-- In which Wes talks about dropping money on the ground to make a better wine, about Chardonnay in the Santa Rita Hills and Clos Pepe.

Year in the Vineyard with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe Vineyards and Estate Wines

Week #21:  August 14-20, 2009

Welcome back to Year in the Vineyard, a weekly romp through my life as a vineyard manager and winemaker.  This week was busy and satisfying.  We finished getting the nets up, dropping green and fruit from congested areas on the ground, we got into the winery to rack and filter the 2008 Axis Mundi Syrah, prepared a bit for harvest, and now we’re tying up the bottoms of the nets to keep the birds from discovering a way to get to our precious berries.

Nets, birds and the ‘green drop’:  I’ve seen flocks of starlings as large as a few thousand birds strong—flocks so big that they shade the area under them like a cloud, flocks of a size that they could decimate an acre of pinot noir in minutes.  For some reason the big flocks haven’t arrived in the Santa Rita Hills yet, from what I’ve seen.  Usually their arrival is as timely as that one drunk guy in college when the keg gets tapped, but this year they’re late.  It could be that the popularity of vineyard netting is keeping the flocks smaller, or they could have found a better hunting ground for pinot noir, but if they did arrive today I’d be ready for them.  The entire vineyard is netted, and the nets will be tucked,  rolled and tied shut by Saturday so even the smartest birds have no way of getting into the canopy and feeding on my precious clusters.

The finches, doves, songbirds and smaller birds continue to sneak in and steal a berry here and there, peck a cluster in this row or that, but in a year where we have a good crop, we can easily cut the damaged clusters out pre-harvest to assure every cluster retained for winemaking is quite perfect.  As I’ve mentioned before, the key to perfect pinot noir is consistency—consistency of ripeness from vine to vine, cluster to cluster, in each block.  This way, on harvest day, the clusters are all consistently ripe—no green fruit, no overripe fruit.  That’s how great wine is grown.  The next time a winemaker tells you that 75% or 90% of a wine’s quality is dependent on the farming (fruit), please call bullshit and ask this question:  ‘How can there be 10% of a wine without the fruit?’  It’s like saying 90% of a steak’s quality is dependent on the cow.  A chef can cook it perfect (or fuck it up), but like a nice cut of beef, 100% of a wine’s potential quality is dictated by the fruit as it arrives at the winery. 

So to increase quality in the field, we dropped about $35,000 worth of fruit on the ground this year.  Jackson Brooke, our intern, quoted one of his Aussie mentors who used to say (as fruit was dropping to the dirt): "Would you rather have a full glass of decent wine, or a half glass of delicious wine?" 

What gets dropped?

• Fruit that is late coloring up, or ‘green clusters’.
• Fruit that is too cluttered in the canopy—nested clusters that are too tightly bunched.  Opening up some space between clusters allows better sun and wind penetration, lessens botrytis pressure, reduces vegetal flavors and promotes color, stuffing  and complexity
• Clusters on small, stunted shoots.  If a shoot doesn’t support at least 10 leaves, we remove the fruit from it.  Clusters on small shoots lag behind, so they go on the ground.

Next in the vineyard we will finish tying up the nets, do one last spray in the pinot noir for botrytis bunch rot, clean some weeds and grasses out of the rows, clean out all of our picking bins, start bringing in fruit samples from each block of grapes to see when we’re going to pick.

Winery work:  Wednesday marked the first busy day in the winery for the Summer/Fall.  We racked, filtered and blended the 2008 Axis Mundi Syrah Sleepy Hollow Vineyard, which is a wine that launches our new second label.  I’m very excited to be able to practice the craft of winemaking with a new varietal, and we hope to make expressive wines from great vineyards and price them around $25 or less.  The 2008 Axis Mundi Syrah has been in barrel since early November, and is an unapologetic slut if a re wine; seductive, spicy, floral and rich.  The goal for Wednesday’s winery work was to get the interns comfortable with their winery environment (teach them where everything lives and how to operate the equipment), to get the wines separated from their sediment, to put the clean wine in a tank and the sediment in one barrel for settling, and then put the wine through a very light filtration into a second tank.  Light filtration (300 micron for the geeky) will not strip proteins or complexity, but will polish the wine and make sure it is clean and brilliant in the glass, and will not have annoying sediment on the cork or in the neck of the bottle when opened.  Because I do not rack my wines during aging, the filtration is key to producing an acceptably clear wine. The finished syrah  will wait safely for bottling a week from Tuesday.  The same process will occur with the Clos Pepe Estate wines next week.

