Ed Sbragia, pictured here in the ’70s employing a Brix Refractometer, studied enology at Fresno State College. One of his generation’s longest-tenured winemakers, he will celebrate his 30th anniversary with Beringer Vineyards this August.
Those '70s Guys -California's Most InfluentialWinemaking GenerationBy Lyn FarmerThe face of American wine is ever changing - though perhaps not as quixotically as the prices. But it only takes a drive through Napa Valley, congested with grapes, or through the agricultural bounty of Sonoma, or the flourishing Central Coast to understand that the California wine business is booming. There are now vineyards where only apricots and almonds once grew; there is vineyard land where sheep once grazed that now costs nearly as much as a block in Manhattan.
During the last 30 years, Americans have discovered wine and, more importantly, Americans have discovered American wine. But, perhaps "discover" is the wrong word because it implies that the wine was always there. It was not. In 1966, Napa Valley was home to just 25 wineries, one of which - the Robert Mondavi Winery - was brand new. Today there are more than 225 wineries in Napa - an astounding 800 percent jump. The California - and American - wine business is certainly burgeoning, thanks in large part to a generation of winemakers who quite literally changed the world.
As fate and circumstances would have it, this highly influential group of winemakers earned their enology degrees within a few years of each other in the 1970s. Most, in fact, were still in school in 1976 when the wine world was shocked by the result of Steven Spurrier's legendary Paris tasting, wherein the top red and the top white wines, as rated by French judges, were both from California. "The Judgment of Paris," as it came to be called, showed the world an unexpected level of quality in American wine, shattered more than a few preconceptions and made quite an impression on malleable minds.
And Paris was only the beginning. Those who began their winemaking careers at that time have built upon that unexpected victory for California wine by creating some of the most prized vintages
in the world.
These wines have iconic names that resonate even for the newcomer: "Beringer Private Reserve," "Flora Springs Trilogy," "Martini Monte Rosso," "Mondavi Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon," "Phelps Insignia." The vintners who made wines such as these came from varied backgrounds and had different goals, but they shared a passion for their subject and an enthusiasm for being pioneers of sorts. They did not create the California wine industry, but they did revitalize it, refine it and raise the world's expectations for California wine. In the process, California wine not only improved its collective reputation, but gained an identity that had been sorely lacking. Those who accomplished this bring their individual stories to the experience.
Nixon was president in 1971 and Randy Dunn was an undergraduate at the University of California at Davis majoring in etymology when he first encountered winemaking. "I had a professor who liked wine," he recalls, "and we had a good relationship. He called me up one Friday night and asked 'Want to learn how to make wine? Come over tomorrow, we'll go over to Lodi and get the grapes and we'll split the wine.' He had an old house in Davis with a cellar. I thought it was fun, and when I was working on my PhD in etymology a couple of years later, I needed two outside fields. I made one field enology, which was already an undergrad major with maybe 75 students, but I was a real outsider to them."
Dunn says he didn't originally plan to make enology a career. "I had it made in etymology. I was into mosquito control through pheromones and was already in a patent application, so it wasn't logical to do something else, but winemaking seemed kind of fun. It was new, challenging and outdoors, and I could see that unless I was really a clever chemist, I'd have a company job in a major city, which I didn't want, so I ended up in Napa."
Tom Peterson started out as a passionate consumer. "In my family, wine was always a familiar part of everyday life. We've been Californians for 125 years, and vineyards and wineries are part of the fabric of life here. Wine tied into so many things that worked for me - the agricultural side, the technical side, the artistic aspect, the cross-cultural bit. Wine connected to all of them, so it was no leap of faith to choose a career in winemaking." He attended Davis in the late '70s, then worked as a winemaker in Monterey before settling at Chateau Souverain in 1984; in 1997, he moved to corporate management positions, and is currently a winery consultant in Sonoma.
"I started my career right after college with a stint at retail," Peterson says. "Fortunately, I worked for the Beltramo family in their store in Menlo Park. They focused on wine and had a fantastic staff. In fact, I stocked shelves with a new guy from the east coast, Mike Benziger, whose family has since become legendary in the California wine business."
