Do Beer and Wine Mix?

In a warehouse-sized building set in the rolling hills of Los Olivos, among acres of Chardonnay and Merlot grapevines, Jeffers H. Richardson raps his knuckles on a row of 60-gallon oak barrels.

Inside the broad-beamed casks, as the magic of fermentation takes place, the liquid bubbles and strains. A big part of Richardson’s job is to keep a wary eye on the barrels, a chore he performs as vineyard workers just outside carefully tend the grapes.

“A few days ago, these barrels were ready to go through the roof,” he says. “They were just quivering.”

Richardson, hired by Adam Firestone, the president of Firestone Vineyard, and Firestone’s brother-in-law David Walker, at first might seem to be a typical winemaker. But he’s not a winemaker at all. And the barrels he tends hold liquid that is neither red nor white. Richardson, 36, is a brew master, and the object of his obsession here in the heart of California’s Central Coast wine country is beer.

Until recently, you could say that wine is wine and beer is beer and never the twain shall meet. But the growing popularity of richly flavored small-batch brews known in the trade as craft beers is luring respected viticulturists afield. The Institute for Brewing Studies says craft beer sales soared 26% last year, and market share grew to 2.6% from 2% of all beer sales.

Many winemakers see a common interest with their beer-making brethren in working with wholesome, natural foodstuffs, and a few are willing to try making a business, not just a hobby, out of the 6,000-year-old art of brewing a fine beverage out of malted barley, hops and yeast.

Recently, breweries have been established at three well-known California wineries. Firestone Walker Brewery was spun off from Firestone Winery, and Sonoma Mountain Brewery was started by the same people who run Benziger Family Winery in Glen Ellen. Both have full-size operations capable of serving regional markets. The third, Russian River Brewing Co. from Korbel Champagne Cellars at Guerneville in Sonoma County, operates a microbrewery that produces small amounts of beer for sale exclusively in its delicatessen.

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Low in a cozy, verdant valley about 12 miles north of the farthest reaches of San Pablo Bay, you’ll find a sun-drenched plot where you can take a bud of Liberty hops in one hand and a bunch of Merlot grapes in the other and thus begin to appreciate an old saying of the wine country: “It takes a lot of beer to make a great wine.”

“Winemakers are in most cases regular people, farmers,” says Tim Wallace, chief executive officer of Glen Ellen’s new Sonoma Mountain Brewery, showing a visitor around what he claims is California’s largest hops field. “They are working people with an agricultural product and they like a cold beer, too.”

Perhaps nowhere else do the worlds of beer and wine blend more harmoniously than here in Glen Ellen, where the wine- and now beer-making Benziger family celebrates the agricultural heritage common to both timeless beverages.

Patriarch Bruno Benziger left the liquor-importing business in New York in 1980 and moved west to found Glen Ellen Winery, a label that became a nationwide popular-priced best-seller.

After his death in 1989, son Mike took over and, in 1993, sold the business to Hueblein for a reported $150 million. As managing general partner of Benziger Family Winery, he wanted to refocus the family mission toward the limited production of fine wines.

The family--an extended clan in which Mike Benziger’s sister Patty is married to Wallace--has invested several million dollars in recent years in the Sonoma Mountain brewing venture. In doing so, the Benzigers have made perhaps the strongest statement by a wine company about the beer business, illustrated by this 1.6-acre hops field, planted where Merlot grapes used to grow.

Brewers everywhere use hops in many varieties to give beers their distinctive flavors and aromas. Not everyone, however, goes to the trouble of growing their own. By converting some of the grape fields to the farming of hops, the Benzigers are actually reviving an old Sonoma County tradition: There was a time when hops were a leading crop in these parts.

“It has been an interesting resurgence,” says Jim Sallee, a deputy Sonoma County agricultural commissioner, who dug up records showing that production peaked in 1946, when 2,600 acres in the county were planted with hops, yielding a crop of 22,000 bales valued at $2.3 million.

A string of rainy winters in the ‘50s caused an outbreak of damaging fungus about the same time that farmers discovered a new cash crop--wine grapes. “[Hops] fizzled overnight,” Sallee says. Production plummeted from 1,529 bales in 1960 to none in 1961.

When Sonoma Mountain’s first crop ripened last summer, the Benzigers blended the past with the present by seeking out local residents who had long ago labored in hops fields. Nearly two dozen people from 55 to 95 years old turned out one Sunday last August for a reunion of sorts and to work again among the rows of hops vines reaching up 20-foot cord trellises. As the delicate buds were gathered, the new farmers watched and learned from the old.

