Grape Expectations : Wine: The snobs may scoff, but Leeward has high hopes for its maverick ’91 Ventura County Chardonnay.

The slights were less subtle when the winery was situated in Oxnard.

“Oxnard? People would ask that,” said Brooks Painter, Leeward Winery’s winemaker. “A winery in Oxnard? Well, they couldn’t believe it.”

So Leeward moved, in 1982--not to the fecund floor of Napa Valley, the undulant hills of Sonoma, or even to the rustic Santa Inez Valley. No, Leeward went north a few highway miles to a warehouse off the roaring Ventura Freeway: a white box in the sun, surrounded by asphalt, across the street from Century Theaters, walking distance to Toys R Us.

No picnic tables. No vineyard to gaze at.

No, well, romance.

“Occasionally, still,” Painter said, “we’ll run across the attitude: ‘A wine made in Ventura? You’ve got to be kidding.’ ”

He’s not, of course. Painter has been crafting Leeward’s broad Central Coast Chardonnays since 1989, having picked up on the richly flavored Leeward style first established by the winery’s founders and owners, Chuck Brigham and Chuck Gardner. And Painter, formerly with Felton Empire Winery in Santa Cruz, has been picking up medals to show for it.

But Leeward is flouting convention yet again, this time in what is its greatest anti-wine-snob move of all: 1991 Ventura County Chardonnay.

Cuvee Moorpark. Or is it appellation Somis? The tiny seven acres of vines for this wine straddle the border along a windblown hilltop 12 miles from the ocean. Whatever you call it, it’s a viticultural anomaly: wine from flourishing Chardonnay vines--which generally prefer cooler climates--in blazing hot lemon country.

Till now, Leeward wines were made from grapes grown elsewhere--mostly the Central Coast areas--and crushed, aged and blended at the warehouse. The only thing Venturan about Leeward’s Chardonnay was that it was blended and bottled here. (Painter’s winemaking style, it’s worth noting, can be found in his deft touch for blending up to a dozen Chardonnays for one Leeward bottling.)

Leeward’s ’91 Ventura Chardonnay thus becomes the first commercial production of Chardonnay from grapes grown in Ventura County. It will be a single-vineyard wine as well: all from the same seven-acre patch.

This is good in that single-vineyard wines tend to bear the characteristics of the specific soil and climate of the vineyard, making them more prized. But it’s also risky because those characteristics, without an “averaging” of traits achieved by blending from many different vineyards, can sometimes be too extreme--a foul, vegetative scent, for instance, or an overwhelming mineral flavor. Single-vineyard wines, as a result, tend to come from mature, celebrated properties that are known for a specific set of balanced flavors.

But then Leeward is designing its own course here and, this summer, will be releasing ’91 Ventura Chardonnay, a wine from vines in their infantile second year.

This fact mystifies Robert Parker Jr., editor and publisher of The Wine Advocate, a subscription-only periodical whose critical ratings of wine are so influential as to affect the pricing of wines worldwide.

“I don’t know Leeward, and I don’t know of any wines from 1- or 2-year-old vines,” he said from his home in Baltimore.

But Parker is just as quick to remember the California wine that rocked the wine world in 1976: Napa Valley’s Stag’s Leap. In a blind, international competition in Paris, Stag Leap’s Cabernet Sauvignon was judged to be the best, ahead of wines from the most prestigious French chateaux. It was produced from 3-year-old vines. The French were appalled. The Californians beamed.

$12 a Bottle

Painter isn’t beaming, at least not yet.

His ’91 Ventura Chardonnay sits in French oak barrels in a 55-degree room in Leeward’s warehouse, aging, taking on wood and yeast flavors, losing its sugar, approaching the day this coming summer when, at 13% alcohol, it will be bottled, labeled as 1991 Ventura County Chardonnay, and released for $12 a bottle.