"The industry was different in the mid-70s," recalls Ken Deis, who has been the winemaker at Flora Springs since 1980. "I learned to love wine in the service," he says. Unlike his Fresno State College classmate, Ed Sbragia (Class of '75), who notes, "I learned about it at home; my father was a good Italian, which meant he made wine at home. He'd learned from his father, so it was a family tradition, but not on a commercial level." Today Sbragia is the senior vice president and winemaster at Beringer Vineyards, where he has worked for 30 years.
Bryan del Bondio (Davis, '77) , president of Markham Vineyards, did learn about the commercial side of wine early on because his father worked for 45 years at Inglenook. Mike Martini's family owned another of the most respected properties of the time, Louis Martini Winery, and he was one of the few who absorbed the commercial side of wine early on. "I grew up around a winery. When I went to school, I wanted to do something different; I studied food science because I thought
I was going to make cheese, but there's a lure to this industry that keeps pulling you back."
It was a lure that was particularly strong, if not especially well defined, for many people in the early 1970s, including another potential cheese maker, New York dairy farmer John Williams. He was enrolled at Cornell when he got a work-study position at nearby Taylor Cellars, felt the pull of wine and quickly decided to pursue a master's at Davis where he joined the Class of 1978. Williams went back to New York to make wine for a brief time, but returned to California where, inspired by a tenure at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, he started his own Napa Valley winery near a pond, calling it Frog's Leap.
As solo winemakers, each was a breath of fresh air; as a group, however, they possessed the force of hurricane winds. Martini says, "My family had made wine in Napa since before Prohibition, but I think this group of us who came into the business in the 1970s really shaped the industry as we know it today."
To understand what brought this dynamic band of winemakers onto the scene in the 1970s, and the extent of the changes they made, it's helpful to look back to the beginnings of the California wine industry.
The Catholic missions established in the 18th century produced wine, but it was, by all accounts, poor in quality. Infinitely better juice began to appear in the mid-19th century when a German immigrant named Charles Krug established what is generally acknowledged to be Napa Valley's first commercial winery in 1861. Within a few years, many others had joined Krug, including Jacob Schram of Schramsberg (founded in 1862), the Beringer brothers, who established their winery in 1876, and John Daniel, who built Inglenook in 1879.
There were more than 140 wineries in the valley by 1889, the year California wines won 20 out of 34 medals in an international wine tasting competition in Paris. It was a stunning validation of European technique applied to the New World. An outbreak of phylloxera greatly debilitated California's vineyards around the turn of the century, but it would be the glare of Prohibition in the 1920s that dried up the dazzling progress made by the California wine industry in a relatively short period.
Although the thrust of the Temperance Movement was aimed at beer and spirits, not at wine, most wineries went out of business anyway. Most, but not all. "Prohibition actually got us into winemaking," says Tim Mondavi, whose grandfather owned a boarding house popular with many Italian immigrants. "When Prohibition came, you couldn't produce beer or spirits, but since wine was part of the sacraments, there was a loophole. The law permitted the head of a household to produce four barrels of wine per year, so my grandfather got into it, shipping grapes to people who wanted to make their own wine, and eventually into winemaking himself."
By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, many wineries had closed, and the remaining 20 or so languished. The Temperance Movement proved to be the great divider; it nearly extinguished the American wine industry and, yet, at the same time,
it was responsible for its resurgence as a vital entity. Sbragia believes Prohibition's impact was felt on many levels. "When I look back, I realize that most of our professors [at Fresno] didn't make wine. Prohibition probably drove out everyone who loved wine that didn't have [an ownership] stake in property."
The tradition of European winegrowing initiated by Beringer and Schram that won so many awards in Europe in the 19th century was nearly wiped out in the relatively short 14 years of Prohibition. It's the better part of a generation, and so much of that knowledge that was passed from one generation to another was interrupted and nearly vanished. And yet there were exceptions, and winemakers learning their craft in the '70s reaped the benefits. Sbragia says, "Joe Heitz was a professor of enology at Fresno, and I had another professor named Sigmund Chandrell who got his start making wine at Gallo before he became a teacher. His great contribution was excitement. He brought in top winemakers and suppliers to talk about the industry with the students. We really felt a passion for what we did."
