Appellation America: How did the job at J come about?

George Bursick (GB): Judy [Jordan] and I have been friends for more than twenty years. When I left Ferrari Carano, she told me she had some changes in mind and asked if I would take them on. The main change was to significantly expand the Pinot Noir program at a world-class level.

At this point in my career, I didn’t want to step back or even sideways. I wanted to take everything I have learned and go to a new level. Making Pinot Noir is perfect in that regard because no one owns Pinot Noir. Ninety percent of the producers are making less than 1000 cases, and that small size is a big reason they get attention. If you want to keep getting 1000-case attention with a much bigger program, you can’t cut corners. You can’t lower your standards. That’s my whole approach. Break everything down into the details, and get every detail right.

AA: J already has a pretty lofty reputation for its sparkling wine. Did you feel any qualms about putting that reputation on the line with the still wine programs?

GB: I know I’m under a microscope here. I would not have taken the job if I didn’t know what it meant.

AA: What about the fact that you’re not known for making Pinot Noir?

GB: I made Pinot Noir at Ferrari Carano for more than ten years, working with four different clones. I was allowed to release it only one year, in the late 1990s. Usually it was blended into Siena [a Sangiovese-based proprietary blend]. So the grape and the wine are not a mystery to me. I’ve already made all the mistakes!

What most people don’t realize is that making Pinot Noir is almost identical to making Sangiovese. Both are so clonal and site-specific in the vineyard, and both are delicate and unforgiving in the winery. You have to minimize tannin extraction without losing anything else. Texture and mouthfeel make a huge difference in how people perceive the wine. So I think of Sangiovese as “conceptual Pinot Noir,” and it’s not hard to make the transition. If I had come from a Cabernet Sauvignon background, that would be hard.

AA: Most vintners in California revere Pinot Noir and have turned their back on Sangiovese, so this comparison might startle them.

GB: Good farmers wouldn’t be surprised. Crop load and vine balance, avoiding rot and sunburn – the mentality for growing Pinot and Sangiovese is very similar. For winemakers, though, the two are night and day. When winemakers found out that Sangiovese is hard to make, and that it exposes their mistakes without mercy, they abandoned it.

We had success with it at Ferrari Carano because my big thing is wine body and structure – how people perceive the wine physically in the mouth. That’s the challenge in Pinot Noir, too. You have to deliver a mouthfeel that people notice and love. If I could get it with Sangiovese, I can get it with Pinot Noir.

AA: How are you going about that at J? Did you have to make many changes in the winemaking processes?

GB: It was radical change everywhere: in the vineyard, in the crush, in the winery, in the barrel program. If someone could not explain to me 100 percent why they were doing something in a certain way, it was on the table for discussion. And I really mean discussion. I wasn’t dictating new rules; I was listening for the logic, the approach, the passion. If you find those qualities in your people, you can do anything.

AA: Can you give an example of something that was both a big change in process and that had a big influence on the Pinots you’re releasing now?

GB: The three new wines we’ve added to the line-up were created from 84 different lots.

AA: How did you get 84 lots from a handful of vineyards?

GB: I dissect them. I taste every vineyard every day. One vineyard could produce fifteen different wines if you analyze all the variables of soil, exposure, drainage, and so on. That means you could pick fifteen different times because there is no such thing as the “perfect” moment to pick a whole 20-acre vineyard. The vines don’t care about each other, so they keep evolving at their own rates. It’s up to us to decide when to step in and select the moment of harvest.

In the winery, I keep the lots separate until we make the final blend. In my world, more wines are better than fewer. You learn more, you have more choices, and you have the chance for a single block in a vineyard to reveal itself as a gem – capable of producing a complete wine in a given vintage.

AA: Does the Russian River Valley lend itself to this kind of vineyard dissection?

GB: It requires it! The other Sonoma appellations I’ve worked in have some broad soil and climate variations, but nothing like we have in Russian River Valley. This region wasn’t meant to be, geologically. Millions of years ago, the river flowed from Mendocino into San Francisco Bay through Napa Valley. Then all hell broke loose: volcanoes, earthquakes, slides, you name it. The river couldn’t get out to the bay anymore, so it fought its way through here to the sea. The result is absolute chaos in the soil geology.