It is already showing well: light in body, delicate, yet delivering peach-like flavors set off by an intensely citrus finish. It will get bigger, but not much.

“It’s almost a novelty item, really,” Painter said, noting that it will likely remain so unless, over the next five to eight years, “there is more interest in Chardonnay-growing in Ventura County.”

It’s a bit of a sticking point for Leeward. Most of its wines are sold outside the county, a fact that Painter would like to see change.

Three-quarters of Leeward’s annual production of roughly 15,000 cases--12,500 of them Chardonnay--go to California markets. This allotment is split, half going north to the Bay Area and half south from Los Angeles to San Diego. One-quarter of Leeward’s production finds its way to 25 other states. While the wine can be difficult to find only 10 miles from the winery, it has found a small but loyal following--150 cases’ worth--in Anchorage, Alaska, and, in slightly smaller amounts, in London and the Caribbean.

The ’91 Ventura County Chardonnay, however, won’t be going too far. Only 100 cases are being produced, all sold directly from the winery’s tasting room.

That could change. This year’s wine came from vines that produced 3.5 tons of grapes per acre, a good but modest yield from infant vines. Already the budding ’92 vines, now in their third year, are prolific, promising a yield of more than 10 tons per acre.

Microclimate

“It’s not that we’re on particularly good ground,” said vineyard keeper Steve Fox, brushing back the broad Kelly green leaves called canopy to reveal tight clusters of chalky green Chardonnay grapes. “It’s that we’re sitting in a great microclimate.”

It’s certainly a great view. Leeward’s acreage forms a mild peak at 900 feet above sea level at the head of Long Canyon. The views to the north are of South Mountain and Santa Paula. To the south are the Los Posas and Santa Rosa valleys, with the Santa Monica Mountains looming behind.

The vineyards are a dot at the center of the opulent 560-acre St. George’s Farm, otherwise devoted to raising thoroughbred race horses, citrus crops, and custom fruits such as persimmons, Asian pears and plumcots. Leeward doesn’t actually own the Chardonnay acreage; it simply buys the grapes on contract from the ranch owners, the Gibbons family of New York.

Arlene Gibbons is a driving force behind the whole Ventura Chardonnay experiment. But she is anything but a farmhand.

“The spot where the vines are is so beautiful,” she said. “If we didn’t make wine from there, it’s a wonderful place to put a guest house.” The Gibbonses regularly shuttle from New York to the ranch, she says, “to be with nature and the animals.”

“But we were trying,” she continues, “to select the right crop for that spot, and well, planting Chardonnay was so much more romantic than growing pumpkins.”

Agriculturally, it’s at least as well-suited.

Chardonnay prefers a cooler climate--65 to 75 degrees by day, said Jack Foott, a farm adviser with the University of California Cooperative Extension service in San Luis Obispo. While it is not uncommon for the temperatures to soar into the 90s on the St. George’s ranch, the specific Leeward hilltop vineyard is saved by two things: cold morning fogs that press inland from the ocean and a cooling, sometimes stiff, eastward afternoon breeze.

The result has been fecund: abundant, vividly green and healthy Chardonnay that has escaped most ravages except high mortality after the first plantings and continued marauding from rabbits and coyotes.

Fox, who grows expansive vines, said the multiplying grape clusters might actually have to be halved in order to control growth. And, he adds, “We’ve gotta watch out for the animals a bit more, as Ms. Gibbons won’t let us shoot or trap anything.”

Local Character?

The real challenge now falls to Painter. In successive vintages it will be a game of judgment about the grapes and skill in the vinification.

At some point, Ventura County grapes might boost their own regional character. Grapes from the Santa Maria area, for example, can produce wines as bald and obvious as their hot climate: lush, tropical melon flavors abound, finishing, sometimes, like candy. The brooding morning fogs of Mendocino, in contrast, can produce more tightly focused, austere Chardonnays. For now, Leeward’s ’91 Ventura Chardonnay seems, to Painter’s palate, to bear faint likeness to wines produced in the Santa Ynez Valley: crisp, yet with ample fruit and peach flavors, and sometimes citrus-edged.

