The accidental vintner

STANDING on his family’s Stone Corral field five years ago, Brian Talley could feel the midday sun on the southeast-facing hillside; the afternoon ocean breezes rushed up from Morro Bay. He knew these 27 acres of sandy loam would be perfect for growing grapes to make world-class Pinot Noir.

In a typical “making of a winemaker” story, the plot from that moment on would have been straightforward: He’d have hired high-priced consultants, planted vines on steep hillsides, crushed perfectly ripe grapes and spent his inheritance or dot-com winnings to become the darling of Pinot festivals around the world.

But Talley didn’t have the deep pockets of the second-career wine hobbyist, nor the training of a UC Davis graduate, nor the experience of someone who has worked in Europe’s celebrated cellars. And he wasn’t a wine geek willing to risk everything in pursuit of an evanescent pleasure.

Talley is a third-generation member of a vegetable farm family. His father, Don Talley, planted the first grapes 24 years ago in Arroyo Grande, a slender valley near Pismo Beach, not because he knew something about wine, but because he had hillsides that weren’t good for growing anything else.

In the years since, wealthy speculators and wine enthusiasts have planted vineyards on every available site around Talley Farms, eager to exploit the potential they first tasted in Talley’s Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. Most famously, in Edna Valley, the appellation abutting Arroyo Grande, John Alban has earned international acclaim for his Syrahs, Viogniers and Grenaches.

Talley, the accidental vintner, is now scrambling to keep up with his neighbors. In recent years, he has overhauled the family’s vineyards and improved the winemaking. Developing the new Stone Corral vineyard is another step toward realizing the potential of the corner of the wine map his family pioneered. Oddly, it could also lead to a solution for a feared shortage of farmworkers due to the gathering storm over illegal immigration.

Talley’s family owns 200 acres of vineyards in Arroyo Grande, Edna Valley and Paso Robles. The family also owns 1,000 acres of vegetable fields running through and around those hillside vineyards. Their main crops -- bell peppers, cabbage and cilantro -- have become crops grown more cheaply elsewhere.

The prices of vegetables are falling; the price of top-flight California wine is soaring. But he can’t just shift gears. Whatever Talley does as a vintner, he must do without breaking the bank.

A novel vineyard-sharing plan Talley conceived for Stone Corral Vineyard is one way. Convinced of the former grazing land’s vineyard potential, Talley called neighboring vintners Steve Dooley and Don Othman with an unusual proposition: If they shared the costs of developing Stone Corral, he would give them each a 20-year lease on a third of the vineyard and an equal say with him in what to plant and how to divide it up. Under the agreement, Talley earns a management fee for handling the farming chores, and each of the vintners has a free hand managing the vines in his section, including deciding when to harvest.

Talley created a level playing field where three vintners would compete head-to-head to see who would make the better wine. It was an incubator for easy-to-read experiments.

His partners relish the challenge. “I’m not independently wealthy and I didn’t want to take on investors to make top quality wine,” says Dooley, who makes Stephen Ross Wines. Though it would have been cheaper to buy grapes on the open market, it’s impossible to find such high-quality fruit from a vineyard you can control. Says Dooley: “That’s quite valuable.”

Othman, who owns Kynsi Wines, calls Stone Corral “an expensive gamble,” but still the most economical way to secure a long-term supply of good grapes.

It’s an unconventional way to develop a vineyard, to be sure, Talley says. But if it works, it could be a template for how to shift more fields from vegetables to vineyards.

When Talley was named general manager of Talley Vineyards in 1991, the family had just built its own winery, taking the first step beyond its original attitude that grapes were just another crop.

For the next 10 years, the family would expand its vineyards piecemeal, flipping marginal land to vineyards wherever and whenever it seemed appropriate. The same crew of farmworkers worked the vineyards as the vegetable fields, with an understanding that the vegetables came first.

It wasn’t the push-the-envelop viticulture his neighbors were pursuing. And Talley realized his family had fallen behind in 2001, he says, when, despite efforts to improve grape quality by reducing vineyard yields, he harvested a bumper crop.

The problem was the farming, consultants told Talley. He needed to start managing his vineyards like a winemaker instead of like a vegetable farmer.

