Technical Spotlight
by Jim GordonTechnical Spotlight
January 2019Technical Spotlight: The Hess Collection Winery
The Hess Collection Winery completed a major renovation of its estate winery on Mt. Veeder near Napa, Calif., in time for the 2018 harvest. It had been four years in the making, prompted by major damage to tanks and other equipment and the resulting loss of 42,000 gallons of spilled wine during the 2014 Napa earthquake — then delayed by a harrowing wildfire drama during the 2017 harvest.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
November 2018Ashes & Diamonds
TV sitcoms and Broadway musicals aren’t the only outlets celebrating the art of the revival. As you drive up to the Ashes & Diamonds winery, tucked nearly out of sight from Highway 29 in Napa, Calif., the building itself emits a simultaneous call to modernism and retro throwback. In fact, this time-warp sensation is woven throughout the winery, the winemaking and even the wines themselves.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
October 2018Bogle Vineyards
A visit to the tasting room and original winery of Bogle Vineyards gives no immediate sign of how big and how progressive the family owned winery is today. County Road 144 that reaches the Bogle ranch and winery from the tiny town of Clarksburg, Calif., two miles away runs along the top of a levee that keeps Elk Slough from flooding the rich farmland all around. This is the Sacramento Delta region, California’s version of the bayou, and as if to prove this point a foot-long snapping turtle inches across the road and causes a short delay as Wines & Vines approaches the family property.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
September 2018Double Canyon, Single Focus
Despite the long gestation and lofty ambitions for the Double Canyon winery in the new Red Mountain Center industrial park in West Richland, Wash., the focus of the facility is incredibly tight.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
August 2018Zialena Winery
Walking through Zialena Winery is a study in old-world wines made with modernity in mind. The 7,000-square-foot, custom-built winery completed in 2016 sits among 120 acres of vines owned and tended by the Mazzoni family since 1931.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
June 2018Ferrari-Carano Red Wine Production Facilities
"So, three crush pads are what we have now," says winemaker Rebecka Deike as she walked past one of those new crush pads at Ferrari-Carano Vineyards & Winery's red winemaking facilities near Geyserville, Calif.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
May 2018Tolosa Winery
Jean Hoefliger has made a reputation for making Cabernet Sauvignon wines at Alpha Omega in Napa Valley but his first winemaking experience was with Pinot Noir.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
April 2018Silver Oak Cellars' Alexander Valley Winery
While walking through the cellar of Silver Oak Cellars' new Alexander Valley winery filled with new stainless-steel tanks, most of which are fitted with an independent pump-over system and designed to never be used more than once per vintage, one has to stop and ask: "Is this all just for Cabernet?"
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
March 2018Jeff Cohn Cellars
It was supposed to be a simple move into an urban winery located in a commercial neighborhood.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
February 2018Technical Spotlight: Irvine & Roberts
The short story is that it was all inspired by an intoxicating night in Rome.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
January 2018Hyde Estate
Well after Hyde Vineyards had become an established farming operation with dozens of high-end winery clients producing vineyard-designate wines and a waiting list of other premium wineries hoping to do the same, founder Larry Hyde purchased another property in the Carneros appellation of Napa County.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
January 2018The Walls Vineyards
Microsoft attorney Mike Martin wasn’t planning to buy a winery when he and a buddy stopped for a quick round at the Wine Valley Golf Club in Walla Walla, Wash., a few years ago.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
November 2017Mending Wall Winery
The unique name of a new Napa Valley winery is neither from the owners’ last name nor dreamed up to resonate with millennial consumers or some other demographic.
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
October 2017Wheeler Farms
As Bart Araujo was talking about the vision behind his new winery in Napa Valley, he had to pause and make sure a concrete truck was able to make it through the correct gate at the property.
When Wines & Vines visited on a warm afternoon in mid-July, not everything was finished, and the truck was there to pour concrete for a chicken coop, shed and other outbuildings that would be clustered near a fruit orchard. The chickens, orchard and a planned vegetable garden are intended to support the winery’s commercial kitchen as well as evoke the property’s past.
When husband and wife Bart and Daphne Araujo purchased the 12-acre property on Zinfandel Lane southeast of St. Helena in 2013, they were buying the last parcel of the historic Wheeler Farms, which in the 1800s stretched over 2,000 acres and included a winery that was established in 1880. Back then, the ranch had its own railroad depot, Zinfandel Station, and a mix of crops that included prunes and table grapes.
The property came with 9 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, but Araujo removed a half acre of vines for the garden because it was so important to him to have a bit of agricultural diversity. In addition to the garden, he also imported 80 olive trees. “The concept here is we wanted to have a state-of-the-art winemaking and hospitality facility, but we wanted the architecture—both building and landscape—to be reflective of the historical nature of the property,” he said. “I really wanted people to have an agricultural experience, not just a wine experience.”
The Araujos bought the property after they sold their namesake winery, Araujo Estate, and the famed Eisele Vineyard near Calistoga to Artémis, the holding group founded by French billionaire Francois Pinault. Artémis also owns Bordeaux first growth Chateau Latour, Chateau Siaurac in Bordeaux, Domaine d’Eugenie in Burgundy and Chateau-Grillet in the Rhône Valley.
The Eisele sale took place in 2013. At the time, the Araujos said they planned to invest in vineyard property and continue to make wine. They had no plans to build a winery.
But serendipitously, the couple learned of an opportunity to buy the Wheeler Farms property, which was already approved for a winery permit.
Land, plans and a permit
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
September 2017LVVR Sparkling Cellars
With U.S. sales of sparkling wines rising and demand for higher quality in California’s Lodi appellation, the timing was right for winemaker Eric Donaldson to parlay his sparkling wine experience into starting a winery. In addition to producing sparkling wines under his own label, Donaldson fills a niche providing custom services to produce méthode champenoise-style sparkling wines for other wineries.
For many years Lodi has had a bulk sparkling wine facility supplying bottled wine with custom labels to local (and out-of-area) tasting rooms, but there was no méthode champenoise producer using Lodi-grown grapes and performing the entire process within the Lodi appellation. As Donaldson observed, “Charmat (bulk) processed sparkling wines are not cutting it here anymore. Lodi appellation wineries and customers have become more knowledgeable and experienced, and they want something better.”
Donaldson’s LVVR Sparkling Cellars wines were recognized by Wine Business Monthly as one of 10 “Hot Brands of 2016,” and Donaldson believes his list of a dozen custom service clients will double by 2018. Early on, LVVR has established the ability to produce a quality product with growth potential. The equally remarkable story is how a young person in his 30s, mainly going it alone, was able to start a winery from scratch with a limited budget for producing traditional sparkling wine, which requires specialized and often expensive equipment.
Donaldson’s résumé
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
August 2017Lingua Franca
When the 2014 South Napa earthquake subsided, wine consultant and master sommelier Larry Stone surveilled the wreckage of his Napa home and thought, “Wherever I work next, it’s gonna be earthquake-proof.”
Stone almost got his wish. His next move brought him to Oregon, where he and his family had purchased the Janzen farm in 2013 on Willamette Valley’s Eola-Amity Hills in partnership with attorney and publisher David Honig. Stone planted 66 acres of the 140-acre property to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with future plans for another 15 acres of vines and 35 acres of usable farm land.
Next, Stone enlisted Burgundy winemaker Dominique Lafon, with whom Stone had worked previously at Evening Land Vineyard, and Lafon protégé Thomas Savre to join him in the Oregon project christened Lingua Franca, or “honest tongue” in French.
After the winery was bonded in 2015, the partners scrambled to source grapes throughout Willamette Valley, renting space from Coelho Winery in Amity to produce their inaugural vintage of white and red wines. Yet throughout that first harvest, the team members understood they needed their own facility and set about constructing it.
Challenges and restrictions
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
July 2017Riboli Family Winery
The new Riboli Family Winery is equipped with a set of sophisticated crush pad equipment, brand new tanks and all the technology and infrastructure one would expect in a well-funded, high-capacity winery.
It was also designed to accommodate future growth while accounting for the growing cost and scarcity of water and labor. Throughout the large winery located east of downtown Paso Robles, Calif., are equipment and design touches to save resources and make it easier for fewer workers to do more.
Completed in time for the 2016 harvest, the winery is one of the newest in the Paso Robles region, but the owners have been in the industry for a century. The Riboli family produces more than 500,000 cases of wine under a variety of labels including San Simeon, Opaque, Maddalena, La Quinta and others. In addition to domestic wines, the Ribolis also produce and import wines from Italy including the brand Stella Rosa.
The company started in 1917, when Italian immigrant Santo Cambianica founded San Antonio Winery in Los Angeles, Calif. A contract to supply the Catholic Church with sacramental wine helped the family-run business survive Prohibition, and it continued growing even as a revived California wine industry found its focus in the northern half of the state.
A new winery for new estate vineyards To supply the growing winery with grapes, the Ribolis purchased vineyards in Monterey County and Napa Valley and began buying grapes from growers in the Paso Robles region in the 1970s. Starting in 2015, the family began buying land in Paso Robles for vineyards and now own five of them: three in the El Pomar District and two in the Creston AVA, for a total of 400 acres of vineyards with about 250 acres bearing. The family has plans to plant several hundred additional acres during the next few years. The existing vineyards mostly are planted to Cabernet Sauvignon along with other red Bordeaux varieties and Sauvignon Blanc.
In tandem with the vineyard investment, winemaker and part-owner Anthony Riboli said the family wanted to build a new winery to have even more control of its production process. From the start, he said the plan was for the winery to have a flexible design that could handle all kinds of varieties and winemaking styles and be set up to run with minimal labor while conserving resources.
