CHAPTER SEVEN
Made in
the U.S. of A.

Pickers to Vintners:
A Mexican-American Saga

By ERIC ASIMOV

When Amelia Morán Ceja and her brother-in-law Armando Ceja look out at the vineyards around her house, they can also see the past, when their fathers traveled from Mexico to harvest fruit in stifling heat for meager wages. Ms. Ceja can still feel the grape juice on her hands, made raw from helping her father tend the vines in fields just like these.

But now the Ceja family owns its own vineyards and produces critically praised wines, a global emblem of the good life.

Over the past few years the first fine wines made by former migrant workers, the children of those workers and other Mexican-Americans have been released, winning good reviews. All told, there are more than a dozen such labels. Fifteen years ago there were none. Mexican-Americans have also become managers or winemakers for important vineyards.

The California wine industry was built on the backbreaking labor of a largely Mexican seasonal work force. But the rise of the fine-wine business created a growing demand for year-round workers with special skills in Napa and other regions. Many former migrant workers settled down in wine country. They sent their children to school and taught them how to tend the vines. Some saved money and bought land, and soon began growing their own grapes.

Ceja Vineyards’ first wines came out in 2001. The year before, the Robledo Family Winery, owned by Reynaldo Robledo Sr., a former migrant worker, offered its first bottles for sale. Also in 2000 Salvador Renteria, who came to the Napa Valley as a field worker in 1962, and his son, Oscar, offered their first bottle of Renteria Wines cabernet sauvignon. Alex Sotelo, who arrived in the Napa Valley as a field worker in 1991 and is now the winemaker at the Robert Pecota Winery, will begin selling his own wines this fall under the label Alex Sotelo Cellars.

Their tales are new versions of a familiar story, in which the children of immigrants, by working hard and celebrating the virtues of family, achieve the American dream of ownership. These immigrants, though, came with even less than, say, the Gallos or the Mondavis. And unlike those families, they did not come from a land with a great tradition of winemaking. Like the dishwashers in a fancy restaurant, the Mexican field workers have long been invisible players in the history of the wine industry, hired to do the work that Americans would not or could not do themselves.

Today the wine industry uses far fewer seasonal workers than it did 25 years ago, said Karen Ross, president of the California Association of Winegrape Growers in Sacramento. Still, an overwhelming proportion of the field workers in the wine industry—98 percent by Mr. Sotelo’s estimate—are Mexican.

It was not always that way. Until World War II the field workers were Americans, an image immortalized by John Steinbeck. But when the draft caused a shortage of agricultural workers, the Mexican and American governments collaborated on the bracero program, which brought Mexicans to the United States for field work.

Ms. Ceja’s father, Felipe Morán, first came to the United States in 1947. Pablo Ceja, the father of her husband, Pedro Ceja, and her brother-in-law Armando, worked in the bracero program for many years. Mr. Robledo came to the Napa Valley in 1968 as a migrant worker, living in a transient labor camp set up at the Christian Brothers Winery. Typically the migrants would work their way up the West Coast, following the harvest of grapes, pears, plums, cherries and apples before returning to their families in Mexico.

Some liked California so much that they decided to stay. It helped if they had particular skills that were useful year-round. Mr. Morán was a mechanic, and Mr. Robledo became a specialist in grafting, a valued skill in the wine industry because vines are almost never grown on their own rootstock.

“I didn’t speak a word of English when I arrived here,” said Ms. Ceja, who was 12 when Mr. Morán relocated his family to the Napa Valley in 1967. “Neither did Armando or Pedro, but that wasn’t an obstacle.”

As a boy, Armando Ceja hung out with his brothers among the vines while his father worked.

“Growing up in the vineyards, you understand it from the ground up,” he said. “It’s second nature: plant, prune, grow, succor, harvest. When the fruit goes away, it leaves kind of a void.” He is now the winemaker for the Ceja Vineyards.

As with many immigrant families, the Cejas, the Moráns and the Robledos had ambitions for their children and encouraged them to get an education. Amelia Ceja studied history and literature at the University of California, San Diego. Armando Ceja studied winemaking at the University of California, Davis, which has perhaps the nation’s leading program. Mr. Robledo so much wanted his nine children to work in the wine industry that he decided to start his own business so that each would have a place.

He worked long hours on his own time, he said, to learn every aspect of the wine business: matching budding vine to rootstock, making thousands of grafts that will thrive, pruning so the vines get just the right amount of sun, determining the proper number of grape bunches per vine, and any number of other small but important skills.

In the 1970s he bought a house, which he sold in 1984 to pay for his first vineyard. The Robledos now own 200 acres, 160 of which are planted with vines.

“All seven of my brothers are involved in the farming,” said Vanessa Robledo, a daughter, who is the president of the Robledo Family Winery. The ninth child, Lorena, has contributed in another way. Her husband, Rolando Herrera—himself the son of migrant workers—is the Robledo winemaker. Mr. Herrera, too, makes his own wine, which he bottles under the label Mi Sueño, which means “my dream.”

In 1983 the Cejas—Amelia, Pedro and Armando—bought 15 acres in the Carneros, the gently rolling hills southwest of the city of Napa, with Pablo Ceja and his wife. They now own 113 acres of vineyard, including the 20 acres that surround the house Amelia and Pedro Ceja share with their three children. Through the 1990s Armando Ceja managed the vineyards, while Amelia worked in marketing and sales at the Rutherford Hill Winery. In 1998, when the Cejas decided they were ready to strike out on their own as winemakers, Ms. Ceja quit her job to devote herself to Ceja Vineyards.

“To give up everything and to start a wine production company is very scary,” she said.

Making wine requires money for barrels and bottles, for labor and for a place to do the work. And starting up is tricky, especially for fine wines, because the product must be stored for a few years or more before it can be sold and start to offer a return on the investment.

“We’re able to do it because our vineyards subsidize our wine production,” Ms. Ceja said. Of their 113 acres, the Cejas keep only 10 to 15 percent of the grapes for their own use, selling the rest to other wineries. They produce about 4,500 cases a year. The Robledos produce about 5,200 cases of sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, pinot noir, cabernet sauvignon and syrah. They also run a well-regarded vineyard management company, as do the Renterias.

The Ceja wines include a creamy-textured, minerally chardonnay; an elegant and compact pinot noir; a very good cabernet sauvignon; and two exceptional blends, one red and one white, that they call Vino de Casa. The single varietals sell for $28 to $38 a bottle, the blends for $18.

“We’re all making top-of-the-line wines, which I think is very interesting,” Mr. Sotelo said. “I think because people looked at us as farmers for many years, and we’re proud of it, but we wanted to prove that we’re able to do much more than that.”

Mr. Sotelo was 18 when he arrived in the United States in 1991. He got a job in the fields through an uncle who had been in the Napa Valley for 23 years. He fell in love with the place, he said, and then learned to speak English and got a job working in the cellar at the Robert Pecota Winery. With the encouragement of Mr. Pecota, he took classes at Napa Valley College in viticulture and learned the laboratory skills necessary for modern winemaking. He graduated in 2000. He says the formal education was crucial in gaining the confidence to become a successful winemaker, a position that, like executive chef at a restaurant, now requires some public image building.

“We’ve been making the wine for many years, although people don’t notice this,” he said, “but we have to learn to feel comfortable to step out and take charge.”

Mr. Sotelo says the success of Mexican-American winemakers has encouraged him to pursue his dreams. In an effort to help others pursue their dreams, 15 Mexican-American winemakers and brand owners are to gather at the Robledo winery on Sunday to discuss forming an association that would coordinate marketing and help finance education programs.

“We’re just getting started,” he said. “The sons and daughters of the Robledos, they’re going to get into the industry. They’re going to get formal educations, going to Davis and Fresno State.

“I think we’re limited to a certain point,” he said of his generation, “but they’re not going to have limitations.”

Just as important as moving into winemaking, Vanessa Robledo says, is elevating the status of those who remain in the field.

“One of my main goals is to promote what the farmers do,” she said, “because it’s their labor that helps to produces these fine wines. A lot of times it’s called unskilled labor, but it’s very highly skilled labor, and that’s why I’m proud to say that my father was a migrant worker.”

October 2004

Gratification, but Not the Instant Kind

By ERIC ASIMOV

The California wine industry sometimes seems to exist in two parallel universes. In one, the air is heavy with a smug sense of self-congratulation. Billionaires buy pieces of Napa Valley, charge $150 a bottle for the first vintage and want you to understand, by the way, that they do it all for charity.

Earnest ideologues natter on about the terroir in their 16 cuvées of pinot noir, but the wines all taste the same. Hot young consultants notch more 95-point wines than Paris Hilton has boyfriends. It’s the gospel written by publicists.

The other universe is a more modest one, where a respect for the past tempers the can-do certainty. It’s a world where you realize that for all the accumulated knowledge of viticulture, winemaking and marketing, some forces are simply beyond control; where after 50 harvests or more it begins to dawn on you that, paradoxically, the less you think you know the more you begin to understand.

It’s this sense of accumulated wisdom that characterizes many of California’s visionary wineries like Ridge Vineyards and Mount Eden Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the Calera Wine Company on Mount Harlan, Stony Hill Vineyard in the Napa Valley and Hanzell Vineyards here, on a winding dirt road that gently rises into the hills overlooking the city of Sonoma.

Though respected, Hanzell is rarely mentioned these days when people speak of California’s greatest wines. Yet year after year, Hanzell’s chardonnays have stood with California’s best.

And while California wines are frequently condemned as fruit bombs that have little sense of place and will not age, Hanzell, approaching its 50th vintage, has produced wines of subtlety and power that age beautifully and, above all, speak clearly of the vineyards that crown this hill on the southern end of the Mayacamas ridge.

On a bright, cool August morning, I sat down at the winery to taste 10 older vintages of chardonnay and 8 of pinot noir with Bob Sessions, who was Hanzell’s winemaker for 30 years, before he retired in 2002; Jean Arnold Sessions, the president; Michael Terrien, the general manager and current winemaker; and Alexander de Brye, the owner.

What makes these wines so distinctive? “Ageability is what we feel is the hallmark,” Ms. Arnold Sessions said. “You just can’t have a wine that is ready to drink now but will age for 20 years.” Mr. Terrien added, “Burgundy is about potential, while most California wines are about delivering the potential right away.” Indeed, young Hanzell chardonnays are clenched and coiled, but with, say, a decade, they start to open up.

A 1995, though still tightly wound, was beginning to exhibit a rich, tangy texture, while a 1991 was in its prime, full of citrus, apple, herbal and mineral aromas and flavors. A 1990 was rich and deep, more open than a 1986, which, though it showed floral and nutlike aromas, might have benefited from decanting.

A 1973, Mr. Sessions’s first vintage at Hanzell, was vibrant with anise, apple and pineapple aromas, while a 1965 had aromas of wet earth, mushrooms and hazelnuts and continued to improve in the glass for a full two hours.

Each wine had a lively energy and freshness that kept me going back to the glass for more, and showed distinct mineral aromas and flavors, qualities often hard to detect in California wines.

“Minerality is often a characteristic of wines made with restraint,” Mr. Terrien said. “I think a lot of minerality is covered up in wines by oak and other things.”

While Hanzell is known more for its chardonnays than its pinot noirs, the pinots, too, are compelling for their unusual tannic power and the intense flavors that eventually evolve. Both a 1998 and a 1993 seemed too young, with piercing fruit aromas that were kicking like newborn foals.

But a 1981 had beautiful raspberry, strawberry, licorice and mineral aromas that were intense yet light, while a pale ruby 1974 was complex and harmonious. These pinot noirs demand patience to say the least.

Through his 30 years as winemaker, Mr. Sessions was determined to maintain Hanzell’s stylistic legacy though the winemaking world around him was changing. Now Mr. Terrien has taken on the challenge, even as Hanzell’s own world has changed.

In 2003 Hanzell’s 2000 chardonnay and 1999 pinot noir were found to be tainted with 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, the compound that causes musty aromas and flavors in corked wines. The taint was traced to its old cellar, and the wines were taken off the market. The winery was then in the process of building a new facility and moved its operations to the new cellar later that year.

But while the equipment has changed the Hanzell winemaking has remained steadfast. Years back, Hanzell was one of the bigger California wines, with alcohol levels hovering above 14 percent. It’s still in the range of 14 to 15 percent, even as many top California wines now surpass it.

Walking through the 42 acres of vineyards, where the gorgeous panorama can stretch all the way to the Golden Gate on a clear day, it’s easy to see why James D. Zellerbach, an industrialist and later an American ambassador to Italy, chose this site back in 1953 to plant six acres of pinot noir and chardonnay.

