Big In The Mouth

Segue Goes Biodynamic

“Great news!” many of you have said at the tastings and events where I’ve been pouring Segue ’06 wines over the past  few months when you've found out that I've harvested biodynamic  grapes this year for a new release in ’08.  And then, after a slight pause:  “By the way, what exactly is biodynamic?”

Like a lot of things that are supposed to be good for you, the danger is that the more you inquire about it, the more you regret that you asked. Well, maybe not in this case. Biodynamic is simply an ultra-organic approach to farming that creates a kind of closed natural system, where all the composted ingredients that go back into the living earth come from the farm itself.

It also stimulates plant growth through homeopathic preparations, sprayed in minute amounts on a variety of crops after being composted in buried female cow horns.

The Rush Limbaughs of the world love the cow horns. They latch on to them, also to the  biodynamic method of planting by lunar cycles, to prove that stoned ex-hippies are taking down this great nation one moonstruck bovine adornment at a time.

Hey,  biodynamically grown grapes and fruits and broccoli florets don’t much care what Rush,  his agri-chemical buddies or anyone else thinks. They’re radiant.  The farm is their Cote D’Azur.  They bask and eat and grow and thrive. If you’ve ever seen a vigorous biodynamic grapevine in full cluster, you know.

Me, I’ve got some serious doubts about whether biodynamic wine-grape growers, still a scant minority, are making a convincing  case to mainstream consumers for the wines that come out of their vineyards. But I have no doubt that their purely organic grapes produce clean, vibrant wines that don’t pollute our streams  and air. Mike Benziger, of Benziger  Family Winery, compares conventional farming with synthetic inputs to  grime on windshields. The chemicals  obscure the view—or in this case, the flavors that define a particular place, he argues. He's a terrific biodynamic proponent and pioneer, both—but he doesn't foist his views on anyone.

At a recent biodynamic wine conference, Bonny Doon owner Randall Grahm said that to him, these wines stay fresher longer and don’t produce as many negative personal side effects like headaches.  Now that, I thought to myself, is a potential CNN sound bite.

The 100 or so cases I’m producing from my ’07 harvest come from a small farm in Anderson Valley, Mendocino. It’s Segue’s first foray out of the Russian River area, and hardly the last, if these grapes deliver the way they promise to. So far the wine, now in barrel, tastes purely delicious.

If you want to know more about the history and practices of  biodynamic farming, please email me. I’ve got a voluminous  file.

Indecent Exposure:the Segue '06 RRV

How to read a wine barrel: YAPNDN060= Yafa Pinot Noir DuNah lot 060. If you could see the head, it would read MT, or Medium Toast, along with the name of the cooper—Seguin Moreau—and the vintage year. It would tell you as well if the barrel heads as well as the sides are toasted. For many winemakers, head-toasting imparts too much oak. Usually Pinot Noir, unlike Cabernet -family grapes, stays in new oak for 11-14 months, not 22 months or more. The barrels do their work for 2 years, then become neutral.

One of the things I’ve discovered as I prepare for the second release of my Segue Russian River Pinot Noir this coming fall Is that there are no formulas for directing Pinot Noir to where you want it to go.

Sooner or later the wine develops its own willful character, and you have to accept that human logic and cunning take you only so far. Like a domestic pet, or your own offspring, it can be solicited to obey, wheedled to conform to the rules you’ve established—but in the end Pinot Noir will always behave according to some unpredictable genetic code you can never fully unravel or decipher.

I suspect those same unfathomable mysteries help explain the popularity of astrology—which, by the way, somebody could get rich applying to wines. Why does this Pinot smell as musky as a forest floor today when last week it smelled like a bowlful of cherries? Well, why not? It’s a Gemini with a split personality. Too much tannic grip? Hey, that’s easy, the wine’s a control-freak Virgo.

And the real losers, the grapes that go south in the barrel for no rational reason, those can be explained away in three simple words: Mercury’s in retrograde.