According to the Wines Vines Analytics winery database, the company is producing around 550,000 cases of wine per year and was No. 29 on Wine Business Monthly’s 2016 Top 30 list, which is produced in part with those same database figures. Riboli declined to confirm the company’s current case production, but the new winery is definitely equipped for high-capacity, high-quality winemaking.
The company’s winemaking team is comprised of Riboli, who holds a master’s degree in viticulture from the University of California, Davis; Arnaud Debons, who worked for wineries in France before coming to the United States, where he worked at Newton Vineyards before joining San Antonio Winery in 2003; and Ben Mayo, who has more than 15 years of winemaking experience in the Central Coast and is the former winemaker and partner at Eberle Winery.
Riboli worked with architect Shana Reiss and general contractor JW Design & Construction, which are both located in the Central Coast and have winery experience, as well as winery design consultant Joel Crosbie. Much of the winery was inspired by the nearby Justin Vineyards & Winery facility completed in 2012.
The winery encompasses 90,000 square feet, and the crush pad is set up to receive grapes in half-ton MacroBins, valley bins or gondolas. For the half-ton bins, the winery has a Carlsen & Associates hopper with an elevated conveyor that can be used as a sorting line and dumps into a Pellenc Selectiv’ Process Winery L destemmer. The must is either pumped directly to tanks or collected into bins that are then dumped into open-top tanks with a forklift. Used for small lots or hand-picked grapes, this crush setup can be moved where needed on the winery’s expansive covered crush pad.
For future harvests, Riboli said he wants to complement this line with an optical sorter to eliminate the need for any hand sorting. He said he held off on buying one because he wanted to make sure the machines could deliver an efficient throughput rate, be worth the cost and have technology that is sustainable. “The technology is evolving so quickly the other question is: Will it be obsolete the year after you buy it?”
While most of the grapes processed at the winery will be machine harvested, some of the Riboli family’s vineyards are planted on hillsides too steep for even the latest generation of harvesters. “The machine harvesting will end up being hopefully 80% to 90%, but certain hills are too steep, and all our vineyards here are hills,” he said.
For the machine-harvested grapes, Riboli invested in a new Pellenc Optimum machine that he views as an extension of the winery’s crush pad. “You’re spending all this money on a really expensive harvester that does a good job,” he said. “Why run the grapes back through another destemmer and beat up your fruit more?”
From half-ton bins to gondola loads
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
June 2017Tamber Bey Vineyards
When Barry Waitte was a student studying finance at California Polytechnic State University, he worked at a local wine shop. One day his boss opened a Beaulieu Vineyard Georges de Latour that sparked a passion “and literally changed my life.”
READ MORE »
Technical Spotlight
April 2017Infinite Monkey Theorem
If the old adage in business and real estate is correct, and success is all about location, some may have said winemaker Ben Parsons wasn't making the best decisions when launching his new wine company.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
March 2017Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards
A nail gun rat-a-tats and hammers pound as workers from Greyback Construction Ltd. complete the new home of Fitzpatrick Family Vineyards on a bench overlooking Okanagan Lake south of Kelowna, B.C. It’s late October, and the premises have received their first crop from the 40 acres of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and other varieties surrounding one of B.C.’s newest sparkling wine producers.
Sales of sparkling wine have been growing at approximately double the pace of still wines across North America, a phenomenon that’s been picking up steam in British Columbia. While imported Prosecco is winning on price, established local labels such as Steller’s Jay and Cipes Brut maintain a hometown advantage. Approximately two-dozen sparkling wine producers now operate in the Canadian province, and Fitzpatrick is the latest of the new wave. The building overlooking Okanagan Lake aims to deliver traditional-method sparkling wine in a structure built as much for wine production as for show.
“We’re doing it exactly the way they do it in Champagne, but with an Okanagan twist,” principal Gordon Fitzpatrick says of the facility, set to open to the public April 1.
Designed by architect Vassos Demetriou of Seattle, Wash., the winery promises a “very educational, interactive, interesting experience.”
The winery runs parallel to the lake, an orientation dictated by the local topography that gives visitors a sense of being ushered into a world apart as they step into the welcoming area and wine shop that formerly housed the main hospitality area for Greata Ranch Vineyards, as the property was once known. When the Fitzpatrick family moved in 2014 to convert the facility into a sparkling wine house with 22,500 square feet of space indoors and out, the wine shop was compressed to make room for offices, a by-appointment tasting space and a bar area focused on wine education.
“This is going to be actually like a bar: In addition to featuring our sparkling wines, we’re going to do tastings,” Fitzpatrick says. “It’s the education, the traditional method and how we do it, and we’ll also feature other sparkling wines from around the world—everything from Prosecco to Champagne, just to educate people on the difference of the bubbles.”
Speaking of bubbles, the bar will also have three taps for craft beer as well as six counter seats and room for 16 at four high-top tables. An outdoor patio will seat 44.
The arrangement reflects the shift many wineries are making away from the traditional tasting room experience. Play Estate Winery in Penticton, B.C., opened in 2014, does away with a tasting room altogether; instead, visitors enter a bistro. Domaine Roy & Fils in Dundee, Ore., also lacks a tasting bar, preferring to welcome guests into a space reminiscent of the principal’s home.
‘Wine mulligan’
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
February 2017Judges Honor Innovation at German Trade Show
An agile German-made harvester and a highly automated cross-flow filter from Italy won top prizes in the Innovation Awards sponsored by the German Winegrowers Association. These two gold medal winners and five silver medal winners were on display during the biennial trade show Intervitis Interfructa Hortitechnica last November in Stuttgart, Germany.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
February 2017Roar Wines
Just like many of their clients, the Franscioni family trucks grapes from their vineyards in the Santa Lucia Highlands AVA of Monterey County to a winery in the northern half of California.
It may not be the easiest and quickest way to turn estate grapes into wine, but it works for wineries such as Kosta Browne, Siduri Wines and others. Since 2001, the Franscionis have done the same.
Gary Franscioni planted his first vineyard in 1996 and partnered with Gary Pisoni to develop their Garys’ Vineyard a year later. The site is planted to Pinot Noir and Syrah and can usually be found on any short list of California’s best vineyards. The two growers have known each other for most of their lives and have been successful business partners for decades. Both also produce wines under their own labels; Lucia Vineyards & Winery is run by the Pisonis, and Roar Wines is the Franscioni brand.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
December 2016Domaine Roy & Fils
Gray autumn clouds are descending as leaves turn color on the vines surrounding Domaine Roy & Fils, perched on a rise above the town of Dundee in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Olive trees, their leaves glistening with rain, line the pathway leading to the entrance.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
October 2016Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery
The Vogts had expansion in mind when drafting plans for Four Daughters' winery and hospitality spaces.It’s not an unfamiliar story: A couple raises four daughters while farming corn and soybeans, and during free time they visit wine regions in Italy and California. They get bitten by the “let’s start a winery” bug, plant some vines and open the doors to a small winery. That story describes how Gary and Vicky Vogt, owners of Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery in Spring Valley, Minn., entered the wine business, but it doesn’t really tell the full story or give a clue as to what happened next: In five years, the winery went from being just opened to the largest winery in Minnesota.
Vicky Vogt had been looking for a business opportunity that would draw her four girls, now grown, back home to southeastern Minnesota. She knew that none of her daughters or sons-in-law wanted to grow corn or soybeans as she and her husband had done for about 25 years, but it occurred to her that they might be interested in growing grapes and opening a winery, as the entire family enjoyed wine. She and her husband attended a wine conference to learn more about the industry, she did a lot of research and then wrote a 40-page business plan.
During 2010, the family began to put that plan into effect, and two daughters, their husbands and children became part of the new venture. Daughter No. 1, Shawn, an attorney, and her husband, Patrick Sween, an aeronautical engineer, moved their family east from California so that Sween could be the vineyard manager. He took courses through the University of Minnesota’s VESTA program to learn the skills needed to grow grapes, while Shawn Vogt Sween set up her law practice in nearby Grand Meadow with the winery as one of her clients. Daughter No. 3, Kristin Osborne, and her husband, Justin Osborne, also joined the winery’s team. Kristin Osborne, who had run her own public relations agency, became the marketing director, and Justin Osborne, formerly a construction manager, also took courses through the VESTA program to learn the winemaking skills he would need as the family’s winemaker.
The winery, a combination tasting room/wine-production facility with about 9,000 square feet, was built in 2010-11. Vogt worked with architect John Kirk, owner of John W. Kirk Design in Minneapolis, Minn., to come up with a plan for the winery that allowed for additions when the winery needed more space in the future. The winery design is distinctly modern, even futuristic. The roof is stainless steel; the walls in the tasting room are composed of two main materials: a horizontal metal siding and a vertical cedar wood, with the goal of creating a somewhat industrial-style space but with the wood providing a feeling of warmth.
The Vogt family planted a total of 6 acres of grapes in 2010 and 2011; the winery was bonded in 2010 and officially opened Dec. 15, 2011. Osborne had made 8,000 gallons of wine, and within a year they were sold out. In 2012, production was increased to 12,000 gallons, and the following year to 26,000 gallons. Vicky Vogt had planned for the winery to expand, but she never envisioned that growth would happen quite so quickly. According to the Wines Vines Analytics Winery Database, Four Daughters Vineyard and Winery makes between 50,000 and 499,999 cases per year.
