Thom Elkjer (TE): You started out buying fruit before you had your own vineyards, and you’ve continued to buy grapes in Anderson Valley ever since. Was it hard to find Anderson Valley fruit for sale back in the 1980s?

Milla Handley (MH): There wasn’t a lot of competition inside the valley back then, so I had a good variety of sources. I got grapes from Valley Foothills, Ferrington, Savoy, and four or five other vineyards.

TE: The ones you just named are some of the best sites in Anderson Valley.

MH: Yes, but a lot of the others were not so well managed, because they didn’t have to be. Winemakers were not as demanding as they are now. You made a handshake deal with people who you figured were going to do a decent job, and you took their fruit when they said it was ready. No one was telling growers that the fruit had to come in at a certain ripeness, or within a certain range, or at a certain load. As a winemaker, you worked around what the growers did. Now the growers work to accommodate the winemakers.

TE: What other changes have taken place in the grower-winemaker relationship in Anderson Valley?

MH: Mostly things have changed on the grower side. Irrigation was not at all scientific -- if people even used it. Now it is. Also we did not have any new clones, just the ones that had been around in California for a long time. Trellising and yield management are important, so wineries ask their growers to thin shoots early in the season and “green harvest” (cut off slower-ripening bunches) at veraison (when wine-grapes begin turning color in August). These techniques have improved grape and wine quality.

TE: What was the hot new thing when you started?

MH: We started planting here about the same time as Roederer Estate and a few others. At that time, the big thing was not rootstocks or clones. It was trellising. The idea of trellising grapevines was still pretty radical. Most people just strung a wire and let the vines hang on it. Roederer did a lot of lyre trellising, which is good for making sparkling wine.

TE: It didn’t become very popular for still wine.

MH: That’s because it tends to produce a lot of fruit, which is not necessarily what we want any more. If you have too much fruit, then you have to resist temptation. Before you know it you start to feel greedy. But you have to resist. It’s hard to drop fruit. Very hard.

TE: Can you regulate the crop load in other ways besides cutting it off the vines?

MH: It depends on where you are. We get a lot of winter rain in Anderson Valley, and the valley floor has a lot of water most of the year as a result. So if you have a healthy vineyard of AXR-1 rootstock on the valley floor, you can’t slow the vines down by taking away the water – the roots will go get their own water.

This does change somewhat as the vineyard gets older. Most of our vines at Handley are twenty years old now, or close to it, so we can regulate vigor with water somewhat. You can also regulate naturally if you plant on a hillside, or if you use tighter vine spacing.

TE: Short-cycle, more sensitive rootstocks give growers a little more room to influence vine vigor with irrigation.

MH: Yes, but I have some questions about those rootstocks. People who are new to winegrowing haven’t experienced the three years of drought which we had in the 1970s. The ponds [used to store rain water and run-off for irrigation and frost protection] would go dry before the growing season was over.

We haven’t had a drought like that for thirty years, so people with younger vineyards don’t realize that it can happen again. They put in sensitive rootstocks that need to be watered two or three times a week during hot spells. What happens to those vines if there is no water?

TE: Don’t you mean, “when” there is no water? Because droughts are inevitable. It’s just a matter of time.

MH: But people don’t think that way. And remember that in a long drought, we don’t just struggle with the heat and lack of water. If there are no spring rains, you can also get worse frosts because there’s not enough natural moisture in the ground and air to prevent them.

It doesn’t matter what causes a drought, -- whether it’s global warming or fifty-year cycles -- it’s inevitable that we will have them here in Anderson Valley. We need to remember back to previous generations before we try to outsmart nature.

TE: Let’s go back to the winemaking for a moment. When you were getting grapes from multiple sources, did you start blending them together from the beginning?

MH: We started that with our first Chardonnay, because we were buying from multiple sources and we wanted to make an Anderson Valley (appellation) wine. We continued to blend after we planted our own vineyards, but we were able to do it with more control and more choices. We had the choice of blending everything or selecting out an estate wine. And that started right away. I believe our first estate Chardonnay was 1987. As soon as we got our sparkling wine program up and running, all the sparkling wines were estate wines.

TE: Did you have separate blocks for the sparkling programs?

MH: We always chose our best grapes for the sparkling wines. That doesn’t necessarily mean they came from the lowest-crop vines. It means healthy blocks with good flavors and great acid balance at lower sugars. In 1990 we did plant some Pinot Noir particularly for our sparkling wines.

TE: Acid formation does not seem to be a problem in Anderson Valley.