This is both fascinating and humbling. There’s no place like it on earth. You’ll never get a handle on the whole thing. The only thing we can do is dissect the vineyards, figure out what’s going on in the soil and the drainage and the fog and the sun, and try to capture each unique combination in one lot [of wine] – because the next ten rows may have a completely different combination.

AA: How does the current vogue for artisanal Pinot producers play into this?

GB: It’s the right thing at the right time. Once upon a time, Warren Dutton made people take Pinot Noir if they wanted to buy his Chardonnay grapes. Then the big growers moved in during the 1990s. Now the small producers are pouring in, buying grapes in small lots, and taking the micro approach to Pinot Noir that the appellation really needs. They will delineate and dissect the region and express it better and better over time.

AA: You’re already doing something similar here, at a big winery.

GB: We’ve gone from three Pinot Noirs to six, and we could do more if we have wines of such quality that they merit their own bottling. 2007 was a great vintage for us, so the possibility is there [to expand the line-up in the near term].

AA: What are you seeking, stylistically?

GB: I want to make powerful wines. Not from oak or excess ripeness, but from nature and patience. That goes for the whites as well as the reds, which means we’re not leaning on malolactic fermentation.

My first crush here, the winemaking staff was terrified because I let a Chardonnay primary fermentation take almost four months. I use wimpy yeasts and I don’t feed them nutrients. This approach is not for the faint of heart, but it lets the wine do what it has to do. You have to be patient and trust nature, which comes a little easier after 30-plus years in the business. For the younger people here, it was a major freak-out. But they hung in there with me and now they’re into it.

AA: Given your experience and standing as a winemaker, is there anything about your move into Russian River Valley and Pinot Noir that has surprised you?

GB: You know, people think winemakers are one big happy family, but they’re not. We help each other, we enjoy each other’s company, but we’re also competitors who keep our best secrets to ourselves. So the big surprise is that I’ve been accepted into the Russian River Pinot Noir club. I thought I would have to kick and claw my way in, but it’s been the opposite. People here are passionate about their appellation and their grape. The amount of sharing, the give and take, it blew me away.

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The Softer Side of George Bursick

By Dan Berger
George Bursick had heard the gossip soon after he was named to the position of wine maker at J Vineyards in the Russian River.

“They said, ‘How can this work out? He’s never made sparkling wine or Pinot Noir.’”

It was April 2006 and George, formerly wine maker at Ferrari-Carano, up the road in Dry Creek Valley, had inherited the 2005 vintage wines from the previous head man, Oded Shakked, and was now hearing how unsuited he was for this position.

But plans were afoot. He was pleased to acknowledge his previous wine making style, even though people who knew George well believed that some of the Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs he made at Ferrari-Carano were not to his personal liking, but fit the style of winery that Ferrrari Carano had become.

“When I got here, with the Chardonnay, for example, I threw everything out that I had previously done.” Among other things, every grape at J would be handled a lot more gently than anything he had previously done. For the Chardonnay, for instance, he ordered a Coquard press, one of the gentlest presses in the world and a staple with the top producers of Champagne.

“And we’re done pumping,” he said. The tactic now used to make all wines at J is to eschew pumps and to use gravity for movement of the grapes and the must. “If you pick it right and treat it delicately,” he said, “you can make a greater statement in the texture.”

It was texture that George specialized in while at UC Davis, and his thesis is that the better the texture, the more the wine’s balance is in harmony with the way it will taste when young, and the better it will age.

One way to assure this is to make his Pinot Noirs with softer tannins. To do that, he puts each wine into the barrel “dirty,” on the gross lees. This, he says, protects the wine from oxidation. He wants less than 1 part per million of dissolved oxygen in the wine.

A key to the tannin structure that George demands from his Pinot Noirs is that the tannins be supple, not harsh. From his UC Davis work, Bursick had learned that tannins derived from seeds (which are alcohol-soluble) are harsher than the tannins from grape skins, so he works diligently to remove as many seeds from the fermentation as possible early in the process. He said he sweeps out about 75% of the seeds in the first few hours of fermentation, keeping the more bitter tannins out of the wine.

The result of all this tinkering may well be a wine that isn’t as forward as some when it’s young, and the 2006 wines (tasted in late June) were at least six months if not a year away from showing best. The youth of the wines was most evident in the heavier versions.
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Photos of George Bursick by Thom Elkjer; all others courtesy of J Vineyards & Winery