I will be working for Donelan Wines, a boutique Rhone producer in the Russian River Valley who also produces some Burgundian varietals. I am super excited, the winemaking team is going to be super-small and we’re going to be working with some world-class fruit. Can’t wait to start.
Check them out: http://www.donelanwines.com/thewines.html
Ok, so here I am, sitting in a train station in Cootamundra, (why don’t we have names in the U.S. like Cootamundra? I love these people!) thinking about everything. Thinking about home, what makes home home, what I want home to be, thinking about Australia, thinking about the future and thinking about wine. I also am thinking that I haven’t written in this blog for a while. Suffice to say things have been eventful on this side of the world, with a trip to Melbourne, closing in on making a decision as to where I will be next vintage, (either going to be working in Russian River Valley, Napa Valley or Sonoma Valley) and being en route to a trip to Sydney, Osaka, Bangkok and Singapore. However, if you want to hear about that, you’ll have to give me a ring or something.
So I guess this is a good time to tell you about Casella wines: the real dirt of the issue. Casella wines makes wines in a dramatic and factory-like manner. Some of the things they do seem down-right alien, and through-out the process, the chain of command is long enough that by the time it reaches the worker at the bottom the wine itself, the wine seems like just red stuff that it’s our job to process as if it were oil in a refinery. The fact of the matter is because of the sheer volume of wine and the gross size of the winery, it doesn’t make sense to make wine the same way we do in another winery. You can’t drain a tank, then hop in and shovel out the tank when there’s 200 tons of grapes in the tank. So what we do is we hop on top and shoot down wine like firemen with powerful hoses to make a muck we can pump out. It seems ridiculous, but it’s just the reality of this volume. Even transferring a tank is a day-long operation, setting up lines that stretch some ½ mile long to get from one 1,100,000 (look at all the pretty zero’s!) liter tank to another.
It was definitely a positive learning experience nonetheless, however. I’m learning that every winery in the world is going to do things differently, and I’m learning to roll with it. Stone Hill made wine one way, Fresno State another, and now, Casella another. It makes sense, as it allows them to make wine cheaply, and spend more money on grape quality (or not, depending on the product), but it’s not for me. The wine-makers here have their hands somewhat tied. You can’t take a risk with a million liter tank, you have to play it safe, and being careful and gentle isn’t really an option here, the processes here are not of the wine-maker’s design, rather, they are pre-set to handle large quantities of wine quickly and efficiently.
That’s not to say that there aren’t good wines being made here, there most certainly are, especially the wines that came from the Riverina before the rains in March, but the biggest reason things here aren’t for me is the lack connection with the wine. I think one of the romantic and fun things about wine is the intimacy: the experience of watching a wine grow into something beautiful. The feeling of making something gorgeous is what drives any creative person to create, but here the watching is casual, and the beauty, well, let’s be honest, this is bulk wine…
At first glance, Zane Katsikis doesn’t fit into one of the type of boxes we often like to lump people in. He has a long unbridled mane of black, grey and white hair that flows back from a face that clearly has seen more things than either you or I will likely ever get the chance to see in our lifetimes and square spectacles that sit on his face. Zane is my room-mate, and for the first four months I was here, I knew him simply as the unconventional gentleman that had the room upstairs drove a Mitsubishi Montero and was a picking expert/winemaker for Treasury Wine Estates.
But Zane is much more than that. For his winemaker profile, I sat him down and asked him the story of his life, and almost like Gandalf in the land of Hobbits, Zane told me a the story of a life that greatly surpassed any expectations I could have had walking into the interview.
Before I start however, a word on who Zane the winemaker is now and today. Zane is a winemaker for Treasury Wine Estate, an Australian wine company whose holdings in the United States include Beringer, Chateau Souverain and Chateau St. Jean among others. Zane is the winemaker who specializes in picking decisions for the company, especially picking decisions in regions outside of Napa and Sonoma in Northern California, in other words, his job is to evaluate and decide when to pick fruit in Lake County, Mendocino County, Lodi, Clarksburg and Solano County. These may not be rock-star districts such as Stag’s Leap District or Howell Mountain, but they are important in supplementing programs such as St. Jean and Souverain, and often drive programs such as Beringer’s Fouder’s Estate, and Sledgehammer. Zane evaluates and grades these blocks, often on a “A”, “B”, “C” rating system to slot each block of fruit to a program (read: wine label) such that the qualities of the fruit match what the consumer of said program is looking for. Coupled with this decision of evaluation and fitting fruit to consumer, he makes the picking decision to ideally get just the flavors the consumer is looking for out of the vineyard as the vintage allows.
However, how Zane is the true story. I always knew Zane was a dual citizen of the United States and Greece, and that he spoke French, so I always knew that there was much more to him than met the eye. Zane is first and foremost Greek, but he is also American, having received his first degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management in Cornell and getting his introduction into winemaking through the front of the house and service. His first working experiences in the wine industry were just a way for him to learn more about the product he sold. His first job was working in the vineyards for a summer in Alsace, which he chose because he spoke German and would be able to communicate with people in the French/German borderlands. “One thing led to another, man” Zane says of this experience and sure enough, he never turned back. For the next several years, Zane did exactly what you would expect a journey-man to do. He moved from place to place to place, every time taking on more and more responsibility and learning more and more; and while his travels and experiences were extensive, working in famed regions such as Bergerac, Cotes d’Or and Beaujolais, Zane returned after every harvest to his country of birth, where he would work on his numerous writings.
As I sat and listened to Zane speak about his numerous experiences, working in literally every hemisphere and most of the major winemaking continents, what surprised me the most wasn’t the places that he’d been, as impressive as they were, but rather his motivations. His winemaking education had clearly been in France, where attended a list of schools as diverse as the regions he worked, but he didn’t do it for a love of wine. He still remembers the front of house work fondly and thinks about going back. He did it for pride.
