Cover Story : Virtual Winery

When most people picture a winery, they see a beautiful stone chateau surrounded by acres of well-ordered vineyards. They see a genial, smocked winemaker who spends much of his day checking the wine stored in gorgeously rustic wood barrels in an ancient cave filled with priceless vintages. They see the gracious owners, living at the winery, involved in every step of the process, making decisions about just when to harvest their grapes as they sit down to a simple, delicious vineyard lunch.

Now picture this: Jon Doe winery owner, on the way to his downtown San Francisco office where he works as, say, a dentist, calls a grape grower in Fresno from the car phone of his BMW, and contracts to buy a batch of grapes. Doe next calls his consulting winemaker to update her on his activity. Later, she pencils in a harvest date and makes arrangements to use facilities at a custom-crush winery when it’s time to crush and ferment the wine.

A contract trucking company picks up the harvested grapes; as the wine ages, a wholesale company can begin marketing the new wine.

Doe then comes in and has yet another contracted company design, print and affix labels on his wine bottles. What will they read? How about Doe Vineyards and Winery Chardonnay?

Today in California you don’t need a chateau, cellars or even vineyards to call yourself a winery. Anyone can own a winery, without even bothering to put up walls or grow grapes.

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The winery-in-name-only is one of the invisible developments that has fueled much of the growth in the California wine industry in the past 30 years.

Perhaps 200 of what appear, from their names, to be wineries have neither grapes nor buildings. Properly speaking, they are wine brands. Wines and Vines Magazine says there are 684 bonded wineries in California, but estimates that there are some 850 wine brands.

Many of these brands are so-called second labels or affiliated brands of major producers. Some have separate wineries; some don’t. The second labels include such brands as Mondavi Woodbridge (second label of Napa Valley’s Robert Mondavi Winery), Livingston (E & J Gallo Winery), Il Podere dell’Olivos (Au Bon Climat), Napa Ridge (Beringer Vineyards) and Gavilan (Chalone Wine Group).

Of the affiliated brands, perhaps no winery has more than Kendall-Jackson of Sonoma County. Here is a complete list (as of this week): Cambria (Central Coast Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), Bailey and Brock (a new Mendocino-based sparkling wine brand), Edmeades (mainly Zinfandel and Pinot Noir), Camelot (Central Coast Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), Cardinale (North Coast red and white blends), Kristone (Sonoma County sparkling wines), La Crema (Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), Lakewood (Sauvignon Blanc), Robert Pepi (mainly Napa Valley Sangiovese and Sauvignon Blanc), Stonestreet (a broad line of Sonoma County premium wines) and Hartford Court (Russian River Pinot Noir).

It’s similar to what goes on in the beer industry, where the same company offers products of different styles at different prices. For example, Anheuser-Busch makes upscale Michelob and several lower-priced and specialty beers as well as mainstream Budweiser.

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Then, of course, there are actual wineries that happen to lack vineyards, such as St. Clement Vineyards, which for a decade owned just one acre of vines. And there are wineries that lack a winery, such as Jade Mountain Winery. It is but one of a number of “wineries” that have no wine-making facilities of their own; they lease other people’s facilities.

One of the best of these grape-growing operations is the mountainous Sonoma Valley property of comedian Tom Smothers, whose Smothers Cabernet Sauvignon is one of the finest wines to come out of Sonoma County.

Smothers has no winery up on Remick Ridge, where his grapes grow and where he and his wife and new son live. However, he does have an agreement with winemaker Richard Arrowood to make the wine for him at Arrowood Winery.

And then there’s the case of Sanford Winery in Buellton. Richard and Thekla Sanford own a gorgeous Spanish-style tasting room west of town, up a raw gorge filled with dramatic redwoods, sycamores and cottonwoods and dozens of varieties of wildflowers.

The winery? Oh, that’s in a most unromantic, concrete-paved commercial park in Buellton. The Sanfords’ vineyards are among the best in the area, yet the tasting room isn’t located on a vineyard property either.