So far, the planets have been in perfect alignment for the ’06 Segue Russian River blend, I’m pleased to report. Over the past ten days, sniff by sniff and sip by sip my partner-in crime, Greg LaFollette, and I have been creating it from half a dozen Russian River and neighboring vineyards. The process is exciting, because the ’06 wine-growing season in West Sonoma , a difficult one , promises to pay off in richly textured wines with plenty of structure and depth.

All the sniffing and sipping accounts for that sea of semi-filled glasses in the left photograph, and for the serious concentration. Each glass holds a different blend—a staggering seventy or more possible combinations of one part this to two parts that, or two parts this to three parts that for more silky mouthfeel and so on, tasting forwards and backwards and even, yes, sideways to arrive at just the right proportion of the three finalist vineyards.

The base of my ’06, as in my ’05, is from a vineyard block I purchase with the help of DeLoach winery—whose owner, Jean-Charles Boisset has been a generous ally and champion of Segue from its inception, as has Greg LaFollette,  one of our country’s best Pinot Noir winemakers.

If you sat and tasted with us, you’d pick up these tidbits from our conversation :
Me: It’s getting there, but like Ginny says, it’s still too polite.
Greg: Yeah, we need to add something slutty to this—or slutty lees for yeast stress aroma, sulfides.
Me: To get the feral thing into it, yup, but not so much it’s over the top.
Greg: For sure. We don’t want it to get arrested for indecent exposure.

If you taste a slight smokiness and mushroom woodsiness in the’06, along with raspberry and dark blueberry, that’s more or less what we’re talking about. Just the sort of wine a Leo with a moon in Taurus would love—or a Pinot buff who’s addicted to discovering new layers of aroma and taste as the wine opens up to reveal its beguiling secrets. To pre-order, please visit Segue Cellars.

The Case of the Missing Bottle

One of the first things I did when I released my Segue Cellars’05 last November was to send a bottle to Charles Olken , whose Connoisseurs' Guide To California Wine is, as billed, the authoritative voice of the California wine consumer. Olken and Associate Editor Stephen Eliot have been reviewing and rating California wines since 1974 in their monthly guide, and they are famous for taking no prisoners.

“No one does a better job of covering the California wine scene,” says Robert Parker, Jr.

Every wine is wrapped in tin foil and blind-tasted in varietal flights of eight, analyzed for aroma, taste, mouthfeel and so forth, then ranked in order of preference by the editors and selected guests. Olken and Eliot collect their notes and write concise, thoughtful  descriptions for their subscribers . They never ask for free winery samples. They pride themselves, as they should, on remaining intractably objective over three decades.

Only the highest-ranked wines get scores in the 90’s, and are awared puffs. Yes, puffs. These puffs are cuddly stars, soft at the points where stars are sharp. They look like little tufted pillows—and if a wine gets two or three, it’s being especially singled out for praise. Most get none at all.
(The puffs were originally meant to be stars, by the way, but when Olken began his guide, faxing and Xeroxing equipment lacked precision, and as Olken sent out his first Connoisseur copies they migrated by distortion into puffs.)

Now, about that missing bottle of Segue. About three months after sending it along to Charles simply for his opinion—knowing I wasn’t making enough for it to be officially reviewed in print— I realized I’d never heard back from him. That was odd. Charles is gracious as well as communicative. When I phoned to ask how come, he was surprised; he told me he’d never received my bottle. By now , three months later, I’d sold out of my scant 50 cases, but I still would have valued his opinion.
It was not to be—or so I thought until we met again last week at a San Francisco tasting of West Australian wines. ( Tip: remarkably crisp Rieslings that improve with age.) Olken greeted me with a big smile.

“It’s coming out in June,” he said. “Our review of your Segue in the Pinot Noir issue.”
It took me a few moments to understand that he’d somehow discovered and dug out my missing Segue’05 bottle from his stash of several thousand wines. The bottle hadn’t been lost in transit after all. It had been recently tin-foiled, blind-tasted, rated and written up, without my knowledge, even though it wasn’t generally available.

