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Inquiring Winemaker TIM P A T TERSON What Winemakers Are Excited About ative people," said Gianni Abate, winemak- er at Morgan Winery in Monterey County, Calif. "Mother Nature doesn't give you predictable material every year, but you still have to make consistent wines." The way Andrew Wenzl, winemaker at T Abacela Vineyards in Oregon's Umpqua Valley, sees it, "If you aren't trying to make better wine every year, why be in the wine industry?" Veteran winemakers tend to be a bit skeptical about the next new thing. "I've never been a silver bullet kind of wine- maker," said winemaker John Falcone. "There's always a trend, some new piece of equipment—the latest and greatest— that will make the best wine ever. But I taste a lot of wines made a lot of differ- ent ways, and they're all good wines, and I wonder.…" "It's an incremental business," said Joe Hart of Hart Family Winery in Temecula, Calif. "You make progress in small increments, not revolutionary changes." Winemaker Kimber- lee Nicholls, who joined Napa's Markham Vineyards as an enologist in 1993, captures the quandary many winemakers are in: "I talk to other winemakers, and we all feel we may be missing something, but who knows what it is? It's a competitive field; you have to check everything out." So, are all the cool wineries up to their ears in designer yeast strains, miracle enzymes and flash extraction grape ex- ploders? Apparently not. Using my idea of modern technology—a telephone lan- 48 Wines & Vines JULY 2012 radition plays an enormous role in the world of wine, but scratch any good winemaking operation and you'll find an undercurrent of change, too. "Winemakers are generally cre- dline—I called a barrel of wine monkeys to find out what was (relatively) new in their domains. None of them were swooning over any single game-changer, and several were having good luck ignor- ing conventional wisdom. "It's an incremental business. You make progress in small increments." —Joe Hart, Hart Family Winery Starting in the vineyard As I expected, several people were more eager to talk about what had been going on in their vineyards than in their cellars. When I asked Bob Lindquist at Qupé in California's Santa Maria Valley what was new in his winemaking, he said, "I don't change very rapidly. My winemak- ing style is pretty traditional, using tech- niques stretching back hundreds of years, so they don't change that much." What was new, however, was that the vineyard he and his winemaker wife Louisa (Ver- dad Wines) have owned since 2005 was certified Biodynamic in 2008, so it now comprises a significant part of the Qupé grape sourcing. The vineyard is in the Edna Valley, with a climate similar to the Santa Maria vine- yards that Lindquist has been using for years, but with more clay in the soil mix. Lindquist insists there is a difference in fruit quality from the Biodynamic farming, conveying a "sense of place" that he ad- mits is hard to define, and not just over the phone. The one difference in winemaking is that, following Biodynamic winemaking practices, no yeast is added for fermenta- tion. But as Lindquist is the first to note, the facility that he and Au Bon Climat owner Jim Clendennen have shared for three decades no doubt has its share of res- ident yeast populations, making it a safe place for a "wild" fermentation. Further up California's Central Coast in Paso Robles, Tablas Creek general manager Jason Haas said their big news is convert- ing all their vineyards from organic to Bio- dynamic farming during the past 2.5 years. (See "Expansion Aids Visitors and Wines" in the June 2012 issue of Wines & Vines.) The lots from the first few Biodynamic sections were outstanding, so they decided to go for it. The vines share space with a mixed herd of sheep, alpacas and donkeys, along with chickens and pigs. Maybe it's the climate, maybe it's that the vines are older, maybe it's the Biodynamic farming, but Hass notes that something is bringing down their aver- age harvest Brix levels—from 24.2º in 2007 to 22.4º in 2011—without any conscious at- tempt to harvest at lower sugar. In Mendocino's cool Anderson Valley, Navarro Vineyards decided a while back to have Babydoll sheep grazing in its vine- yards, which meant fiddling with the trellis- ing systems to get the grapes a little higher off the ground. In the process, they have moved from vertical shoot positioning to "a kind of modified California sprawl," said winemaker Jim Klein, in order not to Highlights • Good winemakers are always trying new tricks, many of them not all that trendy. • a round of calls to winemakers across the country unearthed a number of in- teresting wrinkles in vineyard and cellar practices. • If there was one overall trend, it was bucking conventional wisdom.