Mr. Zellerbach was not without ambition. California then had less than 100 acres of chardonnay and even less of pinot noir. But he envisioned his winery, which he named Hanzell Vineyards after his wife, Hana, to be a piece of Burgundy in the Sonoma Valley. He even modeled the facade of his winery on an ancient structure at the Clos de Vougeot, the historic Burgundian vineyard.

With an innovative winemaker, Brad Webb, Hanzell helped to revolutionize winemaking in the late 1950s. It was the first winery to use stainless-steel temperature-controlled tanks for fermentation. Such tanks are now used all over the world. Hanzell also is credited with introducing French oak barrels to California, though only a third of the oak barrels it uses each year are new.

“We prefer a gentle oak pedestal rather than a slathering-on of flavor,” Mr. Terrien said.

Mr. Zellerbach died in 1963, and the estate was sold to Douglas and Mary Day in 1965, then to Barbara and Jacques de Brye in 1975. Alexander de Brye, then a teenager, inherited the vineyard in 1991.

Perhaps in the face of change at the top, safeguarding the identity in the wines became that much more important. Or maybe it was simply a respect for tradition, an overused word that ought to be earned rather than seized.

“Now it’s our legacy to protect,” Mr. Terrien said.

September 2006

A Cult Winemaker Tinkers With Success

By ERIC ASIMOV

Out here in Sonoma County south of the Russian River, where a rolling ocean of vineyards surrounds a few surviving Gravenstein apple orchards, the growing season is typically long and warm. Grapes customarily bask in the ripening sun until they practically burst with sweetness. The challenge is to prevent the grapes from ripening too much.

Last year was different. Until the heat spiked at the last minute, 2010 had been one of the coolest seasons on record. Nobody knew if the grapes would mature enough. That meant trouble. Or maybe a lucky break.

“Everybody was worried about getting things ripe,” said Jason Kesner, the assistant winemaker at Kistler Vineyards. “We had the acid, we had the color, we had the flavor, but we didn’t have the typical California sugar to match up with it. We had the tremendous opportunity to make wines at lower alcohol levels. It was the holy grail we’d all been asking for.”

Really? For more than 30 years, restraint was not a quality remotely associated with Kistler. In the 1980s and ’90s, as Americans developed a ravenous thirst for chardonnay, Kistler set a standard of quality with its powerful, oaky, voluptuous wines. Using grapes from small lots in prime vineyards in Sonoma and the Carneros, it was among a handful of California wineries that pioneered the use of Burgundian techniques, like fermenting in small oak barrels.

American critics raved about the wines, placing them at the pinnacle of California chardonnay. More quietly, Kistler was also lauded for its pinot noirs.

As Kistler’s lush, exuberant style was widely emulated, it became one of the first modern California cult wineries, its wines available only in restaurants or to long-term customers. It was a model for today’s mailing-list avatars of the full-blown California chardonnay style, like Aubert and Peter Michael. Indeed, some producers began making even more powerful wines so overflowing with flavor they made Kistler’s look almost sedate.

But with little fanfare, the Kistler style has changed in the last few years. Following the evolving tastes of Steve Kistler, one of its proprietors, rather than the pressure of economic necessity, Kistler has stepped back, striving for finesse and energy rather than power.

Kistler’s departure from its extraordinarily successful style is a shock, and perhaps even risky business. And yet the California wine industry has seen a stylistic evolution in the last decade, especially with chardonnays. More and more wines seek elegance and vivacity rather than sumptuous force.

Partly, this is a retreat from the overuse of oak, with many more producers marketing their wines as “unoaked” or “steel fermented.” Similarly, more producers now tout their chardonnays as “Chablis-like,” evoking the leaner, more minerally style of that region rather than the richer, more opulent chardonnays of the Côte de Beaune, the home of Meursault and Montrachet.

Even many chardonnay producers who continue to pursue the Côte de Beaune ideal, like Littorai, Peay, Rivers-Marie and Failla, are aiming more for grace than for power. As a result, the spectrum of California styles seems wider and less monochromatic today, with room for chardonnays in the leanest to the most luxuriant styles. Kistler’s wines are still ample—certainly not on the Chablis end of the spectrum—but they now seem fresher, more focused and finely etched.

“Was there a time when we erred on the side of uniformity, of over-fine tuning, of picking later, only when every last cluster was ripe?” asked Mr. Kistler, who owns the company with his business partner, Mark Bixler. “Maybe so, but we’ve evolved, as I think others have, too.”

While some customers say they miss the wines that made Kistler famous, he says the evolution has mostly been well received.

“We don’t worry if the pinot noir isn’t dark enough,” he said. “Some people do ask us to return to the overblown, blowzy style of chardonnay, but no.”

Indeed, the Kistler business has been affected more by the economy than by the stylistic change, but even the economy hasn’t put a serious crimp into sales. The entire production, about 20,000 cases of chardonnay and 5,000 cases of pinot noir, used to be available only in restaurants or by the mailing list, where the single-vineyard chardonnays sell for around $75 and the pinot noirs range from $75 to $90. But now you can find the Kistler Noisetiers chardonnay, the lowest echelon, a blend of several vineyards but representative of the style, for around $60 in retail shops.

Mr. Kistler, 62, attributes the change inside the bottle to his own developing preferences. “My tastes now run toward more structured, lively wines that go with food, that have power and finesse at the same time,” he said as we spoke outside his winery, looking out over the adjacent Vine Hill Vineyard, the source of some of his best chardonnays. Even there, change is visible. He and Mr. Kesner are replanting part of the vineyard, reorienting and tweaking the vines so the grapes can be picked earlier, when, as Mr. Kesner puts it, “the fruit is at a peak level of energy.”

Even before the changes, Kistler chardonnays were pure and deep. Yet I’d had mixed experiences with them. Some I had found to be wonderfully ripe and laden with mineral flavors, rich yet tense. Others seemed flaccid, hot and oaky, without much staying power. The pinot noirs were commanding expressions of fruit, but somewhat chunky rather than elegant.

The move to harvest earlier began, almost serendipitously, with the 2006 vintage, when Mr. Kistler had to pick certain lots of chardonnay grapes earlier than usual to beat bad weather. In the resulting wines, which were not released until 2008, he found wonderful and surprising characteristics.

“That was a definite eye-opener,” Mr. Kesner said.

It was a decisive element in a continuing effort, particularly with the pinot noirs, to make wines that were intense but not heavy, fresh rather than brawny. In their quest, they’ve committed themselves to indigenous rather than cultured yeasts, to using fewer new barrels and, over all, to letting go of overt control in the vineyard and cellar. Describing their approach, Mr. Kesner quoted the jazz great Charlie Parker: “Don’t play the saxophone, let the saxophone play you,” he said.

Mr. Kistler said, simply, “We’ve really worked hard on them the last 10 years, and we’re making much better wines.”

Tasting the wines, I can’t help but agree with Mr. Kistler. The 2008 McCrea Vineyard chardonnay from Sonoma Mountain is lovely, light-bodied and energetic, with creamy mineral flavors. The ’08 Vine Hill is more austere and tightly coiled than the McCrea, while the ’08 Hudson is richer in texture, with an almost briny flavor, and the ’08 Stone Flat is tangy, with a waxy, lanolin texture and beautiful mineral flavors.

What has not changed at Kistler is an underlying philosophy of meticulous attention to detail with an aim to express subtle differences in terroir. As it always has, Kistler tries to reduce variables so that vineyard characteristics will stand out. It uses only one clone of chardonnay, for example, a California heritage selection rather than something developed in France to meet Burgundian needs. That clone, in turn, mutates over time within each vineyard, becoming part of the terroir.

“We were unusual 30 years ago in that we planted vineyards and chose techniques to make wines of a certain style,” Mr. Kistler said. “We never were interested in fruit-driven chardonnays. Our goal was wonderful mineral wines with a soil-driven character.”

For the pinot noirs, Kistler has narrowed its focus to western Sonoma County and coastal sites east of Bodega Bay. The ’08 Kistler Vineyard pinot noir, from a few miles south of the Vine Hill Vineyard, is surprisingly delicate and harmonious, with lingering floral, fruit and mineral flavors. The ’08 Cuvée Natalie from the nearby Silver Belt Vineyard is more intense, not quite as well-knit, perhaps still a work in progress. By contrast, a barrel sample of a 2009 pinot noir from one of the coastal vineyards stands out for its freshness and energy.

“That’s what makes us as excited as we were 30 years ago,” Mr. Kistler said.

Changes have come not only to the wines, but also to the business. Since its founding in 1978, Kistler has largely been a two-man operation. Mr. Kistler oversaw vineyard and winemaking operations, while Mr. Bixler took charge of laboratory work and the business. In an era of uninhibited marketing in which winemakers have been propelled to superstar status, Mr. Kistler has shunned publicity and overt salesmanship.

“We’ve always been more comfortable letting the wines speak for themselves,” said Mr. Kistler, a lean, private man with a quiet, almost hesitant manner.

In 2008, though, he expanded the roster, adding Mr. Kesner, who, as manager of Hudson Vineyards in Carneros, a prime source for Kistler chardonnays, had established a comfortable working relationship with Mr. Kistler.

“For all those years we got by without assistance,” Mr. Kistler said. “But in order to take everything to the next level, there was only so much I could do.”

The next level meant more than refining the vineyard and cellar work. It also meant thinking of the future. As with many family-run operations, generational succession is an issue. Just a few years ago, Warren Winiarski sold Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, the historic Napa estate, after it became clear that his daughter was not committed to carrying it on. Mr. Kistler has two daughters, but neither so far has become involved in the wine business. Instead of selling, Mr. Kistler hired Mr. Kesner, 42, who says he views his job as an Old World apprenticeship.

Mr. Kesner says he shares Mr. Kistler’s inclination for privacy. But he also said he believes Mr. Kistler deserves more recognition, both for his wines and his dedicated approach, and prodded him to speak publicly.

“I feel very much like Charlie Bucket, and I’ve found the golden ticket,” Mr. Kesner said. “I want everyone to know how wondrous it is inside the chocolate factory.”

January 2011

Garages for Chardonnays, Not Camrys

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

The fever comes on suddenly for Tom Clark, a lawyer with the Port of Oakland, when he spies his office phone blinking with an urgent message. The news on the voice mail will haunt him, cost him sleep, draw him from his bed into the garage in the middle of the night, where, giddy and nervous with anticipation, he will wait in musty seclusion illuminated by a single light bulb until sweet deliverance arrives: 550 pounds of freshly picked wine grapes.

“I couldn’t go to bed,” he would say the next evening as he punched down a Rubbermaid container of fermenting booty with a toilet-bowl plunger. “I wanted to play with those sangioveses.”

In fact, the fever is rampant in northern California. At this time of year in neighborhoods like Mr. Clark’s in Piedmont, a small bedroom community tucked into the Oakland hills, nondescript garages housing wet-vacs and lawn mowers are transformed into chateaus by “garagistes”—amateur home vintners—who obsess about malolactic fermentation and how to carpool 650 pounds of petit verdot grapes in the back seat during rush hour.

“When the crush is in, there is nothing better,” said Mr. Clark, whose two-car garage, along with the three-car garage of his neighbor Mike Masero, has been transformed into a grease-stained Napa. In this inelegant tableau, the two are producing their ambitious 2004 vintages—about 2,000 bottles of 13 varieties—that began with muscat canelli grapes crushed in August and continued to the sangioveses that Mr. Masero, an information technology specialist for a webcasting company, recently raced to pick up late after work.

“Part about having a passion about something is, you’re not in control,” said Mr. Clark, a sophisticated winemaker who will drop everything for the right grapes. “You’re having to accommodate yourself to some other force. There is also a kinetic energy to it. I sit in front of the computer all day, and it’s a real relief. We’re physical beings. So it’s ‘Let’s go out there, get our hands all mucky and crush some grapes.’”

Spurred by the grape glut of recent years, do-it-yourselfism and, perhaps, the indefatigable baby boom desire for perfection, the garagiste scene is expanding throughout California, the Pacific Northwest, the Finger Lakes region of New York and other hubs of winemaking. Thanks to the increasing availability of cultured wine yeasts and wine-quality concentrated grape juice, home vintners are also flourishing in less likely places like Vermont and especially Canada, where, largely for economic reasons, one quarter of the wine consumed is now made by hobbyists, according to Brad Ring, publisher of WineMaker, a magazine geared to home winemakers founded six years ago in Manchester, Vt.

