Book Review: Robinson and Murphy on American Wine

January 29, 2013 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Jancis Robinson 4 Comments

Jancis Robinson and Linda Murphy, American Wine: The Ultimate Companion to the Wines and Wineries of the United States. University of California Press, 2013.

I’m in Sacramento this week for the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium, the largest wine industry gathering in the Western Hemisphere. I came for the informative seminars of course but it’s the trade show that really takes my breath of away. Hundreds of exhibitors and thousands of products and services — wow! It makes me reconsider my vision of wine in America.

Wine isn’t just about bottles and corks and retail shelves and its not just California, either. The American wine industry is broad and deep, spanning the continent and reaching into almost every imaginable type of business and walk of life. Looking across the trade show floors (two of them because there are so many exhibitors) provides a dramatic vision of what wine in this country has become.

American Wine, the beautiful and informative new book by Jancis Robinson and Linda Murphy, has the same breath-taking effect. No matter how you think of American wine, this book shows you that there is more to it than you ever imagined.

Drilling Down Deep

The main text is organized around geography, as you might expect, starting with large national regions, then the wine producing states (with California getting the lion’s share of the page count), then regions within states, AVAs, sub AVAs and so on. As the authors drill down, they pass through many layers that include geography and geology, history, industry, viticulture, producers, personalities and finally the wines themselves.

As a test I worked my way though the Sonoma section in detail and it was an amazing experience to have all these dots connected so seamlessly and well and illustrated with beautiful photos and useful maps. By the end, after taking in all of Sonoma’s regions and AVAs, I felt that I had a much more nuanced understanding of this complicated and important region and its unique characteristics.

One of the things that I like best about American Wine is that it takes its title seriously and attempts to do for the entire country what it obviously does for California. You would expect the major producing states like Washington, New York and Oregon to get detailed treatment here and they do. But you might not expect detailed analysis of Colorado, for example, with its rapidly emerging industry, or Missouri with its important viticultural history. Indeed, every state makes wine in one way or another and every state gets serious consideration here. (Alabama and Mississippi get just a paragraph each, it must be said, but maybe that’s not a surprise).

A Bit Overwhelming

By the end of the book I felt a bit overwhelmed, and not just by the vast landscape of detailed information. It was more of an emotional response. American Wine helped me re-imagine America as a country where wine is deeply embedded in history and culture and widely embraced.

Wine consumption is still low in America if we judge by European standards, and wine still struggles to overcome the legacy of Prohibition. American Wine recognizes these challenges, but it projects an inspiring vision of wine today that suggests how it might evolve and develop in the future.

While no single volume can possible satisfy all interests (I’m sure my friend Karl will wonder why New Jersey didn’t get the attention he believes it deserves), I think this American Wine lives up its “ultimate companion” subtitle. Highly recommended.

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American Wine is the second new book Jancis Robinson has published this season. Wine Grapes, co-authored with Julia Harding and José Vouillamoz, came out just before the holidays. It’s a magisterial survey of global wine viewed through more than 1300 grape varieties. Writing just before Christmas, I declared it the best gift a wine enthusiast could hope to receive. Now you can add American Wine to the list.

Only one thing could make Wine Grapes better (apart from a lower price, of course) — access to a searchable electronic version. Jancis says they are working on it, but it’s not a simple task with a book of such size and complexity. Fingers crossed that we see it before too long!

The Unified Symposium: Globalization, State of the Industry and Book Signing

January 24, 2013 By Mike Veseth in globalization, wine markets Leave a comment

I hope to see many Wine Economist readers next week at the Unified Wine and Grape Symposium in Sacramento, California. The Unified is North America’s biggest wine industry gathering. Here’s how the website describes it.

Built with the joint input of growers, vintners and allied industry members, the Unified Wine & Grape Symposium is held annually in Sacramento, California and is the largest event of its kind in the western hemisphere. Serving as a clearinghouse for practical information important to wine and grape industry professionals, the Unified Symposium also hosts a trade show with over 650 suppliers displaying their products and services to the more than 12,400 people who attend annually.

