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Feature Article
The latest winery model resembles the traditional family farm winery in its situation and aesthetic, only the vineyards surrounding it are well established and owned by someone else.
Anderson Valley Phases In The Future
Well into its fourth decade as a wine region, Anderson Valley has seen its share of evolution, not just in its wines, but as much in the style of businesses utilizing the appellation’s fruit.
by
Thom Elkjer
April 20, 2006
The maturation of an appellation is a wonderful thing to watch. Because wine involves two things that have changed dramatically over the generations -- property ownership and agriculture. Today, legacy business models based on cheap land and family farming can survive cheek by jowl with new business models based on cheap debt and outsourcing.
Sometimes this makes for head-snapping juxtapositions. At Kelham Vineyards in St. Helena, for example, the family has owned its vineyards for a generation or more, farms them by its own lights, and even hand-labels its Cabernet Sauvignon bottles in a small workshop as orders come in. Across the vineyards a ways, lies The Napa Valley Reserve, where the wealthy pay north of $125,000 for a country club-style membership in an 80-acre, full-glam, self-operating estate winery served up by real estate mogul Bill Harlan and his deep-pocketed partners.
I don’t mean to pick on Napa, but it does tend to serve up high-visibility examples of everything good, bad and indifferent about the wine business. Once Napa showed me how an appellation’s past and future could coincide so closely, I started to look for the same phenomenon in smaller appellations where the shifts are more subtle. The one I can see best is the one out my window: Anderson Valley.
When I first visited the valley 25 years ago, the only wine industry in evidence was highly traditional. It consisted of people who moved to the valley, bought land, planted grapes and made wine. Often they converted old barns and apple dryers into wineries or barrel storage until they could build modern facilities.
The names that are still emblematic of Anderson Valley – Navarro, Husch, Edmeades, Handley, Claudia Springs, Scharffenberger – all started that way in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the newer wineries have the same feel to them. Londer Vineyards may be just five years old as a wine label, but its mature Gewurztraminer vines and converted barn have been there for a while. These are what I would call first-phase wineries.
The second phase began 20 years ago when big-name Napa wineries including Cakebread, V.Sattui and Schramsberg began planting grapes in the valley or buying them from established growers. They didn’t need to build any wineries, of course, because they had them already. So they truck out tons of grapes each fall, and blend the fruit into their Napa Valley bottlings (of which nearly one-sixth can come from somewhere else).
The third phase kicked in around the turn of the millennium, when a whole new class of out-of-appellation grape buyers began prowling the valley. These labels are based in cities, not the countryside. Their wineries are warehouses, not barns. And their production is measured in hundreds of cases, not hundreds of thousands. These include such garagistes as Adrian Fogg, Copain, Littorai, MacPhail, Radio-Coteau, Siduri, Skewis, and others. These labels are run by their winemakers, who do almost everything themselves. Their whole value proposition is intensity: wine that makes you say “Wow!” even if you don’t particularly recognize a grape or a place.
In fact most of them source fruit from the same constellation of coastal appellations: Anderson Valley, Sonoma Coast, Russian River Valley, Santa Lucia Highlands, Sta. Rita Hills. These are “Wow!” grape sources, no question about it, but most of the impression they make on us now comes from the wines of the smaller producers named above that really pushed the envelope of ripeness.
But back to Anderson Valley. The third phase is now well established, right alongside the first- and second-phase operations.
A few weeks ago I got to watch while Michael and Susan Addison, owners of Wightman House Vineyard, interviewed third-phase winemakers who were interested in their grapes. A year ago, the vineyard’s fruit disappeared into Goldeneye, the eponymous Anderson Valley Pinot Noir made at one of the few new wineries built in the valley since the first phase ended. From now on, the Wightman House Pinot Noir grapes will go into a third-phrase vineyard-designate made by James MacPhail.
One of the suitors who lost out at Wightman House then tried to get fruit from Rich Savoy, who serves up Anderson Valley Pinot Noir to Copain and other garagistes. But the suitor was out of luck – Savoy’s got enough buyers already.
Yet another sign of third-phase reality came to light when the Mendocino Winegrowers Alliance announced plans to send wine writers a demonstration box of Mendocino-grown Pinot Noir.