But it’s too soon to tell with something that evolves over years. Those changes occur both in the vines, which Parker cautions “can grow wild and prolific in the fourth, fifth and six years, producing a vegetative quality,” and through Painter’s approach to winemaking, which itself is governed partly by the specific qualities of each year’s grapes. Then there is the continued contract with Arlene Gibbons for her Chardonnay, the only Chardonnay in the county grown for commercial winemaking.

Clearly, Leeward’s immediate problem is in introducing the wine in such a way that people will recognize it as new and distinctive and, as a result, memorable.

But introducing a Chardonnay in California is like brewing a new beer in Milwaukee or opening a new Italian restaurant in New Jersey. It’s called market saturation.

Chardonnay demand has, in fact, skyrocketed. But so has supply. Roughly 32,000 tons of Chardonnay grapes were harvested annually in California in 1979 and 1980. For 1990 and 1991, the Chardonnay crops leaped to 161,000 tons annually, a 507% increase, according to figures from the state’s Department of Agriculture. And as Chardonnay has flooded the market, prices have become extremely competitive.

It raises the uncomfortable question: Is there room for Leeward’s pioneering Ventura County Chardonnay? More pointedly, how will it sell at $12 a bottle after the novelty wears off?

“Given the marketplace,” Parker sighs, “they’d better make a damn good wine. If what they come up with is truly profound and compelling, well, then that’s OK--no matter what the price, people will buy it. But if you’re not capable of making something truly sublime, it must be under $8 or you’re out. Lost.”

He cites two California Chardonnays that succeed at each extreme: the yeasty, perfume-scented Peter Michael Mon Plaisir that sells for $25 to $30 per bottle and is more Burgundian in style than Californian, and the rich, well-structured but unpedigreed H. G. Phillips, which sells for about $7 and is very Californian in its directness and relative opulence. Everything in the middle range--and most premium Chardonnays sell in the teens--is where the real heat is.

But Zelma Long, president and winemaker at Napa Valley’s Simi Winery, would dispute Parker’s calculus. Long, one of the state’s premier winemakers with a specific strength in Chardonnay, plainly says: “There’s always room for new entrants. I often talk about it in terms of restaurants. Is there room for yet another restaurant? They open and close all the time. But if a restaurant opens and has something about it that’s valuable to a specific clientele, it will do well.”

‘Boutique-Sized’

Painter is counting on anything.

“We’re still boutique-sized,” he said. “We’re still hand-crafted and barrel-fermented. Our wines are $11 or $12. The difference between a $40 bottle and a $10.99 bottle is perceived value. And that’s what’s important: perceived value.”

And, of course, what’s in the bottle. It brings out the philosopher in Painter.

A silk-screen artist when he is not running a forklift in the warehouse or doing the finely calibrated chemistry of enology, Painter is happy to let his aesthetic sense run things. Dressed for this interview in a shirt that is a blur of blue, purple and green, he resembles a moving Richard Deibenkorn painting.

“Creative forces take over technical correctness,” he says with jazz-like imprecision.

“My propensity toward minute detail shows in my wine and my (art) work. That’s what should be reflected in a wine. It should be technically correct but, most important, balanced and flavorful, and be enjoyable for what it is: a mealtime beverage.”

Arlene Gibbons couldn’t agree more. She swoons at the prospect that a Chardonnay from her ranch in Ventura County would enjoy such success as to win a medal or a position on the wine list at a fancy restaurant.

But price could be a problem. Her sense of perceived value contrasts somewhat with Leeward’s Anchorage-friendly $12.

“Oh, it’s very exciting,” she said. “I’d love to see it on the wine list at Maxim’s in Paris or, even better, Tour D’Argent, for about $500 a bottle.”