THE WINE DOCTORS : Winemakers Without Wineries

When Bart and Daphne Araujo bought the famed Eisele Vineyard in the northeastern quadrant of the Napa Valley, they knew they would make a great Cabernet Sauvignon. The Joseph Phelps Winery had made an excellent Cabernet from the property for two decades, and the Araujos had the fruit. All they needed was the right winemaker to turn their grapes into greatness.

The Araujos could have hired an executive search firm to analyze the field and hire a winemaker for them. Instead, they called Tony Soter, one of Napa Valley’s best winemakers, and asked him to take a look at things.

Soter is one of a small breed of winemakers who set the style for not one, but several small, quality-oriented wineries. At each winery Soter works closely with a staff of cellar workers who carry out a program tailored for each business.

Consulting winemakers are often compared to hired guns brought in to clean up a town of unruly thugs. And there are many such winemakers who come in on an emergency basis to solve a problem. A winery with a fermentation gone awry, for example, might call in an expert to cure it. Or if the regular winemaker takes ill at a crucial moment, a consultant could come in and watch over time-sensitive acts such as blending and bottling.

The difference between the rescue artists and people like Soter, Tom Eddy and Merry Edwards is that the latter three are on the short list of consulting enologists who are hired on a multiyear basis to make major decisions for wineries that couldn’t afford their expertise as full-time employees.

“We look at the overall picture,” Eddy says. “We want to know [an owner’s] long-term marketing goals. So, to that end, we get involved in the marketing end of the business.”

The fact that they don’t have to show up at the same winery on a daily basis permits them to accept more than one consulting position, but each of them flatly refuses to work for more than five or six clients at a time. “To do the right job for the client, you almost have to be a family member,” says Eddy, “and that takes a lot of time. You have to be at the winery frequently.”

There are other consultants around, but many have an agenda, a desire to handle all grapes of the same variety in the same, formulated way. Soter, Edwards and Eddy are as much vineyard consultants as winemakers. They feel quality wine starts in the vineyard, so their decisions are based around the unique characteristics of each vineyard.

Edwards, a Sonoma County winemaker, earlier made wines for Mount Eden Vineyards and Matanzas Creek Winery. Now makes wine for three major clients--Liparita, Bob Pellegrini (his wines include the excellent Olivet Lane Pinot Noir) and a division of Bronco Wines, for whom she makes the Laurier Chardonnay. She says she accepted the position as consultant for Liparita Winery on Howell Mountain even before the vines were planted.

“Bob Burrows is really a good example of the type of person I like to work for,” says Edwards. “I consider myself to be very vineyard-based, and in his case I was brought in initially to plant the vineyard, in 1985.

“At the time, the property was a forest, so I was involved in choosing the varieties of grapes, even the clones of each variety. And I helped him hire his vineyard manager.

“Eventually there would be a winery, but the vineyard came first.”

Soter, who is consulting enologist for four Napa Valley projects--Viader Estate, Eisele/Araujo, Niebaum-Coppola and Spottswoode Winery--and for Tom V. Jones’ Moraga Vineyards in Los Angeles, says he has refused many positions because he didn’t see the vineyard commitment by the prospective clients.

“The first meeting with any client is always on me,” says Soter. “It’s really a fact-finding mission, and I’m trying to determine, ‘Does the client have what it takes to do it right?’ That usually means the grapes. And some of it is human potential.”

John Skupny, who is responsible for marketing and wine quality at Niebaum-Coppola Estate, interviewed a number of wine consultants before hiring Soter. “What I was listening for were not answers,” he says. “I know what the answers are. What I wanted were the questions, and Tony knew what the questions were.”

Eddy, who was winemaker at Souverain Cellars and The Christian Bros. before becoming a wine consultant, says he dislikes being called a fix-it man.

“I prefer not to go in and repair problem wines,” says Eddy, who consults for Goosecross Cellars; Bella Luna Wine Co. (formerly Charles Shaw Winery), and Plam Vineyards in the Napa Valley; and for Llano Estacado in Texas. “Ideally, you go into a situation where the grapes already have a reputation and you make the wine without much tinkering.”