Talley created and trained a dedicated vineyard crew to prune the vines into uniform rows that were managed from the start of the growing season to produce an evenly distributed crop. Over time, the dedicated crew was assigned to the vineyard year-round, including during the harvest. “I think completing the cycle of the grapes gives them more pride in their work,” Talley says.

Last year when the family bought 90 acres in the Paso Robles appellation, a long-standing source of grapes for the family’s secondary label, Bishop’s Peak, Talley instituted the same vineyard reforms there.

In the winery, Talley says, he improved tracking the wine throughout production. Steve Rasmussen, Talley’s winemaker since 1996, stepped aside to be a consultant. Leslie Mead, formerly of Bonny Doon, now heads the winemaking team that includes, for the first time, a dedicated oenologist. Mead instituted a second sorting of the grapes before fermentation to further increase the uniformity of the fruit.

All of these improvements are starting to show in the wines, says Talley, who hopes to catch the current wave of enthusiasm for Pinot Noir.

Although his Rosemary’s Vineyard Pinot Noir has long had a popular following that has allowed Talley to charge a premium $68 for the limited bottling, most of Talley’s estate wines cost between $25 and $32, retail.

Just as Talley is re-establishing his wines, a new and even more difficult challenge has arisen, he says. Some proposed immigration changes, like building walls along the border with Mexico, raise the specter of a shortage of farmworkers.

You need a person to pick a peck of peppers, but the same isn’t necessarily true for vineyards. Mechanization is an option. It’s how Australia and New Zealand resolved their labor shortage. “It could become our reality in California as well,” Talley says. “It’s the biggest issue facing my business right now. If we can’t get people to do the work, we have to think how else we can utilize this land.”

Flat, nutrient-rich produce fields won’t produce the kind of premium grapes Talley wants for his flagship wines. But they will produce grapes good enough for “value” wines. Talley’s contingency plan would reserve his workers for the existing estate and vineyard designate wines, which he would continue to hand-farm and hand-harvest. The vegetable fields would become mechanized vineyards.

The problem, as always, would be financing such a costly shift in operations. And that takes Talley back to Stone Corral. His model for making ever higher quality wines -- split the cost of developing a vineyard with partners who are invested in its success as long-term leaseholders -- is also his template for sharing the cost of expanding into the low end. The future of the family farm may well be riding on the success of Stone Corral.

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Pinot Noirs from Stone Corral

Stone Corral Vineyard Pinot Noir

The 2003 Stone Corral harvest was minimal -- an average of a third of a ton per acre -- but enough for Stephen Ross Wine Cellars, Talley Vineyards and Kynsi Winery to bottle several dozen cases each. Kynsi’s blocks produced the highest yields. Each subsequent harvest has been larger as the vines have matured. The vintners harvested each block separately that year but with little variation in grape maturity. All three vintners used small open-topped fermenters.

2003 Stephen Ross Stone Corral Vineyard Edna Valley Pinot Noir

68 cases. 14% alcohol. The wine includes only a portion of Stephen Ross’ Stone Corral grapes with the rest of the harvest blended into a Central Coast wine. Cultured yeast fermentation. 16 months in 35% new Francois Freres French oak barrels.

This deep purple wine was the most intriguing of the three, with attractive aromas and some complexity. The herbal nose is pleasantly gamey; the palate shows sweet, ripe red fruit flavors, with a slight tang on the long finish. Available at the winery, $45.

2003 Talley Vineyards

Edna Valley Pinot Noir

88 cases. 14.1% alcohol. Released as an Edna Valley estate Pinot Noir, Talley reserved the Stone Corral designation for the 2004 vintage when the vines were more mature. Wild yeast fermentation. 17 months in 35% new Francois Freres French oak barrels.

This reddish-purple wine with a ripe blackberry/black cherry nose is a simple, yet pleasant Central Coast Pinot that reveals the young age of the vines. It would be nice slightly chilled. Available at the winery, $28.

2003 Kynsi Stone Corral Vineyard Edna Valley Pinot Noir

250 cases. 13.8% alcohol. 100% of the grapes from Kynsi’s portion of Stone Corral. Cultured yeast fermentation. 18 months in 20% new French oak with some Hungarian oak barrels.

This garnet-colored wine with black cherry and cola aromas is fresh and balanced, with citrus and cola notes. Available at the winery, $45.

-- Corie Brown