It’s a Really Big Show (as Ed Sullivan might have said) and I’ll be part of three events: two sessions and a book signing. I’ll paste the details of the sessions at the end of this post.

I’ll be on the panel for the general session on globalization and the U.S. wine industry that starts at 9 am on Tuesday, January 29,
I’ll be moderator for the “State of the Industry” panel that starts at 8:30 am on Wednesday, January 30, and
I’ll be signing copies of Wine Wars at the Wine Appreciation Guild booth in the trade show from 12:30 – 2 pm on Wednesday. Please stop by Booth # 1620 and say hello if you are there.

Here are the details:

How the Global Wine Market Affects U.S. Production

U.S. growers and wineries are directly or indirectly impacted by the global wine market. Bulk wine movements ebb and flow based upon changes in currency valuations, relative costs of production, transportation costs, and supply and consumer demand. U.S. producers are accustomed to competition from branded imports, but numerous U.S. brands also source bulk wine internationally to meet cost-of-goods targets or to satisfy consumer demand for popular wine styles or varietal grapes in short supply. These trends affect U.S. grapegrowers and wineries, and this session will help you understand the market forces that will likely affect your business.

Moderator:

Jeff O’Neill, O’Neill Vintners & Distillers, California

Speakers:
Kym Anderson, University of Adelaide, Australia
Greg Livengood, Ciatti Company, California
Stephen Rannekleiv, Rabobank, New York
Mike Veseth, The Wine Economist Blog and The University of Puget Sound, Washington

State of the Industry

The State of the Industry session will provide a comprehensive look at every aspect of the wine industry, from what’s being planted to what’s selling. This 2½ hour session features highly regarded speakers and delivers incredible value for attendees who need to understand the market dynamics of the past year and are seeking insight into the market trends that will define the year ahead.

Moderator:
Mike Veseth, The Wine Economist Blog and The University of Puget Sound, Washington

Speakers:
Nat DiBuduo, Allied Grape Growers, California
Jon Fredrikson, Gomberg, Fredrikson & Associates, California
Charles Gill, Wine Metrics, Connecticut
Glenn Proctor, Ciatti Company, California

Busting the Big Tank Myth: Durbanville Hills

January 22, 2013 By Mike Veseth in South Africa, wine brands, wine markets 6 Comments

There are easier ways to get to Durbanville Hills Winery than aboard a snorkel-equipped Land Rover, but I don’t think there’s a better way to go.

They brought out the 4×4 vehicles (snorkel-equipped — who knew? — so the engines can breathe even in deep water crossings) so that we could experience and appreciate the hills, the vineyards and the rugged terrain even before we came to the winery itself and the braai lunch that was planned for us there.

My visit to Durbanville Hills Winery started as adventure and became a learning experience about the diverse nature of wine in South Africa. Now it is also Exhibit A in the case against the One Big Tank myth that I wrote about last week.

The Big Tank theory is that giant wine and drinks companies with dozens of brands in their portfolios offer consumers the illusion of choice, not real choice. It’s as if all the different wines came out of one big tank. Although there is a grain of truth in this idea, I think it is fundamentally bogus and Durbanville Hills is a case in point.

From Oom Tas to Nederberg Noble

Durbanville Hills Winery is part of the Distell drinks empire. As I wrote last week, Distell is South Africa’s largest wine and spirits producer and is a global power in several beverage categories. They superficially fit the Big Tank stereotype, but within their range of brands you will find choices over a wide range starting with very basic wines such as Oom Tas (described as “an inexpensive, dry, golden, unsophisticated wine of constantly good quality and taste”) and Kellerprinz (” an unpretentious, fun wine, its quality is nevertheless good and consistent, offering value for money”) and moving on up the ladder to the rather special Nederberg Noble Late Harvest wine I wrote about last year.