Early in his winemaking career, Osborne noticed that many hard ciders were being made with artificial flavoring and colors, but none emphasized the natural flavor of the apples. He decided to try making a cider using local Honeycrisp apples and no flavorings or sugar. He made small lots of cider in 2012 that were then sold only on tap in the Four Daughters tasting room under the name “Loon Juice.” The cider is light in color with a crisp, pleasant apple taste and a great acid/sugar balance, and visitors to the winery loved it. Officially launched into distribution in August 2014, Loon Juice hard cider was packaged in 5-liter mini-kegs custom-made by a German company.
With sales of wine and demand for Loon Juice increasing, the family decided they needed to double the size of their sales, wine production and storage areas. In 2014-15, a 9,000-square-foot addition to the winery created space for the Barrel Room (a working barrel-storage facility that also can be used as an event space to seat 300 people), a pre-function Cocktail Room that can handle 200 guests standing or 80 seated, a private dining room for 20 people, an expanded kitchen facility that will allow for cooking classes and a wine-storage area.
In 2016, the winery expanded again, adding a separate 12,000-square-foot building dedicated to the production of Loon Juice. The cider facility, with higher ceilings, more space and a better design, was finished by June 1, and this summer Osborne created four other flavors of cider: Tea Time, Ginger Mojito, Strawberry Shandy and Grow a Pear.
The vineyard
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
September 2016Technical Spotlight: Titus Vineyards
The new winery is located in Napa Valley, north of St. Helena on the Silverado Trail.Since moving to Napa County in the 1960s, the Titus family has watched the area change drastically while adapting its own wine business in response to those changes.
The family has been growing grapes in Napa Valley since 1970, started making their own wine in 1990 and just last year finished building an estate winery north of St. Helena, Calif., in time for the 2015 harvest.
When Lee and Ruth Titus brought their family to the area in the 1960s, the Napa Valley was undeveloped and the outside world had little interest in the small valley. Lee Titus was a radiologist who set up a practice in the nearby town of Sonoma, Calif. The couple loved wine and wanted a vineyard of their own.
“At that time—and I remember because we got dragged around with our parents looking at properties—everything was for sale,” recalled Phil Titus. “Basically there was so much to choose from at that time, and they just drove around Calistoga, St. Helena, Rutherford and looked at different pieces of property.”
The couple eventually settled on a 32-acre vineyard property and closed on it in 1969. Lee Titus later bought a 10-acre parcel that was home to a burned-down farmhouse and abandoned prune orchard on nearby Ehlers Lane in 1972, and in 1976 he bought about 18 acres of pasture land adjacent to the southern edge of the first property.
Phil Titus and his brother Eric would eventually take over the family vineyard business and winery; they recently spoke with Wines & Vines about their new winery and the history of the family business.
When Lee Titus bought the 32 acres of vineyards, some of them predated Prohibition and were planted to a hodge-podge of varieties. “It was a typical vineyard of the time,” Eric Titus said. “It was largely Zinfandel that was probably the biggest single variety, but there was Carignan, there was Burger, Mondeuse, a little Sémillon and there was even a block of Pinot Noir.”
The Titus brothers believe the property had been planted with vines as far back as the early 1900s, when it may have been owned by “the Frenchman,” who sold it to the Nagel family that in turn sold it to the Miamis who sold it to the Titus family.
Despite its heritage, the vineyard was in need of replanting. “The Burger (grapes) were the most disgusting sacks of water, and the Chasselas or the Palomino was just pulp: There was no juice,” Phil Titus recalled.
Fortuitously for the family, Lee Titus chose to plant Bordeaux varieties and Zinfandel, and he had picked up some tips from a few of his neighbors who were longtime growers. “Our dad was a pretty smart guy as a radiologist, but when it came to grapegrowing he was kind of a neophyte, so he made friends with some of the locals here,” Phil Titus said. “The name for rootstock for him was St. George. He didn’t have any clairvoyance not to plant AXR1; it’s just the Zin is planted very much in the old way.”
Planted in 1977, that dry-farmed Zinfandel is still going strong and can often be one of the most productive vineyard blocks of the estate. “It seemed to go through kind of a quiet period seven or eight years ago, when we thought it was in decline, and then it just woke up again in 2012 and we’ve had really good crops.”
While the family dream had been to open a winery, the brothers said they didn’t start to make wine under the Titus Vineyards label until 1990. Production stayed small for the next 10 years, and eventually the brothers took over when it became clear their father had no interest in the modern wine industry. “As much as he loved growing grapes, he didn’t really like the wine business,” Phil Titus said.
Their father enjoyed a simpler version of the wine business, in which vintners sold their wares either to the neighbors or a few clients. “The picture that he liked was the barrel of wine in the cellar and drawing off a jug, and the neighbors coming and buying it,” Eric Titus said.
Phil Titus said that when his father got a taste of label design, compliance, packaging decisions and working with distributors, he decided to stick to the vineyard. “He was the first to recognize, ‘This is not what I want to do,’ so Eric came in and we bought out their investments in what they put in for the startup costs,” Phil Titus said. “They were very gracious. They kind of stayed involved, but at the same time they wanted to know what was going on, they just left us alone.”
Eric Titus had come back to the Napa Valley after a career in marine biology. While his brother had been traveling around the world, Phil Titus had pursued winemaking at the University of California, Davis, and worked at a few Napa wineries. After taking over the family business, Eric Titus focused on the vineyard side while Phil handled winemaking.
In 1990, Phil Titus had also been named winemaker at Chappellet, and the Pritchard Hill winery served as the custom-crush home of the Titus brand for the next two decades.
Back in the early 1990s, there weren’t as many wineries producing boutique, small-vineyard Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, so the brothers said sales were brisk from the start. The family produced just a few hundred cases for the first few vintages, but that steadily increased until 2008, when they were making close to 10,000 cases.
Plans for a winery take shape
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
August 2016Technical Spotlight: Materra | Cunat Family Vineyards
The new winery facility is visible from Materra's main entrance.Materra | Cunat Family Vineyards’ goal from the start was to design, build and equip a new winery for high-quality wine production and efficient operation. Based on the quality of the young wines produced from the first crush at their new Napa Valley winery in 2015, Materra’s owners and winemakers have already seen the rewards of their efforts.
Wines have been produced under the Materra label since 2007 using estate fruit from the Cunat Family’s Oak Knoll vineyard and Cabernet Sauvignon sourced from other Napa Valley locations. Past vintages were produced at multiple custom-crush locations.
Materra owner Brian Cunat said, “I always felt our wines were good, but based on our evaluations of the 2015 wines for blending, it’s like we’ve taken two steps up.” He said the 2015 white wines were “already incredible,” and the red wines were showing promise earlier in the aging process than wines from previous vintages. He observed, “We’re working with some of the same fruit sources we’ve had in the past, but we now have much tighter control over production with our own facility.” Wines from past vintages have received critical scores in the 90s, but Cunat believes more of the label’s wines will score in the upper 90s with all production now under one roof.
Building the dream
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
July 2016Technical Spotlight: Charles Smith Wines Jet City
Charles Smith built one of the largest wine companies in Washington state with his brash personality, irreverent marketing and distinctive packaging.
Behind all that style, however, Smith’s wines have always had substance.
Many of the top wine critics have awarded Smith’s wines high scores, and several of his brands have been hits with consumers. Since starting with just a few hundred cases under the K Vintners brand, Charles Smith’s annual production has grown to more than 740,000 cases comprised of eight major brands and many SKUs.
The company’s latest project is a tasting room and winery in Seattle’s Georgetown district (an urban neighborhood described as “quirky” and “gritty”), which is home to a mix of light industrial, art galleries, restaurants and bars.
The area seems a good fit for Smith and his wine company, as both have maintained a style that runs counter to the wine industry’s traditional marketing. A native of California, Smith picked up a passion for wine while traveling and living in Europe, where he managed a Scandinavian rock band. When he returned to the United States, Smith ran a small wine shop in the Seattle area before being drawn to Washington’s vineyards on the other side of the state. He settled in Walla Walla, Wash., and launched his own brand in 1999.
Smith gets his footing
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
June 2016Stoller Family Estate
The arrangement of tanks around the perimeter of the new winery ?creates a central space for working with barrels and equipment.Perched on a knoll overlooking the town of Dayton, Ore., and the Willamette River in the distance, the boutique winery Bill Stoller built in 2006 is a local landmark.
Nestled among 373 acres of rolling oak savannah, Stoller Family Estate was the country’s first winery to receive LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Designed by Portland, Ore.-based architect Ernest Munch, the original building’s stringent design guidelines and certification program were a mark of distinction that both expressed Stoller’s sense of himself as a steward of the family property and distinguished the winery from others
Bill Stoller “wanted a sustainable building,” Munch told Wines & Vines during a tour of the facility in 2008. “He wanted some guidance to do that, and then you have certification. And that brings you here rather than another winery, which may do the same thing but it’s not certified.”
A new direction
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
May 2016Benovia Winery
The winery's new open-top tanks by Westec all are equipped with heating and cooling jackets on the tank sides and bottoms.During the 2015 harvest, the staff at Benovia Winery in California broke in a new winery dedicated to red wine production. The new facility was part of a larger expansion that also included a new vineyard and tasting room. In addition to providing the winemaking team with better equipment and more space, the expansion is also the beginning of the next phase in the history of the Russian River Valley estate winery.
Founders Joe Anderson and his wife Mary Dewane came to Sonoma County after purchasing the Cohn Vineyard near Healdsburg, Calif., in 2003. Before joining the wine business, Anderson and Dewane both enjoyed successful careers in the health care industry. Anderson was the co-founder of a Phoenix-based health plan services firm that operated in eight states; he sold the company to Aetna in 2007 for $535 million.