"The passion is what is remarkable," agrees Craig Williams, longtime winemaker at Joseph Phelps Vineyards. "All of us in this group that caught the wine bug in the mid-70s were so lucky that, at the time we felt this passion, there were also people around who wanted to start vineyards. People like Joseph Phelps, who had been in the construction business, and Dan Duckhorn, who was a wine lover, not a winemaker. Their guidance and vision combined with our technical interest - that's what made this surge possible."
But not every winery in Napa and Sonoma counties was new. Tim's grandfather Cesare Mondavi had launched a fresh career in wine a generation earlier when his sons Robert and Peter joined him. "My father joined my grandfather when he graduated in 1936 and convinced him to purchase Charles Krug Winery in 1943," says Robert's son Tim, "so he was steeped in the wine business." More importantly, the Mondavi brothers were not alone.
"It's a myth to think there was no wine education before the 1960s," Sbragia says. "When I got into the business, there were guys we really looked up to, like Louis Martini and Myron Nightingale [Sbragia's mentor at Beringer] who had been in school in the 1940s - there were some great winemakers turned out back then and later in the 1950s."
They honed their skills in an educational system that has long been a crucial part of American agriculture - a system that propelled the wine industry forward. According to Mondavi, "When the industry could start up again after Prohibition people didn't have tradition to rely upon - we'd lost that and many wineries in that 14-year period. In Europe, they relied on perpetuating tradition, but California relied on the university system."
"The University of California at Berkeley was the place to learn about making wine after Prohibition," Martini says. "The graduating class in 1941 included my dad, Louis, Myron Nightingale, who went on to Cresta Blanca long before he was at Beringer, and Charlie Crawford who went to Gallo. I think at that time there were five guys, including them, who were making about 85 percent of the wine in California, and much of it was sweet."
This is where American wine takes a decisive turn, and marks the ascension of the school that is almost universally referred to in the wine industry simply as "Davis." Davis was (and to some extent still is) a small agricultural town near Sacramento, conveniently situated only an hour's drive from Napa and Sonoma counties. It was at Davis that many students intending to enter the traditional agricultural industry figuratively stumbled upon the wine business instead.
Over the years, Davis and Fresno State College built up programs that had a huge influence on the American wine industry. The two schools are still considered the premier American institutions for anyone serious about making wine. Davis has especially gained substantial visibility with an outspoken faculty that, at the time, included a plant physiologist named Maynard Amerine.
"Amerine was the first to look at California from a climatic perspective," Mondavi observes. The professor had developed a map of California on which he outlined climatic zones - still followed by vintners today - that indicated which grapes do
best in which areas. "He had a huge impact," he says. "I think he was the one with the global perspective, as well as the scientific background, that helped establish the golden era of Calif-ornia wine."
That golden era began slowly in the
1950s and reached a peak in the 1970s, when a huge influx of young people, most of whom came of age in the turbulent era defined by Civil Rights, the Vietnam War, the Space Race and Flower Power. These were heady and unconventional times to say the least. Jobs that put one in closer touch with the earth seemed rife with career possibilities.
Peterson thinks a lot of it had to do with wealth, demographics, education and age. "Generational change was a social theme of the '60s," he notes. "Wine fit in with the new behavior and caught the Boomer wave. Timing was especially fortuitous because promotion of varietal wine by pioneers like Fred McCrea, Joe Heitz and Lee Stewart had taken root in the 1960s, establishing a new definition of wine in the mind of the trade and the consumer."
Lee Stewart was a pioneer in the production of high-quality wine in Napa at Chateau Souverain, and one of those vintners who served as inspiration to the coming crop of winemakers. Joe Heitz, a member of the first class of seven students to graduate from Davis with enology degrees in 1951, established a quirky winery that quickly became a Napa Valley icon. Heitz was also on the enology staff at Fresno State when this new generation of enology students, such as Sbragia and Deis, were coming up through the ranks.