Durbanville Hills Winery is a relatively new addition to the Distell group. The winery is beautiful in a modern way that does not seem out of place for its setting. The public spaces are welcoming, the restaurant gets good marks and you can’t beat the views looking out over the vineyards or on to the city. It looks like Distell has put a lot of time and money into the operation and the result is impressive.

Even Lettie Likes It

The wines are impressive, too. I especially liked the Sauvignon Blanc, which seems to do especially well in these hills. And the Pinotage is good enough to get a nod from self-confessed Pinotage-hater Lettie Teague, wine critic for the Wall Street Journal.

Durbanville Hills’ wines are distinctive (which runs counter to the Big Tank myth), but in fact the whole operation is unusual and not what you would expect from a “drinks company” winery at all.

Durbanville Hills was founded in 1999 as a partnership between Distell and seven wine farms in this region and the first wines were released in 2001. This area has a long history of wine growing — the youngest of the farms was founded in 1714 according to the winery website.

Triple Bottom Line

Distell’s representatives sit on the winery board, as I understand it, along with the farmer partners plus a workers’ representative. The wine farm workers have a 5% equity stake in the business that is administered through a trust that provides a number of social and economic benefits to workers and their families. Durbanville Hills was one of the first wineries to be accredited by the Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association.

Cellar master Martin Moore is an enthusiastic promoter of a particular brand of sustainability that is sometimes called the “triple bottom line” approach (although he never used this term when talking with me). Businesses need profits to sustain themselves in the long run, of course, but economic sustainability doesn’t mean much if the environment is sacrificed (true for all business, but especially for wine), so you have to add that factor into the equation. And what are planet and profit without people? Communities must be sustained along with business and the environment. So true sustainability is the intersection of the three spheres of life taken together.

To quite intentionally organize a wine company around these values is a long term commitment and not the sort of thing that you associate with a corporation nervous about quarterly earnings reports. But it seems to me that everyone at Durbanville Hills is in this for the long run and the structure of the business is meant to keep it that way. It’s an impressive achievement and it makes a glass of Durbanville Hills wine a particularly satisfying drink.

Not Free Range

Clearly there are values and principles beyond a simple short-term profit motive behind the Durbanville Hills project, but they are usefully balanced with a sense of realism — you have to be pragmatic to make the triple bottom line work because this idea of business isn’t about avoiding trade-offs, it’s about confronting them and making effective choices.

I saw this in a sort of sustainability manifesto that Martin Moore gave me at the end of my visit. Moore writes that, “We farm responsibly … not organic, not biodynamic … but sustainably.” I think his point is that it is difficult to balance all three bottom lines if you swear off potentially important tools. “I would not even claim that we have free range vines,” he jokes, “as most of it is stuck in a trellis system.”

But I do believe that if we continue improving strengthening our 3 pillars of sustainable farming Durbanville Hills, our producers, our farm workers and community will hand over a successful business to the future generation without having to apologize.

Myth and Reality

Clearly Durbanville Hills Winery doesn’t fit the Big Tank theory and I think it is an indication that Distell and other giant wine and drinks companies are capable of offering wine consumers real choice — choice in both the wines themselves (which is the point after all) and in the entire wine experience.

It would be easy to make the case that Distell and Durbanville Hills are special cases. South Africa has a unique wine history that stretches back for hundreds of years and a unique social history, too, which motivates many there to address directly issues of race and inequality.

And then there is the Rupert family’s influence on Distell. If anyone understands the the benefits of product differentiation and avoiding a Big Tank syndrome, it is probably the Ruperts, whose broad holdings control many luxury brands including Cartier. They would certainly appreciate the business value of distinctive products compared with Big Tank uniformity.