Across the country, there are an estimated 750,000 home winemakers and counting, Mr. Ring said, among them members of intensely serious wine clubs like Cellarmasters Home Wine Club in Los Angeles, the Sacramento Home Winemakers and the Contra Costa Wine Group outside San Francisco, who compete in amateur wine competitions at state and county fairs and at events like the International Amateur Wine Competition in Vermont. Unlike the landed gentry or old-time rural families, most garagistes do not have their own vineyards but buy grapes in bulk, sometimes doing the picking themselves. They produce wine for their own consumption and to share or trade with friends; the sale of wine is limited to bonded wineries.

“You get close to your inner Dionysus,” said Jerry Miller, 56, an energy utility analyst, who has been making wine since 1979 and whose garage, filled with neighbors and friends with chronically wine-purple hands during crush season, has the festive quality of an Amish barn-raising. “I do it for the sensuality of it.”

Around the San Francisco Bay area, arguably the hub of the garagiste movement, placid oak-lined streets are alive with the clickety-clack of handcranked wine presses, as home winemakers with a penchant for jazz and chèvre sit on milk crates in their driveways, buckets at the ready to catch the torrential “free run” of flowing juice—the wine equivalent of nirvana. Cars banished to curbsides, they speak of “brix” (sugar content), “hot” wine (too much alcohol) and “M.O.G.” (material other than grapes, like spider webs and bees, that gets mixed in during picking).

Vacations are out, as internal clocks are reset to the rhythm of grapes. Weekends and wee hours are consumed with crushing, de-stemming, pressing and racing—particularly if, like Mr. Clark, you have your heart set on a certain row of petit verdot hanging provocatively in a grove of eucalyptus near Lodi, 75 miles away, and learn it is to be picked that day.

Many garagistes fantasize about going pro. “Home wines are some of the best wines in California,” said Kent M. Rosenblum, a veterinarian turned vintner whose respected winery, Rosenblum Cellars, got started in his basement. “They’re also some of the worst wines in California.”

Since the repeal of Prohibition, government rules permit households to make up to 200 gallons—1,000 bottles—of wine a year. At Bissie and Jerry Miller’s, six couples get together each harvest season to purchase a ton of grapes, which yields between nine and 11 cases for each family. Each couple’s $500-a-year investment works out to about $5 a bottle.

Their wine, which is pumped through a siphon hose from the garage to the basement, is also liquid memory. Their Wedding Ring wine of 1991, a pinot noir, commemorated the year that Bevan Vinton, a high school social studies teacher, lost her wedding ring in the crush (it was retrieved during pressing a week later in the “cake” of smashed skins and seeds). The Fire zinfandel was named for the Oakland Hills fire, during which the Millers temporarily fled their home, leaving the grapes behind in the garage.

The Bay area’s extreme garagistes “know they can buy Two-Buck Chuck,” said Lisa Van de Water, a technical wine consultant and founder of the Wine Lab in Napa, which does scientific analyses for home winemakers and sells yeast nutrients and related products. “They’re trying to make really good wine, something that’s theirs.”

It helps to be a geek. Bonneau Dickson, 60, who has christened his home elixirs Chateau Bonneau, for instance, is a sanitary engineer who lives in Berkeley. “Wine is an anaerobic process, like sludge digestion,” he said, an observation not likely to be repeated in The Wine Spectator.

The ceiling of his 700-square-foot third-floor walk-up is dented from an errant stopper blown off a vigorously fermenting chardonnay. His kitchen is a welter of calibrated cylinders, acidity kits and pH meters. His décor consists of 65 wine-filled carboys, six-gallon glass containers, which have subsumed nearly every inch of his apartment. His preoccupation, however, does wonders for his social life. “As soon as I started making wine, I noticed I had more friends,” he said.

Stephen and Susan Abbanat, who, like Mr. Dickson, are members of the Contra Costa Wine Group, spend their leisure time developing math-laden spreadsheets to monitor the parts-per-million of potassium metasulfite and the like, spurred by the yeasty smell of wine fermenting in their Oakland basement. “You start to build a taste for your own wine, and that’s what you prefer,” Mr. Abbanat said.

“There’s a mystery to it, a random element,” he said, turning philosophical as he drove home from a vineyard recently with 155 pounds of merlot grapes in his Lexus. “Making things is a survival trait, part of our genetic code. It’s a piece of ourselves we’re trying to connect with.”

Nevertheless, romance can fade with panic, spurred, say, by pernicious Brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast, or, in the Abbanats’ case, “Pepto-Bismol-colored bubbles coming off during fermentation that could have been a funky bacteria.” Because he lives near wine country, Mr. Abbanat was able to drive a vial of the suspicious cabernet up to the Wine Lab in Napa, founded by Ms. Van de Water, who has earned the nickname “the bad wine lady” (everything was fine). Home winemakers, she noted, must function without microbiologists, state-of-the-art filtration systems and other resources available to commercial wineries. “Their expectation that everything will turn out O.K. leads to a lot of ruined wine,” she said.

A big reason winemakers form groups, at least in California, is access to know-how and most important, good grapes. The grape glut, which peaked in 2000 with a staggering 90,000-plus tons of grapes, has opened up many onceexclusive vineyards to home winemakers, but many growers still regard them as the equivalent of telephone solicitors in the middle of dinner. “It is difficult to convince a grower to sell 300 to 500 pounds of grapes,” said Dave Lustig, 48, a Pasadena computer programmer and secretary of the Cellarmasters, who admits to having driven 23 hours nonstop from the Willamette Valley in Oregon with five tons of pinot noir in a rented Ryder truck. “In a co-op you can buy a 1,000- or 2,000-pound quantity, so it’s easier to be treated like a big boy than someone showing up with garbage pails and a cooler.”

Mr. Clark and Mr. Masero said they have had great success obtaining grapes from stellar vineyards, first sampling commercial wines to decide on a growing region, then setting out on a field trip to meet growers. “You say, ‘Man, whatever you’re doing to that mourvèdre is so fine,’” Mr. Clark said. “You have to establish a rapport. It’s about friendships. It also helps to pay cold hard cash.”

His face was pure ecstasy one night recently as he sat with Mr. Masero at a TV table set up in front of his garage, drinking a 2003 mourvèdre while a pink cascade of sangiovese emanated from the basket press. In Mr. Masero’s “annex,” Big Bertha, a 110-gallon tank of petite sirah, was improving every day. “It’s pure gold,” Mr. Clark said. “You know they are going to give you pleasure for 15 years.”

In Berkeley, Bonneau Dickson was euphoric, too, as he sat on his porch watching carbon dioxide bubbles percolate through the carboys’ air locks. He keeps his windows open at night so he can hear them, the surround-sound of bubbles luring him to dreamland. “They’re nice at night,” he said. “They help me sleep. It’s like a babbling brook.”

October 2004

Growing in Napa:
Club, and Camp, for Wine Lovers

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

At 5:30 a.m., the stars still in the sky, the pickers approached the fields. Wearing miner’s lamps, they attacked vines heavy with cabernet grapes of the finest French stock. Occasionally, the sticky clusters of grapes would muck up the prongs of the women’s Cartier jewelry.

It was harvest time at the Napa Valley Reserve, the nation’s first wine “country club.” Here, on Napa’s choicest land, C.E.O.’s, venture capitalists, lawyers and other Type A’s indulge their agrarian fantasies by playing farmworker for a day.

As Augusta National is to golf lovers, so the Reserve is to elite enophiles prone to using phrases like “depth of color.” For a $140,000 initiation fee, each member gets several rows of picturesque grapes to harvest—a foolproof proposition, given the resident wine experts who supervise the operation, along with such guest “lecturers” as Robert Mondavi.

Dr. Orrin Devinsky, a professor of neurology at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine, had been making his own wine in a refrigerated garage in Short Hills, N.J. “It was perfectly drinkable,” he said. “Though I loved having my fingers soaked in grape juice, the truth was I could buy a $25 bottle that exceeded it.”

Now Dr. Devinsky has joined the Reserve because he cannot manage a vineyard cross-country on his own and does not want to make mediocre wine. “I love the visceral side—the land, the grapes, the biology,” he said. “That whole thing is extremely appealing.”

The Yoda of this good life is a millionaire businessman, H. William Harlan, the club’s founder. Mr. Harlan is owner of the famed Harlan Estate winery, and his own cabernet sauvignons have thrice earned a rare 100 points from the wine kingmaker Robert Parker. His 2001 cabs now retail for around $475 a bottle, with a three- to five-year waiting list.

Though wine clubs have become common in many American cities and suburbs, the 80-acre Reserve is in a league all its own. Its grapes come from root stocks and clones on Harlan Estate, and its 244 members can cook with the author Patricia Wells, and confer with the superstar Bordeaux enologist Michel Rolland. A resident wine historian quotes Thucydides and other ancient Greeks.

Members—the club will cap its list at 375—pay monthly dues of $80 and commit to “personal wine production” ranging from a minimum of 150 bottles a year, for $7,500, up to three barrels, or 900 bottles, at a cost of $45,000. They pay for use of the vines, rather than ownership of them, and are strictly prohibited from selling wine, though they are free to impress friends and business associates with a label named for a ranch or yacht. Barrels are sequestered to age in a 35,000-square-foot steel-reinforced wine cave, which is under construction.

It is slow going. “I have a new appreciation for the difficulty of the work,” said Cam Garner, a venture capitalist from Rancho Santa Fe, who was hacking young vines with a sickle-shaped knife as roosters crowed. “You spend that much for a bottle of wine, you might as well appreciate all the aspects.”

At the harvest in mid-October Daryl Bristow of Houston, who helped George W. Bush secure the 2000 election in Florida as a senior law partner of former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, was huddled intently in the West Barrel Room of the East Fermentation Building. Before him was a conveyor belt ferrying thousands of berries—they are never called grapes—toward oak barrels, the scene a dead ringer for the famous chocolate-factory episode in I Love Lucy.

Mr. Bristow’s mission was to ferret out teeny green unripe berries; mushy, bird-pecked berries; shriveled, raisin-y berries; and M.O.G., material other than grape. “Here I am throwing out spiders, leaves and little green berries, right there with the grapes that will make our wine,” said a euphoric Mr. Bristow. “It’s a very neat feeling.”

Along with “fireside chats” by Mr. Mondavi, held in a chic pre-weathered barn, members get to personalize their vintages, select the amount of time their oak barrels will be toasted and steep themselves in the club’s wine library, which is full of rare first editions.

Members will also have their own private wine storage lairs within the cave, which they may decorate. “Ooooh—can we store shoes, too?” asked Kathi Mallick of Rancho Santa Fe, who resembled Nancy Drew as she peered into the wine cave’s inky blackness.

The club, which had its first harvest, a limited one, last fall, is a shrewd gesture to both wine’s snob appeal and the seemingly limitless marketing of Napa Valley’s gauzy Mediterranean allure, fueled by Greystone, the Western outpost of the Culinary Institute of America, and celebrity winemakers like Francis Ford Coppola. Two-thirds of its members come from outside Northern California.

Avid collectors like Mr. Garner may spend $100,000 a year on wine, but the frenzied apogee of American wine connoisseurship may be Auction Napa Valley, a premier charity event held at Meadowood, Mr. Harlan’s luxury resort up the road. Last summer, ferocious bidders spent over $10.5 million, with Jay Leno auctioning off the first 15 lots; the high bid of $650,000 went for a rare Colgin Cellars quartet of double magnums, with a private dinner for eight by Thomas Keller of the French Laundry.

The Reserve redefines the notion of a cult wine, said Daphne Derven, the program director at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture on the Rockefeller estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y. “He is creating an exclusive closed group,” she said of Mr. Harlan.

Before he opened his first winery, Mr. Harlan, 65, made millions as a cofounder and chairman of Pacific Union, the real estate company.

The Reserve is a microcosm of Napa history, beginning as a ranch, then farmed by Swiss immigrants until Mr. Harlan and two partners purchased it in 2001. Today it is prime acreage of Cezanne-like beauty, holding—in addition to grapes—550 Tuscan olive trees and exotic plantings like shiso, a Japanese herb that is infused in oil and drizzled over tuna tartare in the club’s demonstration kitchen.

Mr. Harlan, who has invested tens of millions in the Reserve—he would not divulge the exact amount—said he hoped to create a legacy for “people of discernment” and their families (though no one has yet tasted the club’s wine, which takes two years to age).

“For 15 years I kept hearing, ‘I’d love to have a little vineyard,’” he said of his customers. “Now they can have the good part without the responsibility and risk.”