Fred McCrea plays a small but important part in this tale as well. A San Francisco advertising executive, McCrea, and his wife, Eleanor, had come to Napa Valley in 1943 and decided to buy property for a vacation home on Spring Mountain near St. Helena. They paid the princely sum of $7,500 for 38 acres of rocky hillside land, producing their first commercial wine in 1952 from the winery they called Stony Hill. This had a far-reaching impact.
At a dinner in 2002, John Kongsgaard (Davis '78), now one of Napa's most revered enologists, remarked that as a young man, a visit to Stony Hill persuaded him to become a winemaker. "I saw Fred with his elbow on the mantle, drinking a gin and tonic, listening to Parsifal. I wanted this existence." In the early 1970s, Stony Hill was unusual. There just wasn't a tradition of boutique wineries in Napa Valley, and especially not wineries as iconoclastic as Stony Hill, where the McCreas went against the advice of Davis grape experts, who said chardonnay would never grow in hillside locations in Napa County, and ended up making Chardonnay of uncompromising longevity. >
The experts were obviously wrong, but it took time and a surge of winemaking talent in the 1970s to sort out just how versatile many grapes could be, and even how much better they can be when matched to a benevolent microclimate.
One of the problems in the 1960s was too few wineries and too many wines. "As late as 1964, there were just 24 wineries here in Napa, but there was so much more variety of wines then," says Beringer's Sbragia, who also acknowledges that many of those wines would not find a market today.
Markham's del Bondio recalls "starting out producing Chenin Blanc, both barrel-fermented and dry to slightly sweet with no oak, Riesling, Napa Gamay, Gamay Beaujolais and a Rosé of Gamay. Now it's [all about] Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel and Syrah."
"We used to make a huge range of wines at Louis Martini," Martini admits. "But that was also part of what the wine business in California used to be. Beringer was the same way, making a huge number of wines you don't see much anymore, like Malvasia Bianco, or the Barbera that we made for ages at Louis Martini or the Grignolino that Joe Heitz used to make. We sold to Gallo in 2002 and they wanted us to focus on Cabernet. We have a great red wine legacy [when pressed, he cites his 1987 Monte Rosso Vineyard Select as his benchmark], and within a huge portfolio like Gallo has, it makes sense to have components that specialize, but it means we lose some of the heritage. It just became increasingly impractical," he says, as wines increased in quality in the 1970s and wineries proliferated.
When Robert Mondavi left his family's Charles Krug Winery and built his own property in Oakville from the ground up in 1966, it was the first entirely new winery constructed in Napa Valley since Prohibition. One of the results of the expansion that has since taken place has been the rise of single grape variety specialists. "Wineries like Silver Oak and Jordan gave us a lot of competition," Martini continues. "If we were making ten varietals, we suddenly had ten areas where we were competing with specialists. It marked the end of generic winemaking and forced everyone to pay more attention to detail."
Martini's Davis classmate Jack Stuart became one of those specialists. Like Martini, his family had lived in Northern California for generations, and says studying winemaking was a logical step for him. In 1980, even before the winery was completed, he joined the design team at Silverado Vineyards, where he became winemaker (then general manager) for many years, crafting some of Napa's most admired Cabernets. "It's hard to believe, but when our class was in school there were only about 600 acres of cabernet planted in California," Stuart notes, "but it was still considered the great grape. When I started, we had very good examples to learn from - Martini, certainly, and BV, Inglenook and Charles Krug were all well known for their Cabs in the '60s and '70s. I think a lot of us, among the new winemakers, were drawn to it and ended up specializing in it."
That is how it happened for Tom Eddy - it just took a while. When he attended Davis in the early '70s, he was advised by his mentors to forego the boutique winery route after graduation. "They said an experience at a large commercial valley winery would expose me to the 'guts' and 'heartaches' of the business. They were dead on. That decision prepared me to survive and thrive."
Eddy later earned his reward with winemaking stints at Chateau Souverain and Christian Brothers before building his own Napa Valley Cabernet-only winery (the first vintage of "Tom Eddy" was 1991).
