnay, I have to say when I think of promising

[01:38:07] and really noteworthy Chardonnay vineyards in California, I mean, Bent Rock is on that list for me. The young juice is delicious. The young wine, the young ferment is you know you're onto something special. But like the best Chardonnay vineyards in the world, it wraps into a cocoon and it comes out as a butterfly in bottle. And that to me is rare. Bent Rock is balance, elegant, and refinement. It's,

[01:38:37] I'm with you 100%. As far as promising Chardonnay vineyards that I've ever tasted, domestically speaking, strictly domestically speaking, I think there's some amazing things happening in Oregon. I think there are some vineyards where we are actually some south-facing properties that are quite remarkable. And I think Bent Rock is up there. Absolutely. So what's your approach to Bent Rock Chardonnay, which is a wine that you've progressively made more and more of each year? We mix it up. So a lot of it goes whole cluster to press.

[01:39:08] We press, we do de bourbage, no sulfur added, de bourbage for about 20 to 24 hours. And then we rack to oak about 40% new French because it just loves oak and ferment in barrel. Another portion of it comes in, and like I was saying, we de-stem it. We layer, we make the peanut butter and jelly sandwich of stems and grapes. And we basket press it, which gives us a lower NTU. We actually basically go directly from basket press to barrel because the solids, turbidity.

[01:39:38] I know I asked you this question already, but the NTU means... Yeah, it's another way of looking at the solids suspended in the juice. If you go to barrel with too little solid, you're going to deal with some issues with fermentation and aging. If you go with too much solid, you could do issues with cleanliness of ferment, of expression of fruit, whatever it might be. You can play with that. That's the creative wiggle room as a winemaker. But the big thing about de-stemming to me

[01:40:08] and then basket pressing is you release these unique aromatic compounds from around the stem where the stem attaches to the grapes. And if you pull all those off, you unleash that world of a slight aromatic floral note that I love. And so we combine those two. We ferment in, again, 40% new French oak, predominantly barrique. We do a couple 350s, some cigars, which are 320s. We do some 500s, some 600s, and some oval tanks. We ferment. It stays on leaves without sulfur for basically a year.

[01:40:38] We'll use sulfur if we start getting aldehydes in some older barrels. We'll run into issues, so we'll be prudent. But we're talking like two grams. I mean, we're talking a very small ad. And then at about 11 or 12 months, or to put it more succinctly, basically the day before we're picking to fill them again with the next vintage, we'll roll those We have the OXO system, so it allows us to roll barrels. So we'll leave the bung in, we'll tighten it up, we'll turn them upside down, we'll leave them from anywhere from two to six minutes, I would say. And when we leave the barrels upside down, the leaves come back into suspension.

[01:41:08] Selected leaves. Some of the darker kind of less lovely leaves will stay on the barrel. But we found it between two and six depending on the vintage and depending on the clarity of the fruit and the cleanliness of the fruit coming in. We'll roll the barrel back, we'll take the bung out, and we'll pump that bent rock Chardonnay to tank, taking let's say 60% of the leaves. We'll age it in tank, we'll let those leaves be reintroduced. It's like a giant singles mixer, right? All these barrels coming together and all this leaves

[01:41:37] material, and there's kind of this enriching moment. You can simultaneously sense the wine expanding and then immediately contracting. And that's what I love about that time in oak is it expands, everything kind of gets together, it gets to know each other and then that wine contracts and reduces because the reintroduction of those same leaves. And we leave it in there for between six and eight months and we protect it with a little bit of sulfur and we top tanks to the brim, we put them downstairs in the barrel cellar

[01:42:06] and then we bottle in the spring of the following year. So when you taste wines that have very little leaves exposure, an example off the top of my head would be like Jean-Noel Gagnard and Sassam-Arocher versus wines that have quite a bit of leaves contact. In Chardonnay, I guess an example might be Hubert Lemmy maybe or Pataille. You know, obviously these are brigandie examples. What is the difference for you

