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Feature Article
"Alexander Mountain has incredible energy. It sounds unscientific , but I can feel it and it’s always part of what I’m trying to capture."
Young Blood on Alexander Mountain:
Stonestreet Winery Enters a New Era
“The whole mountain is a revelation. Both the richness and the restraint that you find in the wine are there in the fruit – we don’t introduce that in the winery, we just harvest it.”~Graham Weerts
by
Thom Elkjer
September 19, 2007
In 1999, the South African winemaker Graham Weerts was invited to work the crush at Verité, one of the high-end “Artisans & Estates” wineries owned by Jess Jackson and his family in California. Fast forward to a February day in 2004, a week before the southern hemisphere harvest was to begin. Weerts got a call saying that Jess Jackson wanted to interview him for a winemaking job. He flew to the U.S. two days later. The two men must have impressed each other, because Weerts was named winemaker at another A&E property, Stonestreet, in Alexander Valley.
He apparently had no qualms about working under one of the sharpest microscopes in the wine business. Jackson had already planted 900 acres of wine grapes on Alexander Mountain, with a view to getting the entire mountain declared an American Viticultural Area
Stonestreet’s winemaker Graham Weerts.(AVA). Not only that, he had moved his own household and executive offices to the mountainside. Now he wanted Stonestreet Winery, at the base of the mountain, to be the flagship winery for the vineyards above it.
This in turn makes Stonestreet a flag-bearer for Jackson’s widely publicized winegrowing strategy, which is to use grapes from high-elevation hilltops, ridges and mountainsides. On top of it all, Jackson is a demanding taskmaster, and at the time of his hiring, Weerts was not yet out of his twenties.
When Weerts arrived, production was cut back to 30,000 cases from 50,000. While Weerts expects the winery to start increasing production again, he’s not in a hurry now. “If anything, I’m the one holding things back because I want to understand every vineyard block individually,” he says.
I caught up with Weerts just a week before harvest started in late August, and we drove up and down vertiginous roads between estate vineyard blocks draped on Alexander Mountain’s knolls and swales like blankets laid out to dry in the sun. In between tasting grapes and studying soil, we talked about a range of topics; here are some excerpts from the conversation.
He apparently had no qualms about working under one of the sharpest microscopes in the wine business. Jackson had already planted 900 acres of wine grapes on Alexander Mountain, with a view to getting the entire mountain declared an American Viticultural Area
Stonestreet’s winemaker Graham Weerts.
This in turn makes Stonestreet a flag-bearer for Jackson’s widely publicized winegrowing strategy, which is to use grapes from high-elevation hilltops, ridges and mountainsides. On top of it all, Jackson is a demanding taskmaster, and at the time of his hiring, Weerts was not yet out of his twenties.
When Weerts arrived, production was cut back to 30,000 cases from 50,000. While Weerts expects the winery to start increasing production again, he’s not in a hurry now. “If anything, I’m the one holding things back because I want to understand every vineyard block individually,” he says.
I caught up with Weerts just a week before harvest started in late August, and we drove up and down vertiginous roads between estate vineyard blocks draped on Alexander Mountain’s knolls and swales like blankets laid out to dry in the sun. In between tasting grapes and studying soil, we talked about a range of topics; here are some excerpts from the conversation.
Thom Elkjer (TE): Everything we’re looking at and talking about today has to do with specific sites and their natural flavors. Yet you’ve got a huge, state-of-the-art winery down below with every tool a winemaker could want. How do you reconcile the two?
Graham Weerts (GW): Technology allows you to do basic, simple winemaking as well as you possibly can. We may have the coolest sorting table you can imagine, but the basic process is still sorting: making sure that you crush only the grapes you want to crush. With the technology we have, we don’t have to compromise on the basics, so we don’t have to intervene later in the process to fix things. If you get the basics right, then your site can shine.
TE: Jess Jackson decided what varietal wines you would make. Did he give you any stylistic instructions?
GW: I don’t subscribe to styles in wine. I put a microscope on my property and see what’s there to express. Some things you find with science, such as the great variety of soils, the
With Healdsburg in the far distant valley, Stonestreet’s mountain estate vineyards offer eagle-eye vistas. excellent drainage, and the way that constant air movement on the mountain minimizes mildew and other problems. Other things you find just by being on the ground among the vines. For example, this mountain has incredible energy. It sounds unscientific to say that, but I can feel it and it’s always part of what I’m trying to capture.
TE: Your Chardonnays remind me of Mulderbosch whites, which have both richness and crispness combined with vivid flavor profiles. What did you learn in your first job that you’re applying here?
GW: Attention to detail and a drive for purity. For me, purity in wine is a snapshot of exactly what I find in the vineyard site. I try to keep ego to a minimum, intervene as little as possible, and let the vineyard be the hero.
