Segue '06 Pinot Noir

There are good problems to have, so the aphorism goes—and this is one of them. Thanks to your willingness to take a flyer on an unknown upstart— my ’05 Segue Cellars Russian River Pinot Noir—I’m  sold out of it.  That  may sound less  impressive when you learn that I made a mere 50 cases, that three got soaked up by oak in the  barrels or spilled on the winery floor or consumed by mysterious midnight imbibers, I’ll never know, but in the end 47 cases and a few bottles became my entire inventory. Now there are four—two for the newly inaugurated Segue Wine Library ( my home basement, complete with mousetraps, if you really must know) and two stashed away for my first  Segue public tasting event at  Pinot Days in San Francisco in late June.

125 Cases +/-
This year I’ll be producing about 125 cases of the ’06 Segue, the same blend as the ’05, and as an new addition,  a single vineyard from the DuNah Estate in Russian River, where Rick and Diane DuNah tend their grapes with more care and devotion that  some parents lavish on their offspring. If interested in reserving a case or more, simply email me —info@seguecellars.com— and I ‘ll contact you with details.

Purple Haze
The ’06 harvest was a bear—lots of fruit, ripe all  at once, major logjams at  Owl Ridge in Sebastopol, the custom crush facility I use, and just enough rain at the end to invite smelly mold, the notorious botrytis. How to separate out the bad clusters from the rest? Pretty much the same way that winemakers have been doing that for 3000 years—one handful at a time. As a forklift tilts a bin carrying close to a ton of grapes at the top of a funnel-shaped shoot, you and your manic cellar rat crew line  up on either side of a sharply angled conveyor belt.

The clusters pour down, thousands of them, like a purple tsunami and as they cascade toward the crusher-destemmer at the bottom of the conveyor, you reach in with furious intensity  and grab the clusters that look moldy and throw them over your shoulder onto the concrete floor, much the same way that Henry VIII tossed moose bones to the hunting hounds at his banquets. Perhaps. But while Henry VIII got up and walked out , possibly to polish off another wife, when finished as a grape-sorter you go nowhere. You’re in for the long haul, up to six hours  and thirty tons of grapes at a time. You sweat, you ache, but hey—you’re in the thick of the action.

Nose to  Nose
There’s a good chance that most of these delicate, thin-skinned, cranky and highly temperamental Pinot Noir grapes, about the price of gold nuggets these days, won’t wind up in your own bottles. They’re likely to be grapes purchased by other boutique winemakers at the custom crush to ultimately be pressed and racked and bottled to compete with your wine on the open market.

That’s  handcrafted, garagiste winemaking. The usual laws of competition apply, and don’t. We all know that one winemaker’s crisis this year—too much fruit for the capacity of the fermentation tank, a sudden  attack  of  brettanomyces yeast that give off a bouquet of horseshit—may well be ours next year, and so with few exceptions, we take care of our own business and pitch in without complaint when another one of us needs help. Survival. There’s also sense of camaraderie about the enterprise that draws on the social aspect of winemaking.

Yes, it’s nice to rub sticky elbows with your professional friends, but beyond all that there’s the nature of wine itself. It comes to us through the senses of taste and smell, our two most elusive, subjective ways of interacting with the world around us. Is my nose for cinnamon and tea leaf in that Pinot the same as yours? Is the blackberry I’m tasting  in this glass that thing you keep calling dark cherry?

Raising Wine
Winemakers have the same problems as wine drinkers in identifying and agreeing on aromas and tastes. We’re just asked to do it more often, so we get more practiced at It. That  doesn’t make us less curious about how our sniffers and tongues compare to the guy with his nose in the glass beside us, and that’s one reason we’re always handing each other  our works-in-progress, barrel samples. We smile when a colleague says “delicious” and wince when she says “It disappears, mid-palate.” Beyond that, if the wine’s not going in the direction we want, we can stare at the chemistry panel numbers on it all day long and still be stymied, but when a fellow winemaker we trust says something like, “I’d think about doing a tartaric (acid) add,” we’re apt to jump on that advice.

There are no formulas that guarantee perfect results. If there were, we’d find another line of work. Garagistes aren’t formula folks.  Which of course brings me around to the Segue ’06, now in barrels and behaving itself nicely. In the  months ahead  it will fall apart briefly, collect itself, stumble again and catch its balance and I trust, find its voice,  something like an actor in rehearsal before opening night.