“It’s not just a return on investment,” he added, waxing philosophical. “It’s a return on life.”

Indeed, ownership of a Napa vineyard is becoming increasingly unattainable, even for the megarich. Sales of vineyard land now average $150,000 to $200,000 an acre, with a 40-acre zoning minimum, but there isn’t much of it left. “The Napa Valley is pretty well planted out,” said Sean Maher, a wine business consultant here.

County erosion control regulations and ordinances protecting scenic vistas keep much of the land off limits for winemaking, said Tom Jordan, a real estate appraiser in Napa. Most available land, he added, is located in marginal cooler reaches that would not produce a “high-end cab.” Mr. Harlan estimated the cost of a serious vineyard at $15 million to $20 million.

“To own a vineyard is pretty stupid,” said Kellie Seringer, 35, a Reserve member who runs a hedge fund focusing on health care in San Francisco. “So we’re outsourcing the expertise.” Ms. Seringer, who has a degree in biochemistry and genetics, tracks sugar levels and the sun on the Valley floor as meticulously as she does health care equities.

And investing millions of dollars in a B-team is a scary prospect. “I’d probably make bad wine, so this is a way to hedge,” said Richard Helppie, a 49 year-old self-described “recovering workaholic” from Bloomfield Hills, Mich., who sold his company, Superior Consultant Holdings, last January for $122.2 million.

Mr. Helppie was eating breakfast on the stone patio with his fellow pickers, an impressive post-harvest spread with truffles and tartlettes and fresh berries laid out with silver tongs. The strains of jazz wafted through the air.

“There’s a spiritual element to wine,” he said. “You know you’re producing something from the earth.”

In the amber-lit perfection of the vineyard, the handsome club buildings stained silver-gray, the members of the Reserve were nevertheless dabblers, chasing after an authentic experience that by its nature remains elusive. When they finished their tasks, of course, the pros took over.

Real vineyard workers, noted Rosa Segura, chairwoman of the county’s Migrant Farmworker Housing Committee, get paid by the ton, usually $90 to $140. They pack a bean or fried potato and egg burrito, taking a quick break under an oak tree. They go home to overcrowded apartments, she said, “or maybe somebody’s garage, where they pay $100 a month to sleep on a sofa.”

Real vineyard workers, she added, “pick with a needy passion.” Club members, she suggested, “should pick with the real pickers. Then they would have the full experience.”

October 2005

Too Sweet to Be Invited to Dinner

By ERIC ASIMOV

Drawing by Melinda Beck.

It’s happened so many times that I’ve lost count. I’m having dinner with another person, trying to choose a wine that will complement the odd combination of dishes that we’ve ordered—meat, fowl, fish or whatever.

Back in the old days, 10 years or so ago, California pinot noir was one of my go-to wines. Its reputation was poor, and critics lambasted American pinot noir as a pale imitation of Burgundy, but I found it a great food wine, light-bodied enough to go with fish, yet intense enough to match up with meat. Not unlike Burgundy, in fact, but a lot cheaper.

Not anymore. California pinot noir has shot up in stature. Its popularity has skyrocketed, and the critics now love it. But on the dinner table? I rarely look at pinot noir nowadays. Not only because it’s gotten so expensive but because many modern pinot noirs have lost the dry, lithe character that made the wine so fine a partner with food.

Why is this? Far too often now, pinot noir tastes sweet and has a heavy, almost syrupy character. And while pinot noir is the most glaring example, it’s often true, too, of many other high-end, supposedly dry red American wines like cabernet sauvignon and zinfandel.

Now sweetness itself is not intrinsically a problem. Some of the greatest, most versatile food wines in the world are sweet, like German rieslings and demi-sec chenin blancs from the Loire. But those wines have more than sweetness going for them: they have balance. The sugar is balanced by acidity, which provides structure and liveliness, allowing the wine to be both sweet and refreshing.

The American red wines, on the other hand, are meant to be dry, like their French forebears Burgundy and Bordeaux, which are dry by definition.

Burly zinfandels have always flirted with a tinge of sweetness, but nowadays they too taste sweeter and sweeter. I’ve particularly noticed this problem in pinot noirs from the Santa Lucia Highlands and Santa Barbara County on the central coast of California, in Napa Valley cabernets and in zinfandels from all over.

I’m not the only one bothered by this. Dan Berger, a critic who publishes Dan Berger’s Vintage Experiences, a weekly newsletter, called the rising sense of sweetness in American red wines “a sad and pernicious trend.”

“They’re impressive wines, but the word ‘impressive’ is not always a positive word,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s lots to them, but maybe more flavor is less good. What you want is a harmony of flavors.”

Dry wines that are not really dry are an American tradition. As the old saw in the wine industry has it, “Americans talk dry but drink sweet,” and the history of American wine consumption bears that out.

Popular mass-market wines from California, like white zinfandel and Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve chardonnay, have always had more than a subversive touch of sweetness, while the best-selling Champagne in the United States by far is Moët & Chandon’s White Star, a cuvée made especially for the American market that is a step sweeter than the typical brut Champagne.

The rationale has always been that the American palate is shaped by the sugary soft drinks, ketchup and breakfast cereals of the childhood pantry.

Modestly sweet wines therefore help a wine-wary population make the transition to more classically dry wines, especially if that population believes it is drinking dry wines.

Sweet wines were associated with low-status fortified wines, like Thunderbird, or the sort of syrupy Concord grape wines that appear on many kosher tables.

But now, apparently, the sensation of sweetness has triumphed over the belief that fine red wines were dry bordering on tart and even somewhat austere. The changing character of the wines may even change the way people think of drinking wine. Justin Smith of Saxum Vineyards, a small but acclaimed producer in Paso Robles, Calif., calls them “social wines.”

“These wines aren’t meant to go with food,” he said. “They’re for when you get home from work: you open a bottle, pour a glass and sit with it out on the deck.”

In other words, they’re to be consumed like cocktails, which they resemble in another way, too. Most of these wines are high in alcohol, at least 14.5 percent and often above 15, which contributes to the impression of sweetness even if they are not actually sugary.

California red wines are made in a fruitier style than they used to be, which also contributes to an impression of sweetness, said Dr. Susan E. Ebeler, a flavor chemist in viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. Grapes nowadays are allowed to ripen on the vine much longer than 10 or 15 years ago, resulting in much higher concentrations of sugar at harvest.

More sugar requires longer fermentation, which produces more alcohol and more glycerol. Dr. Ebeler said glycerol, whose name is derived from the Greek word for sweet, also contributes to a perception of sweetness.

Let’s see: fruitiness, high alcohol and higher glycerol. Add it up and what do you have? “It could be the sum of the parts,” Dr. Ebeler said.

While wines made in this style may try to appeal to the American sweet tooth, they may also reflect the wine business’s dependency on high ratings from critics who taste dozens of wines at a time.

“I think it’s a real, conscious effort on the part of some winemakers to make the wine taste supple and soft and hedonistic,” Mr. Berger said. “I think this style of wine is designed to be a home run. You don’t see very many people bunting. I think the more flashy, expressive style tends to be the style that catches people’s eye.”

Of course, not all California red wines fall into this sweet category, not by a long shot. I’ve enjoyed many excellent reds in the last year, including, just last weekend, Etude’s 2003 Heirloom Carneros pinot noir, which was full of complex sweet fruit aromas and flavors, held together by a firm structure.

But the Etude was in marked contrast to two sweet pinot noirs that I could not drink with dinner. One was the Loring Wine Company’s 2004 Rosella’s Vineyard in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The other was an ’04 Cuyama River in the Santa Maria Valley from Taz Vineyards.

Whatever else wine is, ultimately it must be at home on the dinner table. Obviously Americans enjoy sweet beverages with food, whether Coca-Cola, white zinfandel or this year’s top-ranked pinot noir or cabernet.

But for the long term, red wine that seems sweet runs the risk of becoming a marginalized beverage, served on the deck before dinner, yes, or maybe afterward with cheese or chocolate, like port. Then it will be time to stop and praise the winemaker’s impressive achievement, and reach for something else to drink.

July 2006

Finessed and Light:
California Pinot Noirs With a Manifesto

By ERIC ASIMOV

As the rain slanted down onto the vineyard around Copain Wine Cellars, just outside this town in northern Sonoma County, Wells Guthrie, the proprietor, poured a glass of one of his 2006 pinot noirs.

The wine was fresh and light with aromas of flowers and red fruit. Even in the gray dimness of his tasting room I could see my fingers on the other side of the glass through the pale ruby wine.

It was vibrant and refreshing, nothing like the dark, plush, opulent wines that have made California pinot noir so popular. Mr. Guthrie used to make wines more along those heavier lines, but not anymore. After the vinous equivalent of a conversion experience, with his 2006 vintage he renounced the fruit-bomb style in favor of wines that emphasize freshness and delicacy.

“It got to the point where I didn’t want the wine to be fatter than the food,” he said. “Wine should make you think of what you want to eat.”

From Mendocino and Sonoma through the Santa Cruz Mountains and Arroyo Grande south to the rolling hills of Santa Barbara County, a rebellion is brewing. The dominant style of California pinot noir remains round, ripe and extravagant, with sweet flavors of dark fruit and alcohol levels approaching and sometimes surpassing 15 percent.

But on a recent trip through these leading pinot noir areas I was thrilled to find a small but growing number of producers pulling in the opposite direction.

Instead of power, they strive for finesse. Instead of a rich, mouth-coating impression of sweetness, they seek a dry vitality meant to whet the appetite rather than squelch it. Instead of weight, they prize lightness and an almost transparent intensity.

Some of these producers are fairly new to the pinot noir game, like Anthill Farms in Healdsburg, a partnership of three young men who share a taste for balanced, elegant wines, or Peay Vineyards on the northern Sonoma Coast, which makes spicy yet polished pinot noirs, or Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which after just five vintages is already producing brilliantly distinctive wines.

Others, like Ted Lemon of Littorai Wines, Josh Jensen of the Calera Wine Company and Jim Clendenen of Au Bon Climat, have been preaching the virtues of finesse for more than a few years now.

“I wish somebody could explain to me how picking grapes when they’re precisely in balance and making a wine in balance became unfashionable,” Mr. Clendenen said as we stood in the middle of his utilitarian winery, in the middle of the Bien Nacido Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley. On a big industrial stove Mr. Clendenen was preparing lunch, as he often does, for the winery staff and the occasional visitor. When it’s ready, work at Au Bon Climat stops as everybody sits at a long, indoor picnic table to eat and drink a glass or two of wine, a reminder to all of the place and intent for their beverage.

“The ultimate use for wine is pairing with food,” said Rick Longoria, who makes intense yet balanced pinot noirs in Santa Barbara County. “There is no greater experience than the beautiful synergy between wine and food that elevates both.”

Food and wine’s role at the table is seemingly what divides these stylistic camps. Is wine a supporting player at a meal, intended to harmonize with food? Or is it meant to be, figuratively speaking, a meal in itself, best consumed on its own?

The answers can sometimes seem paradoxical. Leslie Mead of Talley Vineyards in Arroyo Grande, north of Santa Barbara County, makes fresh, earthy pinot noirs that would do well on any table. Yet for herself, she appreciates the other approach.

“I think there’s a place for every style,” she said. “Sometimes I like water with dinner and wine on its own.”

I can respect that point of view, but I can’t understand it. For me, wine’s place is with food, and that’s why I had begun to despair of so many California pinot noirs. Their power and sense of sweetness were overwhelming at the table. But it turns out that more than a few California producers share my feeling, like Ehren Jordan of Failla and Thomas Brown of Rivers-Marie, Joe Davis of Arcadian and Alex Davis of Porter Creek. Almost to a person, they make no secret of being inspired by the wines of Burgundy.

“It’s not that we’re trying to make Burgundy in California,” said Adam Tolmach of the Ojai Vineyard, which makes lively, savory Central Coast pinot noirs. “But the world loves Burgundy because of its sense of style, that’s a style that we’d like to emulate, and it’s hard to do that at 17 percent alcohol.”

It’s fashionable among the makers of bigger, heavier pinot noirs to reject any comparison with Burgundy. We don’t make Gevrey-Chambertin, they will say. We make wines representative of the Russian River Valley, Santa Rita Hills or Santa Lucia Highlands—take your pick. This stance implies that California conditions dictate wines of extravagance and power. In fact, this style of wine is more often determined by winemakers’ decision making. And no decision is more important to the ultimate style of a wine than when to harvest the grapes.