TE: Speaking of Mulderbosch, it’s famous for its Sauvignon Blanc. Do you have any plans to make Sauvignon Blanc at Stonestreet?
GW: It’s already made. There’s a bit of an irony that just before I was hired, Stonestreet tore out its Sauvignon Blanc, so I made the wine from another [Jackson] estate.
TE: Will you release it commercially?
GW: I hope so. We’ll see. Jess and Barbara [Banke, Jackson’s wife and co-CEO] aim pretty high, so the idea is to give Didier Dageneau [a benchmark vintner in France’s Sauvignon Blanc-producing region of Sancerre] a run for his money. If the wine is a success, we’ll have to find the right site for a permanent program. When you look at how white wine grapes do on Alexander Mountain, I don’t think there’s any question we could grow some great Sauvignon.
TE: At Mulderbosch, you picked some of your Sauvignon Blanc as low as 19º Brix, which most people would consider unripe. Why did you do that?
GW: We were picking our acids so we wouldn’t have to add acid in the winery from a sack. When we picked at 19º, we knew we would also be picking other blocks at 26º. So we were simply coming by our balance and complexity naturally. We do some of that here with our Chardonnay, and I think it’s more common in the business than people tend to talk about. It’s easier to say you picked at an average of 23º.
TE: You mentioned that Jess and Barbara “aim high.” What’s it like working for them?
GW: I find Jess to be one of the most supportive proprietors I’ve worked with. His level of knowledge and involvement in the business is mind-boggling, but he also lets you do what you’re doing. One of the most amazing things is that when I started, he said I had five years to prove myself. That’s a long time in the wine business.
TE: What about Alexander Mountain itself? Is there anything about the site that surprised you?
GW: The whole mountain is a revelation. Both the richness and the restraint that you find in the wine are there in the fruit - we don’t introduce that in the winery, we just harvest it.
What we do introduce in the winery is wood: we ferment and age the wines 100% in oak, and up to 45% of the barrels are new. Yet the wine integrates it beautifully, to the point that people often don’t have any idea how much new wood we’ve used.
TE: One of the main things we’re seeing up here on the mountain is concentration: everything is smaller and more concentrated than down in the valley. Clusters are small, berries are tiny, and 12-year-old vines look like they’re a third that age. The same thing is evident in California wine overall - more concentration of flavor and color, particularly in high-end reds. What do you think is going on?
GW: It’s a worldwide phenomenon. It has a lot to do with sales, I think, because really concentrated wines stand out head and shoulders above the rest. People coming into the business clasp onto that as a way to the top. If they have a place like this mountain, then it’s natural because the site and the vines combine to concentrate the flavors for you. But in a lot of places, people are reverse-engineering the naturally concentrated wines so that they can create concentration in the winery according to a recipe, with machines. That, to me, is the height of desperation.
TE: Given your experience in California so far, in what area do you think the state has something to teach winemakers in South Africa?
GW: Viticulture. The investment people make in California to get perfectly ripe fruit is astonishing. The planting, the labor, the technology – it’s amazing. On this mountain, we have barcodes on every single row, so that we can record anything we see or do in a computer and then analyze it down to an incredible level of detail. We have a long way to go in South Africa to match that level of farming.
TE: Let’s turn the question around: what could vintners in California learn about from South Africa?
GW: Innovation. I know there’s a lot of innovation here in the States, but the level of experimentation and discovery in South Africa is unbelievable. After Apartheid ended in 1994, a huge number of young people went into winemaking but in the ten years before that the
Fingers of fog lap against the Alexander Mountain vineyards, providing the cooling temperatures needed for Stonestreet's white grapes.entire industry had fallen a couple of decades behind the rest of the world. The new winemakers showed up to find a whole decade’s worth of new winemaking techniques just waiting for them. So they have gone wild, trying everything imaginable to figure out for themselves what works. They don’t have a set of expectations or accepted practices, so they’re free to explore what’s really right for the wines of the country.
TE: You’re in year four of your five-year proving process. How’s it going?
GW: I like the 2004s, but they’re really markers for what we’re going to release in the years ahead. The 2005s and 2006s will show a lot more of what we can do on this mountain, and 2007 is looking very good as well. Right now, I’m not thinking further ahead than tomorrow, because we’ve got hundreds of tons of fruit coming off the mountain in the next few weeks.
Photos by Thom Elkjer, except for 'Fingers of fog" courtesy of Stonestreet Winery.
Graham Weerts (GW): Technology allows you to do basic, simple winemaking as well as you possibly can. We may have the coolest sorting table you can imagine, but the basic process is still sorting: making sure that you crush only the grapes you want to crush. With the technology we have, we don’t have to compromise on the basics, so we don’t have to intervene later in the process to fix things. If you get the basics right, then your site can shine.
