Tony Coturri owns an old, unirrigated 5-acre (2-hectare) zinfandel farm in Glen Ellen, Sonoma County, California. He also buys in grapes from nearby organic vineyards and is one of the pioneers of natural wine in the United States. Tony has been farming organically and making wine without additives since the 1960s.
“You might think that places like Sonoma and Napa were always grape-growing regions, but they weren’t. The Sebastopol area, west of here, for example, used to be an apple-growing region. But in the early 1960s, it all began to change. The apples being grown were dirt cheap, selling for $25 a tonne. They were worth nothing, financially speaking, so the government came up with a plan and started touting the Gravenstein apple as the future for the area. The Bank of America lent money to farmers to go for Gravenstein and a giant plantation drive ensued.
But the Gravenstein is a soft apple, only good for sauce or juice. You can’t store them easily, so they have to be picked and processed quickly, which was a problem since one of the advantages of hard apples was that you could put them in cold storage and deal with them at a later date if you needed to. The whole thing eventually collapsed, ushering in ‘the time of the grapes.’
By the end of the 1960s—’67 and ’68—the big boom of planting grapes in northern California had begun. By 1972, a tonne of cabernet was worth $1,000, which was huge money at the time. (Nowadays, grapes in Napa can sell for $26,000 a tonne!) So, farmers took out all the apples, all the walnuts, all the pears, it all went.
Apples were out and grapes were in. And the landscape changed.
It was grapes everywhere. Any place you could do it. It went from being a cottage industry to a full-blown manufacturing one, almost overnight. Big tank farms started appearing and big money moved in. Suddenly, the person working the vineyard and the person in the winery didn’t own them anymore. Instead, they were working for some person living in New York or LA. Jobs became compartmentalized, and you started getting five winemakers in a single winery, each one working on a different variety. It was a big change. It was the birth of the Sonoma and Napa that we know today, although now it’s even more extreme.
It’s all monoculture within monoculture. It’s not just grapes but one or two varieties only, planted and replanted using identical clones of each. Everybody talks about zinfandel and a bunch of other varieties but, when it comes to planting, cabernet and chardonnay are 90 percent of what everybody puts in. Why bother making merlot when you get more money for cab? Over-ripened, then diluted with water, acidified and ‘corrected,’ this is the premium Napa product, sold at 100 bucks a bottle.
This total grape domination has had some happy results, though, because there are lots of abandoned apple trees, particularly on the west side of the county. And I’m not talking about a few apples that got missed when farmers were picking—I’m talking tonnes. Troy Carter, from Troy Cider, and I hooked up last year and made cider in my cellar. Ninety percent of what we made was from apples that had fallen on the ground. We just collected them, pressed them, put the juice in barrels, and that was it. The cider made itself, natural yeast and all. Troy took it down to San Francisco and people went crazy for it.
Compared to grapes, though, apples are easy. There isn’t the same prejudice surrounding them. There isn’t all that stuff that people think wine is supposed to be. People just see it for what it is—cider or fermented apple juice. So, it can be sparkling, it can be cloudy, it can be all the things that wine ‘can’t’ be, and people accept it. There’s no ‘I’m going to listen to this guy because he knows, and I am going to drink this wine because he tells me to drink it.’ There’s no Wine Spectator magazine reviewing cider.”
Tony’s similarly dressed and equally bearded cellar hand (who helps out at vintage), checking the fermenting grapes.
Tony’s biodiverse, organic vineyard is an anomaly in the context of Sonoma and Napa.