As he was leaving health care, Anderson saw the potential of the Cohn Vineyard through the critical success of wineries—Kosta Browne and Williams Selyem produced acclaimed wines using grapes from the vineyard—and decided he wanted to launch a winery. In 2005, Anderson and Dewane purchased what was then known as Hartman Lane Vineyards and Winery, which had been built by Cecil DeLoach. Anderson and Dewane came up with the name of their winery by combining the names of their fathers, Ben Dewane and Novian Anderson.
After buying the Hartman Road winery, the owners brought on winemaker Mike Sullivan, who had been racking up high scores and critical acclaim while making wine for about a decade at nearby Hartford Family Winery. Sullivan not only would be the winemaker for the new Benovia Winery but a partner as well.
In addition to the 18-acre Cohn Vineyard, the winery’s other estate properties include the 12-acre Tilton Hill Vineyard near the Sonoma Coast and the 42-acre Martaella Vineyard that surrounds the new winery. The winery produces vineyard designate and estate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay as well as a small amount of Zinfandel and Grenache. Benovia also buys grapes from Martinelli Vineyards and a vineyard owned by Sullivan’s family.
A place to grow
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
April 2016Comstock Wines
Among the new crush equipment at Comstock Wines in Dry Creek Valley sits an old, well-used basket press.
It’s the press that Sandy Comstock used to make wines with grapes from the family vineyard near Geyserville, Calif. The homemade wines did well at local harvest fairs, and Comstock and her husband Bob often discussed building a winery and turning the home-winemaking operation commercial.
Their plans for a small winery, however, turned into a 21,000-square-foot facility that is permitted to produce 35,000 cases per year and will house several custom-crush clients—and that’s just the first phase of the winery development. The second phase, expected to begin this year, will mean more tanks and nearly doubling the production of Comstock-branded wines.
The Comstocks planted their 20-acre vineyard around 2000 and purchased the property for the winery in 2012. After bringing Chris Russi on as winemaker, the Comstocks made wine at nearby Mauritson Wines during the design and construction of the new winery.
Completed just in time for the 2015 harvest, the new winery features a large tank room, multiple barrel areas, a lab, cold room, covered crush pad and well-appointed hospitality areas.
Bob and Sandy’s daughter, Kelly Comstock Ferris, is the winery’s general manager, who sees the humor in how the winery grew much larger than her parents originally envisioned. “They decided they wanted to do a small little winery,” she said. “As they started talking to friends, the whole concept grew in to what we have here. I think they still walk through the door and say, ‘So this is our small little winery. OK.’”
Focused on Sonoma County
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
February 2016Cairdean Vineyards
Cairdean barrel room.When Cairdean Vineyards opened in 2014, much of the initial press coverage focused on the food.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
January 2016MacRostie Winery and Vineyards
The recently remodeled MacRostie Barrel Room.A busy harvest day at the new MacRostie Winery & Vineyards facility entails about 10 tons of grapes.
That may not sound like much, but the small production team at the winery near Healdsburg, Calif., also manages up to 100 different fermentations over the course of a harvest. The owners built the structure to produce vineyard-designate Pinot Noir in the Russian River Valley of Sonoma County, and processing a few tons of grapes is often bracketed by conducting dozens of pumpovers and punchdowns on small-lot fermentations.
But that is exactly what MacRostie winemaker Heidi Bridenhagen envisioned when she helped design the winery that was built just in time for the 2015 harvest. “I am totally vineyard-driven, and I love how each vineyard, each block, each chunk of vines is different. So, knowing that it wasn’t less work but more, I was like, ‘How can I split these into really small ferments and keep everything separate?” she told Wines & Vines during a tour of the new winery in late October.
Keeping everything separate means that all the wines ferment in 1-ton “Super Ts” or 48s by MacroBin. This enables Bridenhagen, who has been working at MacRostie since 2011, to set different processing and fermentation protocols for each tiny lot of grapes. “We bring in about 100 tons of Pinot, so I’m literally doing about 100 different fermentations.”
New home for the MacRostie brand
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
December 2015Michael Shaps Wineworks
Grapes destined for the appassimento process arrive at the winery in 14-pound lugs.Michael Shaps started Virginia Wineworks south of Charlottesville, Va., with his business partner, Philip Stafford, in 2007. They called the business “Wineworks” to reflect the industrial feel of the building and to indicate that it was more than a winery—it was going to be “a multifaceted winery.”
According to Shaps, “Our objective was to be a contract winemaking facility that was more of a production space than a fancy winery and tasting room. We wanted the name to reflect the vision of what it would be.” The winery part of the business produces wines from Virginia grapes under both the Michael Shaps and Wineworks labels, packages wines in bottles, bag-in-box format and growlers, and also offers contract winemaking services to approximately two-dozen clients. In addition, the Virginia Wineworks tasting room sells wine Shaps makes in Burgundy, France, under his label, Maison Michael Shaps.
Shaps’ route to owner and manager of this complex venture did not begin with studies at Cornell, Davis, Fresno or a local community college. After he graduated from Skidmore College with a degree in economics and business in 1986, he moved to Boston and soon was managing a restaurant where he also was in charge of the wine program. Intrigued by the wine industry, he moved to Burgundy in 1990, studied at the Lycée Viticole de Beaune and earned a diploma in enology and viticulture.
He worked two harvests in Burgundy and returned to the United States in 1992 to work at a start-up winery in Massachusetts. “I’m an East Coast person,” Shaps told Wines & Vines, “but I wanted to be in Virginia, so I took a job as winemaker at Jefferson Vineyards in 1995. I started consulting and in 2000 created my own brand.”
By 2004, Shaps was back in France to start a boutique wine label with Michel Roucher-Sarrazin, his friend and boss, as partner. They formed Maison Shaps et Roucher-Sarrazin, which specialized in Chardonnays from Meursault and Pinot Noir from several Burgundy appellations. Shaps bought out his partner in 2012, changed the name to Maison Michael Shaps and continues to produce approximately 1,000 cases per year from some of Burgundy’s best vineyard sites and premier cru appellations. He now goes to France about every other month to supervise wine production there, in addition to spending many mornings in Virginia working with his French staff in Meursault over the phone.
When Shaps started Virginia Wineworks in 2007, he and Stafford purchased the former Montdomaine Cellars property, a winery opened by Michael Bowles and a partner in 1981. The Bowles had leased the facility to Horton Vineyards in the 1990s, while Horton’s winery was under construction, and the Montdomaine facility then stood empty for 10 years until Virginia Wineworks took over the building. Bowles still owns a 4-acre vineyard next to the winery that is planted with some of the oldest Chardonnay vines in Virginia.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
November 2015Law Estate Wines
The main hospitality area of the new Law Estate Wines property in Paso Robles, Calif., was designed to blend into its surroundings.The owners of Law Estate Wines made major investments in design, construction and winemaking equipment to produce estate wines of high quality in an exceptionally simple manner.
Located on a ridge in the Peachy Canyon area of the Paso Robles AVA on California’s Central Coast, the winery is an excellent example of the modern, open style that is designed to almost blend into the land around it.
Owners Don and Susie Law purchased the 55-acre property after searching throughout California for a site to produce premium Rhone-style wines with estate-grown grapes. Don Law is the founder and president of a Denver, Colo.-based oil and gas firm. The Laws’ property is near Epoch Estate, which is owned by another Colorado couple that found success in the oil industry before founding a winery.
John Crossland of Vineyard Professional Service and winemaker Scott Hawley designed and developed the vineyard in 2008. More than half of the property is planted with Syrah and Grenache. The rest grows Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Carignane, Tempranillo, Marsanne, Roussanne and Clairette Blanche.
As for the winery, San Francisco, Calif.-based BAR Architects designed the 28,000-square-foot building, and San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based Specialty Construction Inc. (SCI) built it. Grapes arrive at the top level, which is the first stop of a gravity-flow production process.
Laid out in the above graphic and accompanying text are the key steps and equipment in wine production at Law Estate Wines.
1. CRUSH PAD
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
October 2015Epoch Estate Wines
Winemaker Jordan Fiorentini does a punchdown on one of the winery's open-top concrete tanks.In the early 20th century, the world-renowned Polish musician and concert pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski purchased a ranch near Paso Robles, Calif., after visiting the city’s famous hot springs to treat his rheumatism. Paderewski would later grow Zinfandel and other wine grapes on the ranch and send the fruit off to an old winery on nearby York Mountain to be made into wine.
His wines would go on to garner awards at state competitions and earn some acclaim before the onset of Prohibition in 1920. Paderewski was far less successful prospecting for oil on the thousands of acres he owned and last visited the area in 1939.
A century after he bought the parcel in California’s Central Coast, grapes are once more being trucked from the Paderewski Vineyard and turned into wine at the top of York Mountain, but the winery and vineyard are now owned by geologists who came to the area for its calcareous soils rather than mineral hot springs.
York Mountain is now the home of Epoch Estate Wines, which is owned by Bill and Liz Armstrong, who founded Armstrong Oil & Gas in Denver, Colo. In 2004, the Armstrongs purchased 350 acres of land that had been part of Paderewski’s original ranch, and in 2010 they purchased the York Mountain property that had been the site of a winery dating back to the 1880s.
The Armstrongs had planned to build a modern winery near where the defunct historic winery stood, but a separate 20-acre parcel on York Mountain that was already home to a winery went on the market in 2012, and the Armstrongs purchased that instead.