In Burgundy, a cooler climate prevails. Grapes historically struggle to ripen, and the dilemma is whether to play it safe and harvest before the autumn rains arrive or take a chance and wait a little bit longer to achieve proper ripeness. In California, with ample sun and warmth and little chance of autumn rains, growers can allow the grapes to hang for as long as they want.

As a result of this option, and with the help of improved vineyard techniques and new vine clones unburdened by viruses and other plant diseases, California growers in the last 10 or 15 years gained the ability to ripen grapes almost to the point of shriveling, well past what was once considered desirable. Where grapes 20 years ago were considered ripe if they achieved 23 or 24 on the Brix scale for measuring sugar content, producers of ripe pinot noirs today aim for a minimum of 28, 29 or even 30 Brix.

In fact, Mr. Guthrie of Copain doesn’t even use the grapes from the 13-acre vineyard around his Healdsburg winery because he feels the weather gets too warm and the fruit too ripe.

Instead he gets grapes from cooler sites, largely in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County. He sells the Healdsburg fruit to producers like Kosta Browne, who have won widespread plaudits for their dark, plush, opulent Russian River Valley wines.

Such extravagantly ripe—some would say overripe—grapes have their own set of problems. Sugar in fruit accumulates at the cost of acidity, which balances out sweetness with a zingy liveliness. This is especially true of the pinot noir grape. When all that sugar ferments into alcohol, little zing is left.

“With pinot noir, at a higher alcohol level, you don’t get the acidity that you do with, say, zinfandel,” said Mr. Jordan of Failla, who, in his day job as winemaker at Turley Wine Cellars, has ample experience making big zinfandels.

To compensate, many producers of big pinot noirs will add tartaric acid to their wine, which is permitted, and also add water to cut down on the alcohol, which is a murkier legal area that producers rationalize as simply adding back water lost as the grapes began to dehydrate in the final stage of ripening on the vine.

Yet when the pieces are assembled, what results is not necessarily a seamlessly integrated wine. “To me, pinot noir is a house of cards, and each manipulation adds more cards,” said Joe Davis of Arcadian, a steadfast believer in early picking. His wines are slow to develop but are meant to age. While many producers are about to release their 2007s, his graceful, fresh 2005s have only recently hit the market.

Before Mr. Guthrie saw the light, he said, he, too, was adding water and acid to his wines. When he sampled those wines after several years, all he could taste was the water and acid.

“In 2006, I made the decision to pick earlier to retain freshness and vibrancy rather than play the game of picking ripe and adding water and acidity later on,” he said. “It was the first year I made pinot where I didn’t have to add acid or water, and it felt good.”

The differences in well-made examples of early picked and late picked pinot noirs are striking. The earlier picked wines smell of flowers and red fruits rather than black fruits and jam. They are vivacious rather than dense and concentrated. They are dry, not cloying, and offer nuance rather than impact.

“I do not like pruney wines,” said Kathleen Inman of Inman Family Wines, which makes small amounts of lively yet delicate pinot noirs in the Russian River Valley. “I’m kind of the bellwether. People say, ‘Kathleen’s picking—that means harvest is in two weeks.’”

Well, honestly, nobody is going to ’fess up to liking pruney wines. Nonetheless, these ultra-ripe pinot noirs are highly popular. Partly that’s because they’ve received such critical acclaim. In the current issue of Wine Spectator, the highestscoring pinot noir from California is described as “superrich, bordering on syrupy.” Those are apparently compliments.

Now, I haven’t tried that wine, but I can’t say those qualities are what I desire in a pinot noir. I prefer words like elegant and energetic, which I used to describe Anthill Farms’ 2007 pinot noir from the Comptche Ridge Vineyard in Mendocino County, or restrained and mineral, as in the 2007 Rivers-Marie Summa Vineyard pinot noir from the Sonoma Coast.

Clearly, not everybody agrees with me. Of course, wines that soar for one person thud to the ground for the next. Accounting for divergences in taste can be a thorny subject, especially for those who on some level may feel they haven’t received proper respect for their achievements.

“I think it’s been whacked into a naïve public’s head that these big wines are the wines that people are supposed to like,” said Lane Tanner, who has been issuing pinot noirs under her own name from Santa Barbara County since 1989. Her wines are light-bodied, fragrant and floral—“feminine,” she calls them, in contrast to the hulking masculine wines that some critics favor.

It takes determination to stick to a style that is less popular.

“There is a lot of pressure in California to make wines in that other style, and you can understand why,” said Alex Davis, whose 2006 Porter Creek Fiona Hill pinot noir from the Russian River Valley has a freshness that will wake up the most tired palate. “People have a lot of bills to pay.”

Still, none of these producers is suffering, and many are encouraged by the growing demand for their wines.

“The palate in Europe, like the wines, has had a thousand years to develop,” said Ted Lemon of Littorai, whose wines beautifully combine structure and intensity with restraint. “We’re only starting.”

On the Lighter Side

The following are among the California pinot noirs made in a lighter style, emphasizing finesse over power. Some wines are widely available; others are sold by mailing list. Prices can range from around $20 for entry-level bottles up to about $75 for some single-vineyard wines.

ANTHILL FARMS Sonoma/Mendocino; lovely, fresh and floral.

ARCADIAN South Central Coast; lively, pure and age-worthy.

AU BON CLIMAT Santa Barbara; well-balanced and complex.

CALERA WINE COMPANY Mount Harlan; intense single-vineyard wines.

COPAIN Mendocino; delicate and nuanced.

FAILLA Sonoma Coast; elegant and focused.

INMAN FAMILY WINES Russian River Valley; bright and pretty.

JOSEPH SWAN VINEYARDS Russian River Valley; restrained and delicate.

LANE TANNER Santa Barbara; light-bodied and fragrant.

LITTORAI Mendocino/Sonoma Coast; structured and energetic.

LONGORIA Santa Barbara; earthy and intense.

THE OJAI VINEYARD Santa Barbara; light and savory.

PEAY VINEYARDS Sonoma Coast; spicy and polished.

PORTER CREEK VINEYARDS Russian River Valley; fresh and elegant.

RHYS VINEYARDS Santa Cruz Mountains; graceful and complex.

RIVERS-MARIE Sonoma Coast; intense, lively and balanced.

TALLEY VINEYARDS Arroyo Grande; earthy yet fresh.

March 2009

Letting a Grape Be a Grape

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Noah Berger.

Here at the rustic wooden headquarters of Ridge Vineyards, nestled 2,400 feet up in the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking Silicon Valley, the winery is celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, practically an eternity in the California wine business. Most wineries seize anniversaries as an opportunity for marketing and promotion, and Ridge is not immune, assembling a small group of wine writers and sommeliers for an in-depth, historical tasting of its top wines.

Ordinarily, I pay little attention to such events. But for a half century Ridge has made one of California’s greatest cabernet sauvignons, Monte Bello, in a remarkably consistent style independent of the twists and turns of fashion. Ridge has also been the leading standard-bearer for zinfandel, which has likewise followed a serpentine path of styles.

Perhaps because of its longevity and its consistency, and because its wines are actually available to consumers, Ridge tends to be taken for granted, its achievements noted dutifully even as attention shifts to the new, the expensive and the scarce. That seemed reason enough to spend an afternoon visiting Ridge before the celebration.

Over the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to drink Monte Bellos covering a range of 40 vintages. The 1970 is one of the greatest California cabernets I’ve ever drunk, beautifully balanced and graceful with a pronounced minerality and the sort of herbal accents that are routinely denounced in California but which I think are integral to good cabernet.

Meanwhile, the latest release, the 2006, offers all of these qualities, along with the gentle fruit and violet flavors and aromas that you would expect to find in a young wine. In an era when cabernet growers pick grapes ever riper for wines of great power, fruit magnitude and impact, Monte Bellos remain focused and intense yet, above all, balanced.

Not that Monte Bello hasn’t evolved at all. The first vintage, 1962, cost $3.50 a bottle. It’s now up to $145, though it is still cheap next to other elite wines. (The vineyard-designated zinfandels are more approachably priced, from $25 to $35.)

Over time, Ridge has refined its approach in the cellar, treating the youthful wine more gently so the tannins are softer and less imposing. One thing that hasn’t changed: Ridge’s reliance on American oak for its barrels, rather than the French oak that is standard for almost all leading California cabernets. In its style and the methods by which it is made, Monte Bello manages to bridge Old World and New.

In many ways this is a testament to Paul Draper, Ridge’s chief executive and winemaker, who is marking the 40th anniversary of his affiliation with the winery. For as much as Ridge wines display the greatness of place—Monte Bello as well as its two primary zinfandel vineyards in Sonoma, Geyserville and Lytton Springs—Ridge’s success also affirms the greatness of Mr. Draper’s vision of applying traditional European techniques to wines that demonstrate the potential of California.

Indeed, it may seem odd to celebrate Mr. Draper, who attributes his success to what he calls “nonaction.”

“Our main thing is to allow grapes to show their character rather than imposing our will on them,” he told me as we looked out over the dormant cabernet vines awaiting their winter pruning.

Noninterventionist winemaking has become one of the great modern marketing clichés. But Mr. Draper’s beliefs are grounded in preindustrial techniques practiced by Europeans for centuries: rely on natural yeasts for fermentation, use minimal amounts of sulfur dioxide as a stabilizer and otherwise do as little as possible beyond gently guiding the transformation of grape juice into wine.

Crucially, he also believes that wine’s place is on the table with food, which explains why, year in and year out, Monte Bello’s alcohol content hovers around 13 percent, even as other top California cabernets break the 15 percent level. Its zinfandels are higher in alcohol, naturally, but not as high as the full-bore, highoctane zins that top most critics’ charts.

Here in the Santa Cruz Mountains, cabernet and the other Bordeaux grapes in the vineyard cannot achieve the high levels of ripeness typical of grapes grown in the warmer parts of Napa Valley. Warm air wafts over from the San Francisco Bay, fending off the fog and cold that blow in from the Pacific and moderating the temperatures just enough to ripen the grapes.

Apparently not enough for some critics. In his blog last fall, James Laube, who covers California for Wine Spectator, suggested that the cool climate made for reds that were too green and herbal to suit his taste. It was an opinion that stung Mr. Draper.

“We’ve always made wines that we loved to drink,” he said. “We’ve never made for the market. Luckily, people have always bought our wines.”

Mr. Draper has always contended that he knew nothing about making wine when he joined Ridge in 1969. The winery was founded in 1959, which makes both anniversaries a bit approximate. Four scientists from Stanford Research Institute bought 80 acres on Monte Bello Ridge, including an abandoned winery and a mature vineyard. Without training, they made wine and liked the results so much that they went into business.

Mr. Draper, born in the Midwest and educated at Choate and Stanford, had served in Army intelligence in Italy, where he developed his taste for fine wine and food. After his discharge and further work for the government, Mr. Draper and two partners began an economic development project in Chile. Among other things, they had the idea of creating a model winery, making first-class wine that could be exported for hard currency.

When the partners determined that the political climate in Chile would not support a profitable enterprise, Mr. Draper returned to California with the cabernet he had made. The Ridge partners, impressed by its quality, invited Mr. Draper to join them.

Mr. Draper had no formal training, either, so he took as his guiding light an 1883 manual written by E. H. Rixford, who coincidentally planted a cabernet vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains that became legendary as La Questa. Cuttings from La Questa were the basis of the original Monte Bello vineyard, planted in 1886 by Osea Perrone, an Italian doctor from San Francisco.

Even today, getting to Monte Bello requires a harrowing 4.4-mile drive of narrow hairpin turns around which one can only pray a truck is not barreling. Whatever possessed somebody, I asked Mr. Draper, to plant a vineyard up here?

“They were Europeans,” he said. “You grew grapes where nothing else would grow.”

Mr. Draper, who will turn 74 next week, has made few concessions to age. He still moves easily up and down the old steps of the restored three-level winery, where the original 19th-century redwood joists and limestone walls are covered in the sort of black mold common in ancient European cellars but rare in California. His new Acura is equipped with a five-speed manual transmission, and he doesn’t plan to rest on his laurels.

“Every year we’re trying to learn something that will push us 1 percent or 5 percent forwards,” he said, “and it’s gone on for 40 years.”

March 2010

Is There Still Hope for Syrah?

By ERIC ASIMOV

There’s a joke going around West Coast wine circles: What’s the difference between a case of syrah and a case of pneumonia? You can get rid of the pneumonia.