Distell is a unique wine company in many ways, but I don’t see it as unique in terms of the Big Tank myth. While I don’t deny that there are a few Big Tanks out there, in general I believe that even giant wine companies have strong business incentives to provide consumers with diverse choices (and even in some cases to take seriously the triple bottom line).

It is a sad fact that some of the great potential diversity of wine production does get filtered out by the logic of distribution and retail economics, and the vast scale and scope of the wine giants indirectly contributes to that problem. But, as I said in my last post, it takes a village to raise a child and it takes an entire supply chain to deliver diverse wine choices … or not. But it’s not just a Big Tank problem.

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I realize that one example, even a really good one like Durbanville Hills, isn’t enough to bust a myth (n=1 is a pretty small sample size). But there are lots of examples if you only take off the “Big Tank” glasses and look around.

Thanks to Cellar master Martin Moore and Managing Director Albert Gerber for taking the time to answer all my questions at Durbanville Hills and Cape Wine 2012. The images up top are from the winery’s website.

The “One Big Tank” Myth

January 15, 2013 By Mike Veseth in South Africa, wine brands, wine markets, wine price 1 Comment

My recent post about How Much Choice Do Wine Drinkers Really Have? made the point that true diversity in wine choice is complicated. Although there are constellations of wine brands that are theoretically available, from a practical standpoint the choice available to you depends on your price point “comfort zone,” how you shop (on-line or wine club versus bricks and mortar stores), where you shop (local shop versus national chain store), where you live (state regulations vary enormously) and many other factors.

It takes a village to raise a child, they say, and it takes an entire product chain to raise up a diverse selection of wine … or not!

The Illusion of Choice?

A persistent concern is the influence of giant wine companies with dozens of wine brands in their portfolios. The conventional wisdom seems to be that these big firms merely create the illusion of choice, not choice itself. I guess the idea is that all of these different wine brands actually pour out of the spigot of one giant wine tank. If they all come from Gallo (or Constellation Brands or Treasury Wine Estates, etc.) then they must all be the same — or so similar as to make choice irrelevant. I call this the “One Big Tank” theory and I think it’s a myth, although like all myths it contains a grain of truth.

The reality is that giant wine companies can and often do produce distinctive wines. And smaller operations sometimes pump out quantities of relatively terroir-free negociant wine to pay the bills. Size matters in wine, but it’s not the only thing. My motto is still “think global, drink local,” so I am not arguing against small terroir-driven producers, but I think at least some of the big wine companies have an undeserved poor reputation from the wine choice standpoint.

Giant wine companies have many advantages: access to capital, technology and vineyards, for example, and economies of scale in purchasing, distribution and some aspects of production. What matters from the consumer choice standpoint is how these advantages are employed. You can aim to fill that one big tank as cheaply as possible or you can leverage the large scale advantages to create real quality and diversity.

Big Tank Stereotypes

A good example of how the myth unravels at least some of the time comes from my visit to South Africa. I was a guest of Distell for part of my visit (Distell owns Nederberg and I gave the keynote at the Nederberg Auction) and this gave me an opportunity to learn about the company, which is South Africa’s largest wine and spirits producer.

If you go strictly on stereotypes, Distell has got to be one of those “big tank” operations because it has most of the defining characteristics. It is, first of all, a “drinks company” and not a “wine company,” to use a distinction I first heard from a New Zealand winemaker (who worked for a “wine company,” of course). Here’s how the wine vs drinks dichotomy works.

Wine companies make wine (and only wine) and are often family owned. Drinks companies, on the other hand, manufacture all sorts of alcoholic beverages and are usually public corporations. Whereas wine companies think tradition and terroir, the story goes, drinks companies think marketing and product positioning. Wine companies sometimes stay in the founding family’s control for generations. Drinks companies often get acquired, merged and traded back and forth like properties on a Monopoly board.

