Call them mavericks
Mark HORVATH and Joey Gummere have to shout to be heard over the thundering drumbeats and screeching guitar riffs blaring from the stereo and reverberating off the corrugated metal walls of their makeshift winery. But they hardly notice. They are on a roll about Syrah -- the wine they believe is their ticket to stardom.
The new Syrahs from Santa Barbara County are killer, according to the pair, whose 2003 Kenneth-Crawford, their third vintage, is aging in barrels stacked in the back corner of their Buellton industrial park digs.
They hope they’ve caught lightning in a wine bottle.
As do a lot of other garage winemakers toiling away in the hills just beyond Los Angeles’ back door. Their ambition isn’t to make wine on par with Northern California’s cult wines. It is to surpass them.
Industrial parks on the back roads of the tiny towns of Buellton, Lompoc and Santa Maria, just north of the city of Santa Barbara, are being jury-rigged into wine laboratories as this small army of guerrilla winemakers strives to make the best wines it can. To most of them, that means big and bold. This is the style of wine they think will earn critical raves. It’s the wine they like to drink.
Syrah dominates their dreams, but the movement isn’t limited to one variety. Other grapes associated with France’s Rhone Valley -- Grenache and Mourvedre -- as well as Italian grape varieties and Santa Barbara’s perennial favorite, Pinot Noir, are part of the action.
The brashness of these fledgling winemakers is evident in the prices they charge: $20 to $50 a bottle.
“A new wine generation is surfacing here,” says Horvath, 38, who migrated down from Sonoma in 1999 to catch the wave. Gummere, originally from Huntington Beach, is 27 years old. Cocksure only to a point, the two have kept their day jobs -- Horvath as a winemaker at Babcock Vineyards and Gummere at Santa Barbara Winery -- while they wait to be discovered.
Toiling in obscurity
These days Santa Barbara County feels a lot like 1970s Napa. Showplace wineries still are rare here. Few garage winemakers have a vineyard to call their own, much less a tasting room. Even within Santa Barbara’s wine industry, they work in relative obscurity.
“It’s a burgeoning culture,” says Jeff Newton, a leading vineyard manager in the region and a champion of the new wave. The garage winemakers are hovering just below the radar, he says, but that will change soon. “They are going to have a huge impact on the future direction of Santa Barbara County,” he says. “They are the new direction. These are not the same wines we’re used to making in Santa Barbara.”
One key difference is the ripeness of the fruit they are using. The new winemakers let their grapes hang on the vine longer than has been the norm here. It’s risky. In a cool climate region like Santa Barbara, overripe usually means over-alcoholic, making a difficult, unbalanced wine.
A boon to these newbies is a coincidental development: the arrival of a clutch of the super-rich eager to see their names on wine bottles. With the kind of deep pockets necessary to custom-plant vineyards to grow the kind of fruit the garage winemakers need for their particular alchemy, a marriage of convenience has formed between new money and youthful ambition.
This led to the first garage wine star: Brewer-Clifton, which produces, in a Lompoc industrial park, a highly extracted Pinot Noir made with grapes from the Santa Rita Hills. Greg Brewer’s day job is as winemaker at Melville, a new winery created by stock market tycoon Ron Melville. Melville allows Brewer to cultivate some of his vineyards just for Brewer-Clifton wine.
Two years ago, critic Robert Parker catapulted Brewer and his partner, Steve Clifton, into the spotlight with a positive review. Wine Spectator magazine jumped on the bandwagon and, ever since, Brewer-Clifton has been a cult hit.
Now others are rushing to repeat their success.
Arriving in Santa Barbara fresh from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Benjamin Silver discovered wine while studying in Italy, then picked up a wine education at Santa Barbara’s Zaca Mesa Winery, which has cultivated many of the winemakers in the valley.
“Up north, I heard that the doors get slammed in your face,” says the 32-year-old Silver, who runs his business out of a no-frills Santa Maria cooperative, Central Coast Wine Services, along with about a dozen other independent winemakers. “Here the growers are doing anything they can to improve wine quality.” Garage winemakers, therefore, can get the fruit they want.
Of course, that fruit doesn’t come cheap, nor, in turn, does the wine they produce from it. Silver charges $45 for his 2000 Julia’s Vineyard Pinot Noir.
It’s a close-knit community, says Silver, as he waves to fellow winemaker Peter Cargasacchi, across the cooperative driveway. They rent chain-link cages that can be bonded by the state as “wineries,” sharing the crushers, de-stemmers and fermenters that few can afford to buy for themselves.
Garage winemaking is a tradition in Santa Barbara, where even Kathy Joseph, a winemaker with many years of experience, as well as an operation in Oregon, works on a shoestring budget. To buy land in the Santa Rita Hills to grow fruit for her Fiddlehead Pinot Noir, she vinifies it in a Lompoc garage.
More typical is part-time wine consultant and struggling Hollywood screenwriter Chris Keller, who has formed a partnership with an old friend and Santa Barbara grower, Joe Kalina, to make Paige 23. Their Pinot Noir is a hit with Los Angeles wine stores because the price is relatively low, around $20 a bottle. The 47-year-old winemaker, who lives in Marina del Rey, rents the corner of a warehouse in Buellton to make wine.
Most members of this new generation finance their winemaking out of meager savings and talk about their “handmade” wine, a fact more often than not dictated by necessity.
Jim Knight, a 31-year-old sales clerk at the Wine House in West Los Angeles, says it was “a labor of love” when he hand de-stemmed the grapes for his first vintage of Jelly Roll Syrah in 2001. He plans to release his 2001 wine this year for $25 a bottle.
