A True Day

Some times it is the simplest things that make the largest difference. A walk in the waning light with the one you love, your dogs at your feet, and a good glass of wine in the hand that’s not holding onto your beloved’s. There is nothing simpler and truer.

June and I have been able to settle into this rhythm as we also settle (somewhat) into the house at Steven Kent’s estate vineyard in the Livermore Valley. The natural beauty of this place is mind-altering and life-changing, and it is a constant reminder of my belief that beauty exists everyday…even if it is sometimes buried beneath heartache.

The Truth About Wine

• Wine IS simple. But only if that’s what you want from it.
• Wine IS complicated. But only if you want it to be.
• The Fountain of Youth was filled with wine.
• Great wine ought to reflect the philosophy of the winemaker.
• Scores are meaningless for 99.9999% of us. How do you put a number to the stuff you were drinking when she said yes?
• If the winemaker is doing it right, he butts the hell out…until (and if) he’s really needed.
• Like Hamlet, wine is bottomless. There is always something more to learn about the great ones.
• Biodynamics may be a hoax. Or…it may be the best way so far to represent a proper relationship between farmer and earth.    
• NOBODY knows what terroir is.
• It’s ok to get emotional over a great glass. Wine likes that.
• If anyone tells you you’re drinking the wrong wine, he’s trying to sell you something else.
• Great wine changes over time. Not always for the better…but if you’re interested in the interesting then the ride is usually worth the price of admission.
• Great Cabernet Franc is as sexy as wine gets.
• Wine’s first responsibility is to be delicious.
• The best wines appeal to the head, the heart, and…the loins.

The (Un) Un-sung Hero

Harvest time is the most beautiful kind of hell. It is grueling; it is full of moments of clenching indecision; it takes you away from your family for 18 hours a day, and leaves the remaining moments that aren’t devoted to a tidbit of sleep, full of self-recrimination and self-loathing. But…in the end, you get this beautiful thing…this liquid treasure that carries all your best hopes and prayers for purity. That’s if you didn’t screw things up. If you paid attention. If you curried the favor of the right gods. And also, most importantly, if you worked with the right people.

Like me, Craig Ploof learned about winemaking by doing winemaking. I met Craig first as a member of the Steven Kent wineclub years ago, we became friends, he wanted to learn to make wine and I wanted to make better wine. A few years ago, he started helping me while he had a full-time gig. And knowing a good and dedicated thing, I hired him to help me full-time. It takes a particularly morbid and self-aware person to plan ahead for the worst possible scenarios, and being only partially morbid (and only under the influence of too much Scotch), I didn’t plan for the love of my life to get sick and for our lives to change forever.

The grapes don’t know the troubles of men and come in when they are ready. And thankfully for us, Craig was ready too. Even more than normal, he has worked like a dog, putting in an ungodly number of hours, and making some really nice wine. More than these things – important as they are – he has allowed me to be with my wife and kids, charting our course through these fucked-up waters.

I will never be able to repay him for this.

The WineLife Got Really Real

The 2014 harvest was always going to be a special one. It was the year of changing our relationship with the winemaking facility in which we worked, Craig Ploof’s first vintage as a full-time assistant winemaker for Steven Kent, the year we actually bought a forklift of our own.

The season itself was also a special one…3 weeks early to start and a compacted rush of fruit within a week to end it very early as well.

Those “new” and “special” things were nothing though, when we found out on September 23rd that my wife, June, had been diagnosed with a grade 4 Glioblastoma…a particularly nasty kind of brain tumor.

A lot of what seemed sure has come tumbling down, and it is taking time to wrap my mind around our new life. Most of what I thought I knew, I don’t anymore. Except the most important things: we are surrounded by many people who love us and who can never be adequately repaid for all the kindness they have shown us in the last month, and June Mirassou, the woman I first met 32 years ago in our Freshman dorm, is the Best person I have ever known.

There will be much more to come in these pages about June’s courage, and her feistiness, and my love and admiration for her, but suffice it to say that getting back on the blogging horse is a many-stepped process.

If you want to read really excellent writing, check out June’s blog here.

What is Veraison?

Grapes don’t give a fig if we make wine from them. Like every other species they are only concerned about spreading their DNA hither and yon. Man comes along many millenia after Nature has solved the problem and names the turning of baby green to ripe red – veraison.

The use of color to signify ripeness is manifold in the animal and plant kingdoms. For grapes, the point at which little green berries start to turn into the gorgeous red grapes that lead to gorgeous red wines is, in many ways, the turning point of the season.

In six weeks or so, we will harvest. In between today and then, grapes have already developed the number of cells they will have and those cells will now expand. Skins will start to soften, sugar content will increase, various acids will decrease, and a couple of weeks after the birds have gotten their fill, we will pick for the wines that will sit upon your table three years hence.

Thus the season proceeds, and thus the magic and beauty and hope that is the greatest part of this crazy business.

Sangiovese: Veraison

Everything Tastes Better at the Beach

I was able to sneak away from the winery yesterday and head down with June to Capitola, one of our favorite places.

Home to Pizza My Heart’s original location along the beach and this day, playing host to what seemed like a million kids at Life Guard Camp, Capitola shone (even in the intermittent sun).

