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TECHNICAL SPOTLIGHT WINEMAKING September 2016 WINES&VINES 45 TIM MALONEY/TECHNICAL IMAGERY STUDIOS for him was St. George. He didn't have any clairvoyance not to plant AXR1; it's just the Zin is planted very much in the old way." Planted in 1977, that dry-farmed Zinfandel is still going strong and can often be one of the most productive vineyard blocks of the estate. "It seemed to go through kind of a quiet period seven or eight years ago, when we thought it was in decline, and then it just woke up again in 2012 and we've had really good crops." While the family dream had been to open a winery, the brothers said they didn't start to make wine under the Titus Vineyards label until 1990. Production stayed small for the next 10 years, and eventually the brothers took over when it became clear their father had no interest in the modern wine industry. "As much as he loved growing grapes, he didn't really like the wine business," Phil Titus said. Their father enjoyed a simpler version of the wine business, in which vintners sold their wares either to the neighbors or a few clients. "The picture that he liked was the barrel of wine in the cellar and drawing off a jug, and the neighbors coming and buying it," Eric Titus said. Phil Titus said that when his father got a taste of label design, compliance, packaging decisions and working with distributors, he decided to stick to the vineyard. "He was the first to recognize, 'This is not what I want to do,' so Eric came in and we bought out their investments in what they put in for the startup costs," Phil Titus said. "They were very gracious. They kind of stayed involved, but at the same time they wanted to know what was going on, they just left us alone." Eric Titus had come back to the Napa Valley after a career in marine biology. While his brother had been traveling around the world, Phil Titus had pursued winemaking at the University of California, Davis, and worked at a few Napa wineries. After taking over the family business, Eric Titus focused on the vineyard side while Phil handled winemaking. In 1990, Phil Titus had also been named winemaker at Chappellet, and the Pritchard Hill winery served as the custom-crush home of the Titus brand for the next two decades. Back in the early 1990s, there weren't as many wineries producing boutique, small- vineyard Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, so the brothers said sales were brisk from the start. The family produced just a few hundred cases for the first few vintages, but that steadily increased until 2008, when they were making close to 10,000 cases. Plans for a winery take shape By then, Chappellet had little extra space for custom-crush clients, so the brothers began to seriously consider building an estate winery. They moved their wine to Laird Family Estate in north Napa and hired a consultant for a winery-use permit. Then the recession struck. "We just realized we had bigger fish to fry," Eric Titus said. "We just needed to worry about staying in business and moving inventory. We had a lot of wine in the pipeline, too." Plans for a winery were put on hold, and Eric Titus said he focused on building the winery's wine club to boost its direct-to-consumer sales, which helped get them through the worst of the recession and also made them realize their own winery was the only way to ensure future suc- cess. "We tried doing it through a wine club and building that organically, and we had limited success. But we just realized that when you're fighting it out in the wholesale market with ev- erybody else and just driving the margins down, that our best bet was really to build a winery. Finally the attitude was: If not now, when?" It was in early 2012 when the brothers re- started the planning and permit process by hiring a consultant who helped them get final approval from the county planning commission in early 2014. Once they had their required permits from the county, the brothers hired Matt Hollis and MH Architects in San Francisco as their architect and started planning the winery. "We really just told them, 'Here are the guidelines: We don't have a ton of money, it's all self-financed, and there is a limit to what you can spend,'" Eric Titus said. "So we kind of got that out of the way." Phil Titus said they had first thought of a very traditional structure similar to a classic barn. During the permit process, however, they learned they would need to build the winery on an earthen berm that would range in height from 5 to 8 feet as their property lies in the flood plain of the Napa River. That would have meant a barn towering some 60 feet over the surrounding vineyards. Instead of a hindrance, Hollis saw the po- tential of the berm to take advantage of the site's views of the Napa Valley. "He got this whole view thing figured out in his head way ahead of us," Phil Titus said. "It really turned out he had it dialed in from the beginning." The Titus' property is at the northern half of the Napa Valley, where it begins to narrow as the mountains from the east and west begin to encroach upon the valley floor. The winery is tucked into a bend of the road and has the feel- ing of being surrounded by vineyards and moun- tains while still clearly visible from the road. A back deck offers an unbroken view of vineyards that stretch to the Napa River and redwood covered mountains spanning the horizon. Because of the building's position on the berm, the design team at MH Architects sought to keep the building's height and general pro- file to a minimum. The main tasting room has bar space as well as tables and private areas, and it is connected to the outdoor area with a set of sliding glass doors that stretch across a 24-foot wide opening. KEY POINTS While the Titus family has grown grapes in Napa Valley for nearly 50 years, the winery was just completed in 2015. A small but efficient cellar provides all the necessary tank space for estate wines. The winery's hospitality areas are vital to the company's focus on DtC sales for fu- ture sales growth. Santa Rosa Stainless Steel supplied the tanks for Titus Vineyards. The outside crush pad can also be used for barrel work.