Bringing Up Big Brother (and That’s Just a Start)

Fred Scherrer is one of California’s most eccentric winemakers. Many of the dozen or so fine, expressive wines he produces under his small Scherrer Vineyards label in Sonoma County have evocative names like Little Sister, Big Brother, Madrona Moon and Diaphanous.

It’s not a gimmick. Scherrer’s wines, like the lean, long-haired winemaker himself, have intense, distinctive personalities.

Funny thing, though--while his peers consider the veteran of several top North Coast cellars a winemaker’s winemaker, he hardly seems interested in winemaking at all. In fact, he quickly turns a discussion about winemaking away from technology, toward the realm of the senses.

For example, he’s currently working with two lots of 2002 Pinot Noir he calls Yin and Yang. They come from a single vineyard--a new planting literally on the Sonoma County coast, with a view of breaking waves--yet they couldn’t be more different.

“The Yin is more aromatic,” he says. “It seems more of the air. The Yang is definitely a more grounded wine, more of the earth. I’m still not sure I’ll bottle them with those names, but that’s how I think of them now.”

Scherrer made his first wine, from his family’s Alexander Valley vineyard, while he was still in high school. After obtaining a fermentation science degree from UC Davis in 1979, he went to work at Fieldstone Winery. At Greenwood Ridge Vineyards in the 1980s, he was praised for such wines as the Scherrer Vineyard-designated Zinfandels made from his family’s oldest vines, planted in 1912.

He moved to Pinot Noir and Zinfandel specialist Dehlinger Winery in 1988, and with owner Tom Dehlinger’s encouragement bottled his first Scherrer Vineyards wine, a Zin from his family’s ranch, in ’91. But it wasn’t until ’98 that he was able to expand his production of small-volume bottlings enough to finance his own winery. Current production is about 6,000 cases, half of them (including the most interesting small-lot bottlings) going to an avid mailing list. The wines range in price from $16 to $45.

Scherrer is aware that he doesn’t fit the image of the California winemaker as a master of technology. “When I started out, I felt that if you’re really in control you have to act,” he says. “After all, we call it winemaking, so you have to do things to the wine. But I had to learn to let go of that and trust the wine to evolve in its own way.”

The winery occupies a cave-like space in an old apple warehouse near Sebastopol. It’s filled with a combination of expensive equipment and self-designed, homemade and jerry-rigged devices like a plywood table/chute for sorting grapes on their way to the press, a makeshift cold chamber for barrel-fermenting Chardonnay. Scherrer is a trained scientist, yet he relies more on taste and intuition than computers or high-tech instruments.

“I can only deal with so much information,” he says. “I’d rather concentrate on sensory stuff. Peasant logic will always win out.”

He’s particularly tuned in to the personalities of different wines. That’s exemplified by two ’99 Pinot Noirs labeled Little Sister and Big Brother. They come from the same Russian River Valley vineyard, yet they are strikingly different. Scherrer’s original intent was to blend them into one cuvee, but when blending time came, he couldn’t do it.

“They fought together in the blend, and I realized they had two different destinies,” he explained. “One was bright and perky, honest, in your face, like a little sister. The other was dark and brooding, wearing shades, trying to be cool--just like a big brother.”

He seems particularly interested in that kind of duality. Since the ’96 vintage, he has been bottling two Zinfandels from distinctly different parts of his family’s estate: the Shale Terrace and the Old and Mature Vines. Tasting all the wines together in early August, I found two consistently different expressions. The wines from 20-year-old vines growing in shale soil are high-toned and pretty, lively to the point of aggressiveness, with bright red fruit. The wines from older vines growing in clay soil are broader, more solid and muscular, with a kind of quiet strength through the palate.

The ‘97s show the differences perfectly. The Old and Mature Vines is heroic in scale, with a fine weight and feline grace on the palate. The Shale Terrace is a racier wine, equally concentrated but in the higher register.

Sometimes Scherrer will see that dual identity in one wine. He delights in observing the often dramatic evolution of a cuvee between fermentation and bottling, especially when it’s dramatic. That happened with his ’99 Pinot Noir from Block 8 of the Hirsch Vineyard, he says. “The wine absolutely imploded during fermentation. The color and flavor disappeared! But then they came back in a different manifestation, and developed beautifully.”

Indeed, the wine is a deep, radiant garnet, wonderfully aromatic, and packed with brilliant flavors. Its high-toned, ethereal quality moved him to label the wine Diaphanous.

Clonal mixes interest him too. “When you build a human body, you’ve got flesh and bone, soft things and hard things. When you build a wine from different clones, you find elements that harmonize when you put them together--from black cherry and red cherry to mystery and earth.”

Last month, Scherrer was invited to present his wines alongside other top Pinot producers from around the world at the International Pinot Noir Conference in Oregon. One of the speakers was a Burgundy winemaker who went off on a metaphysical tangent.

“He was talking like an alchemist, describing how the grapes go through this metamorphosis in the winery that’s like combustion,” Scherrer says. “Yet the essence of the fruit remembers where it came from, the characteristics it developed in response to the environment. And those are consistent in wine from certain places.”

Many in the audience had trouble grasping that concept, says Scherrer, but he understood his colleague perfectly. “You put these grapes in a tank and they fizz,” he says. “It is like combustion. And they do change into something else--a wine that has the specific character of its origin. Imagine how people viewed this stuff before we had a scientific viewpoint. It is a wondrous process. There is something magical about it.”