“I was delighted to see what label was on the bottle once we peeled off the foils,” he told me. And nothing else. Charlie is a man of mystery.

“One to remember.” That’s how I’ll recall my elation at Segue’s first write-up in the Connoisseur’s Guide:
** 91 SEGUE Russian River Valley 2005
You won’t find this limited production bottling at the local wine store, but it does show up on a few wine lists and its impressive showing here makes it one to remember. It starts with distinctive red cherry fruit smells and picks up plenty of rich crème brûlée and sweet smoke notes as it airs. Its balanced, supple feel on the palate and its pleasingly round, lengthy, slightly firm finish assures a bit of improvement with cellaring. OBI$42.00

Man On A Barrel

Yes, that’s me, in Michael Greaney’s remarkably accurate illustration for the first May installment of a three-part series I’ve written on starting Segue Cellars—“Going Pro,” in Wines & Vines .The subhead says it all: “A sandlot winemaker tries out for the big leagues. " Wines & Vines will be publishing Parts 2 and 3 in June and July . They'll also be available on their Web site. Anyone who produces Pinot Noir knows that the grape loves to feast on raw rookies.

 

Segue '06 Pinot Noir

There are good problems to have, so the aphorism goes—and this is one of them. Thanks to your willingness to take a flyer on an unknown upstart— my ’05 Segue Cellars Russian River Pinot Noir—I’m  sold out of it.  That  may sound less  impressive when you learn that I made a mere 50 cases, that three got soaked up by oak in the  barrels or spilled on the winery floor or consumed by mysterious midnight imbibers, I’ll never know, but in the end 47 cases and a few bottles became my entire inventory. Now there are four—two for the newly inaugurated Segue Wine Library ( my home basement, complete with mousetraps, if you really must know) and two stashed away for my first  Segue public tasting event at  Pinot Days in San Francisco in late June.

125 Cases +/-
This year I’ll be producing about 125 cases of the ’06 Segue, the same blend as the ’05, and as an new addition,  a single vineyard from the DuNah Estate in Russian River, where Rick and Diane DuNah tend their grapes with more care and devotion that  some parents lavish on their offspring. If interested in reserving a case or more, simply email me —info@seguecellars.com— and I ‘ll contact you with details.

Purple Haze
The ’06 harvest was a bear—lots of fruit, ripe all  at once, major logjams at  Owl Ridge in Sebastopol, the custom crush facility I use, and just enough rain at the end to invite smelly mold, the notorious botrytis. How to separate out the bad clusters from the rest? Pretty much the same way that winemakers have been doing that for 3000 years—one handful at a time. As a forklift tilts a bin carrying close to a ton of grapes at the top of a funnel-shaped shoot, you and your manic cellar rat crew line  up on either side of a sharply angled conveyor belt.

The clusters pour down, thousands of them, like a purple tsunami and as they cascade toward the crusher-destemmer at the bottom of the conveyor, you reach in with furious intensity  and grab the clusters that look moldy and throw them over your shoulder onto the concrete floor, much the same way that Henry VIII tossed moose bones to the hunting hounds at his banquets. Perhaps. But while Henry VIII got up and walked out , possibly to polish off another wife, when finished as a grape-sorter you go nowhere. You’re in for the long haul, up to six hours  and thirty tons of grapes at a time. You sweat, you ache, but hey—you’re in the thick of the action.

Nose to  Nose
There’s a good chance that most of these delicate, thin-skinned, cranky and highly temperamental Pinot Noir grapes, about the price of gold nuggets these days, won’t wind up in your own bottles. They’re likely to be grapes purchased by other boutique winemakers at the custom crush to ultimately be pressed and racked and bottled to compete with your wine on the open market.