[01:42:36] in the taste of the wines? It's not a taste as much as it is a textural nuance. I mean there's yeastiness, right? There's going to be a pronounced, God for lack of a smarter adjective, yeastiness. But to me it's textural. It's opening the window, it's broadening the wines. To me it is simultaneously vertical and horizontal expansion on the palate. It's a little bit like malolactic fermentation where you're

[01:43:06] opening the window, you're opening the door, you're expanding the wine and its view. And there's just an added layer of depth and breadth. There's something that just again vertical and horizontal expansion and just embracing that slightly more generous and supple edge of the wine. But in some regions where you have massive fruit and you have a warm site, I don't know that that's necessary,

[01:43:36] right? That's why again dogma is very difficult. We happen to have cold sites, even our warmest site is frigid and we have a hard time even getting it through ML because the pH is so low. To speak a little bit about the maturation, you have done experiments with a lot of different cooperage but one of the ones that you really like and have sourced more of are Bruno Lorazon cooperage out of Mercury. Bruno Lorazon is a producer of Mercury

[01:44:05] and I loved his white wines. They were mineral driven and lifted and light as a feather, right? That to me, when you can do that where there's breadth to the wine and then they're light as a feather, kudos. Like, yes, yes please, I will drink that every night. And not to say they're short, quite the opposite. I'm just saying that they finish up. And Bruno's wines always were like that. And Mercury, right? He's one of those guys who's dealing with a region that doesn't get the respect it deserves.

[01:44:36] And finally got a visit with him and wanted to go see what he was doing and I went in his cellar and all of his barrels were Bruno Lorazon barrels. He makes his own barrels. He's a cooper. And we tasted through them and they're so lightly toasted. And we started bringing them over at a very small amount and now we we buy a large number of them and they just kiss the wine. Like, it's the most beautiful combination. I can't put it into words. It's just a barrel should

[01:45:05] caress and frame a wine but do so judiciously and with respect. It should never be at the forefront. For our sake, what we're looking for is texture. A slight textural addition. Kind of a level of richness to the fruit because our acid in Chardonnay specifically is racy. Let's call it racy. You call it electric, call it racy, call it borderline crazy on occasion. But with that you need to pull a little flesh over those bones

[01:45:35] and to me if you have a healthy lees and a barrel that doesn't bring toast, doesn't bring any mesquite or vanillin or any of those items that, you know, lactone kind of qualities, if it just brings a slight increase in textural impact. It's magical. And we found really strange things, you know, we found that a lot of the coopers we use for new French oak for Chardonnay specifically and sometimes Pinot Noir as well but the new oak

[01:46:04] is far more respectful of place than old oak. And people listening probably think I'm crazy but to me if you can find a barrel that doesn't contribute any real aromatic toastiness, to me there's a character to a lot of old barrels that for lack of a creative term is old barrel. We call it scody, we call it soggy and it's something that for me detracts from place where a new barrel if it's proper it's respectfully toasted and it's paired with your wine thoughtfully

[01:46:34] yowza that's a that's respectful and there are some producers who take that view I know certainly Burgundians who do but for us it's really been eye opening I never thought that would be the case New Wood and Chardonnay no, right? No, no one does that nobody wants an overly oaked California Chardonnay right but do people want a California Chardonnay that tastes like place and is a microscope into or a magnifying glass into the terroir I think so and for us it's best achieved a lot of times

[01:47:04] by new oak So something you mentioned in passing is the tendency of the wine to finish up like to move textually with lift at the finish and this is sort of a Matt D signature across Honata and the Hilt in a way that perhaps sets you apart from many winemakers in California at least the California of the 90s where I remember so many people were talking about like how can we polish those tannins you know what I mean and I think a lot of times the end result of polishing the tannins