“No one wants to work for idiots, man” Zane says. Zane is clearly a brilliant man, and it makes sense for a man as intelligent and as independent as him to not want to work under middle-management. The years that followed would reflect the fact that Zane was indeed a wine-maker. He would work all over the world, after France it was largely in Australia, and accept many different positions, but no matter where he would go, he would always find a way to the top, taking on responsibility left and right, and always having something of a say in the final wine.
Over a good expanse of his career, he made wine in Australia, working many jobs, but as always, ending up being the man making the wine. His trip back to the United States was not planned. His employer at the time chose not to renew his visa and he was forced to move out of the country. Zane found himself back in France, on the outside of the industry, looking for a way back in. Zane called Treasury Wine Estates and quickly found himself with a new job; the job he has today.
Today, just like he always has, Zane travels and makes wine. He just finished his most recent stay in California and is headed back to France, before he is back in the United States once again. This year, like the next, and the one before it, Zane will continue to travel, for now with Treasury, broaden his horizons and travel more broadly through the world than most of us ever will. Zane is a worldly man, and even though his appearance tells of vast experience in life, it still belies the depth of the story the man has to tell.
2011 was cool. It was very cool. I first realized this as early as April while I lived in Fresno, when the temperatures would normally stretch high into the 90’s, scorching residents in the area way before we were ready for the summer heat. However, this year, it didn’t. This year, the weather, all the way until June, was cool and in the 70’s and low 80’s.
Grapevines don’t really think too hard when it comes to weather. Generally speaking, unless it reaches dramatic extremes that shut down the vine and its natural processes, it’s a pretty simple formula for them: hot weather promotes and accelerates ripening, while cool weather slows ripening. So this year, the ripening slowed, because it was cool, and the fruit was generally two or three weeks behind an average vintage in its ripening process.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with these types of things, the 2010 vintage did not go well. It had been equally cool, maybe a little less so, and California wine-makers had gotten burned, literally. You see, in any cool vintage, there is always concern about rain and rot. California tends to be dry in the summer and early fall, but late fall and winter are usually accompanied by rain, and if fruit is on the vine, well, it usually will rot, which is, well, bad. Fermenting wine with rot (specifically botrytis cinerea) is usually a bad thing. Unless you’re trying to make a sweet white wine, rot makes the wine oxidize easily, reduces color and is a hotbed for unwanted microbial activity, all of which can ruin the quality of wine overnight.
So in 2010, many California growers tried to speed up their fruit’s ripening by cutting out leaves and exposing clusters more to the sun. The idea being that more sun would increase the ripening of the fruit. However, this plan ended up backfiring on California, and thousands of tons of fruit were scorched and shriveled into raisins when massive heat waves hit California before the fruit was ready.
Turn the page to 2011 and now wine-makers are praying for late rains and brushing up on their techniques for fighting under-ripeness and rot. However, this year we were not going to be trying to shed too much leaf area trying to get things in as fast as possible. We learned our lesson the first time. If we were going to have a strategy, it was going to be to be more patient. So the winemakers hunkered in and waited for whatever mother nature was going to serve up this year.
The problem was, in order for a cool year to work with normal vineyard practices, essentially, it needed to rain late. If we didn’t get any rain until November, it may have been a fantastic vintage. However, our prayers didn’t come true. By the time early October rolled around, most of the fruit (especially reds) in Napa and Sonoma was still on the vine, and it was time to face the music. It was going to rain. At the time, a lot of the fruit was almost ripe. The question for every winemaker became: do I pick a tad early? Or do I try to ride it out? Most winemakers picked as much as they could, and lots of fruit beat the rains, but the majority of the fruit was forced to stick around on the vine.
The result of course, was rot. At our winery, we brought in one lot of Pinot Noir just before the rain (as a matter of fact, the rain hit as we were working on the sorting table) and the fruit was beautiful, the flavors were rich, the tannins were dense for the varietal and the wine was showing immense potential. But the fruit that didn’t make it wasn’t so lucky. A lot of Pinot Noir came in two weeks later and showed so much rot that on the sorting table our head winemaker said not to take out everything with rot, or there would be nothing left, and promptly upped the sulfur. That being said, the fruit was already under-ripe. It was still tart and the red apple and medicinal flavors of the fruit had yet to convert to cherry and blackberry like one would hope.
But that was the story of 2011 and I guess that is the nature of every cool year. There were some batches that came in and beat the rain, but there were also many lots that simply did not. What I noticed was that the fruit for the other winery where I work, Mazzocco, weathered the storm much better than for Gallo. Mazzocco, selling at a more premium point, had the luxury of farming lower yields, which not only concentrates flavor but coupled with talented management, also reduces the fruit’s vulnerability to rot. I also heard similar stories about premium wineries doing just fine in the rain. Friends at Tablas Creek in Paso Robles and Preston of Dry Creek described fruit that survived the rains just fine. It was vineyards that were gunning for higher yields that were struck first.
However, before I let you go and believe that 2011 was a bad vintage and it’s a number on a bottle that you should try to avoid, the truth of the matter for this vintage, as well as every vintage is that there was lots of good and bad wine made. Vintage 2011 was a great year for many wineries that were able to get their fruit in before the rains, so it may be a terrific year for some whites and premium wineries like Mazzocco. However, reds at the medium price point in regions where it was cool enough for quality but with higher yields most likely faced some of the biggest challenges. But at the end of the day, they are only that: challenges. It means the fruit doesn’t naturally lend itself to a higher quality of wine, so the adept winemaker has to do more. I think one winemaker summed it up best when she said, “Great wine is made in the vineyard; but when it rains we make it in the winery!”