That’s  handcrafted, garagiste winemaking. The usual laws of competition apply, and don’t. We all know that one winemaker’s crisis this year—too much fruit for the capacity of the fermentation tank, a sudden  attack  of  brettanomyces yeast that give off a bouquet of horseshit—may well be ours next year, and so with few exceptions, we take care of our own business and pitch in without complaint when another one of us needs help. Survival. There’s also sense of camaraderie about the enterprise that draws on the social aspect of winemaking.

Yes, it’s nice to rub sticky elbows with your professional friends, but beyond all that there’s the nature of wine itself. It comes to us through the senses of taste and smell, our two most elusive, subjective ways of interacting with the world around us. Is my nose for cinnamon and tea leaf in that Pinot the same as yours? Is the blackberry I’m tasting  in this glass that thing you keep calling dark cherry?

Raising Wine
Winemakers have the same problems as wine drinkers in identifying and agreeing on aromas and tastes. We’re just asked to do it more often, so we get more practiced at It. That  doesn’t make us less curious about how our sniffers and tongues compare to the guy with his nose in the glass beside us, and that’s one reason we’re always handing each other  our works-in-progress, barrel samples. We smile when a colleague says “delicious” and wince when she says “It disappears, mid-palate.” Beyond that, if the wine’s not going in the direction we want, we can stare at the chemistry panel numbers on it all day long and still be stymied, but when a fellow winemaker we trust says something like, “I’d think about doing a tartaric (acid) add,” we’re apt to jump on that advice.

There are no formulas that guarantee perfect results. If there were, we’d find another line of work. Garagistes aren’t formula folks.  Which of course brings me around to the Segue ’06, now in barrels and behaving itself nicely. In the  months ahead  it will fall apart briefly, collect itself, stumble again and catch its balance and I trust, find its voice,  something like an actor in rehearsal before opening night.

That’s all part of the process, but if I’ve done my fieldwork diligently, the fruit I’ve chosen  will ultimately prevail to produce the wine I want.  No amount of manipulation makes up for mediocre grapes. That’s why the French  have no word for winemaker. They say you don’t make wine, you raise wine, and if you’ve raised it correctly in the vineyard and shepherded it gracefully through production, you may get to praise of all the elements that combine to create  that satin goddess in your glass,  Pinot Noir.

What's In A Name?

The first question I'm usually asked about Segue is not how it tastes, but how it's spelled. It's not spelled the way it looks, or the way it's pronounced— which is Seg-way. A Segway, spelled like this, is the motorized thing that resembles a hand lawn  mower with oversized wheels. It intuits where you want to go and gets you there based on some sort of advanced artificial intelligence that takes its cues from the soles of your feet.

On the ground or on the label of a bottle of  Pinot Noir,  segue is all about change, some sort of transition or journey, often musical. I used the word because it fit what I was up to, but on the other hand I didn’t hear any trumpet fanfares announcing my segue from wine writer who makes wine at home to commercial  Pinot Noir winemaker who writes at home.

What I  heard were a few loud grunts from some of the many folks I know who make wine for a living as they recalled their own hazardous adventures with the Pinot Noir grape, that demonic diva who  lures you into her boudoir to slit your throat as she nibbles on your earlobe.

Alder Yarrow has pretty much the same reaction to my undertaking  in his feature on Segue this week on his Vinography blog.  He likes the wine and he writes about it with his usual blend of wit and insight. He also knows me. “That he decided to get his start with one of the most notoriously finicky grapes on the planet probably tells you more about Stephen Yafa than anything else,” Yarrow remarks along the way.

This guy’s never met me, it doesn’t matter, he’s nailed me cold. If something’s easy to do, why bother?  When my wife, Bonnie, read Yarrow’s observation, she laughed out loud. She’s been saying the same thing for twenty-seven years about my reckless nature, and  for just about that long I haven’t listened. Somehow she’s mustered the grace and forbearance to make our journey together a voyage of constant discovery, and there’s nothing I've come across in any bottle, including mine, that comes close for pure, vintage soul satisfaction.