There’s nothing fraudulent about any of this. St. Clement always bought grapes from vineyards that were among the best in the business. Jade Mountain and others do, after all, make wine in a winery, even if it isn’t their own. And Sanford’s Chardonnay and Pinot Noir are considered to be some of the best-made on the Central Coast.

At the same time, there are many wine brands owned by small grape growers who harvest their grapes and take them to a contract winery to be turned into wine.

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At the same time, there are literally hundreds of small, independent growers of grapes in Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino and other areas who exist solely by selling their grapes to others. Most growers have at one time sold to the world’s largest winery, E & J Gallo of Modesto, but when entrepreneurs see a marketing opportunity, they often pay higher prices and growers usually take the best offer.

One of the most prestigious of the independent grape growers who makes no wine of his own is Angelo Sangiacomo, whose acreage in the Carneros region of southern Sonoma County is highly prized. Steve MacRostie, whose winery bears his name, buys Sangiacomo fruit and makes the wine at Roche Winery, where he is also the consulting enologist.

Other wineries that buy grapes from Sangiacomo include Joseph Phelps Vineyards, Acacia Vineyards, Bouchaine Vineyards, Domaine Chandon, Saintsbury, Simi Winery, Viansa Winery, Villa Mt. Eden and at least a dozen more.

Then there is case of the marketing company that contracts for wine to be made for it at a winery that leases space. Often this is wine made from grapes the company contracts for independently.

This is the way the Ivan Tamas line of wines is made at Wente Bros. Winery in Livermore. Partners Ivan Fuezy (a marketing specialist) and Steve Mirassou (a grape and winemaking expert) developed the brand a decade ago.

Fuezy and Mirassou have their offices at Wente and make most of the decisions on final blends, but Wente winemaker Willy Joslin oversees production and assists with myriad details.

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There are a number of custom-crush wineries that lease space to those who need to make wine but have no winery. Four of the largest such wineries are Napa Valley’s Napa Wine Co. and Golden State Vintners; Delicato Vineyards in Manteca in the San Joaquin Valley, and Klein Family Vintners in Sonoma County. Wineries as prestigious as Robert Mondavi and Kendall-Jackson make use of larger custom-crush facilities.

Both Kendall-Jackson and Mondavi have major wine production facilities of their own, but as demand for wine grows faster than they can expand their wineries, they arrange to use space at other facilities.

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There are many other smaller custom-crush wineries. One is Rombauer Vineyards in the Napa Valley, which has since 1983 been the home for Dominus and a number of other smaller brands.

Napa Wine Co. operates out of the Oakville facility that formerly made Heublein Wines’ Inglenook-Napa Valley wines. Andy Hoxsey, a fourth-generation Napa Valley grape grower, says he bought the place from Heublein in 1993 “mainly for protection of our vineyards.” Hoxsey sells most of the grapes he grows, but he wanted to insure that the portion he doesn’t sell could still be used.

Hoxsey says that in his custom-crush business he doesn’t go far afield of crushing, fermenting and aging: “We want to stick to our knitting as far as processing; we’re not going to buy grapes from a grower to sell them to someone else.”

Custom-crushing becomes more important when grapes are in short supply, such as the current shortfall of Merlot. Hoxsey explains: “Right now you can sell Merlot (grapes) easy to anybody for $1,600 to $1,800 a ton. But if you have Merlot wine, I could go out today and sign you a contract for $14 a gallon. Now, at 165 gallons per ton, that’s $2,300 per ton.”

Most custom-crush companies have winemakers on staff to make wine for any client that doesn’t have a consultant or winemaker of their own. Napa Wine Co. has Randy Mason, a longtime Napa Valley winemaker who most recently was at now-defunct Lakespring Winery (the Lakespring label can still be found as a custom-crush brand). Rick Sayre is the overseer for all of Klein Family Vintners’ custom-crush accounts.

But Napa Wine Co.’s Hoxsey prefers to have consulting winemakers come in to make wine at his facility: “We don’t want every wine that comes out of here to taste the same.”