The winery was Stephen’s Cellar, which had been built by Stephen Goldman, whose family purchased the historic York Mountain Winery in 1970 and would later create the York Mountain AVA in 1983. The Goldmans sold the York Mountain Winery property in 2001 to David Weyrich, who also owned Martin & Weyrich Winery, several vineyards and a luxury hotel. Weyrich was forced to sell all of those assets in a bankruptcy brought about by the recession and the failure of several ambitious business ventures. The historic winery was severely damaged in a 2003 earthquake and had sat unused until the Armstrongs recently set about to revive it as Epoch’s new tasting room. By purchasing both properties on York Mountain, the Armstrongs have reunited the site of one of Paso Robles’ oldest vineyards with its first bonded winery.
In addition to the 65-acre Paderewski Vineyard, the Armstrongs also purchased the 30-acre Catapult Vineyard on Paso’s west side and plan to plant another vineyard at the winery.
Modern simplicity
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
September 2015Rack & Riddle
Rack & Riddle has two bottling lines: one for still wines and one for sparkling.Founded as a custom-crush operation for sparkling wine, Rack & Riddle had been paving a unique path since its inception in 2007. Owners Bruce Lundquist and Rebecca Faust were forced to get creative once again in 2013, when Duckhorn Vineyards purchased the site Rack & Riddle had been leasing to make wine in Hopland, Calif.
With the deal announced in August and Duckhorn hoping to move by the end of the same year, Lundquist and Faust got to work strategizing how they could be close to their fruit sources, accommodate increases in case production as well as space for wine aging and do it all before the following year’s harvest.
The answer came in the form of not one but three separate facilities: First, in January 2014 the group took over operation of a winery in Geyserville, Calif., from the Murphy family of Murphy-Goode winery (now owned by Jackson Family Wines). Set in the Alexander Valley of Sonoma County, the location is convenient for clients in California’s North Coast—particularly those growing the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay ubiquitous in premium sparkling wines. The winery backs up to vineyards and counts Trentadue, Clos du Bois and Stryker Sonoma among its neighbors.
Next, they outfitted a warehouse a few blocks from Healdsburg Plaza with equipment for tirage, riddling, bottling and bottle aging. Rack & Riddle moved its equipment to that location during June and July 2014—just in time for harvest. (Previously the site served as a barrel warehouse for Clos du Bois.) Lundquist calls the Healdsburg winemaking facility a 24-hour-per-day operation.
Rack & Riddle general manager Mark Garaventa said the Healdsburg property was just a shell when they acquired it, requiring a complete build-out. Extensive construction included erecting new interior walls, creating new offices, paving, installation of a new exterior tank pad, truck scale, purchasing new tanks (more on that later) and installing the bottling lines. The price for both winemaking sites came in at $8 million, with financing provided by Exchange Bank.
A third location about 1.5 miles north of the Healdsburg winery is devoted strictly to lab services and sparkling wine sitting on tirage—all of the Rack & Riddle’s sparkling wines are made in the traditional method. Garaventa said there are between two and six people working there at any given time.
All of Rack & Riddle’s employees from Hopland were offered positions at the new facilities, and Garaventa said about 80% made the move.
While overseeing 65 full-time employees and facilities at the three sites has its challenges, Lundquist said the separate winemaking areas came with a bonus: the capacity to crush an extra 1,500 tons.
Separate locations, separate capacities
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
August 2015Derby Wine Estates
The Derby tasting room is partly housed beneath the new structure on the right of the historic building.Ten years ago, the city of Paso Robles in California’s Central Coast region was set to say goodbye to a landmark building that had stood since 1922.
Known colloquially as the “old almond growers’ warehouse,” the 11,000-square-foot structure had become a local landmark because of its pink color and signature tower, which was the highest structure in Paso Robles.
But the building had steadily deteriorated since the late 1970s due to neglect, and it was turning into more of an eyesore than a landmark. By 2005 the building had been purchased by the discount grocery chain Smart & Final, which submitted plans to demolish and replace it with a new structure featuring a replica tower. That proposal sparked a public outcry that goaded the city council into commissioning a report that deemed the structure of historic value.
What had been a vacant and dilapidated building became a historic, vacant and dilapidated building with an uncertain future.
That all changed in 2010, when Ray and Pam Derby, the owners of Derby Wine Estates, stepped in to buy the building with the ambitious goal of restoring it to serve as a winery and tasting room for their fledgling wine company.
The restoration took three years and required extensive work to the exterior and interior of the building, finishing in time for the Derbys to crush grapes there in 2014. The top floor of the tower that once stored almonds is now a private tasting lounge, and the bottom floor is used to store hoses and other cellar equipment.
Working within the limits of a renovation
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
July 2015Sinegal Estate Winery
The expanded caves at Sinegal Estate offer more space for wine storage.Sinegal Estate is one of Napa Valley’s newest wineries, but it inherits a long tradition at the St. Helena property it now inhabits. In a similar fashion, owners David and Shelley Sinegal are new to winemaking, but he comes from an extensive background in supervising wine, beer and spirits sales at the wholesale giant Costco.
The Sinegals reportedly paid $17 million in 2013 for the 30-acre property historically known as Inglewood Estate, most recently the home of Wolf Family Vineyards. They invested $8 million to refurbish the property, according to The Wall Street Journal, including revamping hospitality spaces, expanding and re-equipping the production area and digging much larger caves for wine storage.
They hired a high-profile vineyard consultant for their 9.5 acres of red and white Bordeaux grape varieties, and both a winemaker and wine consultant with great experience from Napa Valley wineries including Plumpjack and Joseph Phelps.
Then they supplied their talent with major pieces of new equipment for crush and fermentation from Bucher-Vaslin, Santa Rosa Stainless Steel, Burgstahler Machine Works and other suppliers.
Making the wines
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
June 2015Odette Estate Winery
Purchased by the Plumpjack Group in 2012, the Odette estate is home to a new production facility.Situated at the base of a small ridge beneath the plunging cliffs of the Stags Leap area of Napa Valley, the new winery at the Odette estate is somewhat hard to discern against its scenic backdrop.
The curved line of the structure’s roof and large wave-shaped doors in front of the winery make it blend into the surrounding environment. Only when one approaches the winery up close does its full size become apparent. “What we didn’t want to have was a giant footprint that stood out like a sore thumb,” says winemaker Jeff Owens.
Owens said architect Juan Carlos Fernandez designed the building to resemble the natural flow of the landscape. While it may be discreet in appearance, the winery offers more than 7,000 square feet of production space to facilitate Owens’ small-lot approach to making wine with the estate grapes.
The new winemaking facility, built by Napa-based Grassi & Associates, is one of many renovations and upgrades at the estate that used to be the home of Steltzner Vineyards until the PlumpJack Group purchased it in 2012. Once the sale was final, the new owners quickly got to work on the vineyard as well as turning what had been the Steltzner winery into the new Odette tasting room.
Dick Steltzner first planted vines on the property in 1965 while running his own vineyard management company. Steltzner released his own wine in 1977 and built a winery in 1983.
Steltzner still owns vineyards in Stags Leap and other parts of Napa Valley, and the family retained its wine brand. In talking about the sale to Wines & Vines, Steltzner said maintaining an estate winery would have required a major recapitalization of his investment in the facility, vineyards and hiring new staff. It also would have taken more time from him and his family to promote the brand. “To me it was time to exit, and so we did,” he said.
Terms of the deal were never disclosed. “We came up with this number, and the buyer said, ‘I’ll take it at full price,’” Steltzner says, adding with a chuckle, “We should have had a higher price.”
From what he’s seen so far of the changes at the estate, Steltzner is sure he sold to the right buyer. “I think they are going to be a credit to the Stags Leap District in that they are going to give it a new dimension of quality.”
Changes in the vineyard
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
May 2015Buena Vista Winery
The Buena Vista Winery caves were restored by Jean-Charles Boisset to appear as they did in the 1850s.At the site of Northern California’s oldest winery, years of work costing untold millions received an abrupt and violent test in the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 24, 2014. The severe shaking of a 6.0-magnitude earthquake woke Jean-Charles Boisset in his hilltop residence in Napa Valley as well as Tom Blackwood, who endured an even more violent experience in his west Napa home. After both men both made sure their families were safe, their thoughts immediately turned to Sonoma Valley and the Buena Vista Winery, which was founded in 1857.
Boisset Family Estates, the company owned by Boisset’s family, had just spent a fortune restoring the winery, and Blackwood—who has worked for Buena Vista for more than a decade—personally oversaw restoration of the dilapidated building into a working winery.
Blackwood recounted that morning to Wines & Vines about six months later. A native San Franciscan, he said he was riding a bus on the Bay Bridge when a section of the bridge collapsed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, yet he was more scared during the Napa quake. The fear turned to worry when he began thinking about the stone winery in Sonoma. Those concerns were put to rest just after daybreak, when he heard from workers who arrived to find that the walls were still standing. “We had people here first thing in the morning, and the building had been tested, and it held up and it did wonderful and thank God,” Blackwood said.
Without the restoration, which was completed in 2012, Blackwood is certain the winery would have been turned into a pile of rubble. “This would have been the story of the Napa quake. It would have been how this historic winery collapsed, because there’s no doubt these walls would have fallen in.”
What prevented those walls from falling in was a steel skeleton that had been almost surgically installed inside the stone walls, which are more than 150 years old and have suffered through several decades of neglect as well as a few other earthquakes. It was, in fact, the 1989 earthquake that had left the building shuttered and empty until the Boisset family purchased it in 2011. The acquisition by the family that owns one of the largest wine companies in France is now described as the conclusion of Buena Vista’s “corporate period,” in which it changed hands five times between 2000 and 2011.