2006 Barrel Tasting: Part One

Winemaking  is located at the juncture of poetry and chemistry. It’s not a place you’d want to hang out if you  were in any kind of hurry, I was thinking last Saturday as I tasted through  2006 Russian River Pinot Noir barrels with my partner in crime, Greg LaFollette.

One of the great enjoyments or exasperations of  winemaking, in fact, is the time it takes to do all the things that resist  end-arounds and short-cuts. Boutique winemaking  is like writing letters in longhand with a quill, while the rest of the known world  is instant text messaging, emailing, and, yeah, blogging.  Ancient practices have been updated without any corresponding increase in speediness; human sweat  continues to trump technology.

Once they probably used hollow reeds to suck wines-in-progress out of the amphora for a sample swig. Now we  barrel-taste by sucking juice through a narrow plastic siphon tube from 60-gallon oak barrels. That’s about all the difference, 3000 years later. We still purse our lips, breathe in, try not to get it up our nose and hope for the best. As soon as the juice rushes through  we squeeze the tube and aim it toward the glass we hold in our other hand. Usually we get a little less precise as the hours wear on, which is why you see all those claret stains on wine barrels, which are not leaking from within.

But that’s the easy part. The thing that Greg and I were doing, that most boutique winemakers become skilled at, is a form of rock-climbing that doesn’t involve rocks. These filled barrels tower up as high as fifteen to  twenty feet  on steel racks, and although you can use a ladder, there’s a good chance you’ll also quickly learn to rise  to the top level by adroitly climbing up between vertical column of barrels, more or less wedging yourself skyward  as you hoist  your weary torso up with a grunt from one barrel to the next, left then right then left as if ascending  a narrow gap by staggering your steps between ridiculously large boulders.

In one hand you hold your torch—small flashlight, standard equipment—and in the other, your siphon hose and tasting glass. It’s not quite an Olympic event, but there’s enough going on—and an unforgiving concrete floor below—to make you pay close attention.  Over several hours we tasted through ten barrels from six different vineyards.

By “tasted “, I mean that we siphoned off a small amount into our glasses after illuminating the dark bung hole  with our torch and sucking up the fluid. By “tasted” I mean that each time we swirled the new wine, sipped it, gurgled it, and spit it out—sometimes in an arc, twenty feet above ground. By “tasted” I mean that we tried not to swallow, because wine is the enemy of winemakers. When drunk even in small amounts, it tends to dull the taste buds—that’s the alcohol at work—so you learn quickly to spit,   into floor drains, and accurately whenever possible, or anywhere you can when not possible, the way tobacco chewers treated the world around them as one vast spittoon  in The Old West.

As for the 2006 wines-in-barrel we tasted, and the different flavor that each of the different barrels is imparting to them, slowly but surely—more on that in the next installment. They were tricky to harvest for a variety of reasons, but all that may soon be forgotten.

In the Beginning...

I knew I was in trouble. I was a man with graying hair and a prostate that was up to serious mischief and all I cared about at the moment, standing high up on a narrow catwalk suspended across an open-top fermenter that held 8,000 pounds of roiling juice was summoning the strength to press down on the solid cap of skins and fruit pulp that formed a tight, cement-hard seal above the juice, more than a foot thick.

In the pouring rain, at night, I was punching down, or trying to submerge the cap with an instrument that resembles a large, heavy steel toilet plunger with a large disc at the business end. You grip the tool's dowel handles and grunt and push. You're trying to break apart the cap and sink it long enough for the skin tannins and color components to mingle with the juice and enrich it before the released carbon dioxide sends these solids floating up to the top again. They do re-form, and for about a week, and twice a day at least, if you're slightly nuts, you climb onto the catwalk to punch down the cap again by hand. There are automated ways of submerging it but for some of us, the crazies, hand-punching is the only option. It's gentler and kinder to the grape skins we believe, resulting in softer wines.

They say 65 is the new 45. I assure you that when you're punching down on a slippery catwalk and the suction action of the juice just about wrenches your shoulders out of their sockets as you yank up on your tool, it feels more like the new 120.