MH: Acid balance is important here, because the wines tend to be naturally high in acid. So we strive for moderate crop levels and healthy vines to keep the acid-sugar ratio in balance at harvest. If you under-crop in this valley, you can wind up with way too much sugar in the grapes before the acids drop down into a reasonable range (late in the growing season).

TE: Is this why people tend to pick around 24 brix in the valley, rather than the 27s and 29s we see for Pinot Noir in the Central Coast or Russian River?

MH: The grapes in our winery vineyard reach a structural balance at 24, plus or minus. We could wait longer to pick for higher sugars if we wanted to, but that’s not the wine style we’re looking for. We would also be picking even later in the year than we do now, which would be after the rain starts in many vintages.

TE: Your 2003 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir had fruit from ten different vineyards. That’s double figures for a varietal wine that most people fondly imagine as coming from one little block of one little vineyard somewhere. Was combining ten vineyards into one Pinot a record for Anderson Valley?

MH: It might not even be a record even for Handley. We like to get fruit from a lot of places in this valley, because we like to make complex wines. It’s not necessity; it’s intentional. Here at our estate, we have great old clones: Martini, Wädenswil, and Clone 32. So we go out and look for clones that complement ours, and maybe use different trellising and vineyard aspect. It all adds to the wine.

TE: Because of geography, you’re also going to be getting fruit from warmer areas than the one you’re in.

MH: We’re in what’s called the “deep end” of Anderson Valley, meaning the lower elevation, cooler end of the valley nearer to the ocean. Most vineyards in the valley are in warmer, dryer and higher spots than ours. So they ripen earlier, which is great for us. We can crush that fruit up to four weeks before our own vineyards come in. This allows us to harvest over a longer period of time, use all our equipment efficiently, and take the time to give all the grapes the care they need.

TE: You also source from outside Anderson Valley for your Mendocino County wines.

MH: We have been getting Pinot Noir from Potter Valley, and this year we will get some Pinot from Comptche (north of Anderson Valley in western Mendocino County). There are just four or five vineyards up there now, but I think Comptche is an up-and-coming area for Pinot Noir.

We make two different Zinfandels, one from vineyards in Redwood Valley and one from Mendocino Ridge. We’re also making two Syrahs, from Redwood Valley and from my family’s Dry Creek Valley vineyard.

TE: You’ve made sparkling wine connoisseurs very happy by holding back some of your bubblies for a decade or more before release, which is something that the great houses of Champagne have always done. Unlike them, you’ve done it with sparkling rosés as well as bruts. But there are rumors that the sparkling program at Handley has been discontinued. What’s the status on that?

MH: Our last sparkling vintage was 2003. We just disgorged the rosé (removed solids left over from secondary fermentation in the bottle) and next year we’ll disgorge the brut. The plan is to do another sparkling vintage in 2006.

TE: Why did you skip over 2004 and 2005?

MH: We plan to sell the sparkling just through the tasting room, and make only enough to satisfy that demand. So we can pick the vintages that really produce great sparkling grapes.

TE: What makes 2006 a better candidate than the years that preceded it?

MH: A more moderate crop level. Big enough so that we don’t have to take grapes away from our Pinot Noir programs, but not so large that it’s hard to get the kind of balance we want at lower sugars. So we’ll make a (sparkling) rosé in 2006 and see how it goes.

TE: Any other changes you’re keeping an eye on in Anderson Valley?

MH: The big one right now is all the new tasting rooms. It used to be that you could visit a few tasting rooms and that was it. Now there are almost ten, depending on who is open at any given time. I am encouraging people to pick a few tasting rooms to visit, rather than try to hit them all.

TE: Are you concerned that having more tasting rooms is going to slice the visitor pie into tinier pieces?

MH: No, the real concern is that people will consume too much alcohol and then drive 30 miles. The only road through Anderson Valley is a two-lane road that is hardly ever straight and flat. It’s beautiful, but it’s not an easy drive.

TE: It’s a lot different than Highway 29 through Napa, which is a slow-moving parking lot on weekends.

MH: All of the tasting rooms in Anderson Valley need to address this, and we’re looking into what we need to do as a group. In the meantime I am asking people to be careful and use a designated driver. One solution is to bring a teenager and have them drive. That’s what teenagers are for. They can’t drink yet, but they can drive.

~ Thom Elkjer, Regional Correspondent - Mendocino


To comment on Thom Elkjer’s writings and thoughts, contact him at t.elkjer@appellationamerica.com