A cradle of California winemaking
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
March 2015Technical Spotlight: Lazy Creek Vineyards
Standing outside the old wood winery in Philo, Calif., that used to house Lazy Creek Vineyards, winemaker Christy Griffith Ackerman recalls visiting the estate when it was owned and operated by the husband-and-wife team of Josh and Mary Beth Chandler.
The new Lazy Creek Winery building was completed in 2013 and currently produces 6,500 cases.Ackerman remembers a simple tasting bar attached to the rustic winery that had space for a few stainless steel tanks, some barrels and the large, oak oval fermentation and aging tanks that had been installed by the original owners who immigrated to the United States from Switzerland.
The Chandlers and a partner had purchased it from the founders, Theresia and Hans Kobler, in the late 1990s. The Koblers purchased the Mendocino County property in 1969 and established the vineyard with Gewurztraminer, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir a few years later. When the Chandlers took over, they maintained the winery’s rustic vibe and limited production before selling the property in 2008 to Don and Rhonda Carano, the owners and founders of Ferrari-Carano Vineyards & Winery, which is based in nearby Sonoma County.
Today, the old wooden winery still stands, but Ackerman manages a modern winery equipped for the production of small-lot, premium Pinot Noir wines bottled under both the Ferrari-Carano and Lazy Creek labels. The new facility is shaped like an “L” and wraps around the original winery, with the long part of the “L” housing the fermentation cellar, wine lab and offices; the short part contains a warehouse, bottling area and tasting room. Construction on the winery lasted through 2012, and during that year’s harvest the Lazy Creek wines were made at Ferrari-Carano’s red wine-focused Mountain Winery near Geyserville, Calif.
The first vintage for the new winery came in 2013, and Ackerman said everything has run smooth since the start. “It was amazing,” she said, “2013 and 2014 have worked out perfectly.”
Ackerman helped design the winery. She said she and the Caranos went through several plans and had to make the pivotal decision about a tasting room. “I think ultimately what led us to this (design) was cost, and we were also debating whether to build a tasting room,” she said. “When that was decided yes, we were going to, this whole thing—this L-shaped building—made sense.”
From ranch to vineyard
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
February 2015B Cellars in Napa Valley
As direct-to-consumer sales become more and more vital for boutique wineries, many are enhancing their consumer experience to attempt to become prime destinations. Perhaps the ultimate example is Castello di Amorosa in Calistoga, Calif., with its re-imagined 13th-century Tuscan castle. Just 15 miles south, B Cellars in Oakville shares the same goal with a totally different design rendition.
B Cellars recently opened after its operations moved from the site of the old Silver Rose Inn and Winery in Calistoga, which is soon to become a resort managed by Four Seasons with an integral winery.
It’s not surprising that every aspect of B Cellars is aimed at enhancing the experience of demanding visitors, for co-founder Duffy Keys spent 21 years with the Four Seasons luxury hotel chain before partnering with Jim Borsack, who owned a luxury leather company that appealed to upscale buyers.
The appeal extends beyond the visitor center to the newly planted vines, fruit trees and gardens to the inviting production winery and unusually expansive caves.
B Cellars may be the only winery in Napa Valley where the elegant wine tasting room is built around a demonstration kitchen, a reflection of its emphasis on pairing food and wine. And the room itself—with floor-to-ceiling windows that can be opened to the vineyard—seems the epitome of wine country luxury with its polished concrete counter and distressed hardwood floors. It’s more like a living room adjacent to an open kitchen in a Napa Valley estate than a typical tasting room.
Neither Keys nor Borsack had been in the wine business before they founded B Cellars. They met at a Fourth of July barbecue in 2002, when both were exploring new career interests in the wine industry. In addition to sharing the same tastes in wine, the duo discovered they were on parallel missions to acquire vineyard property.
Borsack spent more than 30 years as co-owner of El Portal, a chain of designer leather goods, handbags and luggage stores with 125 stores worldwide. He also orchestrated the rollout of the entire Swatch watch franchise business.
In 2000, he sold his share of El Portal to learn viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis
Keys had been a senior-level executive with Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts. He oversaw operations, marketing, public relations and finance in the United States, Canada and the Asia-Pacific region. He later studied viticulture and enology, also through UC Davis.
In spring 2003, the partners formed B Cellars (B for Brix) based on two principles: to produce artisan wines from multiple vineyards and to develop distinct flavors by blending wines from complementary varieties.
They soon met Kirk Venge, son of veteran Napa winemaker Nils Venge and an accomplished winemaker in his own right. Kirk Venge was named “One of the top 20 new winemakers in the world” by Food & Wine magazine in October 2005 and has been B Cellars’ winemaker from the beginning.
B Cellars made wine at Robert Pecota Winery before the Jackson family bought the property, then for 10 years at Silenus Winery near the city of Napa.
Meanwhile, the partners opened a tasting room at the Silver Rose Inn in Calistoga as the public face for the resort proposed by Bald Mountain Development.
Four Seasons, which would manage the property, wanted a working winery at the resort, but unfortunately existing entitlements had expired, and the project faced local controversy as well as a two-year wait for an election.
The resort ultimately won, but Keys and Borsack had to consider alternatives and found a 12-acre horse ranch (Vintage Oak Ranch) owned by Lisa Miller. It’s in the heart of Napa Cabernet country, and nearby wineries include Silver Oak, PlumpJack, Groth, Gargiulo, Rudd and Screaming Eagle.
After acquiring the property, B Cellars obtained its permit March 6, 2012, and broke ground at the end of June 2013. The architect was Hart Howerton of San Francisco, Calif., and the general contractor was Facility Development Corp. of Santa Rosa, Calif.
The winery hosted a group of country club managers Aug. 18, 2014. “We opened here before construction is starting at the resort in Calistoga,” Keys noted.
The visitor experience
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
January 2015Lodi's Oak Farm Vineyards
Oak Farm VineyardsThe new winery and tasting room at Oak Farm Vineyards provide further evidence that California’s Lodi AVA is shedding its jug wine reputation and transitioning into a destination wine region.
The shift began when grapegrowers started producing and bottling their own wines with labels bearing the Lodi appellation. That move was followed by smaller, independent wineries opening in the sprawling AVA in San Joaquin County, Calif. Today those wineries are upgrading their hospitality areas, and the newest producers boast sophisticated winemaking equipment and are designed to host discriminating wine consumers.
Oak Farm Vineyards’ new winery is located north of the city of Lodi, features 7,000 square feet of production space including a covered crush pad with new processing equipment and a tank room equipped with stainless steel Albrigi tanks imported from Italy. The winery is owned by the Panella family, which has grown nuts, grapes and cherries in the Central Valley for decades. About 12 years ago, Dan Panella, who is the managing partner of the winery, said his family sold a walnut orchard and used the proceeds to buy the historic DeVries farmstead ranch to be the site of their planned winery. Panella lives on the property, and his parents live down the road.
The family launched their brand in 2009 and made wine in custom-crush operations including Estate Crush, located in downtown Lodi. A few years later they hired Chad Joseph to be the full-time winemaker and help design and build the estate winery.
Joseph has worked in Lodi since 2001, and in addition to Oak Farm he helps make wine at several other wineries. He said Oak Farm’s new winery, which officially opened to the public in late October 2014, represents the next stage in Lodi’s development as a wine region.
“I think it’s an example of long-time families in this area investing in the future—and it’s happening, the movement is happening in Lodi,” he said. “The grapes are good, the public is taking notice, the wines are getting good reviews, and I think it’s about time that places like this pop up in an area that really has been the grape breadbasket for California wines for over 100 years.”
Joseph started in winemaking at E. & J. Gallo Winery after studying botany and chemistry at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. While at school, he was introduced to wine by a friend from Sonoma County, Calif.
“It was a good fit for the background I had. I grew up in Visalia around table grapes, and so it just seemed logical with the chemistry and botany and a love of food and wine,” Joseph said. “I like to work, and there’s a lot of work in making wine, so it seemed the logical thing to get in to.”
Streamline production, minimize labor
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
January 2015Vinitech-Sifel Presents Innovation Awards
Special Jury Prize: Mini-digger with pile driver, Duvigneau et FilsA new grape harvester practically turns on a dime. The first automatic liquid-transfer controller senses the differences between must, wine, lees and water. A newly adapted wine press uses inert gas for red wine pressing.
These and 16 other innovative products, processes and technologies were honored with awards from Vinitech-Sifel, the international viticulture and winemaking expo, in conjunction with its Dec. 2-4 event in Bordeaux, France. The judges said that the key trend to emerge from the 2014 Innovation Awards was precision farming, which is now a reality in viticulture.
Judges for the Vinitech-Sifel Innovation Awards meted out one Special Jury Prize, three Gold Awards, two Silver Awards, three Bronze Awards and 10 Commendations. What follows is an account of the awards with descriptions provided by the judges.
Mini-digger with pile driver,
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
December 2014So You Want to Build a Small Urban Winery?
Covenant created an industrial chic tasting room with small kitchen, topped with offices above.Since 2001, I’ve been making wine in other people’s wineries. And I’ve been in the wine business for 25 years. My own California brand, Covenant (which my wife Jodie and I co-own with Napa vintner Leslie Rudd), has been in business since 2003. So last year, when we were in a position to build our own small winery, I thought I knew what to do. I did, more or less. But I learned some lessons along the way that should be of interest to anyone planning a similar move.