It would be funnier if it weren’t so sad. In the last few years, beginning even before the economic downturn, sales of American syrah essentially dropped off a cliff. While precise numbers are not available—for tracking purposes, syrah is often lumped in with Australian shiraz, or consigned to “other red wines”—American syrah producers all tell the same story.

“It appears to have crashed and burned in this country,” said Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards, who 20 years ago was one of the early proponents of planting California with grapes from the Rhône Valley, like syrah, grenache and mourvèdre. Or, as Ehren Jordan, proprietor of Failla Vineyards, put it: “There has been a collective running into a brick wall by people who make syrah.”

Such an impact is hard to fathom with a glass of a Failla syrah in front of you. The aroma—of herbs, olives and flowers—stimulates the appetite. The question is not, what’s wrong with syrah, but, where’s dinner? Back in the mid-1990s, syrah was thought to be the next great hope for American red wine. Growers and winemakers, looking for an alternative to cabernet sauvignon and merlot, pinned their hopes on syrah, known for making savory wines in Rhône appellations like Hermitage, Côte-Rôtie, Cornas, St.-Joseph and Crozes-Hermitage.

How syrah went so horribly wrong may be a cautionary tale for anybody looking to capitalize on the next great trend.

It’s fair to say that much of the syrah produced in California is dreadfully generic red wine of little character. But perhaps more important to recognize is that quite a few producers like Failla are making superb California syrah, a fact that should not be lost in any analysis of the moribund market.

Some producers have made good syrah for years. Others are fairly new to the field and are plunging resolutely ahead, even as the market shrinks. Crucially, though, they are succeeding by staying true to the northern Rhône ideal of making balanced, pungently aromatic wines that belong on the table.

Here in Forestville, a small crossroads town in western Sonoma County, two childhood friends, Duncan Arnot Meyers and Nathan Lee Roberts, are making beautifully aromatic, elegant syrahs under the label Arnot-Roberts. Rather than emphasizing power, concentration and heavy fruit flavors, the Arnot-Roberts wines are graceful and relatively low in alcohol.

“We’re California kids,” said Mr. Meyers, standing in front of barrels holding the previous year’s vintage. “We believe that we can make really good wines here, but our reference points are the northern Rhône.”

He and Mr. Roberts teamed up in 2002 on a shoestring budget. With little financial pressure to cater to the marketplace, they have enjoyed the luxury of stubborn idealism, making wines aimed at achieving the classic northern Rhône aromas and flavors of olives and herbs, bacon and minerals, flowers and spices, blood and earth.

“We don’t want to make really fruity wines,” Mr. Roberts said. “It’s those nonfruit aromas that we’re really focused on.”

One sniff of the Arnot-Roberts 2006 Clary Ranch syrah, made from grapes grown on the Sonoma Coast near Freestone, leaves no doubt of their ideals. With captivating aromas of black olives, laurel and minerals, the direct connection to the northern Rhône is clear.

In the beginning, that was the idea. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, the early efforts of American syrah pioneers like Mr. Grahm, Joseph Phelps, Bob Lindquist of Qupé and Steve Edmunds of Edmunds St. John were all intended to emulate Rhône wines.

Later entrants to the game had different ideas. Syrah was barely on the radar screen in 1990 when, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture, only 164 acres of the grape were planted in the state. Then came an explosion. By the end of that Rhône-mad decade, more than 10,000 acres were planted, and since then even that number has doubled—less perhaps than other red grapes like cabernet sauvignon, merlot, zinfandel and pinot noir, but significant nonetheless.

“People were looking for something that would not be too tannic or challenging, and syrah was poised to be that go-to drink,” said Patrick Comiskey, who is writing a book about the American Rhône movement.

What happened? Partly, Mr. Comiskey said, pinot noir with its cinematic Sideways boost stole syrah’s thunder. More damning, though, was a confusion of styles that robbed American syrah of any sense of identity.

As syrah production was beginning to take off, some American wine critics were starting to award their highest scores to big, broad, powerfully fruity wines that displayed richness and opulence. Prominent among them was Barossa Valley shiraz, as syrah is known in Australia. The desire for critical approval, Mr. Comiskey suggested, caused many American syrah producers to emulate this intensely ripe, jammy style.

“Syrah tends to lose its character at higher ripeness levels,” he said. “The thing that makes syrah beguiling, beautiful and feral is all lost, and you end up with a much more generic, fruity experience.”

Pax Mahle can attest to that personally. Back in 2000 he founded Pax Wine Cellars, making rich, powerful single-vineyard syrahs that were acclaimed by critics like Robert M. Parker Jr. and Wine Spectator. Some of these wines reached alcohol levels above 16 percent. But after a dispute with a financial backer, Mr. Mahle left Pax. He and his wife, Pamela, now make wines of a completely different style under the Wind Gap label, right here in Forestville.

“The Pax wines were good of their kind,” he said. “But I found on a Tuesday or Wednesday night they were the wines I least wanted to drink.”

So he recalibrated his approach, and now aims for lower alcohol, subtler, more savory wines.

“I want the wines to show more earth than fruit, more savor and spice than sweetness,” he said. “I want them above all to be bright and fresh.”

His 2006 Sonoma Coast syrah is full of the herbal, meaty, bacon and olive flavors craved by lovers of northern Rhône wines. It weighs in at 13.1 percent alcohol, but even his biggest wine, at 14.9 percent, from the Castelli-Knight vineyard in the Russian River Valley, is discernibly Rhônish.

Contributing to the confusion is the fact that a good deal of California syrah is simply planted in inappropriate places.

“If you want it to actually have character, it needs to be grown in a very cool climate,” said Mr. Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards, and most top syrah producers would agree.

The Peay brothers, Nick and Andy, along with Nick’s wife, Vanessa Wong, grow syrah on their vineyard near Annapolis, in the extreme northwestern corner of Sonoma County just four miles from the Pacific Ocean. There, the fruit struggles to ripen each year, but retains a freshness that comes from sufficient acidity in the grapes.

“Syrahs from warm areas lack the syrah signature of pepper, olive, meatiness, iron and mineral,” Nick Peay said. “From warm areas they just have this monochromatic blueberry and oak quality.”

His brother chimed in: “There is no better wine for lamb, game and meats, but people are making wines with too much alcohol, too much fruit, no elegance and too much oak.”

The Peay syrahs are elegant and polished, not quite as savory as the Wind Gap or Arnot-Roberts wines, perhaps, yet still dripping with the pepper, olive, meat and animal character of syrah.

Cool climates, at least in Northern California, are not without risk. Arnot-Roberts made a delectable wine from the grapes from Clary Ranch on the Sonoma Coast in 2006. In 2009, they didn’t ripen enough to make a single-vineyard wine.

As with any grape there is no single correct way of making a syrah. It mostly comes down to the personal preference of the growers and winemakers.

“The single most important thing is making a good decision about when to pick the grapes,” said Mr. Edmunds of Edmunds St. John, who makes gentle, graceful syrahs with grapes purchased from a variety of sites in California. His preference is for freshness, so he tends to favor those picked on the early side. Other producers, including many in Paso Robles and Santa Barbara County, prefer riper grapes and bigger wines.

“Just because you can get it riper doesn’t mean you should get it riper,” said Mr. Lindquist of Qupé, who has never strayed from his original ideal of balanced, Rhône-influenced wines.

While the finest syrah producers still manage to sell their wines, it is not without a struggle. Wells Guthrie of Copain Wine Cellars makes excellent single-vineyard syrahs with enthralling mineral, saline, briny flavors. His loyal customers buy direct from the winery. Nonetheless, from the 3,000 cases of single-vineyard syrah that he made in 2006 he reduced his production to 1,200 cases in 2009.

“Without the good portion that we sell direct, I don’t know how you would sell any syrah,” he said.

Still, producers are keeping their hopes up. Mr. Jordan of Failla points out how young California’s syrah vineyards are, and how much the grapes will improve as the vines age.

“People are already making dynamic wines, and are increasingly conscious of where things should be,” he said.

Mr. Grahm, Mr. Edmunds and Mr. Lindquist, who’ve seen consumer interest in California syrah rise from nowhere only to crash and burn, likewise continue to focus on the potential.

“It’s a great grape, obviously,” Mr. Lindquist said. “And great grapes always rise to the top.”

10 That Defy the Trend

Here are 10 of the best California syrah producers (which make wines that emphasize balance and savory aromas and flavors rather than power, concentration and fruitiness), along with some suggested bottles to seek out:

ARNOT-ROBERTS Clary Ranch and Griffin’s Lair, both from Sonoma Coast.

BONNY DOON VINEYARD Le Pousseur.

COPAIN WINE CELLARS Baker Ranch, Brosseau and Hawks Butte.

A DONKEY AND GOAT Mendocino and Sierra Foothills.

EDMUNDS ST. JOHN Cuvée Fairbairn and Wylie-Fenaughty.

FAILLA Estate, Phoenix Ranch.

THE OJAI VINEYARD Melville.

PEAY VINEYARDS La Bruma and Les Titans.

QUPÉ Bien Nacido and Stolpman.

WIND GAP Sonoma Coast, Griffin’s Lair.

June 2010

The Hard Stuff Now Includes Wine

By ERIC ASIMOV

Not so many years ago, back when Americans sought out compact cars and calculated their gas mileage, most California wines clocked in at an economical 12 to 13 percent alcohol. It was perhaps a shade higher than what their European colleagues achieved, but California was blessed with generous sunshine that made ripening grapes an easier proposition than in the cooler climates of Bordeaux and Burgundy.

Twenty-five years later, the 12 percent California wine seems as quaint as the gas-saving hatchback. Today, it’s the rare bottle from California, red or white, that doesn’t reach 14 percent alcohol. Many now hit 15, even 16 percent, a difference that may seem insignificant until you realize that a 15 percent bottle contains 25 percent more alcohol than one labeled 12 percent.

Casual consumers seem to pay little attention to the small print on the label that indicates the approximate alcohol content. And while these extreme wines do not hide their alcohol levels, few winemakers trumpet them, either.

In fact, many of these wines come from some of California’s most critically acclaimed producers, who charge from $25 to $100 or more a bottle. Clearly, consumers intent on intoxication can find far cheaper pathways, like a bottle of bourbon with 40 percent alcohol.

But among California producers and those who follow wine closely, the wines have provoked sharp debate.

Opponents have called them wines on steroids, and insist that the qualities of elegance and subtlety, and the ability to evolve gracefully with age, so prized in traditional wines, are completely lost. Wine’s place on the dinner table, they say, is in danger, too. These wines, they argue, overwhelm food instead of enhancing it. High alcohol can create the impression of sweetness, which can clash with food. And then there’s the headache factor, not to mention the issue of driving.

“You raise the alcohol just a couple percent in wine, and you change people’s experience,” said Andrew Murray, a winemaker in Santa Barbara County, who says he has tried taming the alcohol in his wines. “The old concept, my wife and I can split a bottle of wine with dinner, is no longer true.”

Proponents say the alcohol level is irrelevant, as long as the wines are balanced and taste good. They complain that opponents are judging them by Old World benchmarks. These producers assert that they are carving out an identity for California in the most traditional fashion, by allowing the wines to reflect the characteristics of the soil and climate in which the grapes are grown. They contend that higher alcohol levels are not a flaw as long as other factors, like acidity, which gives a wine zing, and tannins, which give it structure, do their part.

“We’re not trying to be Burgundy, we’re not trying to be California pinot,” said Greg Brewer, who, with his partner, Steve Clifton, makes pinot noir and chardonnay in the Santa Rita Hills of western Santa Barbara County. “We’re only interested in the two grapes that grow best in the area in which we live.” The Brewer-Clifton wines are often above 15 percent alcohol. They are intense, but unlike many of the high-alcohol wines they can be balanced and graceful as well.

“It’s a number,” Mr. Brewer said, dismissing the focus on alcohol. “Are people checking the B.T.U.’s on a chef’s burner?”

At the Adega Restaurant and Wine Bar in Denver, where the higher-alcohol wines are popular, the issue of percentages almost never comes up, said Aaron Foster, the wine director. “Their popularity is due to the name recognition,” he said. “To a certain degree, most people assume that wines are all the same, and they’re looking at taste.”

