History in the Making

Ken Brown is explaining how his Byron winery is heading back to the future--all the way back to Newtonian law, in fact--to revolutionize winemaking.

“Ninety-nine point nine percent of wineries [are] designed on one level and at some point must pump the juice and the grapes,” he said. “That agitates the wine.”

Better, he said, to let gravity do the work. That means less wear and tear on the grapes and more flavor in the wines.

In a profession as ancient as winemaking, it seems fitting that the latest technological advances would have gravity as their centerpiece.

Here at the multilevel facility that Byron Vineyard & Winery has built into a burnished hillside in the Santa Maria Valley 75 miles north of Santa Barbara, grapes and juice are poured, rather than pumped, into fermentation tanks and barrels.

With “gravity flow” and other innovations--one of them borrowed from the aerospace industry--Byron is demonstrating the lengths to which one winery has gone in a bid to win a reputation for quality and set itself apart from the growing pack of U.S. and overseas rivals as demand for premium wine heats up.

“The competition is so keen,” said James Laube, author of Wine Spectator magazine’s “California Wine,” a glossy guide to 700 of the state’s wineries. “The pressure is on constantly to make better wines.”

The expectation is that with gentler handling, the highly regarded Burgundian-style varieties that Byron produces--Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Pinot Blanc and Pinot Gris--will improve enough to command prices higher than their current $11 to $28 a bottle. An extra $5 to $10 a bottle for Byron’s best wines would enable the winery and its owner, Robert Mondavi Inc., to recoup more quickly the $4-million investment in the new building and a planned bridge to get to it.

In Byron’s case, we’re not talking quantum leaps, either. Fans of Byron’s better wines, Brown maintains, would be willing to pay more for a mere 1% to 2% improvement--however that might be measured.

The 32,000-square-foot winery, completed in early August after a year of construction, is designed to last a century. It’s the latest phase in Byron’s pursuit of world-class wines.

But the push to use state-of-the-art techniques to improve quality actually began in the vineyards, long before blueprints for a new winery were drawn. Byron Kent Brown, who co-founded the winery in 1984, knew many years ago that his 125-acre property needed massive reworking to become great.

“All of our vineyards were planted to the wrong density, wrong [grape] clones, wrong trellising system and wrong rootstocks,” Brown said.

By selling the winery to the Mondavi family six years ago, winemaker Brown secured the cash he needed to begin experimenting with new vineyard configurations and growing methods.

Block by block, Brown has replanted, trying out several dozen rootstocks as well as new clones (or genetic variations) of vines from France, Oregon and California. He varied the distance between rows and between vines.

A chief goal has been to increase the density of plantings, European-style. More densely planted vines must compete for sustenance, resulting in reduced yields, smaller berries and more intense fruit.

Some Byron acres now contain 4,300 vines each, nearly nine times the standard in California. (With the addition of neighboring land bought by the Mondavis, the Byron estate has grown to 641 acres.)

Under Brown’s direction, vineyard rows have been changed from an east-west to a north-south orientation to allow for more sunlight exposure on both sides of the vine “canopy.” More than 400 acres, including a 60-acre block devoted to research, have been converted to a European-style vertical trellis system. Four movable wires push leaves and grapes upright as the vines grow, ensuring that clusters will get maximum sun exposure and air circulation--important factors in the state’s coolest grape-growing region.

Among the transformed vineyards is a 120-acre Chardonnay block that is the oldest commercial vineyard in Santa Barbara County. It was planted in 1964 by Uriel Nielson, a UC Davis student, against the advice of his viticulture professors, who said the climate was too chilly for grape growing.

Since then--after nearly 50 years of viticultural dormancy beginning with Prohibition--the region has enjoyed a rebirth. It now is the widely recognized home to more than 30 wineries. Byron wines--particularly its top Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs--are typically rated among the best of the up-and-coming Santa Barbara-area breed.