Distell fits the drinks company profile pretty well. It dominates the market for brandy in South Africa and is the leading wine producer, too. It is the world’s #2 producer of cider, another “drinks” category. Distell has strong international interests and owns both a French Cognac house (Bisquit) and an Asian distributor. It has over 30 spirits brands in its portfolio and an even larger number of wines, wine apertifs, ciders and “ready to drink” beverages.

Distell is probaby best known in the U.S. for its Two Oceans and Fleur du Cap wine brands, but its hottest product is a cream liqueur called Amarula, “the Spirit of Africa.” It is the #2 best-selling cream liqueur in the world according to the company’s 2012 annual report.

Circumstantial Evidence

Distell also has a complicated business history.¹ The current firm was created in 2000 with the merger of Stellenbosch Farmers’ Winery and Distillers Corporation, but the history stretches back a ways. Key players include the South African billionaire Rupert family, which controls a diversified multinational business portfolio (they own the Richemont group of luxury goods companies, for example), the South African wine giant KWV and the big beer player SAB (think SABMiller — SAB stands for South African Breweries).

So, Distell fits the big tank stereotype pretty well and some of its products have the classic “drinks company” profile, too. But the evidence that wine choice at Distell is an illusion is what Perry Mason would call “circumstantial.” Can a “drinks company” like Distell offer consumers wines that give then a real choice and not just an illusion of choice?

Inside the big drinks company I found a good deal of counter evidence to the big tank theory. Join me in my next post as I climb into a snorkel-equipped Land Rover 4×4 and visit Distell’s Durbanville Hills Winery.

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The top image is an historic example of a great big tank: the famous Heidelberg Tun, made in 1751, with a reported capacity of 220,000 liters. Here’s what Mark Twain had to say about it in A Tramp Abroad (1880).

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me. I do not see any wisdom in building a monster cask to hoard up emptiness in, when you can get a better quality, outside, any day, free of expense.

¹ Most of what I think I know about Distell’s business history I learned from the company’s investor website and from Nick Vink, Gavin Williams and Johann Kirsten, “South Africa” in Kym Anderson (editor), The World’s Wine Markets: Globalization at Work (Edward Elgar, 2004).

How Much Choice Do Wine Drinkers Really Have?

January 8, 2013 By Mike Veseth in wine brands, wine distibution, wine markets 7 Comments

How much choice do U.S. wine drinkers really have? The answer to this question, according to a study by a group of Michigan State University scholars, is that it depends on how you look at the question and where you seek your answer.

The study is called “Concentration in the U.S. Wine Industry” by Phil Howard, Terra Bogart, Alix Grabowski, Rebecca Mino, Nick Molen and Steve Schultze and it follows up on previous research on concentration in the U.S. beer and soft drinks industries. (Click on the link to read the whole report and select the tabs you will find there to view the beer and soft drinks information.)

A Question of Perspective

If you look at the question in terms of the number of different wine brands on the market and varieties within each brand, then the answer is clear. U.S. consumers have a galaxy of choices when it comes to wine. I use the term “galaxy” because I’ve taken one of the key info-graphics from the report and doctored it up to look like an image of the stars in the night sky. More wines than than there are stars in the universe — or at least it seems that way some of the time.

But click on that galaxy image above and you will open a window that shows how those wine stars are aligned. And I am sure that you won’t be surprised to see that there are several huge business “solar systems” with dozens of brands each: Gallo, the Wine Group and Constellation Brands among the producers, for example, and Deutsch and Winebow among the importers.

The wine world has its share of Mega and Mini businesses and some of the Megas are very large indeed, although the degree of market concentration is much less in wine than in beer or soft drinks. So if you look at wine compared to beer, for example (and I suspect that this would hold true for spirits, too), there is a very low level of concentration — lots of different choices even taking the biggest firms into account. And if you look at it in terms of number of individual wines for sale you get the same sort of answer. But if you look at the number of wine firms and the amount of the total wine market they fill, the choice seems a lot narrower.

