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WINEMAKER INTERVIEW January 2018 WINES&VINES 133 a wine cave underneath, and the vines had grown down through the top of the cave. I would guess that our own deepest vine roots at Calera are 40 to 50 feet in depth. So stylisti- cally, I would say the biggest change in our wines is a reflection of our ever-deeper vine depth, not anything we do in the winery. Our deep, old vines give our wines more intensity and complexity than they did when they were younger and more shallow. Many years back I was in France, and I had the opportunity to taste with Jacques Seysses of Domaine Dujac. We tasted two wines blind from the 1971 or 1972 vintage. One was lighter and quite pleasant, but the other was darker, more intense and more concentrated. It was a gorgeous wine, a real knockout. I thought the first was a village wine and the other was a Grand Cru. It turned out that both were Bonnes Mares, but the lighter one was from young, baby vines, while the other was from old vines with deep roots. That has always stayed with me. Old vines are the real McCoy. Today, I'm sure those young vines have matured and are making superb wines. On a related note, about a dozen years ago, we began doing longer irrigation sets. When you do frequent irrigations, the roots stay shal- low. As a result, you get very similar flavors to what you get from younger vines. We went from doing 1 gallon per hour of drip irrigation to doing eight-hour sets, then 12-hour sets, then 24-hour sets. Today, we apply 48-hour sets and sometimes do this just once a season. This forces the vines to go deeper and deeper in search of water, which, in turn, exposes the vines and the tap roots to new and interesting geology and yields more interesting flavors. Another factor influencing our viticulture is climate change. Every grapegrower knows that climate change is upon us. With hotter summers, the sugars go up faster than flavor development, whereas the two used to go up in tandem. Now, with hotter days, the sugars shoot up fast while the flavors take their sweet time. Because of this, we have to pick at higher sugars, which results in higher alcohols. If we don't pick at higher sugars, the wines will be green, grassy and herbaceous. About six or seven years ago, I was on a panel for In Pursuit of Balance (IPOB), and I brought two samples from the same block in the same vintage. One I knew I had picked too early, and it was about 13% alcohol. The other was picked later and was about 14% alcohol. The 13% wine had a nice low alcohol, but to me, it didn't have pleasant flavors. Most people wouldn't have shown it to the audi- ence, but I wanted people to see the differ- ences. About 15% of the attendees preferred the 13% wine, but roughly 85% preferred the 14% wine—and this was an IPOB audience. The 14% wine was ripe, but certainly not overripe. Nowadays, you have to wait longer to get the flavors that will receive the right reception. Thirty years ago, we were picking at 23º to 23.5º Brix. Today, we pick at 25º to 26º Brix just to get the same flavors. Q Have your vineyard practices such as irrigation decisions, row orientation and trellising changed? What about root- stocks and clones? Jensen: In addition to the irrigation prac- tices I described, some other vineyard prac- tices have changed since the early days. We started out training along a bilateral cordon. Our spacing for our first 20 years was 6 by 10 feet with 1-foot-wide rows. About 20 years ago, we got rid of bilateral cordons. Now it is just canes tied along wires, and we prune right back to the trunk every year. We have always had very low yields, which are good, but ours were too low. We want 2 tons per acre, which is still very low by almost anyone's standards. (If the yields are too high, Pinots can get watery.) But our yields were more like 1.25 tons per acre. Experts said not to use cordons, so we gradually con- verted everything to canes. The second change we made after getting rid of cordons was to begin planting twice as many vines per acre in our newer sites, which allows us to get a larger crop per acre without any drop in quality. It was very ex- pensive to do. It meant buying new tractors, twice as many grape stakes, twice as many rootings from nurseries and twice as many drip emitters. The new spacing is 4.5 by 7 feet. I was skeptical at first, but the higher density plantings give us darker colors and a crop closer to 2 tons per acre (well, more like 1.5 or 1.6). As we have replaced some vines in our older vineyards, we have also used the tighter spacing. We also started out with St. George root- stock, which is good for a dry area like ours. But we have put in more modern UC Davis crosses, so we don't plant new St. George today. We use five or six different UC Davis rootstocks, each chosen for how high up the mountain the vines are, as well as other features. When we plant new vines, all of the bud- wood is from our original vineyard, with the budwood having been cleaned up over the years by Larry Hyde and Steve Kistler. This material is then grown for a year in nurseries. Q In the beginning, you did whole-cluster fermentation on your Pinot Noir. Has your thinking on that evolved? Jensen: With one exception, we have made all of our Mt. Harlan wines using a significant amount of whole clusters during fermentations since the beginning, and we still use approxi- mately 70% to 80% whole clusters today. The exception is our more youthful de Villiers Vine- yard, which was planted in 1997. For a time, our de Villiers Vineyard was like a juvenile delinquent; it was just too tannic. So tannic, in fact, that for five vintages we didn't bottle it as a single vineyard. Finally, in 2007, our winemaker, Mike Waller, said, "Let's try de- stemming." We destemmed it all, and that solved the excess tannin problem. As the vines have continued to mature, we have slowly increased the whole clusters each vintage from 10% in 2008 to 20% in 2009, and now we are at 70% to 80% whole clusters, and the wine is a favorite of many. Our Central Coast Pinot Noir has followed an opposite trajectory, where we started de- stemming more fruit bit by bit each vintage, and now it is 100% destemmed. This makes the Central Coast Pinot much more approach- able in its youth, which is what we intend and what people expect and want from the Central Coast Pinot Noir. While it will still be good after five years of cellaring, it's a wine you can buy and have that night for dinner. In GOING RHÔNE ON THE CENTRAL COAST C alera is best-known for Burgundy grape varieties (there's even a little Aligoté), but in 1987, Josh Jensen harvested his first Viognier. Why add a Rhône grape? "Because I love Viognier!" Jensen exclaims. "When I lived in France, I would often stop at a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Condrieu and have lunch on their terrace, watching the barges coming up and down the river while drinking Château-Grillet. Viognier was not grown in the U.S. at that time, so upon my return I paid my $75 fee to Foundation Plant Services, and they began the importation process." Jensen says he knows that Viognier "is not for everyone. I've found that about 30% of wine drinkers don't care for its flavors. They can recognize that it's a good wine, but they still do not care for it. The other 70% like it a lot!"