[01:47:33] was that the finish sort of stayed there and sometimes there wasn't that energy and movement across the palate that I think you're really looking for but particularly I feel like it's a sad day for Matt D's if the wine goes down at the finish Oh it's a dark day those are dark times I love structure a structural side of wine is what excites me the most I love the way you can feel the soil

[01:48:03] you can feel the skin and the seed you can feel every aspect of a grape's development on that kind of framing structural grit but I love when it forgives and goes away and with Chardonnay it has to finish up and that's an acid side if you're going to utilize malolactic like we do it still needs to finish up with a saltiness and minerality that drives it into that kind of lime juice divine margarita finish of salt and lime

[01:48:33] and all those things how do you see your own wines in terms of drinking windows we talked a little bit about Honata but in terms of the Hilt wines one of the things we sort of noted together was that the Bent Rock Chardonnay it can almost be more open when it's very youthful in bottle in terms of the fruit profile and then it can get a little slimmer perhaps at least in some examples we tried with some bottle age like it can maybe show a slight touch

[01:49:02] more on the line which is not the normal curve that you might assume is that something you agree with and how do you approach drinking we already talked about how Honata maybe can do 15 years in different grape varieties and maybe the three year period may be a kind of a skinny time for the wines but how do you see the Hilt the Hilt as it stands now the modern Hilt started in 2014 once we bought the property so anything that existed before

[01:49:32] then was from different properties so I can't speak to that as much so I'm really dealing with a 10 year window and I can say with absolute confidence that in 10 years the Chardonnays develop they evolve and they mature I think the big question and a struggle I have with Santa Rita Hills Pinot and Chardonnay specifically is just that when do you drink them do you drink them for their immediate vibrancy their like shimmering

[01:50:01] luminescent kind of qualities or do you wait for the onset of a slight oxidation do you like that nuttiness I struggle sometimes I love the youth I love capturing like we like to bottle and capture lightning in a bottle I love the fruit and the acid at year three I love that my experience is I prefer the wines around between years five and seven that's pinot and chard I really

[01:50:31] really do like the 2018 and 2019 to me are like starting to understand who they are we can kind of read the vineyard like we were talking about like the comment about when the vineyard starts to forget the winemaker we're seeing it about seven years old I think you're starting to see the true sight come out whether someone wants to pick it 16% alcohol or someone wants to pick a chapter lives you know you can still see through that at about seven years or ten years but long story short

[01:51:01] I drink Santa Rita Hills Pinot for vibrancy freshness I drink them young five to seven Chardonnay I do the same five to seven but I'm starting to think about laying them down a lot longer and so in Benrock you because you're you and you're like well the easy to sell wines we can't can't just have those no no no who wants that you you've got some Riesling going we did the freshness of the sight and the sunshine made sense

[01:51:31] so we got three clones we got one a selection from Faltz we got a selection from Rheingau we got a selection from the Moselle and we've spaced them across about three parcels you know good god I think we have an acre and a half out of 200 so we're about right and the first couple years it made lemon juice you know and I think I think that's not what we're looking for and then all of a sudden this past year it hung the roots were deeper mother nature

[01:52:00] threw less curveballs and we had a little bit of wonderful botrytis and we pressed them you know potential alcohols I think they ended up about 11.9 to 12.4 somewhere in there and there's flesh and we put them in stainless and we put them in an oval on leaves and we're beginning to have enough material to experiment with and to understand fully as opposed to like our production a couple years ago was 15 gallons all told full stop and I think it works I think it

[01:52:30] deserves a seat at the table and I would say the same with Syrah which we're just such a fanatic group of winemakers in our cellar towards northern Rhone wines and visiting and visiting and tasting and tasting and walking Janal and all those places you're like whoo you know you feel a spiritual connection to that place and we came back and we walk at Radian and we feel the same spiritual connection and can sense that Syrah would work there and so in a part

