Hanzell, the New-Wave Winery From the Fifties
The view from the deck of the Hanzell Vineyards winery takes in a lot. It overlooks the town of Sonoma, the Valley of the Moon and south to Mt. Tamalpais and the Golden Gate.
It also looks back in time.
The story of California wine has a lot to do with Sonoma. Several of the most important chapters have unfolded in that sleepy little town north of San Francisco.
Alta California was a colony of Mexico when Gen. Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo planted Sonoma’s first fine-wine vineyard in 1835. Gen. Vallejo was 27 when he arrived in Sonoma. He would live to be 90, remaining a respected member of the new American community.
Vallejo’s Sonoma Red and Sonoma White bottlings from his Lachryma Montis estate near Sonoma Plaza were considered the finest California wines of their day, despite being made from the “native” Mission grape (introduced by Franciscan padres in 1823) and other odd grapes such as the sweet Canon Hall.
Vallejo’s friend and neighbor, Col. Agoston Haraszthy, took Sonoma viticulture a step further by importing fine European grape varieties. He first purchased land in 1856 northeast of Sonoma, calling the property Buena Vista Farm. With his sons, Attila and Arpad, he immediately began planting vines.
The next year a visiting committee from the State Agricultural Society reported, “This beautiful location, partly in the foothills, overlooking the valley, is admirably adapted to the cultivation of the grape.” In 1857 Haraszthy made 6,500 gallons of wine and 120 gallons of brandy at Buena Vista. The grapes came from 14,000 “foreign” grapevines embracing 165 grape varieties. And naturally, he also had about 450,000 Mission vines.
With all those varietal options, it’s not surprising that Haraszthy was an early proponent of creative blending, California-style. Showing a flair for public relations that anticipated Robert Mondavi a century later, Haraszthy explained to journalists, “If we make such good wines already from one quality of our native grapes, how much better wines will we make when we have differently flavored varieties of grapes for it in a certain proportion mixed together?”
Warming to the subject, he continued: “To Illustrate it to persons not acquainted with winemaking, I will say that carrots will make a vegetable soup, but it will be a poor one; but take carrots, turnips, celery, parsley, cabbage, potatoes, onions, etc., and you will have a superior vegetable soup. So with grapes: Take the proper variety of them, and you will make a splendid wine.”
Tragically, Haraszthy’s career ended literally in midstream. While trying to cross a river in the Nicaraguan jungle, he reportedly fell into the water and was devoured by alligators. Whatever insights he had gained into varietal blending in California were lost.
Vallejo fared better. American annexation and statehood in 1850 put Vallejo out of a job, but he remained an active participant in California politics. He was a delegate to the constitutional convention of 1849 and helped coordinate the transition to statehood in 1850. He was an effective diplomat between the vanishing world of the Californios and the rapidly expanding culture of the United States.
A century later, another diplomat founded California’s first “boutique” wine estate, Hanzell, which remains one of the best small new-wave wineries in the state.
James D. Zellerbach and his wife, Hana, had fallen in love with Burgundy and its wines while he was serving as an American ambassador in Europe. That inspired them to buy land in 1948 for their own in the hills above Sonoma. The winery they built bears a striking, and intentional, resemblance to Burgundy’s fabled Clos de Vougeot. The vines they planted were the Burgundian varieties, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. And their winemaking methods, particularly the use of small oak barrels, blasted California wine right into the future.
A number of wine producers have taken credit for introducing Europe’s ubiquitous oak barrel to California cellars. The name Zellerbach seldom, if ever, comes up. And yet it was, indeed, Hanzell that first used oak barrels the old-fashioned way to craft a European-style wine.
The first vines were planted at Hanzell in 1953. The Chardonnay was the old Wente clone, reputed to have originated in a famous Burgundy vineyard. The Pinot Noir was the Martin Ray clone, also Burgundian. Subsequent Hanzell plantings have been propagated from these original vines, creating, over the years, a discrete Hanzell domaine character.
Longtime Hanzell general manager and winemaker Bob Sessions is still a little incredulous at Zellerbach’s foresight in committing to varietal Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. “That was nearly 50 years ago,” he muses. “How many varietal Chardonnays were around then?”
There were a few. Martin Ray, Paul Masson, the Wente brothers and Beaulieu Vineyards were making “Pinot Chardonnay,” as it was known then. But neither they nor any of their loyal customers would have predicted the seemingly endless array of Chardonnay labels on a typical supermarket shelf today.
There were even fewer Pinot Noirs. So few, in fact, that high-quality bud wood was hard to come by. However, a Napa Valley vineyard owned by grower Martin Stelling reputedly had a Pinot Noir selection originally obtained by Santa Cruz Mountains vintner Martin Ray from a famous Cote d’Or vineyard, possibly Clos de Vougeot itself.
According to Hanzell tradition, Stelling was unwilling to part with any bud wood, so founding winemaker Brad Webb was dispatched by Zellerbach on a clandestine mission with pruning shears. That 1952 midnight run to Napa, so the story goes, was the source of Hanzell’s Pinot Noir.
Whether or not it’s completely accurate, Sessions says that new Pinot Noir plantings at Hanzell have always been propagated from those original cuttings of the Martin Ray/Burgundy selection. “But now, of course, it’s known as the Hanzell clone,” he adds.
Some fruit was purchased while the vineyards were being established, but the wines have been entirely estate-grown since 1960. Today, there are 26 acres of vines, approximately 60% Chardonnay and 40% Pinot Noir. The production, a meager (and highly sought-after) 3,000 cases a year, roughly follows those lines.
Sessions has been the general manager and winemaker at Hanzell for nearly three decades. He was hired by the legendary Brad Webb, with whom he’d worked at Mayacamas Vineyards, high above St. Helena on the Napa Valley side of the Mayacamas Range, from 1965 to 1972. Webb brought Sessions aboard at Hanzell in 1973. His son, Ben, is now the winery’s marketing director.
Hanzell’s current releases, the ’98 Chardonnay and ’97 Pinot Noir, are typical Sessions-produced beauties.
The ’98 growing season demonstrated how troublesome vintages can yield good results in California, especially with early-ripening grapes such as Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. While in Burgundy the best vintages are warm ones, California performs well when its summer heat is tempered.
That El Nino year was a bit too cool for Cabernet producers’ comfort, but the Hanzell vineyards in the warm Sonoma hills produced classically structured wines with good depth of flavor. The ’98 Chardonnay is a perfect sensory image of the estate and its history. It conveys a strong impression of vines languishing on hillsides in the California sun, with an overlay of European sophistication. At once luscious and firm, it has a clean minerality and bright acidity that carries through the palate to a lingering finish.
The ’97 Pinot Noir is no less impressive. Warmer than the ’98 growing season but still not a scorcher, ’97 produced an unusually large crop of superbly concentrated fruit. The ’97 Hanzell Pinot is not the fruit bomb one would expect from Carneros or Russian River Valley. Like the Chardonnay, it has a classical tautness defining the shimmering array of clear fruit impressions. A mere infant now, it will show increasing charm and complexity as it unfolds over several years.
No doubt Gen. Vallejo would consider such wines a radical departure from the style he set with his Sonoma Red and Sonoma White. But I’ll bet he would have liked them anyway.
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Smith is writer-at-large for Wine & Spirits Magazine.