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.

The incessant spraying of hoses is punctuated by the slams of stainless steel tank doors and the clanging of valves, clamps and other equipment being replaced on the fittings board. While the winery is filled with activity, it’s the measured pace of a winery crew that knows the last of the fruit is in the cellar and another vintage is winding down.

Paul Hobbs, however, is still busy. After he says his farewells to a film crew wrapping up a shoot, he greets another visitor for a tour, after which the wine critic Robert Parker is visiting to taste the wines from Hobbs’ new Cahors project.

Parker will be the first person in the United States to review the wines that will be imported through Paul Hobbs Imports, which Hobbs and partners Andrea Marchiori and Luis Barraud established to import bottles of their Vina Cobos wines and other wines from Argentina. In addition to the import company that sells around 75,000 cases, Hobbs also oversees his value-driven CrossBarn winery, which produces 35,000 cases per year. His eponymous winery now produces around 20,000 cases per year. 

That would be plenty to keep most winemaking entrepreneurs busy, but Hobbs is still racking up frequent flier miles consulting for 35 wineries scattered in Argentina, South Africa, Canada, France and Armenia. In the United States, Hobbs works with a few wineries including Early Mountain Vineyards in Madison, Va.

It’s a busy schedule indeed, but Hobbs is not distracted as he stands on the crush pad describing some of the practices that he feels help his wines stand out from the pack. Hobbs advocates a gentle, minimalist approach to processing grapes. He says gentleness is required at the very moment when clusters are removed from the vine. Instead of the hooked blades that are preferred by most vineyard crews, Hobbs insists workers use scissors to ensure a clean pick and that no berries are damaged as the clusters are harvested.

Hobbs’ staff also supervises each pick to make sure quality standards are met and the priority isn’t to quickly fill bins to boost the tonnage. “We have a policy that we cover every pick,” he says. This approach was somewhat novel when Hobbs was starting out in the early 1990s, and viticulture and winemaking were almost totally separate in California.

Hobbs came to California after growing up on his family’s farm in upstate New York. He nurtured a nascent passion for wine while at the University of Notre Dame and ultimately followed it to the University of California, Davis.

His research on barrel aging earned him a post at Robert Mondavi Winery, and that led to stints as winemaker at some of Napa’s other top wineries. Consulting work took him to Argentina, where he saw opportunity to express the quality of the terroir by introducing modern viticulture and winemaking.

Estate and purchased fruit

Paul Hobbs wines are sourced from California vineyards in the Russian River Valley of Sonoma County and the Napa Valley. Hobbs produces Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and a small amount of Syrah under the Paul Hobbs label.

In summer 2013, Hobbs announced his purchase of the Tourmaline Vineyard in the Coombsville AVA of southern Napa County, Calif. The property includes 63 acres of Bordeaux varieties, and Hobbs renamed it the Nathan Coombs Estate to honor a pioneering Napa Valley settler.

Not all of his vineyard projects have been as smooth. In June 2013, Sonoma County officials halted work on a vineyard development site after discovering plants had been removed from a riparian area. That particular project already had stoked the ire of nearby residents concerned about vineyard development near a school. A group has since filed a lawsuit over the project alleging the county should have required a more rigorous environmental review.

A spokesman for the winery released a statement announcing the winery will “aggressively” fight the lawsuit and that the vineyard development is now in full compliance with the law.

Similar issues arose in 2011 around Hobbs’ conversion of a former Christmas tree farm and after he cut down trees for another vineyard.

Despite the permit snafus and protests, Hobbs owns 31.5 acres in Sonoma County. His vineyards include the 14-acre Katherine Lindsay Estate, which is named after Hobbs’ great-grandmother and where the Paul Hobbs winery is located. The winery’s first crush was in 2003.

In addition to the estate vines, Hobbs sources grapes from Richard Dinner Vineyard, Ritchie Vineyard and Kick Ranch in Sonoma County and Hyde Vineyards, Stagecoach Vineyard and Beckstoffer’s Dr. Crane, Las Piedras and To Kalon in Napa County.

The winery was one of the first to be designed by Howard Backen. Hobbs said he envisioned a set of buildings each with its own purpose rather than a vast structure containing everything. “I can tell you how difficult it was to find a designer who could understand that,” he said. “They all wanted to build it under one roof.”

