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WINEMAKER INTERVIEW 36 WINES&VINES July 2017 W inemaker Scott McLeod, a native of Marin County, Calif., got interested in fermenta- tion when he tried his hand at making beer while he was in high school. That interest took him to the University of Cali- fornia, Davis, where he graduated in 1985 with a degree in fermentation science. While he was studying at Davis, McLeod spent a year at Isole e Olena in Chianti Classico, and he returned to the Italian wine region after graduation to work for an- other year at Badia a Passignano. When he returned to California, he bounced around the Napa Valley, working for several wineries, until winemaker Tony Soter intro- duced him to Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola hired McLeod in 1991 to make the wines at his Napa Valley estate, then known as Niebaum-Coppola. As director of winemaking, McLeod made the estate wines, including the flagship Rubicon Estate red, and oversaw wines such as the Dia- mond Series bottlings. After 18 years working for Coppola, McLeod struck out on his own in May 2010. He's a partner in WineXRay and Safe Harbor Wine Storage, both in Napa. He's also the winemaker for George Lucas' Skywalker Vineyard in Marin County as well as consulting winemaker for Daou Vineyards and Parrish Family in Paso Robles and Monte Xanic in Mexico's Guadalupe Valley. McLeod also consults for several other winery and vineyard projects and is a partner in 180 acres of vineyards in El Dorado and Mon- terey counties. Q One of your ventures is an analytical service in Napa called WineXRay. Please explain what sort of analysis you provide. Scott McLeod: Our platform is based on the Adams- Harbertson Assay from the University of California, Davis. The assay is intended for measuring concentra- tion of families of phenolic compounds found in grape skins and seeds as they migrate into wine during fer- mentation. Our system allows for near real-time evalu- ation of this process, provided a client has the necessary equipment at their facility, as this eliminates the physi- cal transfer of the sample. This is hugely valuable for wineries in need of turning tanks or for blending early for space consolidation. Luxury-tier producers have other concerns such as reproducibility, maximizing very expensive grape supplies, new barrel allocations to their various lots, and experimental validation of new equip- ment and grape handling. Phenolics play an important role in all of these pursuits. The hardware required in a client's lab is about $11,000, but many labs already have pieces of the neces- sary equipment, like a scanning UV-visible spectropho- tometer, a micro-centrifuge, flow-through cell and sipper and a laptop for connection to the cloud. Basically, the cellar gathers samples in the morning after the pumpover and takes the samples to the lab, where the client spins the sample in the centrifuge and then runs the sample, via the sipper, into the flow cell of the spectrophotometer. A file is created to land the raw spec data, then the client accesses our web portal and uploads the file. Seconds later, their phenolic scan is returned to their desktop, laptop or handheld. The first time a client experiences the speed and ac- curacy of the information is transformational in how a cellar executes a maceration protocol. Otherwise, a client packs up samples and sends them to the lab, and we return the results in two or three days, depending on when the samples arrive. But in the heat of battle, three days may as well be three weeks, as the information is forensic at that point. The co-founder of WineXRay is Dr. Gianni Colantuoni, and he has worked extensively in the chemical engineering and process-control industries. Gianni is the creator of the models that allow for the interpretation of raw spec files into tangible, meaningful and rapid results for WineXRay. Our industry is lucky to have him. The power of the analysis is virtually limitless and is not dependent on the scale of a winery. As a tool in sup- port of sensory evaluation, the information allows for the more rapid determination of lot allocation and confidence A CONVERSATION WITH Scott McLeod On tannin analysis and maceration management By Laurie Daniel