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WINEMAKER INTERVIEW 30 WINES&VINES July 2016 W inemakers are often peripatetic types, changing jobs every few years. Not Jeff Meier. The director of winemaking at J. Lohr Vineyards & Wines has been with the company (which has wineries in San Jose, Paso Robles and Greenfield, Calif., and farms 3,700 acres of vineyards) for more than three decades. Meier fell in love with wine country as a child. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Danville, and he would accompany his parents on wine-tasting trips to Napa and Sonoma. He was struck by the beauty of the vineyards. Still, when he started college at the University of Califor- nia, Davis, his goal was to become a veterinarian. He soon discovered, however, that his intended career wasn't a good fit. He took an introduction to winemaking class, and something clicked. It hadn't dawned on him when he was visiting wine country with his parents that people could work in the wine industry. He switched majors during his sopho- more year and earned his degree in viticulture and enology in 1983. Meier worked his first harvest at J. Lohr in 1984. Over the years he rose through the ranks and was named wine- maker in 1995. He became executive vice president in 2009 and added president and chief operating officer to his titles in 2014. J. Lohr has added a number of high-end offer- ings during Meier's tenure, including its Vineyard Series and Cuvée Series. Q You've used a lot of filtration methods during your years at J. Lohr. What practices did you follow in the past? Jeff Meier: When I started at J. Lohr back in 1984, we were doing a lot of clarification and filtration. We used a centrifuge for juice and wine lees clarification. All finished wines were cold stabilized after fermentation and were Velo pressure-leaf filtered (nominally 0.45 micron) back to barrels or tanks for additional aging. We were not unusual in our approach at the time, but as a neophyte winery worker I could see the effects on red wine density. Additionally, the wines, once removed from barrels, were reblended and Velo pressure-leaf filtered (nominally 0.45 micron) a second time pre-bottling, followed by a pad plate-and-frame filter and 0.45-micron Millipore nominal and absolute sterile filter during bottling. Our wines were squeaky clean and microbiologically stable. We also had an ultrafilter from Millipore with a 10,000 molecular weight cutoff that we used on our whites from Greenfield, in the Arroyo Seco AVA, for heat stabilization. Prior to using this ultrafilter, we had to add as much as 10 pounds of bentonite per thousand gallons to heat-stabilize our Sauvi- gnon Blanc from the area due in part to the grape harvesting and handling in the early 1980s, but also as a result of how Sauvignon Blanc was grown at that time. Now we press at the vineyard, so we don't need the ultrafilter and we can use a lot less bentonite. Q You eventually decided that cross-flow filtration was the way to go. Why is that your preferred filtra- tion method? Meier: We had a lot of experience with cross- flow membranes—in our case, with ultrafil- tration and reverse- osmosis filtration for o u r d e a l c o h o l i z e d Ariel wine brand—and began to see more and m o r e a p p l i c a t i o n f o r these same cross-flow fil- ters for polish filtration in the late 1980s. Although we were content with our pres- sure-leaf filtration, when I took over the winemaking reins in late 1995 and began to critically look at our wines pre- and post-filtration, I noticed a drop-off in density of some of our red wines—particularly Cab- ernet Sauvignon. The first thing that I did was to stop cold stabilizing and filtering our wines post-fermentation. We began to assemble our Bordeaux varietal blends in the January after vintage and put the racked blends to barrel for aging. When it was time to remove the wines from barrel, the wines were less prone to precipitation, and we began to look at ways to be gentler on the finished blends—even exploring bottling without membranes. This technique required very clean racked wines and no microbial load. We did have one wine that saw an acetobacter bloom in A CONVERSATION WITH Jeff Meier J. Lohr director of winemaking discusses filtration, Brett and handling Pinot Noir By Laurie Daniel