The main fermentation hall is built with one side into a small hill to help keep it cool. Other rooms contain barrel aging, offices and a lab. A sleek and modern hospitality area on the top of the hill into which the winery is built was constructed in 2006.

Slow and gentle on the crush pad

Crews harvest all of Hobbs’ grapes by hand at night and deliver them to the winery in MacroBins. Carlsen & Associates and P&L Specialties equipped the crush pad. A forklift operator dumps bins into a hopper that feeds an elevated conveyor, along which workers perform cluster sorting. Above the crush pad, wires stretch from the main fermentation building to an office complex. During the hot days of summer, shade cloths hang from the wires.

Sorted clusters either drop into bins for whole-cluster fermentation or receive a gentle destemming in a Vega destemmer. Processed grapes then run through a Le Trieur vibrating sorting table.

Bins or 1-ton gondolas collect the processed grapes.  A forklift dumps the bins directly into open-top tanks, while a Konecranes crane lifts the gondolas and manipulates them into position to be dumped into tanks.

Megan Baccitich, the director of winemaking, says the strategy on the crush pad is to maintain a slow but steady stream of grapes into the winery instead of always striving to increase the tons per hour rate. Baccitich grew up in the Sonoma County town of Healdsburg, Calif., and earned an enology degree from California State University, Fresno, before joining Paul Hobbs as assistant winemaker in 2006. Hobbs promoted her to the post of director of winemaking in 2013.

“We like to control the process, and we decide when anything happens,” Hobbs said, adding that the goal is to always see where they can remove a step or equipment in the process to keep it gentle and simple.

Only spontaneous fermentations

Most lots undergo a cold soak before fermentation is allowed to commence. The winery staff doesn’t add any yeasts or enzymes to the tanks, but Hobbs is hardly a zealot when it comes to yeast and fermentation. “The nomenclature is misleading anyway: natural, native, indigenous. I think true native or wild yeast are not alcohol-tolerant, so wild yeast is a very crude thing to call that, and I don’t know how you would define wild anyway,” he says. “Natural yeast is ridiculous; they’re all natural, just some have grown up in a different way—in a commercial way—so indigenous is what we like to call it.”

A lab did conduct some DNA analysis on the yeast in the Paul Hobbs winery to isolate and identify it in hope of producing an in-house strain, but Baccitich said Hobbs didn’t feel it was worth the time needed to complete the project. “We didn’t pursue it any further than that because we’re not wanting a freeze-dried or cultured strain here.”

Once fermentation begins, cellar workers perform regular punch downs on the Pinot Noir lots, and the Cabernet Sauvignon is managed with pump overs and delastages. The punch downs are facilitated with a pneumatic device set in a rail above the tanks. “I used to do it myself all by hand, and then I’d go to San Francisco and sell wine—sweaty as I was—and then I’d come back and do the punch downs in the evening,” Hobbs recalled.

He said he doesn’t think the punch-down device does a better job than a person of breaking up and submerging a cap, but it does make the job easier and ensures that the cap receives consistent treatment. “Not every worker is dedicated and passionate, and this makes it easy for them, so you get a very high-quality punch down.”

While each of the Santa Rosa Stainless Steel and Silver State Stainless tanks is equipped with glycol jackets and temperature control, Hobbs said he doesn’t like to cool or heat must aside from giving it a little push with heat to get a fermentation started. Fermentation temperatures are monitored and can be controlled with a Logix system.

“We may assist them, maybe nudge them a little bit because we did a cold soak…but then after that we like them to carry on the rest of it, and then as the fermentation cools off the design of this tank is that there’s enough heat loss,” he said. “There’s a little bit of a thermo-dynamic relationship, but it’s a relationship that we’ve calculated from (tank) size to the rate of fermentation to the amount of heat generated to how much loss there is through the skin to the ambient temperature, and we size the tank a little bit on that.”