From wine country to the big city
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
November 2014Raising the Bar in Sonoma Valley
Red grape clusters arrive at Hamel Family Wines in 40-pound lugs and are destemmed before hand sorting and whole-berry fermentations. Photo: Kate NagleWhat started with a weekend home and an acre of Cabernet vines has grown into one of the most modern and well-equipped wineries in Sonoma Valley, supplied by more than 90 acres of vineyards.
Hamel Family Wines owner and founder George F. Hamel Jr. says in 2006 he and his wife were looking for a place to escape to from their fogbound home in San Francisco, for a little sun in the summer. The couple eventually found a home in Kenwood, Calif., that also had a 1-acre vineyard planted to Cabernet Sauvignon. The Hamels bought the place in September of that year and had just enough time to harvest the grapes and make wine.
That first harvest produced about 300 cases but also sparked an interest in Hamel to solve the riddle of the wine business. “We did love wine, and what intrigued me at the time was why, in a crowded market, do some people consistently succeed and others not? How do you differentiate yourself? The kind of challenge on finding a business model that could be replicated was interesting,” he says.
As co-founder of ValueAct Capital Management, a San Francisco-based hedge fund currently managing around $14 billion in investments, Hamel had the resources to start a wine business, but it was the prospect of a family endeavor that created momentum for a winery.
After the Hamels made their own wine, their second-youngest son, John B. Hamel II, discovered home brewing while attending the University of Wisconsin, Madison. John Hamel had planned to pursue a master’s degree in writing but decided to take a year to gain work experience and joined the World Wide Organization of Organic Farms, a work-study program that offers assignments throughout the world. John Hamel’s first post was in the Napa Valley, where he discovered an interest in winemaking and grapegrowing. “For John, the combination of science, art and not working at a desk, all of those things got his interest,” says his father, George Hamel.
With property in Sonoma and experience making wine, the Hamels began to seriously consider a wine business. George Hamel, however, wanted John to learn as much as possible about winemaking to ensure his son was really committed to it. “We said if we’re going to do something you need to get as much knowledge as you can as quickly as you can.”
That education included a winemaking certificate from the University of California, Davis, as well as an internship at a winery in Australia and then helping to produce Hamel Family Wines at a custom-crush facility in Sonoma.
Family business takes shape
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
October 2014Choosing Santa Maria for Pinot
Grape processing and fermentation take place at higher levels of the gravity-flow winery. The roofline of these levels can be seen to the left of the winery's main entrance and tasting room, pictured in the center.Finished in June 2013, the new Presqu’ile Winery is several things at once. It’s an impressive piece of architecture and design as well as a showcase of top-of-the-line winemaking equipment and the manifestation of the owners’ vision of an estate winery.
Yet it’s also emblematic of the confidence the company’s president, Matt Murphy, and his family have in the Santa Maria Valley as the best place to make Pinot Noir in the United States. “I prefer the style of wines that we get from Santa Maria Valley over anywhere else, and for my money I think it’s the best place on the West Coast for Pinot,” Murphy says. “I’m constantly being vigorously debated on that, but this is all about what we like and what we think we can make work, and this is where we think we can do that.”
Presqu’ile (press-KEEL) is located near the small town of Orcutt, Calif., a few miles south of the city of Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County on California’s Central Coast. The name is Creole for “almost an island,” or peninsula, and was also the name of a Murphy family retreat on the Gulf Coast that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
The Murphys’ roots are in the South, where the family founded an oil company that grew into the extraction and exploration giant Murphy Oil Corp., which is based in El Dorado, Ark., but has operations in oil and gas across the globe. The Murphys also have investments in forestry and agriculture.
Matt Murphy’s father, R. Madison Murphy, is a director and former chairman of the corporation’s board. Matt Murphy, however, took a slightly different path after graduating from the University of Colorado with a degree in cellular biology.
Murphy says his parents always enjoyed wine at home, and he thinks that sparked his initial interest in wine that led to taking an internship working in the vineyards at Signorello Estate in Napa Valley in 2004. “That really kind of increased my interest in wine,” he said.
His parents also were investors in the small producer Ambullneo Vineyards in Lompoc, Calif., so in 2006 Murphy and his girlfriend (now wife) moved west from Colorado to dive into the wine industry. While doing the dirty and unglamorous work in the cellar at Ambullneo, Murphy met winemaker Dieter Cronje from South Africa.
Spending more time in winemaking further convinced Murphy he wanted to make his career in wine, and it also helped him define a vision of a family-owned winery. “I worked three harvests with (Dieter), and I liked it enough to talk my parents into leaving that project and starting our own, which was always the goal, I think,” he said. “The natural progression of this was always going to be to build our own place.”
Modern gravity flow
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
August 2014Growing Sustainably
An 1880s barn was the original wine-production facility for Hunt Country Vineyards.When Art and Joyce Hunt moved back to the Hunt family farm west of Branchport, N.Y., in 1973, the Finger Lakes region was a very different place than it is today. While small family farms had prospered for many years, and the towns of Geneva and Canandaigua had become centers for processing locally produced foods, by the early 1970s it was much cheaper to grow and process food in California than in upstate New York. Processing plants closed and both farmers and food processors went broke. At that time, “sustainability” for a farmer meant only the farm’s survival for another year; most farmers had little concern for the impact of farming or building practices on the environment.
The Finger Lakes has changed in many ways during the past 40 years. Vineyards that used to grow grapes for jelly, jams and juice now either sell grapes to wineries or have added winemaking facilities of their own. In 1975 the state had a total of 19 wineries; today New York state has 319 wineries, with 131 of those wineries located in the Finger Lakes region. The wine industry has had a major economic impact on tourism and economic growth in the region, and along with that growth has come an increasing concern with the environmental impact of both grapegrowing and winemaking. Art Hunt and Hunt Country Vineyards have become leaders in the move towards sustainable practices, in the current sense of those practices that are environmentally responsible, employee-friendly, economically viable and practical, as well as safe for the long term.
How did the Hunts make the change from dairy farm to a 10,000-case winery with a focus on sustainability? Lots of hard work and the desire to take better care of their land—and the planet in general—than had happened in the past.
First steps
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
July 2014Villa San-Juliette Expands Estate Production
The new crush pad was still being finished during the harvest of 2013.At the start of 2013, winemaker Matt Ortman’s crush pad was an unfinished dirt lot, and the winery’s fermentation tanks were resting on the ground. He quickly went from being a new hire at Villa San-Juliette Vineyard & Winery to overseeing the first phase of a large expansion to the winery’s production capacity. “Mission one was to get processing on site,” he said.
The winery had been making most of its wine at a custom-crush facility, but Ortman, who had done some consulting for the winery, was hired to start estate production while maintaining quality. One of Ortman’s key decisions was to install a Pulsair System to manage fermentation in each of the winery’s larger tanks.
“While there was some stress with getting the winery online before the grapes came in,” Ortman said, “I think exciting is a better word for it.” Some of the excitement included “MacGyver-ing” a hopper for whole-cluster pressing Pinot Gris when the purchased hopper was stuck in a shipping crate on a loading dock somewhere.
“We were a brand new team working in a brand new winery with fruit that none of us had worked with before. The learning curve was massive,” Ortman said, “but our production family was so solid and enthusiastic that when surprises came up they were met with excitement and a ‘let’s get it done right’ attitude.”
Ortman said he had to schedule grape delivery around when construction crews would be bringing tanks online. He and his team had to learn how to operate new equipment right after it arrived at the winery. The experience wasn’t easy, but Ortman said it provided a great trial by fire experience to thoroughly understand the crush pad and estate grapes.
Family background in winemaking
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
June 2014Winemaking in a Cave
Holman Ranch Winery is built entirely inside a cave on a hillside above Carmel Valley, Calif. Photo: McCullough Photography.Holman Ranch in Carmel Valley, Calif., is a tripartite enterprise. The original guest ranch and hacienda, built in 1928 and carefully restored by the current owners, now serve as an event venue run by hospitality director Hunter Lowder. The riding stables and horse-training operation are rented by several horse owners and trainers. And the 19 acres of estate vineyards and cave winery are the passion of Nick Elliott, Lowder’s husband.
“My mother and father always wanted to own a vineyard and winery, as they spent many vacations biking and hiking through Tuscany and Provence,” Lowder explains. “When my mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, they decided to move quickly to make that dream come true. They started looking for properties, and we stumbled upon Holman Ranch. We purchased it in June 2006 with the intent to plant vineyards and olive groves and build a winery.”
Since the Lowders were not farmers or winemakers, they sought out expert professionals. Vineyard consultant Todd Kenyon studied at the University of California, Davis, and also has worked with Bernardus Vineyards & Winery in Carmel Valley. Winemaker Greg Vita, another Davis alum, spent many years with Spring Mountain Vineyards in Napa Valley before becoming a consulting winemaker in California’s Monterey and Santa Cruz Mountains areas.
Planting vineyards
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
May 2014Growing Into the Estate
About 75% of M2 Wines production is sold direct to consumer through the tasting room or to wine club members. Photo by Randy Caparoso.Inspiration is derived from wine in many different ways.
For Layne Montgomery, founding winemaker of M2 Wines, one of the wines that first stoked his passion for winemaking was undistinguished, yet still proved to be revelatory for someone who knew little about wine.
“My first glass of wine I ever had: I was 19 years old, in college, and it was pink Catawba,” Montgomery recalled while tasting through a few barrels in the barrel room of his new winery, located north of Lodi, Calif. “No offense to them but…you know (I was) born and raised Southern Baptist. Momma don’t dance; daddy don’t rock and roll, and my sister still thinks I’m going to hell for making the devil’s Kool-Aid. But I knew there was enough hype in the world about wine that there had to be better s*** than this.”