Gary Burk, 41, cleans out a used oak barrel with a garden hose in front of the warehouse where Central Coast Wine Services’ members store their wine. Producing 3,500 cases a year of Costa de Oro from vineyards planted on his family’s former broccoli farm, Burk is one of the larger garage winemakers.
“I started hanging out at ABC [Jim Clendenen’s Au Bon Climat], working harvest for him. I incubated there,” he says. He made the jump to working full time on his own wine a year and a half ago. “We’re only going to be seen in the same light as Napa if we stick together, evolve together.”
That doesn’t mean everyone is making the same wine. “We’re seeing the pendulum swing to bigger wines best served as cocktails,” he says. In an effort to buck that trend, he’s trying to produce wines that are lighter, more balanced.
For most of the garage winemakers, finding suitable fruit means stalking Santa Barbara’s prize vineyards, hoping for a chance to get their hands on the region’s best grapes, which they buy in minuscule quantities to make just a few hundred cases of wine a year.
“We wanted to buy fruit from Steve Beckmen for years, but he always said no,” recalls Horvath, noting that the longtime grower’s fruit from the Santa Ynez Valley is coveted because Beckmen has been on the forefront of farming for a powerful taste and deliberately keeps his yields low.
“Then he tasted our wine,” he says. With only 110 cases, their 2001 Kenneth-Crawford (a name derived from the pair’s middle names) was still an experiment. Yet Beckmen “liked what we were doing. He’s now selling to us.”
Plenty of pioneers
Santa BARBARA has long been California’s wine lab, a place without the pressures of the high-rent districts of Napa and Sonoma. “We’ve always gotten the pioneers here,” says vineyard manager Newton.
The area’s first wineries mentored Santa Barbara’s original youth movement in the early 1980s, when a long-haired Clendenen started Au Bon Climat, Bob Lindquist bottled the region’s early Rhone-style wines and Richard Sanford developed his Zen approach to organic wine grape growing. Now these former renegades have grown up to be the region’s leading winemakers. “The young guys work in their wineries,” Newton says. “They watch, they learn,” he says. “But they are going out and doing it their own way.”That means lower yields in the vineyard and leaving the grapes on the vine until the last possible moment.
While winemakers across the region have been moving in these directions, the new ones are moving farther, faster. They want fruit from vineyards where the vines have been planted close together. They want the vines to be the French clonal selections that only recently have become legally available here. “They want more hard work in the vineyard with three or four green drops,” Newton adds, referring to the process of periodically thinning fruit at the end of the growing season to make sure that all of the fruit at harvest is equally ripe.
Their models are the artisan wines produced by Adam Tolmach at Ojai Vineyard and Manfred Krankl at Sine Qua Non.
They aren’t, however, trying to imitate the northern Rhone’s famous Syrahs, the Hermitages or Cote-Roties. In fact, it’s rare to find one of these winemakers who has visited the Rhone, much less worked there.
“We’ve tasted the northern Rhones, as well as Australian Shirazes and other California Syrahs,” explains Horvath. “We’ve pinpointed what we like. If we can emulate some of those characteristics, great.”
Sashi Moorman, the 32-year-old winemaker at Stolpman Vineyard, has been to Italy to meet with Sangiovese growers because it’s one of the wines he makes at Stolpman. But for his yet-to-be released personal Syrah project, there have been no trips to the Rhone.
These days, he’s focused on revamping the vineyards that Long Beach attorney Tom Stolpman first planted in 1992. The vineyards are obsolete, says Newton, who manages the Stolpman estate. Moorman has persuaded Stolpman to plant the new French clones, spaced closer together in smaller blocks in a north-south direction instead of the old east-west configuration, and hanging them closer to the ground to absorb more of the sun’s heat.
Moorman and Newton are renovating the vineyards they lease for Moorman’s personal wine project in much the same way. In fact, there’s something of a ripping-out frenzy going on throughout the region, something seen only in Napa when there was a phylloxera outbreak.”We love the traditional producers, but that’s what we call them,” says Moorman, who found his way to winemaking through a stint cooking in New York City after graduating from Vassar College. “The youth wants to be recognized, so they pick ripe, use lots of oak and are willing to adjust.”
But to get high intensity wines in Santa Barbara, it’s nearly impossible to avoid high alcohol levels, sometimes more than 15%. And though Robert Parker is known to praise some of these highly-extracted wines, many connoisseurs avoid them. (Wines with more than 14% alcohol are not even technically considered table wines. Most European wines range between 11% and 13%.)
“It’s dictated by the environment,” Moorman says. The fruit matures late in Santa Barbara, after the sugar develops. Leaving the fruit to hang until it has all its flavors can mean the sugars, and thus the alcohol, are sky high. Unless you add water -- a controversial winery trick that’s rarely spoken of but allowed by law -- there is little to be done.
Moorman “blows off” a little alcohol by fermenting at high temperatures, then cellars in a very high humidity environment to keep the natural water in the wine from evaporating.
“If we made 13% alcohol wines, the wine wouldn’t be good. They would be under-ripe,” says Ron Melville, who is learning how to make wine from his 32-year-old winemaker. Not until Brewer agreed to take charge of his winery, says Melville, did he feel confident enough to build it.
The garage winemakers all want to create wine their own way, says Melville, who accommodates several of them, planting whole sections to the specifications of this youth movement.
His own 33-year-old son, Chad Melville, has a garage wine project. His label is Samsara, which is a range of varietals made from grapes he’s scouted from across the Central Coast region, not just the family’s Santa Rita Hills vineyard.
Like everyone else here, he hopes he has lightning in a bottle.