High alcohol levels are not completely new in California. Zinfandels have a long history of surpassing 15 and 16 percent. What’s different are the wines from grapes not known for producing blockbuster alcohol levels. The Heavyweight 2003, a blend of cabernet sauvignon, merlot and two other grapes from Behrens & Hitchcock in the Napa Valley, weighs in at 15.6 percent. A 2001 roussanne from Sine Qua Non is at 15.5 percent. The 2002 Hard Core, a blended red wine from Core in eastern Santa Barbara County, hit 15.7 percent. Syrahs from Pax Wine Cellars in northern California regularly approach 16 percent, while the Bulladóir, a 2002 syrah from the Garretson Wine Company in Paso Robles, reached nearly 17 percent. Each of these wines has received scores of 90 points or higher from Robert M. Parker Jr., the influential wine critic.

“It used to be anything above 14 percent was really up there,” said Bob Lindquist of Qupé Wine Cellars, who has been making wine in Santa Barbara County since the 1970s. “Now, 15 is the new 14.”

Around the world, a few wines, like Amarone in northeast Italy, are typically above 15 percent. Australia has had many high-alcohol wines, and in hot years, like 2003 in France, some producers may achieve elevated alcohol levels. But nowhere else can match California’s concentration of extreme wines.

In the state, the alcohol watershed came roughly around 1990. Previously, grape growers judged the ripeness of their grapes simply by gauging the sugar content. When the grapes hit a certain point on the Brix scale, which measures sugar content, they were picked. In the last 15 years, though, the buzz phrase has been “physiological ripeness.” This takes into account the ripeness of other parts of the grape, like the seeds and the skins. A physiologically ripe grape, in which the seeds have turned from green to brown, yields softer, more supple tannins with less astringency, making traditionally long-lived wines easier to drink at an earlier age.

In most California vineyards, the seeds and skins lag behind sugar in reaching their ideal level of ripeness. As the seeds and skins ripen, the grapes get sweeter and sweeter. Growers using the standard of physiological ripeness are picking grapes at a much higher sugar level than they had previously.

That’s only part of it. Many winemakers say that scientific advances in viticulture have turned grapevines from plow horses into thoroughbreds, able to photosynthesize sunshine into sugar far more efficiently than a couple of decades ago. Scientists have sharply reduced the viruses that used to afflict leaves and turn them a brilliant red late in the growing season. Now those leaves are green and absorbing far more light than before. In the modern nursery, growers are able to select their rootstocks, graft them to any number of grapevine clones, and in a sense custom-design their own grape-producing factories.

“Because we’ve done such a great job in the selection of budwood and eliminated the viruses, photosynthesis is working far more efficiently,” said R. Michael Mondavi, the former chief executive of the Robert Mondavi Corporation, who is now a consultant. “It’s forcing people to have much higher sugar levels before the skin and seeds become mature.”

In order to deal with ultra-sweet grape juice, scientists have developed voracious strains of yeast that are far more efficient in transforming sugar into alcohol than wimpier yeasts of old.

“These are Schwarzenegger kinds of yeasts,” said Bruno D’Alfonso, the winemaker at Sanford Winery in the Santa Rita Hills. “They would ferment a building if given a chance.”

Mr. Mondavi does not favor the higher-alcohol wines.

“To me a wine is a beverage to be enjoyed with a meal,” he said. “These wines remind me of what my grandfather used to do with a big, heavy wine. He would add water, then drink it with his meal.”

In fact, Mr. Mondavi’s grandfather used a technique not that different from what some winemakers do to avoid having wines too high in alcohol. They add water to their grape juice before fermenting it into wine, resulting in less alcohol by volume.

“I pick ripe and water back,” said Mr. D’Alfonso, saying out loud what many winemakers would prefer not to admit. “I shoot for between 14.2 and 14.5. But I’ve had wines that were above 14.8 and they were balanced.”

Other winemakers employ more advanced methods, like reverse osmosis or spinning cone columns, which can remove alcohol from wines after they are made. “Pick at 16 percent, spin a third of it down to 12, then blend it together under 15 percent,” said Jim Clendenen, owner of Au Bon Climat Winery in Santa Barbara County.

Mr. Clendenen continues to make wines under 14 percent, and occasionally under 13 percent. So does Randy Dunn, owner of Dunn Vineyards in the Napa Valley, who makes powerful cabernet sauvignons that are always long lived. His 2001 weighed in under 13.8 percent, and he tries to keep his wines in that range, even if he has to resort to techniques like reverse osmosis. Figures like 13.8 percent, by the way, are not as accurate as they seem. A wine below 14 percent, according to federal regulations, has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.5 percent. Above 14 percent, the margin of error is reduced to 1 percent. And for reasons that are more arcane than scientific, the federal government taxes wines above 14 percent at a higher rate ($1.57 a gallon) than those 14 percent or lower ($1.07). Winemakers seem not to care.

“I go with, the numbers be damned if you’re picking the fruit when it’s really ripe,” said Mat Garretson of the Garretson Wine Company, whose wines typically run from 15 to 17 percent alcohol. He acknowledges that his wines may be a little much at a dinner party.

“To do more than two or three of those at a meal is kind of scary,” Mr. Garretson said. “I know that does present a problem for some people, but I’m just trying to make the best wines I can from the area. There’s a lot more pain to be had from people who pick too early or pick too late.”

April 2005

The Day California Shook the World

By FRANK J. PRIAL

On May 24, 1976, six weeks before America’s bicentennial celebration, there occurred in Paris a tasting that American winemakers and cultural historians have come to characterize as the defining moment in the evolution of fine wine in this country.

The effects on the California wine industry, as well as its distributors and, indeed, their customers, were profound. The winemakers had known they could make great wine; wineries like Beaulieu and Inglenook had been doing it for at least 30 years. What the Paris tasting did was bolster their self-esteem. It encouraged many who had been content making mediocre wine to go for the very best.

More important, it showed American consumers that they no longer had to look abroad for fine wine. Little more than a decade earlier, a general American embarrassment had greeted President Lyndon B. Johnson’s decree that American embassies serve only American wines.

At that tasting 25 years ago, nine judges, all prominent French food and wine people, gathered in the enclosed courtyard of the Paris Inter-Continental Hotel and tasted 20 wines, red and white, French and American. The tasting was blind; all the bottles were covered; no one was told which were French, which were American.

When the bottles were unwrapped, the tasters were astonished to discover that the highest scorers were American: a 1973 cabernet sauvignon from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and a 1973 chardonnay from Chateau Montalena, both from the Napa Valley. Under the headline “Judgment of Paris,” Time magazine said that the “unthinkable” had happened: “California defeated all Gaul.”

The tasting had been staged by Steven Spurrier, a 34-year-old Englishman who ran a wine shop and wine school just off the Place de la Madeleine. It grew from the influence of many of his customers and students, most of whom were American. I.B.M.’s French headquarters, with its cadre of upwardly mobile young Yankee executives, was just across the street.

In 1975, intrigued by their talk of American wines, he sent his American partner, Patricia Gallagher, to California. She was so impressed that Mr. Spurrier made his own voyage of discovery.

He returned to France excited by what he had found and determined to arrange a tasting event. He hoped to twit the xenophobic French, publicize the fine California wines he had found and, understandably, win some publicity for himself.

He succeeded on all three counts. The French tasters, who included the chief inspector of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine Contrôlée, the owners of two famous Paris restaurants and the sommelier of a third, were true to form. They lavished praise on what they thought were French wines and derided those they thought were American.

The California reds were all cabernet sauvignon; the French reds all cabernetbased Bordeaux. The California whites were chardonnay, the French whites Burgundy chardonnay. Here is how the judges ranked the wines.

The reds, in order of finish: Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, 1973; Mouton-Rothschild, 1970; Haut-Brion, 1970; Montrose, 1970; Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello, 1971; Léoville-Las-Cases, 1971; Mayacamas Vineyards, 1971; Clos du Val, 1972; Heitz Cellars, Martha’s Vineyard, 1970; Freemark Abbey, 1969.

White: Chateau Montelena, 1973; Domaine Roulot, Meursault-Charmes, 1973; Chalone Vineyard, 1974; Spring Mountain Vineyards, 1973; Joseph Drouhin, Beaune Clos des Mouches, 1973; Freemark Abbey, 1972; Ramonet-Prudhon, Bâtard-Montrachet, 1973; Domaine Leflaive, Puligny-Montrachet, Les Pucelles, 1972; Veedercrest Vineyards, 1972; David Bruce, 1973.

“The egg on the judges’ collective faces,” wrote Paul Lukacs in his American Vintage (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), “came from their inability to discern what until then everyone had assumed was obvious—namely, that great French wines tasted better than other wines because they tasted, well, French.”

Still, there is one notion that the tasting should have dispelled, and that is that California wines do not last. I don’t know why the doubt persisted, but perhaps because it did, Mr. Spurrier decided to recreate the red-wine tasting in 1986.

By then, the wines were 13 to 16 years old. The French ones were in perfect condition, but so were the Americans. And a California wine again placed first—this time, Clos du Val—and the Ridge Monte Bello was second. The Stag’s Leap 1973 was sixth, after three French wines, but hardly because of age. Warren Winiarski, who owns Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, served it at a dinner I attended at Stag’s Leap six weeks ago. It was in beautiful condition.

For the French, the impact of all the comparisons, starting with the first tasting, has been subdued. One early result was that it became easier for French and American winemakers to overcome their mutual suspicion and begin to exchange visits and information. It is a rare California winery these days that doesn’t employ a French apprentice or two, while young Americans can be found pulling hoses and scrubbing tanks in wineries in France.

But the overall effect on the French has become more evident over the years: American wines may still be rare in the French market, but then many French wines, particularly Bordeaux, now taste like American wines. Bordeaux producers have always prided themselves on their wines’ restraint, elegance and subtlety. But anyone who tastes them regularly can attest to how much more fruity, full-bodied and forward many have become.

Once, chateau owners were proud to say their wines took three decades to mature. Now there are Bordeaux winemakers who, like many Californians, insist that their wines are ready to drink after a few years.

One major change, both in France and California, is price. In its June 7, 1976, issue, Time magazine said of the Paris tasting: “The U.S. winners are little known to wine lovers, since they are in short supply even in California and rather expensive.”

Time’s definition of expensive? “$6 plus.”

May 2001

A Dissenter’s View of California Wines

By FRANK J. PRIAL

I used to be among those who were constantly trying to write something perceptive and flattering about California wines. “The California miracle . . . 30 years ago an industry in ruins . . . up from the ashes of Prohibition . . . new wineries every week . . . better and better . . . more and more”—not original, but heartfelt.

Not surprisingly, a couple of years in Europe, away from that charged atmosphere, effects a few changes. Actually it started fairly early in my tour. Lonely travelers would appear bearing California wines in their kits. They—the wines, not the travelers—seemed to have lost some of their charm, the reds in particular. Was it some kind of latent snobbism? Was it possible to become the Henry James of wine, eager to embrace the Old World and shuck off the New?

Then there were a couple of trips home and the concomitant access to plenty of California wine. Same results. I found myself asking, reluctantly, what all the fuss was about? The wines were good, some of them, and often delightful to drink. But the unremitting enthusiasm of their fans and promoters, the breathlessness, seemed excessive. The miracle seemed a bit more commonplace; it appeared that, having expressed our amazement that the dog could talk, it was time to determine what it might have to say.

Ask a professional marketing man about wine statistics and he will dazzle you with charts: huge increases in purchases, in per capita consumption; America becoming a wine-drinking nation. Then ask him about what America drinks. Wine dwindles into relative insignificance. Another batch of charts will show that while it is true that consumption has gone up, it is also true that the number of people who drink wine has not.

In America wine has its own newsletters, its own stars, its own clubs, even its own vocabulary. Where else in the world would someone sip a little wine and then, with a straight face, remark, “I understand they brought these grapes in at 24 Brix.”

What is or are “Brix”? Sorry, you are not a member. Cultists flourish not so much on shared joys as on imagined enemies. American wine enthusiasts dearly love the image of the French expert, white-faced and with fists clenched because he has just identified a California cabernet as a Château Mouton-Rothschild 1945.

Indeed, the French wine world—the people who make it, the people who sell it and, to a lesser degree, the people who drink it—are intensely interested in the American wine scene. They love to visit our wineries and vineyards, they love to welcome American winemakers here and, given the problem of the language barrier, they are happy to receive touring American wine drinkers. They just do not consider American wines particularly good. They do believe that American wines will one day be very good—but not for a long time and probably not from the vineyards we now consider among the best. I am inclined to agree.

This is no blinding Archimedian revelation. There were, for me, those years at the Los Angeles County Fair, judging literally hundreds of California wines—judging them with California vintners—and in many categories finding it difficult to come up with something drinkable. And these were wines their producers thought worthy of honors.

