My last Winemaker Journal highlighted examples of challenges which arise, some anticipated, others unexpected. We received a lot of feedback from readers, many of whom seemed very concerned about my well-being. I greatly appreciate that, but I want to assure you that I still very much enjoy life in wine country as we continue to make progress on all fronts at Calluna despite those challenges. As I said before, at the end of the day, one can regain perspective just by looking at the land, as Marla’s camera caught me here.
Savoring the results of our hard work
Some Early Feedback on our 2020 Red Wines
2020 was a year that would scare anyone in this business, both with excessive heat and, more importantly, regional fires. And 2020 was the one year where fires came early, during the growing season, instead of after harvest. For vineyards near the fires, the risk of smoke taint was high. Calluna was fortunate in its position roughly in between the major fires – the Walbridge Fire on the coast stopped many people from harvesting pinot noir, and in Napa, the Glass Fire ruined a lot of cabernet crop. In the middle of all that, we did have some smoke but it was not severe as we get good circulation on our hillside vineyards. We did a good amount of testing on our final blend of Calluna Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, which includes portions of all our grape varietals. That testing, and all the tasting of our wines, tells us that our wines are not tainted by smoke. Many had said early on that, if you did not have smoke taint, then 2020 is a very good year, and I think this is true. I am very happy with our 2020 wines, although I worry that the reputation of the 2020 vintage could cast a shadow on all 2020s. Given that, I was very heartened to see this early comment via Twitter (before it became “X”) from critic John Gilman who writes View from the Cellar:
Early praise for our 2020 vintage red wines from critic John Gilman
Bottling of our 2021 Red Wines
I am happy to report that we recently completed the bottling of our 2021 reds, which will be released to our mailing list and wine club first beginning in spring 2024. Happy to say this on two counts: First is that these are very good wines from a mercifully uneventful year without the issues of fire and excessive heat. Also, as always, I am happy just to get the bottling done. If you ask winemakers what the task is they like least, the majority will say “bottling.” I might say the least fun task is the regulatory compliance required to deal with every state’s different laws relating to shipping wine. But bottling certainly can be complex and stressful because you need to assemble so many supplies from different vendors – bottles, capsules, corks, and labels. Today, most wineries small like Calluna, and even many medium and larger size wineries, are using mobile bottling services for this job. As a simplistic overview, a mobile bottler brings in a truck the size of a large moving van, you plug in wine hoses to your tank, and the bottling begins. Inside the truck, it is very complex, as are all bottling lines. Things break all the time, but the owner of the truck is intimately familiar with its workings and knows how to fix problems. Between the potential for failed delivery of the supplies needed, and the truck having breakdowns, there is a high risk of failure and/or delay.
Historically, we have been fortunate in avoiding most problems, even throughout the pandemic supply chain disruptions, which were severe. There were times we had to adapt: For the 2020 reds, our capsule supplier failed to make timely delivery of our custom capsules, so we had to use generic black capsules on those bottles. This was frustrating given the lead time I gave on that order, but it was not the end of the world.
This year, we did have one significant problem on bottling day. Towards the end of the day as we were getting ready to bottle the 2021 Colonel’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, which is a prized single vineyard bottling of about 250 cases sold primarily to our wine club. I heard a commotion arise and I ran back to the tank. Wine was all over the floor, leaking fast from the valve. A super competent person in our winery had made an uncharacteristic mistake. It can happen. But it was painful to lose about 15 cases worth of this beautiful wine.
15 cases worth of 2021 Cabernet Sauvignon accidentally spilled down the drain.
Continuing to Grow the New Block 5 Merlot
Our newly planted Merlot vineyard is making progress. Over 3,000 dormant plants in grow boxes have woken up and many are pushing up out of the box. I need to carefully irrigate these young vines about every 5-7 days. When I went out to irrigate recently with some help from a Calluna Partner and close friend staying with us, we found standing water on the side of the vineyard and much water inside the vineyard. Did we have a pipe broken – what in the world could this be? As it turns out, the neighbor to our east has a portion of property at slightly higher elevation than our vineyard, and they had a problem with their water tank that allowed a huge amount of water to escape and flow down through our vineyard. While we needed some water, this was too much and not evenly distributed through our vineyard. Compounding the problem, we had to get this vineyard mowed again. We had mowed once but it was so overgrown again that it was hard to walk through to check the vines and irrigation emitters. However, the flooding of the vineyard now prevented us from getting a tractor through there.