As this '70s generation found their places in the wine industry, other changes were in the works. "We were a pretty tight group and we talked with each other, especially a group of us from Fresno State, since we got into the market a little ahead of the big surge from Davis," Deis says. "In fact, my wife, Evelyn, helped type Ed Sbragia's thesis and maybe even his letter applying to Beringer, and she ended up working at Joseph Phelps."
Sbragia adds, "I got here August 9, 1976, after working a year at Foppiano, where I learned a lot. Ken Deis, Craig Williams, Ken Vigoda at Raymond and I are in a pretty small group of people who, fairly soon after graduation, went to work at a winery and then stayed there for 25 years, even more now. But it's not as if there was no precedent for it
- an earlier generation did that, too, just on a smaller scale."
The young winemakers formed a dynamic, if loosely organized, fraternity. To this day, Sbragia and Martini play in a band with Davis alum George Bursick, for 21 years the winemaker at Sonoma's Ferrari-Carano and now its consulting winemaker. "We all stay in touch in one way or another," Martini says, smiling at the fellowship and shared interests that extend back over nearly four decades.
Perhaps unlike previous, more insular generations of winemakers, "We started paying attention to what other people were doing, what other countries were doing," Deis notes. Sbragia reminisces, "In 1974, Ken and I and all our [classmates] went on a trip. We went to Korbel and then had a tasting at Joe Heitz's house. We tasted Joe's Martha's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon from 1968 to 1973 because David Heitz was a classmate of ours, and that was such a revelation for a young winemaker. Here were great wines with varietal character and they improved with time."
The revelations extended beyond California, as well. "At Davis, the elite, the upper classmen, would have tastings of Bordeaux," Tim Mondavi recalls.
"I thought how great to have tastings of something different to see if we could tell differences and pick out grape varieties."
Randy Dunn also remembers those events. "We tasted some older wines from [the Davis] cellar," he says, "bottles that were 15 to 20 years old, including some Bordeaux that Dr. Amerine liked. He'd say 'this is a beautiful example of this bank' and so on, and frankly, back then, that aroma was defective to my nose. It didn't smell like grapes or fruit. It takes time to appreciate bottle bouquet, and a lot of people never like that quality."
America wanted clean - and clean-smelling - wines. In the 1950s and '60s, there had been many issues over cleanliness in the old wineries still in operation, and an impression lingered that the wines of the time were interesting, but plagued with faults. "Technical changes promoted by Davis in the '60s were being broadly adopted and resulted in much improved table wines," Peterson says. The wines had fewer faults, but, in some ways, fewer distinctions, too.
On sampling Napa and Sonoma wines when he was a student, Mondavi confesses, "We tasted between varietals like Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling, and they weren't flawed, but I discovered that all the whites tasted alike, which was pretty disappointing."
"Everything had to be squeaky clean," says Deis, who thinks that because Davis has had such great visibility, it has been controversial because everything a faculty member would say in the 1960s and 1970s was taken as gospel and sometimes had a sweeping impact in the industry. "At one point, the faculty was arguing that terroir didn't matter, and it was thinking like that that brought about the era of wines made in the lab rather than in the vineyard."
Mondavi argues that clean wasn't a bad thing at this point in their development as winemakers, even when taken to an extreme. It was a stage in the industry's growth and has to be viewed in context. "When the business got going again after Prohibition, there were faults galore. Things weren't clean and there were microbial problems, oxidation, bad equipment and so much more. That's where Davis came in and said 'lets get the microbes out of here, let's sulphur the heck out of the wines and clean them up.' ''
Many now agree this was overboard, but it was the right thing at that time. "It's always an evolution," Mondavi says. "The squeaky-clean wines were a response to erratically made wines, so clean was superior to flawed wine." He believes it prompted good questions, including how one moves from making wines by suppressing faults to creating wines that enhance virtue.
"Don't stigmatize the University for an opinion or even a well-informed mistake," Peterson concurs. "When I was there, nobody on the faculty claimed to have all the right answers and they never claimed that winemaking skill came with the diploma. They taught technology and critical thinking. I believe that the University has stuck to these basics and learned over the years to be more guarded about opinions and early research results."
