Wines go through stages. No two barrels or bottles are alike, no two days are alike, and as they say with the stock market, “past performance is no guarantee of future results.” This is the most frightening part of the business. The younger a wine is in its life, the more dramatic the changes, and the more faith is required on the part of the winemaker. Not faith in one’s own abilities—it is too easy to make mistakes for that conceit—but faith in the terroir. You have to believe that the terroir to which you’ve hitched your wagon will come through for you. That despite your mistakes, the inherent quality of the site will triumph.
There are few things more trite than winemakers talking about their special terroir. The reason we all continue to do it is because it is all we have. At the end of the day, our attempt to produce great wine will hinge not on the thousand decisions we made but on one big question: “did we mess it up or not?”
With lots of industrial controls it is possible to manufacture good tasting, balanced, consistent wines. That is not our path. I am convinced that to really witness the site singing, there has to be a certain degree of risk. And that is definitely the case with the winemaking.
Part of the risk is that we are dealing with messy, complex, unpredictable life. With organisms that are part of ecosystems. The life starts in the soil and transfers through the vines to the yeasts and bacteria that are the true winemakers. And the process is guided by the greater natural forces that surround us. Controlling the process provides predictable results, while allowing the process to happen more naturally gives a result that hopefully is great, but is definitely true, and this is where the faith comes in.
There are two ways to mess the wine up: one is by doing something to it, and the other is by not doing something to it. And obviously the trick is to determine the difference. And that is indeed a trick, since young wine is very hard to understand. Like children, one thing you can count on is that no matter what it is like today, it will change tomorrow.
Some questions are fairly mechanical. Will the oak flavor integrate into the wine? Will the tannins move to the back of the tongue? Will the acidity come into balance after malolactic fermentation? Other questions are more biological. Will the volatile acidity continue to climb? Will the Brett (Brettanomyces) get out of hand? Will the reductive nose resolve? Freaking out about any of these issues and doing something to the wine unnecessarily will surely diminish the end result, yet not doing something when you still had a chance to have a minimal impact could be catastrophic.
As I write this the wines have almost all been pressed and are just starting the malolactic fermentation. I’ve been tasting them every few days, and it is a complete surprise every time. Sometimes as I drive away from the winery I’m ready to dump everything down the drain, and other times I can’t believe my luck. The wines are still in tremendous turmoil. By next summer they will have settled down and the emotional roller coaster will be less extreme. By the time they’ve had a year in the bottle, are well over the shock of bottling, and have settled into their adolescence, the changes will probably only be apparent to Jill and I. Even though we don’t know the route, we know where the journey will go. They say that there are no atheists in foxholes—the same can be said of winemakers.
After years of walking vineyards throughout California and all over the world I have become attuned to sites that have something to say. A special site hits me right in the stomach. That was, and continues to be, the case with our two nearby sites, which happen to be on old gravel bars created by Dry Creek in the Napa Valley, but are not limited by that fact—the voice of a site comes from something deeper than just the climate or the soil. In order to listen to that voice I try to farm our vineyards as much as I can with my own hands. It is incredibly exciting to be present, involved, knowing that the notes to the song are being written as the season unfolds. As I haul the grapes to the winery the anticipation is visceral. Three years later, tasting the wine, despite the challenges of the long winemaking process, my faith in the terroir is such that I’m not surprised that once again the wine only tastes like one place.