Interestingly, I save the sediment from my barrels and use it to flavor the next year’s vintage.  The sediment, or lees, or a wine really begins adding flavor and complexity to a wine as the lees age and begin producing and suspending compounds that add layers of flavor to a wine.  So after the clean wine is carefully sucked off the sediment, the sediment is collected, settled, and then we drink the new settled wine that appears on top of the lees, and we’ll throw the sediment in with the 2009 wines (in the fermenters during primary fermentation) to allow the aged lees to work their magic on the new wines.  In this way, each Clos Pepe wine will contain the ‘ghost’ of past vintages, and will benefit from the autolysis from previous year’s sediment, feeding the wine richness and complexity.  This is a system I’ve considered for years, but will be put into practice for the first time this year.  Of course we smell, taste and evaluate the lees before deciding to add them to the fermenting wine.  And we only use the corresponding varietal—Chard lees into Chardonnay, Syrah to Syrah, Pinot Noir into Pinot Noir.

Chardonnay:  Going back through all of my 20 previous week’s blogs, I did notice a glaring omission.  I really haven’t talked much at all about Chardonnay.  Greg Brewer said something to me a few years ago that really stuck in my head, “All things being equal,” he stated, “the Chardonnay in the Santa Rita Hills is probably better than the Pinot Noir.”  Pretty bold words for an area getting rave reviews for the pinots.  But the more I grow, taste and craft wines from this area, the more I think he’s absolutely correct.  Most Chardonnay plantings in the SRH are on the worst aspects and soils.  The pinot gets the perfect spots and then the lesser areas are delegated to produce Chardonnay.  Even with the sandiest soils and less-than-perfect aspects, these white wines are among some of the most mineral, complex and profound Chardonnays being produced in the New World.  I was asked by Color and Aroma Magazine to pen a short commentary on Chardonnay, and I thought we’d wrap up this week’s Blog with a preview of that short article.  Consider it a love letter:

“Sorry, Riesling.  But Chardonnay is the most expressive and complex white wine varietal in the world.  The main problem is that it is also a commodity wine.  So much of a commodity, in fact, that Chardonnay is synonymous with white wine through much of America.  And there’s nothing wrong with that—the quality of cheap Chardonnay has never been better.

I have a fairly unique perspective on Chardonnay.  I grow 4 acres of it here at Clos Pepe Vineyards in the Santa Rita Hills of California, I make a few hundred cases of Estate Chardonnay each vintage, I write about growing grapes and making wine, and I have been a professional wine judge for 12 years at a half dozen international wine competitions. 

I mention the competitions because that’s how I judge the year-by-year pulse of chardonnays being made globally.  The hundreds (closer to a thousand) of Chards I tasted in panel this year were remarkably balanced, clean and crafty.  Ten years, even five years ago we were smelling so much butter (diacetyl), so much French oak, or so many faults that we weren’t giving many medals.  But the wines are gently leading chardonnay drinkers to a more vervey, crisper side of the grape, and it’s encouraging to see that these wines are being made, winning medals, selling well and matching beautifully with foods from oysters to roast chicken. (Buttery/oaky chards may be sumptuous, but they a bit difficult to match with food.)

It’s unsavory in wine geek circles to love big buttery chards.  It’s the new white zinfandel.  Like white zin, it sells and sells fast.  As a winemaker you have to ask yourself the fundamental question: do I want to make wines that will garnish high scores and sell, or do I want to make wines in a style that I want to craft and drink.  There are lucky-souled winemakers out there that can do both.  I have no doubt Helen Turley loves the style of ultraripe, high-octane wine she creates, as I have no doubt that Robert Parker’s scores are perfectly consistent with Robert Parker’s preferences.  But I’m not that way.   In my head, overt ripeness homogenizes vineyard and regional character.  That means that big ripe wines all taste about the same.  I guess I should be proud as a Californian that the world is trying to emulate the overblown and overpriced cabernets and chardonnays of the Napa Valley, but I prefer my Barolo to be tight on release, and a “super” Tuscan in my world can be 100% sangiovese.

I also like my Chardonnay without the heavy flavor influence of new oak.  Chablis is my style—flinty, high acid wines that are bright and fresh when young and impossibly mineral and complex when properly aged.  The problem is that 90%+ of the world’s chardonnay is grown in too warm of an area to make true Chardonnay.  Chardonnay belongs in cool, coastal areas where it may not get properly ripe in cool vintages.  It needs to be on high calcium and silica soils to thicken the skins and produce that magic minerality when it’s properly structured with acidity.  Commercial chardonnays have done too good of a job getting the world hooked on commodity chardonnay.  As a result, high end California Chardonnay has seen flat sales.  Maybe when the wine geeks realize that the world is no longer dominated by overblown, buttery, oaky chardonnay, they’ll be willing to take a step back towards the most expressive and complex white wine varietal in the world.”  --WDH 8/2009

Wine of the Week: Loring Wine Company Pinot Noir 2007, ‘Clos Pepe Vineyard’.  Luscious and ripe, without being cloying or hot, this is a side of Clos Pepe that shows a different vineyard character than my Estate wines.  Expressive and dense blackberry, blueberry, strawberry and baking spice notes are long in the nose, the mouth and finish.  A big wine that still has enough youth and verve to drink quite beautifully young, and match with flavorful foods.  This is about as big as I like my Clos Pepe’s, and Brian did a very nice job making a New World wine that still struts its pedigree.