Custom lids for tank efficiency

Pinot Noir is fermented in smaller open-top tanks, but Hobbs has custom-made lids by Silver State Stainless that enable Baccitich to also ferment Cabernet in them. The lids are equipped with an inflatable rubber gasket to hold in carbon dioxide and keep oxygen out, but the seals are not strong enough for the tanks to be filled to the top and used for storage and blending. “Today we hardly ever buy a closed-top tank except for if we’re going to do a Chardonnay,” Hobbs said. For “almost all our new tanks we just go with a Pinot tank, and then we put a lid on it and they do double duty. You can go with less tanks that way, because when you finish your Pinot you’re working with Cabernet, so you get more efficient turns.”

Hobbs’ prized Cabernets such as the To Kalon are fermented in a regular closed-top tank, but Hobbs said the Cabs fermented in the converted open tops do very well. He said both the closed- and open-top tanks have a height-to-diameter ratio of 1:1.

During the punch downs and pump overs, cellar workers set a fan at the top of the open tops or run juice into a bucket and sump to help the yeast get some oxygen and lower alcohol levels a bit. Once red fermentation is complete, the pomace is loaded into a Bucher Vaslin JBL basket press. During pressing, the wine receives assiduous monitoring that includes sensory analysis and monitoring for pH changes.

Hobbs said he uses a variety of French coopers for barrel aging including François Fr&egra ve;res, Taransaud, Remond, Cadus, Damy, Marques, Vincent Darnajou, Gauthier Freres, Louis Latour, Sylvain and Marcel Cadet. He said he’s done extensive trials on American oak but ultimately decided French was the better fit. “We’ve done a lot of work between both, but for our style French is preferred,” he said. “We find that really it’s more appropriate for the Paul Hobbs wines.”

In addition to barrel aging, Hobbs uses a portion of new French oak barrels for the primary fermentation of his Chardonnays. Grapes are whole-cluster pressed in a Europress, and the juice is sent to tall, narrow stainless steel tanks for an initial settling. “If all goes well, that juice is in the barrel by evening, so within 24 hours we’ve picked and pressed and it’s in the barrel,” he said. “It’s mainly because we want hazy juice to go to barrel; we only want what we call ‘the peanut butter’ to come out, so that’s why there is a short residence time.”

The barrel fermentations are also spontaneous, and so are the subsequent malolactic fermentations. Some of the Chardonnay lots are fermented with 100% new oak, while others only receive about 40%.

Finished wines are neither fined nor filtered and racked out of barrel with Bulldog wands. The same tanks used for white settling also are used for the final blending. Bottling is conducted with a line that Hobbs owns in partnership with nearby Lynmar Estate winery. Hobbs said the line is used for bottling wines from other wineries, but he gets first pick on bottling dates. He said the set up gives him enough control over bottling and avoids the capital investment in an expensive piece of equipment.

While the Chardonnay ferments in oak, Hobbs doesn’t feel the need for any of his red wines to see oak prior to completing primary fermentation. He said he understands that very light reds could benefit from oak tannins, but the fruit he’s working with doesn’t require much help. “We prefer keeping the barrel out of the equation until after the grape itself—all the parts, the skin, the seeds and everything—have had most of their chemical reactions complete, or the first large molecules formed, before we integrate oak into the equation.”

With that strategy in place, Hobbs doesn’t add oak dust or chips during fermentation. He said he doesn’t use any enzymes or other additions either. “You want to see our chemical room? It’s got (only) bags of tartaric acid,” he says with a smile.

Understanding vineyard variability

The topic does trigger a moment of reflection for Hobbs, prompting him to mention that he’s still trying to understand what drives vineyard variability. The 2013 growing season was nearly perfect—enough so that Hobbs says the weather could be removed as a factor of variability, yet he still encountered different levels of pH and TA. “I think one our biggest challenges today is how to manage the pH and TA of the fruit, the raw material coming into the winery, because we still don’t have a very good understanding of how soil, climate, clone (and) varietal interact to come with a certain pH,” he said. “We see with certain vineyards a high pH, and then not too far away another vineyard with low pH, and we don’t have a good handle on why yet.”

He said he’d like to get some research going with the UC Davis and some other interested wineries to really examine the issue of consistency and uniformity in each harvest. “This question really came to a head this year,” he said.

The comment represents perhaps another example of how Hobbs has achieved success: The global winemaker who has reduced variability to ensure consistent quality on different continents and at different price points is still striving to understand the estate vineyard he’s been tending for years.