As the graphic above suggests, the top 5 firms account for more than half of U.S. wine sales, which is a lot even if it is less than the corresponding figure for beer or soft drinks. Although the study does not provide any international comparisons, I believe the the U.S. wine market is much more concentrated than France, Italy or the U.K., for example, but less so than Australia. (In the UK the critical concentration factor is at the retailer rather than the producer level since the big retail chains are so influential there.)

The degree of concentration also differs depending upon whether you look at all wine as this study does or segment the market according to price, which is the analysis I prefer. The market for wines selling for less than $5 per bottle equivalent is much more concentrated than the $20+ segment, for example. Most consumers make most of their purchases within a relatively narrow price range and it’s the diversity in that segment that matters most to them.

Location, Location, Location

The Michigan State team found that the nature of your choice also depends upon where you shop. Some of the supermarkets and wine shops that they surveyed in Michigan sourced their wine from dozens of different suppliers, providing that galaxy of choices that the vast potential selection promises. But other stores — national-chain convenience or drug stores, for example — can (and frequently do) quite easily fill a 100-item wine wall with products from just two or maybe three suppliers. The Megas can easily provide foreign and domestic selections of all the main varieties at every relevant price point. So choice is both smaller and different, if you know what I mean.

This has an impact on wines produced or imported by smaller firms, of course, and also (according to an interesting study by Rebecca Mino) on local wineries. Mino found that Michigan wines were far more likely to be available in Michigan-only retailers than at the Michigan affiliates of national retail chains.

These studies are very interesting and fun, too — I admit that I played with the “galaxy” graphic for quite a while because I enjoyed seeing the business connections within the different wine portfolios. It is just fascinating — if you haven’t clicked on that “galaxy” image at the top of the page already you’ve got to do it now.

What’s the Right Way to Think About Choice in Wine?

But the main thing I appreciate about this research is the question that it raises: how should we think about choice when it comes to wine? Does that fact that some of the Megas have dozens of brands diminish choice? Certainly not if the brands have considerable autonomy when it comes to winemaking (like the “string of pearls” model that Ste Michelle Wine Estates follows). Sometimes the vast perceived choice is real.

But that doesn’t mean that that there aren’t any effects of industrial concentration in wine, as the national chain store part of the study indicates. Some of the national retail chains treat wine as they do other products and attempt to minimize the number of suppliers while maintaining choice. Choice is diminished when the availability of “Mini” products and especially locally-produced wines is taken into account and this would be a problem if these stores are the only choice for wine (as they may be in some areas). Apparently we need a mix of different retail suppliers to assure that the true diversity of wine is represented on the shelves.

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Thanks to Phillip H. Howard for sharing his results and giving me permission to reprint some of the graphics. Speaking of “it depends on how you look at it” questions, here is one of my favorite science videos — “Powers of Ten” from the Office of Charles and Ray Eames (1977). Enjoy.

Extreme Wine: Vineyard Edition

January 1, 2013 By Mike Veseth in extreme wine, wine history 6 Comments

When I started working on my book on Extreme Wine (due out in the fall) I asked Wine Economist readers for ideas. Who are the most extreme wine people, for example? I received many nominations but one particularly caught my attention.

It came from a California winegrower who asked that winegrowers (although not him/herself) be included on the list. Everyone says that wine is made in the vineyard — and some growers go to real extremes to make that happen — but it is the wine makers who get all the attention. The Pisoni family was cited as an example. Fruit from Pisoni Vineyards goes into some of the best wine in California, although only a little of it is bottled under the Pisoni name.

Good point. A quick search on Robert Parker’s website turned up a long list of Pinot Noir and Syrah with the Pisoni Vineyards designation (Parker calls it a grand cru vineyard in one review). The 2008 Pisoni Estate Pinot earned the highest score (98/100), but all the reviews were strong. Clearly there’s something special about this vineyard and the people who farm it. I visited several extreme winegrowers in 2012 (most recently on Red Mountain). Here are three that illustrate different sides of the extreme winegrower phenomenon.