“We looked at the hops, and all the memories of yesteryear came flooding back,” says Florene Dauanhauer Heck, who had worked in the fields as a little girl. (Her father, Florian Dauanhauer, developed a hops-harvesting machine in 1941, and a family-owned factory in Santa Rosa continues to manufacture replacement parts for machines still in use.)

The hops also play a role in the Benziger family’s plans to create a tourist destination, complementing their winery tour two miles away and showcasing the importance of agriculture in the brewing arts. Visitors alighting in the parking lot just off California Highway 12 will stroll by a small patch of barley, several hops vines, a yeast exhibit under microscopes and a bubbling fountain of well water.

“It will be the first time many will be able to see the ingredients [of beer] in their natural state,” says Mike Benziger. “Most people think that beer comes from a can.”

Making their way to the 8,500-square-foot brewery, visitors will be ushered into the brewery proper for a glimpse at the heart of the operation, originally built in 1967 for the shuttered Kalble Brewery in Steinach, in Germany’s Black Forest, then dismantled and shipped last year to California.

“This came in jampacked in a container with a bezillion pictures we took over there, and we put it back together again,” explains Chris Atkinson, the master brewer.

Brewing began in the spring, and after the proper aging--lager takes a month or more--Sonoma Mountain Golden Pilsner and Sonoma Mountain Amber Lager debuted on July 8.

“Oftentimes we talk about balance,” says Tom Dalldorf, publisher and managing editor of Celebrator Beer News of Hayward. “We try to get a beer that is not too bitter and not too sweet. [The Sonoma Mountain pilsener] is one that has a real significant bittering to it. It’s refreshing and delightful and brings you back for that second taste.”

The Czech-style amber lager, he adds, has a beautiful mahogany color and aromas with a distinctive malty character with some hops spicing. Its creamy caramel flavors of malt are subtly balanced with hop bittering.

The pilsener and lager, says Michael Lewis, professor of brewing science at UC Davis, are classically light in color, crisp, bitter for their maltiness and less satiating. In comparison, the English ale produced by Firestone Walker is darker in color and fruity, with a full, ale-like quality.

Rather than trying to make the same beer year in and year out, Sonoma Mountain Brewery will try to make the best possible brew every year, even if it means something different from the year before--an approach strongly reminiscent of the winemaker’s art, in which fruit is never the same from one season to the next.

“We are going to introduce the concept that our beers will be getting better and better,” says Wallace. “We are not afraid to say we may change our recipe going forward. We hope you are going to love us out the door, but we are going to say, come back and see us again, because it isn’t going to be the same.”

Some in the brewing industry shake their heads at that notion, but the Benziger family is dedicated to the kind of creativity that David Edgar of the Institute for Brewing Studies in Boulder, Colo., says should be welcomed in the brewing community.

“It’s a good thing that some California winemakers are getting into this business,” he says. “They are much more likely to have an understanding of the importance of the subtlety of flavor, and . . . the art and the tradition.”

Just try telling that to a beermaker. Color? Bouquet? Bubble size?

“Most beer drinkers don’t drink that way,” says Steve Harrison of one of California’s pioneering craft breweries, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Inc. of Chico. “From the wine snob point of view, I’m not into that whole scene, and I don’t think most beer drinkers are. We just like good beer.”

Still, Harrison says, “I think it’s great that the winemakers are getting into it, although it’s a little late. When we started out in 1981 we couldn’t get shelf space because people thought what we were doing was strange,” Harrison says. “Now it’s hard to get space because there are so many different beers.”

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The Southern California wave of the winemaker’s beer movement bears the name Firestone Walker.

Pioneering is something of a Firestone tradition, and in this respect, at least, Adam Firestone, 35, a tall, handsome retired Marine Corps captain who carries himself with a crisp military bearing, follows in his family’s footsteps. On the other hand, he’s always been something of a black sheep in the wine-quaffing family.

“Whenever we sat down to dinner,” he recalls, “I was the only one who had a bottle of beer at the table.”

His father is Assemblyman Brooks Firestone (R-Los Olivos), son of Leonard K. Firestone, the late tire fortune heir and ambassador to Belgium. Brooks Firestone went to the Santa Ynez Valley a quarter-century ago to plant the first vineyards that established the Central Coast wine industry. Last year that industry achieved countywide sales volume of more than $120 million, according to the Santa Barbara County Vintners’ Assn.

Adam Firestone says that his father first came up with the idea of brewing a high-quality nonalcoholic beer in 1987 amid a spike in popularity of that product. The elder Firestone purchased equipment and adapted winemaking vessels for beer fermentation and conditioning but ultimately determined that sales of nonalcoholic beer did not justify continuing the operation, so it was abandoned in 1990.