Part of the impetus for improvement comes from Robert Mondavi’s son Tim, a proponent of natural farming techniques and gentler handling of grapes. The Mondavi family’s prestigious Opus One winery in the Napa Valley was one of the first to return to the pre-electricity method of using gravity flow. But pumps are still in use there for moving juice and finished wines.

With the Byron winery, Tim Mondavi and Brown sought to go Opus One one better by eliminating the need for pumps. They enlisted Los Angeles architect R. Scott Johnson, who had also designed the opulent Opus One, which opened in 1991. Johnson, with Johnson Fain & Pereira Associates, said the Mondavis and Brown emphasized their wish that the architecture would “make a statement about the commitment to producing fine and aesthetic wine.”

Gravity flow had been the method of choice for winemaking for hundreds of years before the advent of electric pumps, which saved time and labor costs and made it possible to build wineries on one level. However, Brown said, people lost sight of the fact that wine quality was being compromised.

Pumping tends to shear the grape skins, seeds and stems, exposing the juice to harsh tannins, or acids, and sometimes rendering the final product bitter. After the fermented juice is pressed, pumping can expose the liquid to too much oxygen, the enemy of wine.

Gravity flow, on the other hand, dramatically reduces any bitterness, resulting in a smoother bouquet and a more pleasurable “mouth feel.” Even a novice wine drinker, Brown contended, would notice the difference.

“What we’ve had to do is reinvent the wheel to get it back to the way it was,” Brown said.

Viewed on the approach from Foxen Canyon Road, the Byron building looks long, squat and almost bunker-like. Up close, it appears like an arcade, with a gull-wing roof reminiscent of the surrounding hills of the Los Padres range.

The building is formed of rough-sawed cedar planks and iron windows. The roof is zinc. Near the roof line, free-form panels of dyed, hand-applied plaster recall the colors of the mustard plants and lupine that blanket the hillsides in springtime. A shaded portico runs the length of the front, providing entry to the barrel rooms and a view of the vineyards to the south.

At the rear, the uphill side, workers in recent weeks have been busily unloading grape bins from trucks. White-wine varieties are dumped directly into a press. Red-wine grapes are poured into a machine that removes the stems and, as gently as possible, breaks the skins to release the juice. From there, the grapes and skins fall directly into stainless steel fermentation tanks that sit beneath exposed metal trusses, skylights and lights dangling from the 34-foot ceiling.

In a striking innovation that architect Johnson believes to be unique, these tanks are portable. A typical winery has raised, stationary fermentation tanks. Catwalks around those tanks enable workers to perform necessary tasks, such as punching down the grape skins in red-wine fermenters.

Portable tanks eliminate the need for space-consuming catwalks and allow for multiple uses of the cavernous fermentation room. Brown expects at times to convert the room into a bottling area. (The facility has a capacity of 50,000 cases, up from 20,000 at the original winery nearby. Brown hopes over the next five years to boost the winery’s annual production to 70,000 cases from the current 40,000.)

The warehouse-like fermentation room is where the aerospace innovation comes in: Filled tanks weighing 7 tons can be moved with the touch of a finger by an individual operating a sturdy pneumatic forklift, like those used to move missiles in silos. The tanks, for example, can be positioned under the crusher-stemmer so juice and skins can fall into them, then moved back onto the open floor.

While the red-wine grapes are fermenting for two to three weeks, a worker on a scissor lift uses a pneumatic “punch-down” two or three times daily to gently push the skins back into the juice. More conventional methods involve pumping the juice over the top of the skins or manually pushing down the skins using a pole with a small plate at the bottom.

Byron has also invested in temperature- and humidity-controlled barrel rooms, still a novelty in the industry, and special grape-sorting tables, also an unusual feature.

All this innovation, said Laube of the Wine Spectator, makes Byron a “no-excuses winery.” In other words, gravity flow, temperature and humidity controls and other elements of state-of-the-art winemaking can help vintners avoid any mistakes. Put another way, he noted, they have no excuse for getting it wrong.