Another more practical problem also existed with the more theoretical approach that Davis employed at the time. "In a class of 30 or 40 students, we didn't get to do that much hands-on work with winemaking," Martini says. Fresno had a working winery (and continues to produce upward of 30,000 cases per year, including a popular wine called Tailgate Red), but at Davis, the emphasis was on chemistry. "We learned why to make wine more than how to make it," he continues. Today Davis is building a winery on campus, which will be a boon.
In the 1970s, "Why make wine?" and "What wine do we make?" were important questions. With young winemakers discovering and emphasizing varietal character, many wines seemed as if they were being made for the first time.
Peterson recounts, "After World War II, dessert wines, Ports and Sherries were the mainstay of the industry, and table wines were generics like 'Chablis' and 'Burgundy.' So [with the attention to varietal identity], wine became a new thing, both literally and figuratively."
Mondavi agrees, adding, "We discovered we had the ability to define what the varietals could be like, so we treated Sauvignon Blanc differently from Chardonnay, Riesling different from Chenin Blanc, Pinot Noir different from Cabernet. It's so logical now, but it wasn't then. I went to Europe for the first time in 1970 and could see the huge differences between Bordeaux and Burgundy, but in California, the winemaking approach to Cabernet and Pinot Noir was pretty similar. We wanted that to change." This approach might be this generation's greatest legacy.
Indeed. Bursick says his most important contribution to California's wine scene is how his Ferrari-Carano Chardonnays have "influenced [that varietal's] style and direction over the past 20 years; not only with regard to consumer perception, but to the industry's approach to Chardonnay as well."
Many of the early headlines generated by these '70s guys were based on attention-grabbing Cabernets and Chardonnays - wines that found an immediate home in the marketplace. Mondavi's fascination with Pinot Noir would have made him nearly a lone voice in the Cab-Chard wilderness of the time had it not been for Tony Soter, another member of the Davis Class of 1978.
Soter had impeccable credentials with the elegant Cabernet Sauvignons he crafted at Spotteswoode and later as a consultant at Dalla Valle, Viader and other cult wineries, but his driving passion was Pinot Noir. While Mondavi tinkered with the grape as one of a handful of reds at the Robert Mondavi Winery, Soter eventually established one of the first, and greatest, Pinot-focused wineries called Étude.
As other members of his generation discovered, tasting wines from other regions - and especially Burgundy - opened both eyes and palates. "California Pinots always sort of stay in the red spectrum: raspberry, strawberry - black cherry is as close as they get" to additional complexity, Soter says he had come to believe. At Étude, he revolutionized consumer awareness of the possibilities of Pinot Noir, but has since moved on. He sold Étude to Beringer's parent company (now Foster's) and has since opened a winery in Oregon. Although he still consults in California, he says, "I like the Oregon wine industry right now. It reminds me of being in the business in Napa 25 years ago. And we have personal roots here because I was born in Portland and my wife was raised there." For his Oregon Pinot Noir, Soter wants to make "something a little more demanding of the drinker - a wine that will be age-worthy in a kind of classic or traditional sense."
Though one might think, then, that Soter would say his mark on California would be Pinot, instead he considers his legacy as "being a model for young 'garagists' [after having started] a wine business and brand with literally no resources. The key is having the conviction that someone out there will buy your wine - and not to give up your day job." he adds.
The notion of sharing knowledge may not be unique to winemakers, but the theme resonates among this generation, especially when getting its start. Deis notes, "I remember Dick Graff, the founder of Chalone, coming back from a trip to Burgundy and being all excited because he'd learned about barrel fermentation and we thought this was such a radical concept. He said to our professors 'Why didn't you tell us about this?' And their response was, 'No one ever asked.' That's when we started asking even more questions."
Peterson recalls that among the new generation of winemakers, "We were all thinking varietal wines and we wanted to make the best. Nobody was dreaming about making killer 'Mountain Burgundy.' That meant you had to have great grapes, barrels and facilities. In those days, that meant you had to plant and build and experiment. It was a huge infusion of passion and commitment."