Serendipity

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As luck would have it, at about the same time I was having this extreme wine people conversation I received an invitation from Wine Yakima Valley to participate in a program they were organizing to help wine enthusiasts get to know several of the most noteworthy (read “extreme”) vineyards in the Yakima Valley AVA (which celebrates its 30th birthday in 2013). A perfect opportunity for me to do some extreme vineyard / wine grower research!

The Vineyard Tour Series highlighted the work of four outstanding growers at Red Willow Vineyard, DuBrul Vineyard, Upland Estates and Boushey Vineyards. What a great opportunity. Each of these vineyards is famous for the quality of the wines made from its fruit and each is discussed in Paul Gregutt’s valuable book, Washington Wines & Wineries: The Essential Guide.

Gregutt knowingly breaks down Washington wine into grapes, AVAs, wine makers and wine growers. Boushey is one of his “grand cru” designates while Red Willow and DuBrul make “premier cru” in the top 20 list. All these vineyards have interesting stories, but the DuBrul program was the best fit for my schedule.

Tough Love

I ended up spending a hot July afternoon at DuBrul, walking the vineyards with Hugh, Kathy and Kerry Sheils and gaining an appreciation of the unique terroir. This is how the Sheilses describe their site:

Our DuBrul Vineyard is situated on a basalt promontory with sweeping vistas in all directions. The steep rocky south facing slope is composed of dissected terraces comprised of coalesced alluvial fan deposits primarily from the Ellensburg Formation. The soils in the vineyard are made up of relatively thin loess (wind-deposited silt) over the more coarse-grained alluvial fan deposits. The volcanic ash and heterogeneity of the rock types within the Ellensburg Formation add to the complexity of our terroir.

It’s hard land — literally. I think I remember Hugh saying that the spacing of the vines was partly determined by the lay out of the previous apple orchard there. The land was too equipment-busting tough to cultivate any other way, so they were forced to accept what they had to a certain extent. Wade Wolfe laid out the vineyard and Stan Clarke advised on the winegrowing — that’s as good a combination as you can get in Washington State.

The grapes are in high demand and are sold to only a few carefully selected customers — if you see the DuBrul Vineyard designation on a wine label you can expect something pretty special. So special that some of it is reserved for Cote Bonneville, the estate wine that Kerry makes. The wines get high marks from the critics. At $200 the top of the line Cote Bonneville Du Brul Cabernet Sauvignon is the most expensive Washington State wine.

But DuBrul Vineyard isn’t about the money, it’s about the place and the particular geological forces that shaped it over the millenia and that shape what’s in your wine glass today. And, of course, it’s about the extreme wine people who have nurtured it.

History in a Bottle

The first thing you see when you approach Larkmead Vineyards, which is located in Napa Valley up the road near St. Helena, are the 120 year old head-trained Tocai Friuliano vines planted in a block between a house and the road. Man, that’s history, I thought, as I surveyed these gnarly old vines and imagined the tenacity of the owner and the commitment to a less-than-fashionable Napa Valley variety.

I was right about the history, but wrong about the commitment to Tocai. Turns out the Tocai vines were kept through the years in spite of negligible market demand because they made such a darn fine hedge in the summer. Completely blocked out the road and its noise! Only in recent years did the winemaker decide to make lemonade out of the lemons. Now the unusual wine quickly sells out its tiny production each year. (I was too late to try the most recent vintage. Sigh … maybe next year).

We came to Larkmead for the history (although not specifically for the Tocai Friuliano). Larkmead got into my head when I first read Jim Lapsley’s history of Napa Valley wine, Bottled Poerty. The legendary Andre Tchelistcheff identifed the “big four” quality wine producers in the valley when he came to work here in 1938: Beaulieu (Tchelistcheff’s new employer), Beringer, Inglenook and … Larkmead.