Fortunately, there were several factors that worked in our favor to resolve this. First, this was just water and not something chemically treated, which could have posed a threat to the young vines. Second, all that lush vegetative cover crop and weed growth in the vineyard shown below did a good job of helping pull out the water from the ground. Also, when it is dry and warm in Sonoma County, things do dry up quickly. Finally, young vines can handle excess water for a few days.
New Block 5 Merlot Before Mowing
In the end, the best thing to do was wait it out for a few days, then run a little irrigation water directly on to the vines, wait a few more days, and then finally mow and weed whack around the vines. So we are back in business with this block and can give it the small direct irrigation applications it needs.
An NYC Restaurant Recommendation
I would like to say you heard it here first, but since Via Carota is near impossible to get into, the word has been out for a while now. When we visited our daughter Amy a year ago, she took us to this Greenwich Village Italian restaurant at about 11:30 am and we were lucky enough to get a table. We loved it for all its fresh and creative dishes but the most striking is their iconic green salad, which is large and lush. We had been trying to go back to Via Carota when we traveled back to NY again, but with no luck. On our last trip in April, it was pouring rain horrendously so we figured nobody would be out so we could try for another 11:30 am lunch. Remarkably, the restaurant was packed. They had the outside parklets which were empty, but the sidings were blowing hard in the wind. It looked foolish to try to eat there but we sat down, and it was actually fine with the heaters. We immediately ordered a bottle of wine and the green salad to start, pictured below. The rain pounded and the cloth sides of the parklet swayed, but we had a great time.
If you want to attempt to make this salad, here is the recipe. As Pete Wells of the NYT said in rating the restaurant #4 of 100 in NYC, good luck getting this to taste as good at home, but the recipe is worth it just for the vinaigrette dressing. And do use the Calluna Olive Oil for this!
I am always behind the times on TV shows but I did finally watch most of Yellowstone, and there was one particularly memorable line for me. The family patriarch John Dutton (played by Kevin Costner) is on horseback with the city-bred outsider who looks over his land and says, “It must take a lot to run this ranch.” The grizzled patriarch responds, “it takes everything we’ve got.”
This reminds me very much of Calluna. I can’t claim the heroics of Yellowstone, and we certainly don’t subscribe to the Dutton family’s violent solutions to problems, but the work required to run Calluna Vineyards can stretch me to the limit. While there are many great joys running a vineyard and making wine, the challenging days can outnumber the glamorous ones. I have some great people who work with me and I do try to delegate, but it is not always easy, especially in the field. For your interest, here are some of the issues which we have been dealing with recently…
Vineyard Replanting
Recall in our previous newsletter that I said we were finishing the planting of the last fire damaged vineyard block this Spring. We have just completed this task, but it took several days longer than I anticipated. Perhaps I have forgotten how tough it is to dig 3,200 holes. The holes must be adequately large. The vines must be planted carefully so that the roots are pointed down when the hole is backfilled – if not, the phenomenon of “J Rooting” will guarantee a weak vine (ie, the roots will grow back toward the surface). Labor is harder and harder to get these days, and more expensive. Supervision is critical. Then the new vines must be irrigated carefully, and that means every drip emitter in the vineyards must be checked to ensure they are working properly and in the right position. If you don’t take care that all is done right, a less than optimal vineyard is inevitable.
Digging 3,200 Holes for the New Block 5 Merlot
Calluna Wild Life
We have lots of animals visiting our property – coyotes, foxes, bobcats, skunks, rabbits, and our neighbor immediately to our north reports a mountain lion – but the only animal I really fear is the deer. They can chew down a vineyard overnight, especially a young vineyard. After buying the property in early 2005, our first enormous project was to build a deer fence on the perimeter of the entire 80 acres. That does a good job of keeping them out but every once in a while we get deer in – sometimes, a tree falls on the fence in the woods, sometimes a deer might just walk in through the gate with a car, we don’t always know.
Hearing that deer have entered the property will ruin a perfectly good day at Calluna. We must drop whatever we’re working on to assemble 10 or more people to march in a phalanx along the perimeter of our 80 acre property to flush out the deer. We leave our gates open with the hope that the deer will run the fence line and then exit through a gate. But you need a person at each gate to observe if the deer has actually left. It is painful, and expensive.