One of the wines they chose is made at La Crema. It’s a great wine, and it’s also an Appellation Signature wine for Anderson Valley, but La Crema is in Russian River. While some vintners in Mendocino find it inconceivable that a county wine promotion would feature a Kendall-Jackson owned winery from Sonoma, it’s just more evidence to me that in Anderson Valley, the third phase is locked in for the long term.
So where do we go from here? It’s too early to tell, but I believe that Anderson Valley’s fourth phase will involve aspects of the three previous phases in entirely new combinations.
There’s already evidence that the phases can blur. Take Ferrington Vineyard, which sells to both Cakebread (second phase) and Williams Selyem (an icon of the third phase). All three of the valley’s sparkling wine houses are also deeply involved in still winemaking, so they’re making and selling both legacy sparklers and New World boutique Pinots at the same time.
The most intriguing new model, however, is rising up in plain sight on Highway 128. A few days ago, three brand new wines landed on my kitchen table from Breggo Cellars, which bottled its debut 2005 whites and rosé last week. (The 2005 Pinot Noirs won’t be released until the fall.) Breggo has no vineyards, but the label built itself a winery in Anderson Valley right through the crush last fall and all its fruit came from local vineyards. In fact most of it came from vineyards you could walk to from the winery.
Breggo proprietors Doug and Ana Lucia Stewart are like the garagistes in that they’re going for quality and direct sales all the way, and they’re doing it with cheap money, leverage, and a keen sense of how the industry works. Yet they’re also like the farmers-turned-winemakers of yore, because they converted an outbuilding into their winery, they’re raising a family in a house next to it, and their fruit sources are all around them.
People in Mendocino are forever complaining that there are not enough wineries in the appellation to soak up all the great fruit (Exhibit A: they needed a Sonoma winery’s product to fill out a promotion for Mendocino Pinot). If Breggo succeeds in building a brand, winery and tasting room to showcase vineyards that are already in place, we may be witnessing the emergence of a pivotal new phase in the maturation of Anderson Valley from scruffy backwater to polished Pinot paradise.
I doubt we’ll ever see a wine country club in this verdant valley, but I’ve learned that where wine’s concerned, never say never.
~ Thom Elkjer, Mendocino Editor
To comment on Thom Elkjer’s writings and thoughts, contact him at t.elkjer@appellationamerica.com
Sometimes this makes for head-snapping juxtapositions. At Kelham Vineyards in St. Helena, for example, the family has owned its vineyards for a generation or more, farms them by its own lights, and even hand-labels its Cabernet Sauvignon bottles in a small workshop as orders come in. Across the vineyards a ways, lies The Napa Valley Reserve, where the wealthy pay north of $125,000 for a country club-style membership in an 80-acre, full-glam, self-operating estate winery served up by real estate mogul Bill Harlan and his deep-pocketed partners.
I don’t mean to pick on Napa, but it does tend to serve up high-visibility examples of everything good, bad and indifferent about the wine business. Once Napa showed me how an appellation’s past and future could coincide so closely, I started to look for the same phenomenon in smaller appellations where the shifts are more subtle. The one I can see best is the one out my window: Anderson Valley.
When I first visited the valley 25 years ago, the only wine industry in evidence was highly traditional. It consisted of people who moved to the valley, bought land, planted grapes and made wine. Often they converted old barns and apple dryers into wineries or barrel storage until they could build modern facilities.
The names that are still emblematic of Anderson Valley – Navarro, Husch, Edmeades, Handley, Claudia Springs, Scharffenberger – all started that way in the 1970s and early 1980s. Some of the newer wineries have the same feel to them. Londer Vineyards may be just five years old as a wine label, but its mature Gewurztraminer vines and converted barn have been there for a while. These are what I would call first-phase wineries.
The second phase began 20 years ago when big-name Napa wineries including Cakebread, V.Sattui and Schramsberg began planting grapes in the valley or buying them from established growers. They didn’t need to build any wineries, of course, because they had them already. So they truck out tons of grapes each fall, and blend the fruit into their Napa Valley bottlings (of which nearly one-sixth can come from somewhere else).