[01:53:00] where we had a very difficult time ripening Pinot mind you talk about crazy people and crazy decisions we stuck Syrah on the ground and I think with winemaking there's a lot of stories where people put on the winemaking hat and they're like this wine is exceptional because of all the hard work and brilliance that I put into this wine we grafted in 17 a third of an acre of Syrah 18 we got the first fruit I forgot about it full stop

[01:53:30] forgot about it and like Reuben my brother from another mother had to like call and be like hey man we forgot the Syrah like oh shit so we had put all the equipment away this was late in the year and he picked this this just ragged every color of rot you can see in the world and just like oh god we're not even putting that through the distemmer we're not going to do that it would fall apart so we just dropped it with a big thump into a fermenter whole cluster kind of proceeded to forget

[01:54:00] about it again you know it'll be fine benign neglect and eventually we had to like squeeze the jingus out of it to get a barrel you know it's just half a ton we had to squeeze it hard press it and talk about disrespect it's like first crop you know whatever it'll be fine you know it's an experimental block unbelievable quality astonishing quality and I'm not going to put on my winemaking hat and say because I'm

[01:54:36] thinking that we've grown that project we focus on it intently because it's very difficult to ripen Syrah and we can reach about 11.5% alcohol potential sometimes closer to 12 it's one of those Syrahs that you're afraid is going to walk out of the glass and run away like it is savage it is it is absolute meat spice I think there's fruit in it somewhere but you gotta look real deep in there and it is the most soulful delicate expression

[01:55:06] of that grape and it makes us giddy people come in the cellar we're like you gotta taste this you know and we show them the one couve we have of it you know and I think the future is there for that as well but I think long term in Santa Rita if I were to wave my magic wand and suddenly redo the grape varieties it's something like 50% Chardonnay 40% Pinot 7% Syrah and 3% Riesling and others

[01:55:35] we grafted a half acre of Chenin Blanc this year because I think it could be famously delicious and we got a one you know one tiny cutting of Narello Mascalesi and we're going to find a home for that in some of the volcanic remnants and it also deserves to be in that 1% I think and by the way to toot your horn a little bit you were we tasted those pinots together and you tasted one pinot without me saying anything about it and you said this would be amazing terroir for

[01:56:05] Narello Mascalesi what you tasted was the one block that has very substantial amount of volcanic soil I thought that was amazing I will always remember that that was really fascinating and that's where it might go we'll name the block after you obviously Matt Dees likes to finish on a high note thank you very much for being here today my pleasure it's been a lot of fun Matt Dees is the winemaker at Honata The Hilt and The Pairing All in California All Drink To That is hosted and produced by myself Levy Dalton

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[01:57:43] something I was very moved by and it made me very emotional obviously we lost Jim a couple of years back but I was at a tasting group and just about this young region in this kind of wild west and how we're all writing our own rules and a bunch of winemaking cowboys out here right and cowgirls and like we're all kind of learning our way together I was at a tasting group with long-term winemakers people who have been here for over 20 years retailers who have been here in Santa Barbara County for over 20 years sommeliers who have been in this county for that long as well and we were tasting at one of Clendenin's

[01:58:13] wines we were tasting an O2 S&B Pinot and a conversation ensued about I'm not sure if that's a typical Clendenin wine I'm not sure that that matched his style I'm not sure was it a different vintage was using different barrels we know his style of winemaking and then the conversation turned to I'm not sure it's a typical Sanford Benedict wine and there were pros and cons and people arguing across the table I got very emotional and people were confused as to why and I was like it's just amazing to finally

[01:58:42] be able to have the conversation Jim was doing making wine before I was even I mean come on he started making wine at 77 whatever it is 78 so it's not that his wines haven't been here it's been the knowledge and understanding not only of his wines with age but of vineyard sites and specific terroir discussions and an understanding of what S&B tastes like and it was a wonderful back and forth I think of S&B like this yes I do too I also think of it like this you're all correct it's in that wine I think

[01:59:12] it tastes like a Jim wine and it was just our region has reached a maturity that I found had snuck up on me