It was an electrifying time of experimentation and questioning. "Malolactic fermentation was considered spoilage by many people in the '60s and '70s," Sbragia says. "Everything then was about clean. But this meant out-of-balance fruit bombs in a bottle, and the more we explored what we were doing and why, the more we began exploring barrel fermentation and malolactic fermentation." "Absolutely," Deis says. "Tasting Chalone in the 1970s woke us up. I went there and was shocked. And when I went to Fresno State, I got to try barrel fermentation and that put us on the map."
That passion took hold in the marketplace as well, as a new generation of consumers discovered wine. "In the late 1970s, I think Chardonnay was defined and it just took off in the marketplace," Martini says. Other varietals followed suit, and the industry grew at a dizzying rate as one technological advance followed another.
Deis believes that, "The biggest change since we started in the business is this: Up to the early 1990s our vines were on AxR rootstock. It would grow anywhere and it was really versatile except for chardonnay, but it turned out to be susceptible to phylloxera." Thousands of acres had to be replanted with vines on rootstock that was not such easy prey for the louse.
"AxR really smoked," Sbragia says. "It not only turned out a good-sized crop, but it ripened better. I agree that the change of rootstock makes today's wines very different from what we started out with."
Deis also notes that "we know more now about the components of wine. I think it's relatively new to be talking about phenolics and tannin levels. Thirty years ago, we didn't know what they were and we didn't care. We pay a lot of attention to these and other components today, and I think we're getting optimally mature fruit because of that."
To which Sbragia adds with a sly smile, "We've also learned enough about yields so that today we'll drop the crop before the financial guy knows what's going on."
Bruce Cakebread, winemaker at his family's eponymous Cakebread Cellars, points to other changes: "Years ago, the vines would get one long drink [of water] in the spring, which was believed to be enough until harvest. Today [we use] a neutron-probe irrigation system which allows us to accurately measure how much water specific vines are using and how much watering is needed to grow better grapes."
Trends come and go in the wine business. Some wineries are returning to cement fermentation tanks 30 years after the industry shunned them as old fashioned. And vineyard management is considered a better option for avoiding difficulty than trying to fix problems in the winery. "In early years at harvest, we brought all the fruit in, de-stemmed and crushed it and put the wine in barrels as a matter of routine," Cakebread says. "Today we have 'game plans' for each block in every vineyard, which are written during the summer, so we're ready for harvest. The entire crew knows ahead of time what the game plan is so we get the best we can from the fruit." Observing a harvest in California these days, it's easy to believe tha the greatest technological innovation in the industry is the cell phone that enables precision dispatch of vineyard crews.
Conversely, at Dunn Vineyards up on Napa Valley's Howell Mountain [See "Howell Mountain," page 40], little has changed. "I'm basically doing the same as what I did before, but it's easier. My press is five times the size of my old one. I started getting new equipment, so I'm not fixing stuff that breaks down all the time. De-alcoholization is very useful, too," he says, touching on a delicate subject (increased ripeness and higher sugar levels yield massive levels of alcohol). "I think the media led people up the alcohol curve and now they're leading them right back down. In the old days, we added water - no one talked about it, but we did it."
Martini allows, "There have been some trade-offs in the wine business. I think wine today is more consumer oriented. We can do so much with wine these days. Today I don't think a lot of wines are made to age." And yet, he says, the ability to age remains the hallmark of a great wine, "not because that's an admirable quality, but because when a wine does age well it is incomparable," though ready-to-drink wines drive the market.
There is a good deal of debate, however, about just what makes wine accessible. Many winemakers today talk about seeking "physiological ripeness," reflecting a growing conviction that sugar levels alone, once used to determine whether grapes were ripe, only tell part of the story. To Dunn, physiological ripeness sometimes sounds like a cover story to excuse overly high alcohol levels, a concern shared by Cathy Corison, one of only a handful of women to study enology at Davis in the '70s; she graduated in 1978, along with classmates such as Bursick, Kongsgaard and John Williams.