The third phase kicked in around the turn of the millennium, when a whole new class of out-of-appellation grape buyers began prowling the valley. These labels are based in cities, not the countryside. Their wineries are warehouses, not barns. And their production is measured in hundreds of cases, not hundreds of thousands. These include such garagistes as Adrian Fogg, Copain, Littorai, MacPhail, Radio-Coteau, Siduri, Skewis, and others. These labels are run by their winemakers, who do almost everything themselves. Their whole value proposition is intensity: wine that makes you say “Wow!” even if you don’t particularly recognize a grape or a place.
In fact most of them source fruit from the same constellation of coastal appellations: Anderson Valley, Sonoma Coast, Russian River Valley, Santa Lucia Highlands, Sta. Rita Hills. These are “Wow!” grape sources, no question about it, but most of the impression they make on us now comes from the wines of the smaller producers named above that really pushed the envelope of ripeness.
But back to Anderson Valley. The third phase is now well established, right alongside the first- and second-phase operations.
A few weeks ago I got to watch while Michael and Susan Addison, owners of Wightman House Vineyard, interviewed third-phase winemakers who were interested in their grapes. A year ago, the vineyard’s fruit disappeared into Goldeneye, the eponymous Anderson Valley Pinot Noir made at one of the few new wineries built in the valley since the first phase ended. From now on, the Wightman House Pinot Noir grapes will go into a third-phrase vineyard-designate made by James MacPhail.
One of the suitors who lost out at Wightman House then tried to get fruit from Rich Savoy, who serves up Anderson Valley Pinot Noir to Copain and other garagistes. But the suitor was out of luck – Savoy’s got enough buyers already.
Yet another sign of third-phase reality came to light when the Mendocino Winegrowers Alliance announced plans to send wine writers a demonstration box of Mendocino-grown Pinot Noir.
One of the wines they chose is made at La Crema. It’s a great wine, and it’s also an Appellation Signature wine for Anderson Valley, but La Crema is in Russian River. While some vintners in Mendocino find it inconceivable that a county wine promotion would feature a Kendall-Jackson owned winery from Sonoma, it’s just more evidence to me that in Anderson Valley, the third phase is locked in for the long term.So where do we go from here? It’s too early to tell, but I believe that Anderson Valley’s fourth phase will involve aspects of the three previous phases in entirely new combinations.
There’s already evidence that the phases can blur. Take Ferrington Vineyard, which sells to both Cakebread (second phase) and Williams Selyem (an icon of the third phase). All three of the valley’s sparkling wine houses are also deeply involved in still winemaking, so they’re making and selling both legacy sparklers and New World boutique Pinots at the same time.
The most intriguing new model, however, is rising up in plain sight on Highway 128. A few days ago, three brand new wines landed on my kitchen table from Breggo Cellars, which bottled its debut 2005 whites and rosé last week. (The 2005 Pinot Noirs won’t be released until the fall.) Breggo has no vineyards, but the label built itself a winery in Anderson Valley right through the crush last fall and all its fruit came from local vineyards. In fact most of it came from vineyards you could walk to from the winery.
Breggo proprietors Doug and Ana Lucia Stewart are like the garagistes in that they’re going for quality and direct sales all the way, and they’re doing it with cheap money, leverage, and a keen sense of how the industry works. Yet they’re also like the farmers-turned-winemakers of yore, because they converted an outbuilding into their winery, they’re raising a family in a house next to it, and their fruit sources are all around them.
People in Mendocino are forever complaining that there are not enough wineries in the appellation to soak up all the great fruit (Exhibit A: they needed a Sonoma winery’s product to fill out a promotion for Mendocino Pinot). If Breggo succeeds in building a brand, winery and tasting room to showcase vineyards that are already in place, we may be witnessing the emergence of a pivotal new phase in the maturation of Anderson Valley from scruffy backwater to polished Pinot paradise.
I doubt we’ll ever see a wine country club in this verdant valley, but I’ve learned that where wine’s concerned, never say never.
~ Thom Elkjer, Mendocino Editor
To comment on Thom Elkjer’s writings and thoughts, contact him at t.elkjer@appellationamerica.com