Recently a reformed newspaperman turned California wine fan appeared in Paris. Here is one of the stories he told: It seems that there is a small winery “up in the valley” whose output is highly prized by the cognoscenti, so much so that the winemaker-proprietor can sell everything he makes with his mailing list. My friend was ecstatic because he had been able to take over a place on the list from a friend who preferred drugs.

This particular winery does produce good wines, but not all are worth getting in line for. The notion that one winery will turn out consistently superior wines, year in year out, the way Cartier does watches, is absurd. This is not wine drinking; it is a kind of bush league elitism, like clothes with someone else’s name on them.

Not that elitism is confined to the customers. An astute Frenchwoman with years in the wine trade said recently: “I adore the California chardonnays, but I don’t know what to do with them. They certainly don’t go with meals.” She was half right. They are meant to go with meals, but many of them do not. Like overbred dogs, they have gone beyond their original purpose. They are too aggressive, too alcoholic. They are showoff wines made by vintners who seem to be saying, “I can out-chardonnay any kid on this block.”

We took one of those macho white wines from a famous North Coast winery to a dinner at a three-star restaurant in the French countryside. We matched it with a famous Burgundy. Both were chardonnays, from optimum vintages and in the same price range. At first the California wine was impressive and the French wine seemed weak and bland. Twenty minutes into the meal, however, the American wine was clumsy and overpowering while the charm and subtlety of the French wine was only beginning to emerge.

If I mentioned the name of the California wine, a host of its devotees—well, two or three—would leap forward growling. “Why, that wine took top honors in my last 15 tastings!” an opthalmologist would cry. Exactly. There should be a special label warning that says: “This wine was designed for competition and is not to be used for family dining.”

What is this frantic tasting business all about, anyway? Is it not possible to enjoy wine without having won the equivalent of a black belt?

The point is this: The drinking of wine in America, particularly American wine, is on the brink of becoming inbred and precious. Wine enthusiasts, including we writers, who should know better, ape the jargon of the trade and feel special when we exchange arcane trivia about grape crushers, red spiders and who is opening next week’s winery. A continuing hyperbole competition distorts wines, places and people beyond recognition.

One day the rest of the country, bemused and probably irritated by all this, might just shrug and walk away. Thousands of people wake up every day, smile and say: “I don’t have to play tennis anymore or listen to people who do.” One day the same people might wake up and say: “I don’t have to drink wine either, or listen to—or read—people who do.”

September 1981

An Actress’s Presence Is Still Felt

By TERRY ROBARDS

A plume of yellowish dust rises from a distant field, signaling a plow at work, as Butts Canyon Road snakes through the farmland of northern California en route to a patch of vineyard and an old house that once was the country home of Lillie Langtry, star of the British and American stage, who summered here before the turn of the century.

The road is a strip of macadam that soon turns to hardpan and gravel as it runs past cattle and horses grazing beneath shade trees near a creek, past a young woman in a white cotton dress hitchhiking with two small children in the bright summer sun, past the Circle D Ranch before dipping into a canyon where the Guenoc Valley begins.

Now the road twists and turns as it passes Dedert Reservoir, and the land is a little greener. Suddenly vines are growing as we make a turn up an unmarked road along Bucksnort Creek and then through an open gate and on to the house that Miss Langtry bought in 1887 for $82,000. The price seems modest, for it included 4,200 acres of Lake County, an area that is emerging as a producer of fine California wines.

The house stands in the vineyard, a wooden structure with an outside staircase leading to the second-floor veranda that opens into Lillie’s bedroom, with its westward view into the setting sun across the chardonnay vines. A canopied four-poster bed stands near a closet with a window so that her gowns could be aired in the cool night breezes.

A Victorian chaise is positioned across a corner on the plank flooring, and there is a sense that time is standing still here in this remote and rugged part of the West. Lillie Langtry, once the mistress of Prince Albert, who became King Edward VII, used this house as her country home from 1888 to 1906, a retreat far from her public, a place to come to between American tours.

Now we are downstairs at dinner at a great round table beneath an ornate chandelier, and Orville Magoon is saying: “Just think, Lillie and all those folks were sitting right here just like us. I’ve read so much about her, I’ve fallen in love with Lillie Langtry.”

Orville Magoon and his brother Eaton Magoon Jr. are the principal owners of the Guenoc Ranch and the Guenoc Winery. They are Hawaiians by birth who, in a tax deal, exchanged land in Honolulu for 23,000 acres of northern California, equal to some 36 square miles. Their great-grandfather, John Henry Magoon, a Scotsman, sailed to Hawaii in the 1880s, married a Hawaiian princess and developed cattle ranches and plantations in the islands.

Now a portion of that fortune has been converted to cattle land and vineyards here, and the Langtry house is the centerpiece. Wild boars, coyotes, deer, bears and occasional mountain lions roam the ranch. Its lakes are filled with largemouth bass, and quail and wild turkeys nest in the brush.

“This was the best swap we ever made,” says Orville Magoon in a reference to his family’s acquisition of the Guenoc Valley in 1963. The purchase was facilitated by a provision of the law that enables land in one area to be sold on a tax-free basis under certain circumstances if the proceeds are reinvested in land elsewhere.

The winery and vineyards established here by the Magoons are among the most extraordinary in the nation. The federal government has granted them the right to a new viticultural appellation, Guenoc Valley, and it is the only one in the United States entirely under one ownership. It is almost as if the Napa Valley, some 50 miles to the south, where 135 wineries now operate, were owned and operated by only one, although the Guenoc Valley is somewhat smaller.

The Guenoc winery is an enormous structure ingeniously hidden by a ridge from Butts Canyon Road and from the Langtry house. It is a redwood structure containing 55,000 square feet of floor space, the largest building of any kind in Lake County and probably the largest winery built in California in recent years.

“It was kind of fun designing it, knowing you’re going to go first-cabin,” says Walter Raymond, the winemaker, who also is one of the proprietors of Raymond Vineyards in the Napa Valley. He and his brother Roy, the vineyardist, are responsible for the wines that the Guenoc Winery will be marketing within the next few months.

The first planting of vines under the Magoon proprietorship took place in 1972, involving a dozen grape varieties to determine which would yield the best wines in the Lake County climate. Now the choice has narrowed down to sauvignon blanc, chardonnay, chenin blanc, cabernet sauvignon, merlot and small amounts of malbec and petit verdot for blending. There are also plots of zinfandel and petite sirah.

Eleven years of experimentation so far, and the first commercial crop, the 1980 vintage, has not even been marketed yet. “One of the questions you ask yourself,” says Orville Magoon, “is whether you want to take 11 years of your life and do this. The answer is yes.”

The 1981 chenin blanc—a crisp, dry white—goes on the market next month. It will be the first wine to carry the Guenoc Valley appellation. Later will come a 1981 chardonnay and 1980 cabernet sauvignon and petite sirah. The cabernet, initially bearing a North Coast appellation because only half the grapes came from the Guenoc Valley, is a balanced, intensely fruity red that was already charming when tasted in May.

A 1981 zinfandel, also sampled in May, displayed a spicy aroma and was full-bodied, rich, highly textured and peppery in flavor. Experimental bottlings of the cabernet and merlot from the 1977 vintage were superb, providing a clue as to how the more recent, commercial vintages will mature.

The winery was opened officially last spring with a feast at the Langtry house. Four wild boars were trapped, slaughtered and barbecued over an open-pit fire. A cast of actors and actresses reenacted some of the scenes from Miss Langtry’s performances, and the first Guenoc wines were served.

The cooler for the whites was the old cast-iron bathtub removed from Lillie’s quarters when the house was renovated. It was almost as if she were still here after nearly a century, parasol in hand, bonnet on her head, overseeing the festivities.

July 1982

A Farewell to the Baron of Bully Hill

By FRANK J. PRIAL

Dinner was supposed to be at 8. At 9 and again at 10, the guest of honor called, hopelessly lost in our New Jersey suburbs. We talked him in, so to speak, and close to 11 he appeared, in boots and cowboy hat, swearing mightily and with a case of wine under each arm. He was Walter S. Taylor, and he had arrived.

Walter, the self-styled Baron of Bully Hill, his winery in the Finger Lakes region, had invited himself. It would be the perfect way to show off his wines, he had said. He ended up presiding over a cold dinner and a tasting that, perfect or not, lasted until almost 5 a.m. Then he raced off to another engagement.

That was years ago. Walter Taylor—outrageous, flamboyant, single-minded, immature, irritating, charming—died April 20 at his home in Hammondsport, N.Y., at 69. He had been a quadriplegic since a 1990 minivan accident in Florida.

He was the scion of an old upstate New York family. His great-grandfather had been a cooper. His grandfather, the first Walter Taylor, founded the Taylor Wine Company in 1880 and built a business making wine from native labrusca grapes like the Concord. Labruscas withstand harsh upstate winters but produce a harsh-tasting wine. To make labrusca wines more palatable, they are often cut with water, California wine or grape juice concentrate.

In the 1950s, most winemakers thought that delicate European vines like chardonnay and merlot could not survive the bitter winters of the Finger Lakes. But a few farmers were experimenting with French-American hybrids, crosses between rugged American varieties and the European vines. Walter believed that the wines produced from these hybrids were vastly superior to what his family and the rest of the New York State industry had been making for 70 years, and he began saying so, loudly and often.

In 1970, fed up with his criticism, the family banished him from the Taylor Wine Company, which in 1977 it sold to the Coca-Cola Company. But he and his father, Greyton, had meanwhile bought back the first Walter Taylor’s original vineyard, just outside Hammondsport, on the high hills overlooking Keuka Lake. It was called Bully Hill, and it was planted with hybrids.

Using only hybrids, Walter produced a large selection of wines with names like Old Trawler White, Meat Market Red, Space Shuttle Rosé and Le Goat Blush. The names, along with his unflagging self-promotion and the labels he designed, made Bully Hill the best-known winery in New York State. But he continued his attacks on the New York State wine industry, particularly the Taylor Wine Company.

He once had a railroad tank car hauled up to his vineyard to show visitors how many local winemakers, rather than using hybrid grapes, shipped in California wine and blended it with their product.

After it bought Taylor, the Coca-Cola Company wasted no time in going after Walter. In short order, a federal court judge enjoined him from just about everything but wearing his farmer’s overalls. Most serious of all: he could no longer use the Taylor name on any of his wines.

Undaunted, he gathered 200 fans and, at a highly publicized tasting, had them ink his name off hundreds of bottles of Bully Hill wine. He designed a label bearing a picture of a goat and the slogan: “They Have My Name and My Heritage, but They Didn’t Get My Goat.” Decanter, a British wine magazine, declared it the ugliest label of the year.

Other labels depicted him as the Lone Ranger, with the inevitable caption: “Who Was That Masked Man?” He distributed bumper stickers that said, “Enjoy Bully Hill, the Un-Taylor.” Another label showed an owl and was inscribed “Walter S. Who?”

All this humor earned him a further citation for contempt; he was ordered to turn over to the Taylor Wine Company all the offending material he had produced. “We brought it down to them in a manure spreader,” he said at the time.

“I have been thrown out of the New York State wine industry,” he once told me, “out of my local club, even the Hammondsport Episcopal church. Everybody in my family, except my father, my 10-year-old son and my winemaker, deserted me. The community completely rejected me and treated me like a dog. Why? Because I wanted honesty and integrity in the wine business.”

It was a well-rehearsed speech; one he clearly relished. It was also irrelevant, because Walter Taylor was a transitional figure in the industry. He was right about labrusca grapes; they had had their day. But the hybrid grapes he championed were transitional, too.

Hermann J. Wiemer, whose family had made wine in Germany for generations, joined Bully Hill as winemaker in 1968, producing only hybrid wines. But he rejected the idea that vinifera grapes could not survive the Finger Lakes climate. Another winemaker, Konstantin Frank, had grown them near Hammondsport in the ’50s.

In 1973, while continuing to work for Bully Hill, Mr. Wiemer started a small winery of his own on nearby Seneca Lake, making vinifera wines, especially riesling. On Christmas Eve 1979, while Mr. Wiemer was with his family in Germany, Walter Taylor fired him, presumably for his disloyalty to hybrids.

Bully Hill offers some vinifera wines now, but it is still firmly rooted in the hybrid culture. And for Bully Hill, that works. Under the direction of Walter’s widow, Lillian Taylor, the winery turns out around 200,000 cases a year and, in its museum and in its restaurant, entertains some 150,000 visitors annually. “On weekends you can’t get in the parking lot,” a friend told me. The Baron may be gone, but Bully Hill is booming. Not a bad legacy for a gadfly.

May 2001