That’s all part of the process, but if I’ve done my fieldwork diligently, the fruit I’ve chosen  will ultimately prevail to produce the wine I want.  No amount of manipulation makes up for mediocre grapes. That’s why the French  have no word for winemaker. They say you don’t make wine, you raise wine, and if you’ve raised it correctly in the vineyard and shepherded it gracefully through production, you may get to praise of all the elements that combine to create  that satin goddess in your glass,  Pinot Noir.

Comments

[Robert Scarola]

Praising The Grape
Robert Scarola

I come from an Italian family, and my grandfather used to produce his own wine in his basement. Though he lived in Ohio, every year he somehow managed to get grapes from Italy. All my uncles would show up on a weekend, and disappear into the cellar on Saturday morning with six cases of beer and a huge basket of food. They wouldn’t come out of the cellar until Sunday night, still half-bagged, laughing, waving their purple hands in the air, and making jokes in Italian. They spoke a rapid Italian that left me clueless. Except I knew they had just had a blast.

On our next family get together, my older brother and I would sneak down the cellar stairs and prowl around the five or six oak barrels that had magically appeared out of nowhere. We would sniff the incredibly rich, fragrant, lingering air of crushed grapes. And kick at the sawdust covering the red stains on the floor. “This is where Grandpa’s wine comes from,” my brother, who was two years older, would say, knowingly, as we ran back up the stairs.

At Easter, Christmas, and our once-a-month Sunday visit to my Grandparents’ farm in Willoughby, Ohio, in the early fifties, my Grandmother would lay out a feast, and my Grandfather would sit at the head of the sixteen-foot long dining room table. We would all pass our wine glass to him, and he would fill each one from the jug he kept beside him on the floor. No one said a word until he raised his glass. Then we drank. And ate. And drank. And ate. It was a typical “heart-healthy” Italian meal of spaghetti and meatballs, roasted chicken, fried smelt, Sicilian pan-crust pizza, olive-oil soaked salad, homemade sausage, thick sweat bread, deep-dish lasagna, and, for dessert, chocolate or lemon cake, Neapolitan ice cream, honey-dipped cookies, and espresso coffee. I am convinced my grandparents lived to be 89, and I am still here today, in large part because all of us, kids included, drank my Grandfather’s wine with those meals.
Despite this cherished heritage, I personally know very little about the production of wine.

I’ve visited a number of wineries in California and Oregon. I’ve swirled and sniffed and tasted and spat, nodded, and grinned while the attendant spoke of “deep body, exciting blend of smoky oak and rich berry, good robust challenge to the palate,” etc. as he poured another taster. But, I freely admit that I’ve never really understood what it takes to produce excellent wine.

Well, lucky me. And lucky all of us who are not experts in the world of wine. Steve Yafa, a man I’ve known and admired for many years as a writer, has decided to become a vintner. In his terms, a man who “raises” wine. Not in place of writing, but in addition to it. It may even be more subtle than that. Somehow, the process of raising wine seems to inspire Steve’s writing about it. And his writing about wine seems to inspire his raising of it. I think all of us who know Steve are watching with fascination and, yes, even awe, as he takes on the burdens and joys of actually producing a Pinot Noir with his own hands. And living to tell about it.

Not just tell us about it, I should add, but energetically engage us in the event. The truth is that it’s as much fun to read what Steve has to say about becoming and being a vintner as it will no doubt be to drink his 2006 production.

If you’d like a hint of what I’m talking about, just ponder the name of Steve’s wine, SEGUE. The allusions are enticing. Obviously, Steve segued in his own life from Writer to Vintner. But less obviously, though certainly intended by Steve, wine also segues for us, the readers, as he writes about it.

Steve takes us on a tasty journey from vine to grape, from grape to truck, truck to bins, bins to carefully sorting human hands (I think “cellar rats” are human, anyway?), from those hands to fermentation tanks, to barrels, to bottles, to glasses, to lips, to… well, that great feeling of having just tasted a little of Nature’s true essence. It’s a Segue that Steve literally makes come alive for us in his writing about the wine-raising adventure.

Steve clearly loves what he is doing, and gives us the chance, through his writing about it, to love wine-raising with him. To Praise the grape, even if only vicariously. Thanks, Steve, for bringing all of your many talents to not just raising wine, but to writing about it in a way that lets us share the adventure without having to scrub out the barrels.

I’m looking forward to trying the 2006 production of Segue. I want to see where Steve will take me this year, then next year, and the year after. And, knowing I can expect the same talented effort in Steve’s “raising” of the wine as I experience in his writing about it, I expect to, surely, year after year, be in for a delicious surprise.

Robert Scarola
Kohala Coast
Big Island, Hawaii
March, 2007