TE: Jess Jackson decided what varietal wines you would make. Did he give you any stylistic instructions?
GW: I don’t subscribe to styles in wine. I put a microscope on my property and see what’s there to express. Some things you find with science, such as the great variety of soils, the
With Healdsburg in the far distant valley, Stonestreet’s mountain estate vineyards offer eagle-eye vistas.
TE: Your Chardonnays remind me of Mulderbosch whites, which have both richness and crispness combined with vivid flavor profiles. What did you learn in your first job that you’re applying here?
GW: Attention to detail and a drive for purity. For me, purity in wine is a snapshot of exactly what I find in the vineyard site. I try to keep ego to a minimum, intervene as little as possible, and let the vineyard be the hero.
TE: Speaking of Mulderbosch, it’s famous for its Sauvignon Blanc. Do you have any plans to make Sauvignon Blanc at Stonestreet?
GW: It’s already made. There’s a bit of an irony that just before I was hired, Stonestreet tore out its Sauvignon Blanc, so I made the wine from another [Jackson] estate.
TE: Will you release it commercially?
GW: I hope so. We’ll see. Jess and Barbara [Banke, Jackson’s wife and co-CEO] aim pretty high, so the idea is to give Didier Dageneau [a benchmark vintner in France’s Sauvignon Blanc-producing region of Sancerre] a run for his money. If the wine is a success, we’ll have to find the right site for a permanent program. When you look at how white wine grapes do on Alexander Mountain, I don’t think there’s any question we could grow some great Sauvignon.
TE: At Mulderbosch, you picked some of your Sauvignon Blanc as low as 19º Brix, which most people would consider unripe. Why did you do that?
GW: We were picking our acids so we wouldn’t have to add acid in the winery from a sack. When we picked at 19º, we knew we would also be picking other blocks at 26º. So we were simply coming by our balance and complexity naturally. We do some of that here with our Chardonnay, and I think it’s more common in the business than people tend to talk about. It’s easier to say you picked at an average of 23º.
TE: You mentioned that Jess and Barbara “aim high.” What’s it like working for them?
GW: I find Jess to be one of the most supportive proprietors I’ve worked with. His level of knowledge and involvement in the business is mind-boggling, but he also lets you do what you’re doing. One of the most amazing things is that when I started, he said I had five years to prove myself. That’s a long time in the wine business.
TE: What about Alexander Mountain itself? Is there anything about the site that surprised you?
GW: The whole mountain is a revelation. Both the richness and the restraint that you find in the wine are there in the fruit - we don’t introduce that in the winery, we just harvest it.
What we do introduce in the winery is wood: we ferment and age the wines 100% in oak, and up to 45% of the barrels are new. Yet the wine integrates it beautifully, to the point that people often don’t have any idea how much new wood we’ve used.
TE: One of the main things we’re seeing up here on the mountain is concentration: everything is smaller and more concentrated than down in the valley. Clusters are small, berries are tiny, and 12-year-old vines look like they’re a third that age. The same thing is evident in California wine overall - more concentration of flavor and color, particularly in high-end reds. What do you think is going on?
GW: It’s a worldwide phenomenon. It has a lot to do with sales, I think, because really concentrated wines stand out head and shoulders above the rest. People coming into the business clasp onto that as a way to the top. If they have a place like this mountain, then it’s natural because the site and the vines combine to concentrate the flavors for you. But in a lot of places, people are reverse-engineering the naturally concentrated wines so that they can create concentration in the winery according to a recipe, with machines. That, to me, is the height of desperation.
TE: Given your experience in California so far, in what area do you think the state has something to teach winemakers in South Africa?
GW: Viticulture. The investment people make in California to get perfectly ripe fruit is astonishing. The planting, the labor, the technology – it’s amazing. On this mountain, we have barcodes on every single row, so that we can record anything we see or do in a computer and then analyze it down to an incredible level of detail. We have a long way to go in South Africa to match that level of farming.
TE: Let’s turn the question around: what could vintners in California learn about from South Africa?
GW: Innovation. I know there’s a lot of innovation here in the States, but the level of experimentation and discovery in South Africa is unbelievable. After Apartheid ended in 1994, a huge number of young people went into winemaking but in the ten years before that the
Fingers of fog lap against the Alexander Mountain vineyards, providing the cooling temperatures needed for Stonestreet's white grapes.
TE: You’re in year four of your five-year proving process. How’s it going?
GW: I like the 2004s, but they’re really markers for what we’re going to release in the years ahead. The 2005s and 2006s will show a lot more of what we can do on this mountain, and 2007 is looking very good as well. Right now, I’m not thinking further ahead than tomorrow, because we’ve got hundreds of tons of fruit coming off the mountain in the next few weeks.
Photos by Thom Elkjer, except for 'Fingers of fog" courtesy of Stonestreet Winery.
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