The town itself is tiny and when you look at from the end of the pier it resembles – in its multi-colored buildings rising up away from the water – like a kid’s exuberant and temporary block sculpture. There are nice shops and decent beach food and the weather always seems ideal, sun or not. Capitola is the same as a lot of beach towns in California in all these regards, but there is just something about how it has all come together that makes every experience a little more heightened. A little more perfect.

This is the way the wine experience at a winery ought to be. You are as close to the source as you can be. As close to the grapes hanging pendulously in the vineyard, as close to the crush pad where that fruit is started on its way to vinous glory, as close to the hospitality and the stories that make that one winery different than any other. That’s the way it should be.

And just as a slice on the beach will never taste better, that glass of wine (in that setting with the winery’s folks’ careful attention to helping create your extraordinary experience), will be this close to perfection.

Can Fibonacci Sequence Un-Muddy Wine’s Cloudy Ratings Picture?

Because it’s hard not to compare things, especially (for me) barrels of wine that will ultimately fit into one of a few different categories, I developed a full-proof, easily understood rating system composed of Negative ( – ), Neutral ( O ), and Positive ( + ).

Now, of course, there have to be gradations of each of these three primary categories, right? We’re comparing a lot of wines to each other…there have to be finer shadings so as to capture the whole panoply of my tasting experience. Voila! There’s ++, +-, ++-, O++, +-+, etc. Totally transparent, yes?

Well, over the 4th of July weekend I was mercilessly skewered for my innocent little system. My wife, June, going so far as to call it ridiculous and stupid. Consequently, I’ve re-thought this whole ratings thing and decided on a much simpler system…

From now on each wine will be given a rating based on the Italian mathematician, Fibonacci’s sequence. Found all over nature, the Golden Ratio (based on Fibonacci’s sequence in decimal form) was used by illustrious artists like Da Vinci to define perfection. So my new system has that going for it…the third-party endorsement of one of the greatest artists of all time. It also has size.

The longer the string of numbers…what I call the F-Seq, (ef-seck), the better the wine. So, I had a Zin yesterday…1,1,2. The Chardonnay – 1,1,2,3,5. And, the Cabernet? Brilliant – an F-Seq of 1,1,2,3,5,8,13!

We’re a comparing species; there’s nothing to be ashamed of. Grab some wine, give each one an F-Seq. Grab some apples, forks, carburetors…give them F-Seqs too!!

That’s the beauty of the Steven Mirassou F-Seq System™. The System fits everything, and everything fits the System!

The next time you want to differentiate two of anything, use The F-Seq. My gift to you, free of charge.

 

Time Marches On…

We are in one of those weird confluences that happen every year where the past, present, and future bat up against each other at one single point in space and time.

We are in the process of sending out samples of the 2011 Lineage Family Estate to the press in the next few weeks. This wine has been in bottle since early January and will be released in October. At the same time, the 2012 Lineage blend was just made on Wednesday – individual barrels and portions of barrels were racked to a tank, barrels were cleaned, and the wine was then racked from tank back into those barrels. This wine will be bottled prior to harvest this year and released in October 2015.

And while all this is going on, we have finished initial evaluations of the 2013 vintage of all of our wines (there are probably 25 different wines to whittle down to the 4 or 5 that will be part of the blend – including 6 or 7 sub-lots of just one block of Cabernet from Ghielmetti Estate Vineyard), and we’re at a point where we are conjuring a picture in our minds of what that wine can be…and then blending to that vision.

One of the amazing things about wine is its aliveness. It is living and breathing and evolving constantly. We make scores of mock blends of Lineage each year and finally have to decide on THE one that rings truest and most authentic knowing full well that the blend we have chosen has already moved on and become something else. In this crazy time of year, when three different states of wine-being are foremost in our minds, having faith in our fruit and our experience is about the only weapon we have against inevitable Time.

Lineage 2013: The Beginning

Over the course of the next 18 months, we’ll be whittling a redwood down to a finely sharpened toothpick as Craig Ploof, my assistant winemaker, and I move through 213 barrels of 2013 Bordeaux varieties in 23 separate barrel groups to get to the perfect 20 that will become Lineage 2013. There are many ways of tackling the complexity inherent in this task, but I want to be sure that in getting to our

Making Mock blend

answer we don’t miss out on the joy and beauty of this most essential thing we do.

As Craig and I taste through the barrel groups we will be taking a lot of notes, talking a lot about our individual preferences and making a lot of mock blends. One of things that makes blending this way so interesting is that neither one of us tastes the same thing as the other. What may seem thin and lacking in varietal character to Craig may be overly wooded and too viscous for me. So, in the journey to craft a wine of beauty and tension and complexity, Craig and I must “battle” our own individual (and sometimes – idiosyncratic) biases to get to a point of agreement, and – more importantly – a point that most honestly serves the true nature of this particular wine.

When Lineage 2013 is released my profoundest hope is that the wine is not only spectacularly delicious but that it serves as a symbol for the way I want to make wine and live life. Hopefully, it prods and maybe even provokes a little. This wine should transform, if only to a tiny degree. And if we succeed, we will all see wine and winemaking a little bit differently, and perhaps feel it a little more deeply.