Unfortunately the other week, as we were completing the replanting of Block 5 Merlot, a member of the crew found a deer on the property. Immediately, we had to stop and revert the crew to focus on locating the deer. We worked to flush it out, yet could not find it. This may mean the deer escaped the same way it came in – which is not a comforting thought. We must remain on high alert as our vineyards leaf out.
Mowing
Just mowing down our property is a major, multi-day task, so we tend to wait until the last rains and for the grasses to start drying out. If we are lucky, we only have to mow once. Mowing late also allows the annual portion of the cover crop to reseed itself, so it will grow again next year. But this year, the rain kept going through early May, and totals for the rain season were near 50” – the grasses on our property are all 3-5 feet high. If I show our vineyard now to visitors, they think our main crop is grass – you can’t even see the vines from many angles. We’ve begun mowing now, as it is likely the rain is over for the season.
Mowing Needed
Water Line Problems
We live on well water here and we are fortunate to have a great well. Through the various series of drought years we have had here, our well has been consistently strong. However, it is way down at the bottom of our hill and there is very high pressure in the water line as the pump pushes water up. With the high pressure, the fittings along the water line (couplers, elbows, etc) are always at risk.
Last year we had a small earthquake that did not seem like a big deal. But our water system stopped working! That relatively small earthquake moved the water line just enough to cause it to break in four different points. It is a big job to get it fixed as we need specialty well and pump contractors for that work.
And, just last week, our water stopped again. When I went down to inspect the line, I found the new neighbors were doing some trenching and ran right through our line. Fortunately, their contractor had the requisite skills to fix the problem quickly.
Replanting our Petit Verdot
Another project we’ve been working on is the final grafting of the newly replanted Petit Verdot (PV) vineyard. For this one, we planted rootstock a couple years ago and we are “field grafting” the PV budwood onto those rootstocks. The PV budwood we wanted, Clone 400, is hard to get. Fortunately, I have a friend at one of Napa Valley’s best vineyards who allowed us to take budwood from his PV vineyard two years ago. But as his vineyard was young, we could not get enough budwood to finish the job last year. So we collected more budwood from my friend back in January and are now completing the job. These specially focused workers make a cut in the rootstock trunk and attach a similarly cut single bud from the budwood. They wrap it with medical-looking tape and then we put a grow box on it and wait for the bud to push. It is quite an amazing process that you can propagate a vineyard this way. But it is a lot of work, first to get it done, and then to carefully manage the irrigation process while the vines are so young.
Staying Motivated
Having described all of the above chores at Calluna, I don’t want you to think I am getting disillusioned. I do have to coordinate an awful lot of work to make Calluna function, but there is one important driver that makes it all worthwhile: I believe in the quality of wine we are making. And I believe that the quality of the wine in your glass is a direct reflection of the attention to detail and precision that winemakers and growers have in the vineyard. At Calluna, our quality is very much due to the fact that we own these vineyards and pay close attention to what happens in the vineyards and to the entire winemaking process.
Ultimately, even after the most difficult days, it is always greatly satisfying to sit on our patio and look out at the beauty of our vines with a glass of wine, knowing the effort has gone into making it all happen.
Ideal spot for a glass of wine at the end of a hard day’s work
We will soon be emerging from winter even though it does not yet look like Spring and more rain is in the forecast. It was an extraordinary winter with seemingly non-stop rain giving us over 45” so far for the rain season, which began October 1, vs an average of about 27” and certainly much more than the last droughty years. But in many respects it was a typical winter season for me – I like the winter because the needs of the vineyard are so much less – the vineyard is quiet in dormancy and the rains essentially remove the risk of wildfire. So it is a time of relative calm – but not really relaxation, as there are other tasks to be done.
Pruning
The biggest job in the vineyards during the winter is pruning. Each winter, we undertake the enormous job of pruning 35,000 vines – all by hand. During the process, each vine needs some thought as to how to make the proper cuts which will impact its form for the coming year and beyond. In the early days, I used to be out there with the team myself. These days, I get them going and then tend to the other tasks.