That ordinary wine sparked an intellectual curiosity in Montgomery that compelled him to go on and try thousands of wines. After college Montgomery, whose voice carries a slight drawl from growing up in Missouri and Arkansas, worked in television production in Arkansas, Colorado and Arizona for 15 years before spending seven years in marketing in the Sacramento, Calif., area while maintaining a steadfast pursuit of gaining wine knowledge.
In 1983, while still living in the Midwest, he flew out to Napa, Calif., by himself to visit wineries and taste. While at home he made regular trips to the Brown Derby in Springfield, Mo., to find new wines. “I never even considered getting into the wine business; but you know, now I can’t imagine doing anything else,” he said.
Montgomery first started making wine around 1999. A 5-gallon carboy of wine was soon followed by a barrel, then three barrels, which soon grew to more than seven.
He settled in the Lodi area to be near affordable grapes, and he and his original partner (whose last name also began with an “M,” hence the name M2) produced their first vintage of 750 cases at a custom-crush location in 2004.
The following year they leased an empty warehouse in an industrial area on the eastern edge of Lodi and set up shop as a winery. Montgomery bolstered his skills with classes at the University of California, Davis, and after a few years he bought out his original partner.
Montgomery says he has an intense passion for winemaking, and that narrow focus almost cost him the company. In 2008, brothers Terry and Ted Woodruff and Steve Stiles bought partner stakes in the winery and kept it afloat. Both Woodruff brothers play an active role in the winery, and Terry Woodruff is the CEO. Assistant winemaker Mark Sanford is also a member of the board of directors, as is partner Brian Pickard.
“I was just obsessed with making wine. I didn’t pay attention too much to the other part, and they came in and took control of the financial situation and got everything going correctly,” Montgomery said.
By 2013, the winery had built a strong base of support through its 800-member wine club, good direct-to-consumer sales and a distribution agreement to send almost a third of the winery’s production to Asia.
M2 Wines is now making around 4,000 cases per year. Future growth and winemaking operations were cramped by the tiny warehouse space that also didn’t offer many amenities for folks doing wine tasting.
After looking for property for some time, Montgomery found fallow farmland on which he could build an estate winery. The winery was designed by John Vierra, who grew up in Lodi and is the son of Vernon Vierra, the winemaker and owner of nearby St. Jorge Winery.
“I wanted a tasting room experience that was indoor/outdoor in the middle of a vineyard kind of thing,” Montgomery said. “And I was thinking in the line of 12-foot ceilings and mall doors, but he came up with this, which I think is pretty spectacular.”
Indoor/outdoor tasting room
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
April 2014The Winery of the Future
By collecting CO2 from fermentations at the University of California, Davis, teaching winery, the gas can be converted to other side products or used for carbonation or biofuels.While a few winemakers have consciously adopted a Luddite-like anti-technology position, most recognize that science and technology have led to better wines. Few places have done more to further the science of winemaking than the University of California, Davis, and its research and teaching winery and new sustainable research facilities (see “On Campus, Off the Grid” in the July 2013 issue of Wines & Vines) are already perfecting many old processes as they test new ideas.
The chair of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis is David E. Block, a chemical engineering Ph.D. who is also a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science there. Block formerly worked in another field utilizing fermentation, biopharmaceuticals.
He, along with another chemical engineer and veteran V&E professor, Dr. Roger Boulton, have devoted much time to considering the winery of the future. Block presented their thoughts at the 2013 Wine Executive Program conducted by the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.
The focus of the talk was incorporating new technology into winemaking, both in making wine and in improving management of utilities and waste.
The emphasis was solving key issues facing the wine industry, increasing wine quality, reducing processing costs and increasing sustainability while better managing natural resources. New technology can help meet all of those goals. This article summarizes Block’s comments.
The technologies that improve the winemaking process—and also improve wines—arise from a number of sources including R&D with a specific goal and the application of fortuitous inventions developed for other purposes. The wine industry can apply techniques developed for other industries including dairy processing, beer making and pharmaceuticals.
Fortunately, many changes can improve the wine while reducing cost; saving money doesn’t necessarily compromise quality.
Data helps decide harvest
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
March 2014From an A-frame to Modern Winemaking
.jpg)
The A-frame building that housed the original winery is still used for wine tasting.In 1974, Curtis and Martha Bourgeois bought the cottage and lived there with their family while they built a home nearby. Several years later, one of the Bourgeois’ sons had the idea to plant a vineyard. The vineyard soon supported a home-winemaking hobby that quickly grew into a small winery, and by 1991 the winery was producing several hundred cases of wine. The family purchased an old brick building that used to house a restaurant and an abandoned hotel off Highway 70 to house the fast-growing winery.
The winery gained regional distribution and a strong following at the tasting room, but winemaking was split between cramped quarters inside and an outside area.
Winemaker Jacob Holman joined Les Bourgeois Vineyards in 1999 as a part-time staffer in the tasting room, he eventually moved into the lab and then production. For much of his time at Les Bourgeois, Holman was the one-man team in the cellar. He said that making wine outside may work in California or Washington, but it’s a little challenging in central Missouri.
During the summer, the winery had to spend a lot of money cooling the tanks down, and in the winter valves would freeze and Holman said he’d have to schedule routine cellar work around the weather. “There were times you couldn’t even get to the tanks,” he said.
By the time the company was ready to expand, Holman was the winemaker and played a key role in planning the expansion. He said he wanted a smooth flow of grapes from receiving and crushing through fermentation and bottling.
Aiming for smooth work flow
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
February 2014Renovated Winery in the Livermore Valley
A decade ago, Lisa and Lothar Maier decided that when they retired, they’d grow a few grapes and make some wine. Since they lived near the Livermore Valley wine country in California and liked it there, they figured that would be the spot. But first, they needed a new house.
While they were house hunting, a gem of a vineyard parcel came on the market, prompting them to switch gears and bump up the wine project. It turned out most of the vines needed replanting, so they started from scratch, in the meantime making a bit of wine in alternating proprietor facilities at Wente Vineyards. They drew up plans for a new winery facility on the vineyard property, and just as they were days away from pulling the building permits, an existing winery facility, just the right size, showed up for sale, so they scooped it up and switched gears again.
The only problem with their new acquisition was that it came with another 20 acres of vineyards, capacity they didn’t yet have any use for, so they leased the vines to Wente. The winery was renovated and filled with new equipment, and Las Positas Vineyards went into full production in 2011. Just in time, they snagged a small warehouse for their case goods for a song, completing the end-to-end package.
They still haven’t found that new house.
Reworked facilities
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
January 2014Mondavis Start Over at Continuum Estate
The paint is hardly dry at Continuum Estate winery, the latest chapter in the continuing saga of the Mondavi winemaking family.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
December 2013Ready for the 21st Century
When the Deford family bought Boordy Vineyards from Philip and Jocelyn Wagner in 1980, moving the winery from Riderwood, Md., to their farm in Hydes, Md., the winery came with two horizontal basket presses, three small stainless steel tanks, some large barrels, a couple of pumps, a six-spout filler and a corker. Today the original barn at the Deford farm is still in use as the brand’s main tasting room, but the entire winery—including vineyards, production facility and marketing orientation—has undergone a complete makeover.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
November 2013The Winemaker's Cave Dwelling
TJ Rodgers was already six years and three properties into his winemaking hobby when he began designing the hillside structure that would eventually become a state-of-the-art production facility for his Pinot Noir label, Clos de la Tech. By the time he finished the design three years later, it’s safe to say the venture was no longer a hobby.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
October 2013A Winery With Personality
You can take the restaurateur out of the kitchen, but you can’t take the kitchen out of the restaurateur.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
September 2013Finding the Right Fit
In winemaking, as in many of life’s other pursuits, it’s the simple things that often matter the most. Michael Browne, winemaker and one of the founders of Sonoma County’s Kosta Browne Wines, knew he wanted the company’s new winery to have three things: barrel storage, hot water hose stations and drains.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
August 2013Finding Space for Still Red Wines
Many of the wineries built today start with a clean slate, a talented architect and a pile of money. It may not be as glamorous, but finding a new use for a prosaic existing building can also result in a facility ideal for making fine wine.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
July 2013On Top of Daou Mountain
Daniel Daou can’t stop talking about the dirt.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
June 2013Seeing Red at Trinchero
Mario Monticelli, winemaker at the Trinchero Napa Valley winery, discusses picking decisions and grape processing at the facility focused on producing quality red wines in this video by winery staff. Click the image above to watch the video.
Trinchero Napa Valley is the prestige brand of the Trinchero Family Estates portfolio, and its new winery reflects that position—as well as the financial resources contributed by its more popular wines, like the famous Sutter Home white Zinfandel.READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
May 2013A 'Micro-Winery Gone Haywire'
When winemaker Jeff Brinkman started working in 2006 for Rhys Vineyards in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, the wines were being made in owner Kevin Harvey’s garage in Portola Valley, Calif. The next year, production was moved to some rented space, then later to a large warehouse. The warehouse had plenty of room, but there were drawbacks, chiefly a lack of proper insulation. Clearly, a purpose-built winery was in order.
READ MORE »Technical Spotlight
January 2013Sophisticated Simplicity
It’s the end of another vintage at Paul Hobbs Winery. On a sparkling day in late October, cellar workers are giving the crush pad equipment a thorough wash down before packing it away for winter.READ MORE »CURRENT COLUMN ARTICLES ยป