Eddy says he once dropped a client who had hired him to improve the vineyard and make great wine from it. “The problem was, the vineyard manager wasn’t doing things the way they should have been done,” he says. “[The owners] wanted me to perform miracles without giving me the authority to control the vineyard.” He resigned the position after 18 months.

“I don’t mind making changes [from a previous wine-making regime], and with some [winery owners] it’s a hand-holding situation, a show-and-tell, where you have to explain what you’re going to do and why you’re doing it.”

Likewise, Soter appreciates the challenge in repairs, but dislikes the downside.

“It’s always interesting to waltz in and play wine doctor, but the danger is in the lack of control,” he says. It can be gratifying for the consultant to see a wine go from undrinkable to enjoyable, he says, but ultimately the risks are too great and the winemaker’s reputation can suffer.

When Soter was hired at Niebaum-Coppola, for example, he found that some of Coppola’s Rubicon wines would not accurately represent the Rutherford soil from which the wines came. He carefully chose about half the wine from the 1988, 1989 and 1990 wines for bottling and had the rest sold off in bulk. (The 1991 Rubicon, to be released in September 1996, is the first wine Soter had full control over.)

Soter prefers to have hand-picked assistants on site to carry out his plan for each wine. He helped Coppola hire Scott McLeod as winemaker (in 1992). At Araujo, Francoise Peschon, who is employed by Soter’s own Etude winery, handles the chores.

All the consultants say they are incredibly busy because of where they have to go to make wine. “I go to Texas 12 to 14 times a year,” says Eddy. And even when he’s home, he’s on the road much of the time. “I’m on call 24 hours a day.”

A typical day for Edwards starts early in her western Sonoma County home. After taking her son, Ben, 13, to school, she heads for Napa Wine Co., a custom-crush winery that’s an hour’s drive away. There she will do a blending tasting of the Liparita wines.

At noon, she heads back through Sonoma Valley to stop at Kunde Vineyards, where she checks on the Olivet Lane Pinot Noir. Late in the day she’ll stop by Cha^teau De Baun in Santa Rosa (where Bronco leases space) to check on her Laurier Chardonnay. After dinner, she’ll spend time on the phone with Pellegrini talking about grapes and vineyard practices.

Unlike Eddy and Soter, Edwards also does overview consulting, what she calls “the other side of my business.” At Hanna Winery, Lambert Bridge Winery and Mont St. John Cellars, she assists on-staff winemakers to evaluate their wines and help improve quality.

“I can also help when a small start-up winery wants to hire a young person who might not have some experience, but who has the technical skill to make quality wine,” she says.

She has also helped new owners hire quality winemakers, recommending Julia Iantosca to Lambert Bridge and Will Bucklin to the King Estate in Oregon.

And though most of their energy goes into other people’s wine, all three winemakers have had projects of their own.

Soter makes wines under his own brand, Etude, including excellent Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir. Eddy also makes a marvelous Cabernet under the Tom Eddy label that sells for $32 a bottle, mainly to a mailing list and select restaurants.

Edwards formerly made a small amount of wine under The Merry Vintners’ label but has ended that project. Now she leases her winery to small producers in need of a facility to make their wines.

All three consultants make wine at custom-crush wineries as well as at estate wineries. “There are advantages and disadvantages to each one,” Edwards says. “The nice thing at the custom-crush wineries over a small winery is that there can be a diversity of equipment that can be really nice for making great wine.”

She loves the Kunde Winery for her Olivet Lane Pinot Noir, for example, because it has a must chiller. “It’s great if you have to chill down your Pinot Noir juice if you want to do cold soaking,” she says. The wine is always a great wine and a great value.

Soter says that when he’s new in a project, he’s usually most interested in knowing about the grapes: “A lot of any wine is literally in the taste of the fruit in the field. Some fruit is very expressive and aromatic and has a little more complexity than other fruit. The stony quality I get out of Eisele doesn’t have the high tone or juicy quality I get from Spottswoode.”

Soter says that tasting the grapes gives him “an aesthetic inspiration, and I have to turn that into the liquid sublimation of the fruit.”

He adds, “I have to be sensitive to those things that make the wine what the grapes want it to be. And I try not to make something out of the grapes that they are not inherently.”