Here are before and after shots of the pruning of the Colonel’s Vineyard Cabernet:
The Colonel’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon: Before Pruning March 2023
The Colonel’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon: After Pruning March 2023
Bottling of the 2022 Calluna Estate Blanc, Release of the 2021
I was excited to get this wine in bottle as it is a very good vintage for us –- the really stressful heat of 2022 came after we picked the Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon. For the first time, I chose not to use all the Semillon in this blend. The Sauvignon is ripe and expressive, but the Semillon was a bit on the lean side – I picked it earlier than I really should have because I was worried the Sauvignon was going to be too ripe, so I wanted a leaner Semillon as a counterpoint. With Semillon at only 15% of the blend, the wine works beautifully (usually we have closer to 25%+ Semillon). This wine will be released in about a year.
However, we have just recently released the 2021 Estate Blanc to our Wine Club. For the last few months, I have been presenting it with our distributors to restaurants and retailers as well as to visitors who visit me here at Calluna. It is another good vintage for this wine and showing well after some bottle age. And it has been well received in the market as it stands out from most other California wines due to its citric-honey tones, crisp acidity and moderate alcohol – a really good wine to go with food. Please let me know how you like this wine once you get a chance to taste it.
Blending of the 2022 Red Wines
In my last journal, I talked a bit about “blending trials” where we pull samples and work through building/selecting the blends for each wine. Once we accomplish that and are happy with the result, it is time to go to the winery, pull out all the barrels, and then pump each selected barrel to its destination tank (i.e, the Calluna Estate Cabernet blend selections will be pumped together into the dedicated Calluna Estate Cabernet tank). After blending to the tank, all the wine is then pumped back to barrels for the rest of its aging process, which totals about 2 years.
Here is a picture of the racking and blending of the 2022 reds. Don’t worry about all that wine on the floor. These are lees, or sediments, which settle to the bottom of the barrel during aging – this is part of the clarification process. We will collect most of the lees and resettle them so we recapture wine. But the very last of the lees will hit the floor when we wash the barrels prior to refilling them. These 2022 reds will be bottled in June of next year, 2024.
Barrel work in the cellar. Blending the 2022 vintage wines. March 2023
Winemaker Dinners / Working with Distributors
Because the vineyard needs are much less at this time of the year and the winemaking tasks are limited to a few big operations, I have much more time in the winter to get out on the road and help sell our wine. Most of this work is done with our “distributors,” the wholesalers who sell our wine to retailers and restaurants. We sell a lot of wine to our wine club members and other direct individual customers. However, if we want to be in a restaurant or wine shop in states other than California, we must go through a distributor in those states. Currently, we have distribution in about 10 states and are working on improving that side of the market after Covid knocked that portion of the business hard.
Lots of work with distributors entails riding around with their field reps and presenting the wine to the restaurants and wine store buyers. That can be fun but my favorite work is when we get winemaker dinners where we work with a restaurant or club to pair our wines with a multi course meal. I present the wines as we go, often with the chef who describes the dishes. These events almost always showcase our wines beautifully. I had winemaker dinners at the Penn Club in NYC, a couple in Nebraska with our new distributor there, and one in Denver at the private home of one of our great customers who invited 25 of their wine friends to learn about Calluna. These events are often great for Calluna to add new customers and wine club members. If any readers have favorite restaurants or clubs interested in hosting in cities where we have distributors, I’d certainly love to entertain the possibility.
Often a family member or two accompanies me on a given event, and we also get some time to explore new cities or some new things in familiar cities. In NYC, we had a family visit to the Museum of Modern Art – my first ever visit to MOMA. There is a lot of diverse art there, not all of which I am able to appreciate, but I did find one that I really liked:
David Jeffrey and The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh
Feedback on our 2015 Calluna Estate
You may recall in my last journal I also wrote how I gave a bottle of our 2015 Calluna Estate to Matthieu Bordes, the wine director of Chateau Lagrange in Bordeaux. I wondered if I might ever get any feedback, so it was wonderful to see this post on Instagram with a beautiful picture of our wine next to his 2015.
If you’re also on Instagram, go ahead and give us a follow @CallunaVineyards
Thank you for all the feedback on the first iteration of our new winemaker journal. My hope for this series is to provide our supporters an insider’s view of all the behind the scenes at Calluna while also sharing other commentary on the broader industry. I’ll continue to focus on topical issues for Calluna, but would love to address any questions or big topics any reader might have in future journals so I encourage you to reach out. Lastly, if you have anyone who you think might enjoy reading along, we always encourage forwarding the email to them or encouraging them to sign up for our mailing list here.
On to the update..