Embraced by these guys, she was very comfortable breaking into this male-dominated world. Corison spent ten years making wine on Pritchard Hill at Chappellet before founding her eponymous Napa Valley winery in 1987. "I think the quest to get cabernet in with high sugars is more about boasting rights than quality in some cases," Corison observes. She believes that claiming a pursuit of ripeness to the point where prune flavors take over from cabernet's natural balance of red fruit and an herbaceous edge is a dodge. "If growers are saying 'fully ripe' means prunes, I don't buy it. A lot of my neighbors are making one-note wines" in a quest for something that can be marketed as approachable. "Every red variety tastes the same when it gets that ripe, and you lose all the vineyard characteristics, too," she argues. "I think there is room for lots of different styles," but the lack of complexity and hint of residual sugar that is a hallmark of some very expensive wines these days is not a style she prefers.
Yet Sbragia thinks seeking physiological ripeness is a valid pursuit if it's not abused. "Making wine is not about absolute chemistry like total phenols or lab profiles anymore. It's what tastes good to you, and while you can check all the chemical components and sugar levels and measure potential alcohol, that's not the rigid rule it once was."
On this, he and Corison agree. "I don't harvest by Brix numbers. I'm never sure what they mean anyway and besides, things change from year to year," she says. And so, at least to her, winemaking remains something of a deliberate mystery.
If you do look at the Brix readings, though, there have been some changes over the years. "When I started, we thought 24 Brix was astonishing, and now it's being pushed to 28 or 29," Jack Stuart remarks. Today he continues to consult with Silverado Vineyards, as well as for several other properties. "There are no sudden changes, but there are waves we go through, and I worry that a trend with many younger winemakers these days is to make international wines that all taste alike. But the fruit bombs don't last."
This '70s generation makes many types and styles of wine, and are bound to disagree over various aspects of winemaking, but what is striking is how similar they are in spirit, even 30 years after finishing their formal schooling. Some, like Martini, have spent their entire careers in large wineries; others, like Corison, who was Martini's lab partner at Davis, shepherd smaller wineries making a few thousand cases per year. There is a place in American wine for both, and both point to the future.
Companies large and small compose the American wine industry. As the young winemakers of the 1970s become the revered mentors of today's new generation, the industry is now heading, on the one hand, toward consolidation under corporate umbrellas, as with the acquisition of the Robert Mondavi properties and Franciscan Estates by the giant Constellation Brands; on the other hand, boutique specialists like Corison Winery continue to flourish. Interestingly, although the giants seem to be grabbing the headlines, 70 percent California's wineries produce less than 3,000 cases of wine per year. [See "Standing Their Ground," page 48.]
"Big producers sell to big wholesalers who, in turn, sell to big retailers," Peterson says. "The consolidation in the industry has a tendency to drive to the lowest common denominator, but I don't see young people entering the wine industry today striving to achieve the lowest common denominator. On the contrary, they are full of passion and dreams - thank goodness. I also believe they are better educated than their predecessors."
And today's enology students have two great advantages the '70s class lacked: many more places to work, and many more winemakers from whom to learn. Indeed, the learning process - both in the vineyard and cellar - never ends. Sbragia, who in August marks his 30th anniversary at Beringer, says that making wine is "more exciting than ever," but it's still about making choices. "It is exciting and a little scary that with all the technology and all the things we've learned and all the experience you get over 30 years, the choices are less, not more, obvious. We taste the seeds, we kick the dirt in the vineyard; we have learned to feel when something is right, no matter what the numbers say."
Striking a similar note, Deis says, "When we were young, we came out of school with all these ideas; we thought we knew everything. Now we've been making wine for 30 years and we don't know anything! That's what I love about this business, about this life."
There may be more to learn, but what coalesced in the '70s when this generation of vintners graduated from enology school has spawned a remarkable period of sustained activity. Not yet satisfied with their accomplishments, what they've proved is that there is still much for all of us to learn about wine. Doing so will be a pleasure.
Senior Editor Lyn Farmer received the 2003 James Beard Journalism Award for magazine writing.