Adam Firestone, who became president of the winery in 1994, remained interested in the project. Three years ago, when his sister, the actress Polly Firestone, moved to Santa Barbara County with her ale-loving English-born husband, David Walker, a new partnership was formed.

Walker brought an inborn taste for classic English ales, which by happy coincidence have a long tradition of fermenting in wooden barrels.

As the two beer lovers set about learning how to brew in wood, they took an epic misstep by employing some of the winery’s inexhaustible supply of used wine barrels as fermentation vessels for their beer. The vinegary residue from the wine resulted in what was at best an inconsistent product; at worst, unimaginable swill. The trick, as they learned, was to use brand-new barrels, truckloads of which greeted Richardson when he was hired as brew master in 1995.

“When I first came here, there was no brewery,” says Richardson, who entered the industry from the master brewers program at UC Davis and later worked as the brew master at the Brewhouse Grill in Santa Barbara and at a small chain of brew pubs in Northern California. “They stuck me in an office, and it looked out on the barrel room. All I could do all day was look at barrels.”

Eventually they adopted an old English brewing method called the Burton Union. Their version, dubbed the Firestone Union, uses a series of 18 oak barrels piped together in a closed system that results in fermentation under pressure with classic English ale yeast from London. Richardson’s recipe includes a blend of malted barley from England and the United States and hops from England, Slovenia and Washington state. The water is tapped from 105-foot wells below the vineyards.

The result is Firestone Walker Double Barrel Ale. “It has a definite round flavor,” says the Celebrator Beer News’ Dalldorf, “with a mellowing, softening of the malt. I won’t say it has an oakey flavor, because it is hard to define the oakey character, but it is delightful. And served on draft, it is a superb product.”

Edgar, of the Institute for Brewing, described Double Barrel Ale as “a very well-brewed, flavorful beer, mellow and drinkable.”

Adam Firestone said he is encouraged by the reception of the ale, and this week he introduced a second product, Windsor Pale Ale, which he describes as being lighter in flavor and body but with the nuttiness and wood character derived from the Burton Union fermentation. Meanwhile, beer drinkers--mostly Southern Californians--are downing Double Barrel at the rate of 8,000 cases a month in bottles and kegs.

Firestone says the project hasn’t distracted him from running the second-largest winery in Santa Barbara County, and his neighbors don’t seem to mind the intrusion either.

One of them, Fess Parker, the retired actor and accomplished winemaker, usually doesn’t order his own pricey Santa Ynez Valley labels when he dines out--or anything else from the wine list, for that matter. Rather, he usually lifts a glass of the ale brewed just over the fence from his 90-acre spread.

“I think it’s great,” said Parker. “All it really gets down to is making something that people enjoy drinking, even if it falls a little short of going to church.”

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Korbel Champagne Cellars, based in the Sonoma County town of Guerneville, is a major player in the bubbly wine business--it shipped 1.1 million cases last year--which makes its move into beer brewing all the more significant.

Gary Heck, president and owner of Korbel, says the company invested $700,000 in Russian River Brewing Co., a microbrewery that opened June 1 in the winery’s 115-year-old original crushing facility. So far there are four brews--a golden wheat, a pale ale, an amber ale and a porter--dispensed directly from conditioning tanks through taps in Korbel’s delicatessen for $3.50 a pint.

Sales have reached 300 gallons a day on weekends and should total 24,000 gallons this year, according to Heck. Bottling will begin in October, and sales will follow at local restaurants and bars.

“We decided there is a connection between fine wines and microbrewed beers,” says Heck, whose family bought the company in 1965, “and our customers are telling us we are on to something.”

The appeal of craft beers is clearly evident among consumers who appreciate the finer things in life, says Sonoma Mountain Brewery’s Wallace.

“Beer is becoming a bigger beverage at the cocktail hour,” he says. “Instead of a glass of Chardonnay, somebody will say, I’m going to have a glass of Sonoma Mountain Golden Pilsner.

“But when you get to the table,” Wallace admits, “wine is still the king. It’s a very sophisticated beverage that beer someday could hope to evolve to. I don’t think that it’s there yet.”

BEER SOURCES

Sonoma Mountain Amber Lager and Sonoma Mountain Golden Pilsner are available for $13.98 per 12-pack plus shipping and handling. For information call (707) 935-4500.

Firestone Walker is sold at Vons supermarkets throughout Southern California.

Russian River Brewing Co. beer is available only at the brewery in Guerneville.