Last of the Replanting After the 2019 Kincade Fire
In late October 2019, the Kincade Fire came through Calluna and destroyed about 3 acres or 15%+ of our vineyards. The replanting has been a long haul, but is going well.
A couple vineyard blocks needed to be pulled up completely. Then there were a few blocks where we just pulled hundreds of dead vines and replanted without disturbing the other vines or removing the trellis system.
When we plant individual vines within the existing vineyard, it is much less expensive, but it is more difficult to manage because the new vines have different water, nutrient and pruning needs, and it is frankly difficult to keep track of where all the new vines are when the vineyard block is fully leafed out. When we pull out an entire block and start over, it is much more expensive – upwards of $50K per acre. One of the primary drivers of this is the cost to rip out the existing trellis and irrigation systems, which we must do before we can prepare the ground properly for replanting.
Last fall, right after harvest, we tore out our Block 5 which is 1.5 acres, half planted to Malbec and half to Petit Verdot. You can see these piles in the picture below. And you can see that we re-worked the ground, planted a cover crop, and installed the initial part of the trellis system.
One particular aspect of this process which I really dislike is the disposing of these piles. Because the woody vines are all tangled with the wires and metal of the trellis system, the industry standard way of handling this is to burn the pile. This gets rid of the wood, allowing the metal to be properly recycled – and you actually get paid a little for the scrap. While the last thing I want to do at Calluna is start a fire, we waited for a break in the rainy season when everything is green to start the fire and begin the recycling process. As you can see in the photo below, Jose, the foreman of our vineyard management team, is using a backhoe to feed the main fire during the course of the burn throughout the day. I then had to camp out with the fire until about 7 pm when the wood was burned, but required to be hosed out.
Our vineyard foreman Jose feeding the burn pile of ripped up vines
The vineyard will take a long time to get back in production – in the third year, one can get a relatively small amount of quality fruit as long as we keep the yields very low. The young vine can ripen fruit well, but not too much.
Most of you know that our blends include Malbec and Petit Verdot. And many of you have probably tasted the small quantity of Malbec which we bottle on its own when we have more than we need for the blends. So you may be wondering: is Calluna going to go 3 years without Malbec and Petit Verdot? Fortunately, no! Three years ago, we pulled out our old Block 12 Merlot (also damaged by the same fire) and in anticipation for our 2023 harvest, I replanted this old Block 12 to Malbec and PV. So, if the stars align, we will have at least some Malbec and PV for this year and not have an interruption for these varietals. And the Block 5 you see in the picture above will be replanted to Merlot!
Olive Oil at Calluna
If you asked me what I know about making Olive Oil, I would be honest and tell you, nearly nothing! That was especially true when I decided to plant 150 olive trees on the property as I was planting the vineyard starting back in 2005. The trees look nice, are happy in our warm, dry climate, and don’t need too much attention (as long as you’re willing to tolerate minor problems in nature). We have made olive oil a few times over the years, and for whatever reasons, it is extraordinarily good. I have avoided harvesting most years because it is such a lot of work and very expensive per bottle of oil. But for the 2022 growing season, we have gotten to the point of having what might be deemed, with great imagination, a commercial size crop. We just bottled it today, as I write, and we have about 400 bottles (500 ml). And here are some of them shown below with our new Calluna Olive Oil label:
Olive Oil Coming Soon!
Revisiting Bordeaux
Literally, we did. After many years, Marla and I went back to Bordeaux in late November. There is a giant trade show, Vinitech, which takes place every other year (except in pandemics) and we often go to that as we can see a lot of acquaintances and all the latest equipment. Then we try to add some trips on to that throughout the region. We had a fantastic tasting of barrel samples from the 2022 vintage with Gerard Fenouillet at Chateau Ferriere – a beautiful Margaux property which is owned by our Calluna neighbors, Claire and Gonzague Lurton–they own the Trinite property just to the east of us. By great coincidence, at their Bordeaux seashore home, the Lurtons are also next door neighbors of Alain and Francoise Raynaud, the family I worked for in St. Emilion in 2003. We were fortunate enough to have a wonderful dinner in downtown Bordeaux with the Raynauds, and catching up with them in person was great.
To cap this off, my son Peter and I were fortunate to go to the trade tasting held by the Union des Grands Crus in January in San Francisco. Many of the very best chateaux are pouring wines there and represented by the owners/family/cellar masters themselves. It is an extraordinary tasting (and one must be very careful to spit as there are nearly 100 wines, all of which must be tried).