Larkmead? I knew the wines were very good, but I didn’t appreciate the historical significance. I needed to find out more.

My curiosity was especially piqued because of what I knew about the other three wineries and the way that they fell into corporate hands and met different fates. Perhaps the saddest story (but with a happy ending) was Inglenook, which went from producing some of Napa’s best wines to being a lowly jug wine brand. Only recently, after years and years of effort, has Francis Ford Coppolla managed to bring the estate, its vineyards and the Inglenook brand back together to make excellent wines. Congratulations to him on this achievement.

We tasted with Colin MacPhail and Sonny Thielbar and enjoyed the wines quite a lot. But what I liked even more was the sense of history. Although everything about Larkmead is up to date, there’s a very strong sense of of identity here. The people at Larkmead know what they are –the stewards of the land — and who they are, too. After talking, tasting and thinking a bit I realized that several generations of extreme wine people were necessary to preserve these vineyards and to sustain a particular vision of wine through all of Napa’s ups and downs. The Tocai vines that first caught my attention aren’t central to all this (as I secretly hoped), simply an unexpected reminder of how hard it can be for a vineyard and winery like this to stay true to itself.

Extreme Vineyard Persistence

We visited Anne Amie Vineyards twice during our Willamette Valley expedition (I taught a class for the University of Pinot at the International Pinot Noir Celebration) — first to attend a casual food and wine reception and then again for a “magical mystery tour” seminar and luncheon.

We’ve been to this place on many occasions, starting about 30 years ago when it was called Chateau Benoit (after the founding family). We liked the wines then, especially the sparkling wines as I recall, and it has been interesting to watch the place evolve as the region’s wine industry developed. Much has changed. We called it Chateau Benoit (pronounced Ben-OYT) when we first visited because that’s how the founders said it, but I understand it morphed into a French-inflected Chateau Ben-WAH later on. And it 1999 it became Anne Amie when Robert Pamplin bought the operation and named it after his two daughters.

More than the name has changed — Pamplin has invested much energy into developing Anne Amie’s Pinot Noir program as you might expect in Oregon — but much has remained the same, including some of the original vineyards (which is where this story fits into today’s post). As we drove up the long road to the hilltop winery, we passed the original (1979) block of Muller Thurgau vines that produced the grapes that went into the wines we tasted on our very first visit.

It has taken a good deal of persistence to maintain these vines because they have faced a lot of challenges. The first is economic — there’s not much of a market for Muller Thurgau here in the U.S. It might make economic sense to pull them out and put in a more marketable variety.

And then there’s nature. The bottom of the hill gets pretty cold in the winter and these old vines sometimes suffer. And I think I remember that they’ve been hit with Phylloxera, but nursed along rather than grubbed up as you might expect. I like the wine that is produced from these grapes — crisp and clean — but more than that I appreciate the extreme perseverance that is behind it. This particular Muller Thurgau vineyard is singled out for special mention in Wine Grapes by Jancis Robinson, Julia Harding and Jose Vouillamoz and it is easy to see why.

These three vineyards only scratch the surface of extreme winegrowing, but I hope they make the point that my anonymous correspondent suggested. If wine really is made in the vineyard as we all like to say then we ought to honor and celebrate wine growing as much as we do wine making. Here ‘s a toast to the growers! Cheers!

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Thanks to Barbara Glover and Wine Yakima Valley for inviting me to take part in their vineyard program. Special thanks to Hugh, Kathy and Kerry Sheils for answering all my questions and sharing their wine growing experiences with me. More thanks to Colin MacPhail and Sonny Thielbar at Larkmead and to Ksandek Podbielski at Anne Amie. Happy New Year to all!

Photos: Old vine Tocai block at Larkmead, Hugh Sheils at DuBrul, those old 120 year old Tocai vines once again, and the view from Anne Amie looking down the hill at the Muller Thurgau block.