They were presenting the 2020 vintage which most feel is a very good one and the last of the strong trilogy of 2018-2020 (ie, 2017 and 2021 are less good).
I feel Bordeaux gets a bad rap as being stuffy and over-priced, with the boring traditional varietals of Cabernet and Merlot. The wine world has become very divided. On the one hand, many consumers may love drinking natural wine from an unknown grape that dazzles with the flavors of unknown microbial activity. On the other hand, many gravitate toward the large scale, super ripe wines which critics have elevated in the last decades. But Bordeaux still stands as the largest, most consistent producer of fine wine in the world.
And there are many great wines which are reasonably priced. If you want to know more, drop me a note, but I highlight one here. This is Matthieu Bordes who runs Chateau Lagrange in St. Julien. I met him through my friend who was the assistant winemaker at Chateau Quinault. At this same tasting 4 years prior, Matthieu gave me a bottle of the 2016 Chateau Lagrange which I then opened with one of my tasting groups. It was so good I promptly bought more at about $50 per bottle. At this tasting, I returned the favor by giving Matthieu a bottle of our 2015 Calluna Estate – I am hoping he will write me back with his thoughts.
Chateau Lagrange is a true classic of Bordeaux. The 2020 we tasted here is an excellent wine and I see it retails for about $54. That is a deal for a wine which will outlive most of us. Heck, the 2016 Lagrange can still be bought at $65.
With Matthieu Bordes, GM and Winemaker of Chateau Lagrange
Happy New Year! To kick off 2023, I am launching a series of periodic updates to you as a Calluna Vineyards mailing list subscriber. I aim to share a note at least once per month on what is going on in the vineyard and winery to give insight on how our wines are made. And I will touch on happenings in the greater wine world, including some interesting bottles and producers we have enjoyed along the way.
I would welcome any feedback you have to share with me!
So, without further ado… here’s Volume 1 of our Winemaker’s Journal:
Some Winemaking Tasks Over the Holidays
Over the holidays, with the whole family in town, we addressed one important question that we have been exploring for the past few years. To give you some background, on the top of our property sits a 1.3 acre Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard that has always produced some of our very highest quality fruit. This fruit has gone into our Calluna Estate bottlings and has been so special for us that we gave the vineyard its own name: Skyward. As we’ve conducted blending trials over the past few years, we’ve been so impressed by this block that we’ve decided to explore a single vineyard bottling. With the kids home for the Christmas holiday, I decided to run a blending trial to ask the question: do we want to create another cabernet sauvignon?
As many of you know, we already have The Colonel’s Vineyard Cabernet bottling. And since the 2017 vintage, Calluna Estate has been named Calluna Estate Cabernet Sauvignon to reflect the fact that it is above 75% Cabernet. With this in mind, we sought to determine if the Skyward Vineyard cabernet is different enough to warrant its own bottling.
To conduct this blending trial, we lined up the barrel samples of the 2021 Colonel’s Vineyard, Skyward, and Calluna Estate bottlings. Since we have not finalized the blend of Calluna Estate yet, I had to make each of the 3 possible final blends of Calluna Estate for this tasting. After trying each of the wines, we were very excited about the distinct flavor profiles brought by each of these bottlings. Whereas our Colonel’s Vineyard cabernet is broader shouldered with more oak showing as a by product of its barrel fermentation, the Skyward was quite different, leaning towards a more delicate wine that showcases the great depth and purity of the cabernet flavors with beautiful tones of red fruit. It’s a wine of elegance. The Calluna Estate continues to provide the complex nuances due to the other Bordeaux varietals, cabernet franc, merlot, petit verdot, and malbec, that have been key characteristics of our wines since inception.
Our conclusion was that the Skyward Cabernet Sauvignon is an excellent wine and different enough from the others to warrant a small bottling of its own. I look forward to sharing more details with all of you as we finalize our plans with Skyward and look forward to you trying it soon.
Tasting the 2021 Cabernets
Rain in California
I suppose this topic needs to be addressed because the national press portrays California as drowning in rain, and indeed we are having above average rainfall. If you live near a flooding river or in lowlands, or a tree falls on your house, the rains are a real problem, and that is what is shown in the news. For the vast majority of California, the rain is a blessing. At Calluna, our risk is erosion and falling trees, but we have been lucky so far. And we hope the rain keeps going into the Spring, although a more moderate pace would be preferred by all.
Here is a short primer on California rain from the vineyard owner’s perspective: It generally does not rain here from April to October. Then, historically, we get torrential rain in December, January and February which replenishes groundwater and reservoirs. That cycle is generally a good thing, as the grapevine does not like getting wet during the growing season, and irrigation water is available when needed. (One major downside of this cycle is that California is always a tinder box in late summer and Fall and our “fire season” is getting worse.)
When we don’t get adequate rain in the winter, as in the last 3 years, we go into drought. And just because it is raining hard now, it does not mean we will have above average rain for this season. We need the rain to keep going into the Spring. Many owners of valley floor vineyards don’t want their vines wet in the Spring due to vigor issues, but on our hillsides, I like seeing the ground fully charged in the Spring – there is no standing water to cause a problem and the vine will be happy (not over-vigorous) as it starts the long dry season. And while I can and do irrigate during the growing season, I can never replicate a rain – so a very dry Spring at Calluna is hard on the vines, which doesn’t bode well for quality.
So we all need to wait until the Spring to really make a judgment on how this rain season went and how much dent was made in the drought.
A break in the rain, January 16, 2023.
…And a Really Fun Blind Tasting Over Dinner
All three kids were home with me and Marla over the holiday week. One Christmas gift we received from the children were 3 wrapped up bottles of wine, a verbal instruction not to open them, and a note that the kids would put on dinner and a blind tasting of these wines right after Christmas. The wines were disclosed to be newly released 2019 Cabernets and they asked me to contribute a bottle of the 2019 Calluna Estate Cabernet. That wine will not be released for several more months, but I was happy to put it into the mix. They wrapped up the Calluna too. My brother-in-law Dave and his wife Barbey joined us at the dinner where we poured all 4 wines blind.
I was assuming the kids probably got some decent wines, but did not know what to really expect. I tasted through the wines. The first was very oaky, and not very pleasant oak. The second was very good but I thought the fruit was a bit disjointed still. The third one was excellent. The fourth one was clearly my wine (and you would be surprised how many times winemakers do not identify their own wine in a blind tasting – it has happened to me). I had to say that the third wine was best: light in body but powerful, nicely developed Cabernet fruit. But the Calluna was showing really well – the consensus at the table was that the Calluna was second best in the group; the group was admittedly partisan but most did not know which wine was actually the Calluna.
We unveiled the wines in order of preference, starting with the first choice. I was shocked to see it was the 2019 Phillip Togni Napa Cabernet – I had no idea the kids were going to be buying wine of that quality. Togni is a small volume but long time producer of classic Cabernet – he is a British guy who trained at Chateau Lascombes in Bordeaux. A beautiful wine, his 2019.
The second choice was the 2019 Calluna Estate Cabernet. Perhaps showing as the most youthful of the four but not tannic, just dense fruit.
The third choice was the ’19 Cathy Corison Napa Cabernet. Corison is also an icon of Napa Valley, especially for those who favor the older style of balanced Napa Cab vs the large scale cabs which many critics are enamored with. Again, a great selection and an excellent wine.
At this point, I started getting worried. With all of these wines among the finest quality of wines that the kids know I admire, I started to wonder if they included one of my favorite wines–the Ridge Monte Bello. With the oak tones including traces of dill (a classic marker of American oak), I started to conclude that it must be Monte Bello and sure enough it was. I have always said that Ridge Monte Bello may be the greatest wine made in this country, so I was embarrassed that I ranked it so low. However, given the youth of the bottling I had to imagine that much of this oakiness would integrate over time. To make my conscience right over the Ridge, I went to my cellar and pulled out a bottle of 1990 Ridge Monte Bello (Marla and my wedding year). Ridge is one of the very few top wineries that uses American oak on its best wine, but they are very good at it. That dill tone is not too pronounced, and it integrates over time. The 1990 was a spectacular wine, with plenty of life left in it.
In the end, this was one of the most exciting tastings I have done. These wines are all benchmarks for great traditionally balanced Cabernet Sauvignon. And of course I was super happy that Calluna Estate held its own in this field. I look forward to seeing how all of these wines evolve overtime and our kids were generous enough to get two bottles of each so we can revisit each wine in a few years.
An incredible blind tasting lineup
Wishing you and yours a very happy and healthy 2023.
