San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
WINEMAKERS to WATCH
5 rising stars of the West Coast are poised to shape American wine for years to come
It’s never been easier to find great West Coast wines. We can now expect to find highquality, distinctive bottles from independent winemakers from Washington state to Southern California. If anything, it’s an embarrassment of riches: With more vineyards planted, wineries opened and boutique labels launched, it can get harder for drinkers to keep up with all of the industry’s creative output — and harder still for new winemaking voices to stand out from the crowd.
That’s what makes this year’s class of Winemakers to Watch so exciting. Each brings a unique vision to her wines, whether by a radical new approach to a wellestablished region, like Brianne Day, or by carving out a definition for a stillnascent one, like Nicole Bertotti Pope. They might be working with unusualforCalifornia grape varieties, like Byron Elmendorf, or offering a fresh perspective on the standards, like Shalini Sekhar and the duo of Marty Winters and Alex Pitts. We love their wines now, and we can’t wait to continue drinking them in the years to come.
Brianne Day
Location: Willamette Valley, Ore
gon
Watch her because: Her Day Wines label is changing notions of what Oregon wine should be.
In Oregon’s Pinot Noirworshiping Willamette Valley, Brianne Day has emerged as one of the leading interpreters of alternative grape varieties and wine styles, making everything from Primitivo petnat to MalbecTannat rosé. But she swears that Pinot Noir has been, and always will be, at the heart of her operation. “I’ve always wanted to make wines that are expressive of place, of Oregon,” she says. “And Pinot Noir is the ultimate conduit of place.”
Day Wines began in 2012 when Day scraped together enough money to buy some Pinot grapes from the Silvershot Vineyard. It got written up on an online forum, and suddenly she sold out of all 125 cases. The next year, while working in a restaurant, she waited on a couple who took an interest in her project and offered to invest. Today, with their help, Day makes 17 different bottlings, a total of 6,000 cases, and operates a shared winery, which she calls Day Camp, with five other winemakers.
She’s whittled down her portfolio to include just two Pinot Noirs, from the Johan and Momtazi vineyards in Willamette Valley, and has an extensive output from southern Oregon, whose warmer climate rewards varieties like Syrah and Vermentino. The result is a lineup that spans the traditional to the quirky. She’s also added a tier of red and white table wines, Vin de Days, priced competitively at $15 to $24.
Although Day is often grouped in with the naturalwine movement, she no longer finds the term useful. It implies that “you’re either a natural producer or you’re a completely interventionist chemical producer, and I don’t think that’s the case,” she says. She usually makes minimal additions to her wines, but believes that wines can still be beautiful and honest with some tweaking.
“Also, I’m a single mom raising a 2yearold and trying to run a winery,” she says. “I don’t really have time to be a part of that.”
Try Brianne’s wines: The 2018 Vin de Days Rouge (13.5%, $24) ,a blend of Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Gris, is a gorgeous comingling of earth and fruit, recalling a Pinotbased table wine from the Loire Valley. It’s what the kids these days call “glou glou.” 2018 Tears of Vulcan (12.9%, $30), a skincontact blend of Viognier, Pinot Gris and Muscat, alludes to the volcanic soils found in both Oregon and Sicily, whose orange wines from the Zibibbo grape inspired her. The wine is so vibrantly orange it seems to glow. Don’t miss the 2018 Queen D (13.5%, $28) ,a MarsanneRoussanne creation that tastes like grapefruit, or the savory, herbaceous and spicy 2015 Johan Vineyard Pinot Noir (13.5%, $42).
Alex Pitts and Marty Winters
Location: Berkeley
Watch them because: Their Maitre de Chai winery brings a fresh take to California’s old vines.
The way Alex Pitts and Marty Winters make wine is informed by their backgrounds as chefs. Pitts calls it “the Chez Panisse school of winemaking”: Work with the best produce, then don’t do much to it. The friends met while working in the kitchen at the legendary Healdsburg restaurant Cyrus. Each had moved to California to cook, but while living in Sonoma County they soon discovered a new passion — wine. In 2012, the same year Cyrus closed, they made a little bit of wine together.
Other jobs followed. Winters worked a few harvests and as a sommelier, including at the Restaurant at Meadowood. Pitts cooked at the French Laundry, then became assistant winemaker for the Scholium Project, a post he still holds today. Scholium owner Abe Schoener would call the two “maitres de chai,” the fancysounding French term for cellar master, and the name stuck.
The two manage to walk several fine lines successfully: They make wines in a classic mold but keep them fresh and lively; they work with organic, responsibly farmed vineyards but keep their prices humane; and they make wines that a sommelier can geek out over but that a wine novice would find approachable.
While most of Pitts and Winters’ peer group has gone searching throughout California for semiobscure grape varieties like Trousseau Gris, from the start they had a different aim. “We really just wanted to find oldvine, dryfarmed vineyards,” Winters says. That led them to old standbys like Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay and Zinfandel. “If you’re going to be honest and try to tell the story of California wine,” Pitts says, “you have to make things like Zin, regardless of whether it’s in vogue.”
Their takes on those classics feel fresh and novel, from an insistently floral Zinfandel from Lodi’s Stampede Vineyard to their hauntingly mineral Chardonnay from Sonoma’s Michael Mara Vineyard. With each year they’re moving a little bit further from the influences of mentors like Schoener, toward something more unique to them. “2017 was really the first year Marty and I made the wine we wanted to drink, rather than what our mentors taught us,” says Pitts.
Try Marty and Alex’s wines: Maitre de Chai’s 2017 Herron Vineyard Sauvignon Blanc (14%, $30) is richly textured, closer in style to white Bordeaux than Sancerre, with an umamirich cheeserind aroma on the nose and lasersharp acidity on the palate. That same tension between richness and freshness pervades the 2017 Michael Mara Vineyard Chardonnay (13.1%, $45) and, in a quieter way, their 2018 Kierkegaard Chenin Blanc (12.8%, $25) ,a Champagnemethod sparkling wine from the Sani Vineyard in Dry Creek
Valley, with its white flowers and tart cream flavors. Whatever you do, don’t miss the 2017 Stampede Vineyard Zinfandel (14.2%, $33), bursting with acai berries, cumin and clove in a taut, lean frame.
Shalini Sekhar
Location: San Francisco
Watch her because: She’s making attentionworthy Pinot Noir for WaitsMast and Neely from within the city limits.
California’s got no shortage of boutique wine labels producing singlevineyard Pinot Noirs. But Shalini Sekhar’s Pinots stand out — and they’re being made, of all places, in a San Francisco warehouse.
Originally trained as a musician — she’s a flute and piccolo player — Sekhar got her start at Rosenblum Cellars in Alameda, the first of what would become many urban winemaking gigs. After years of commuting up to Healdsburg to work for famous Pinot Noir producer Williams Selyem, she worked at Bluxome Street Winery and Roar Cellars in San Francisco. Today, as the winemaker for two small labels — WaitsMast and Neely — she works out of a shared winemaking space in the Bayview.
Pinot Noir is the connecting line through Sekhar’s career, beginning with Williams Selyem. WaitsMast, a 600case label owned by Jennifer Waits and Brian Mast, sources fruit from Mendocino County, mostly Anderson Valley. Sekhar loves the communityoriented spirit up there. “There’s still a sense that anyone’s success is everyone’s success,” she says.
Neely is a new project, but its Portola Valley vineyard, Spring Ridge, will be familiar to those who followed the great Varner Wines. (The Neely family owns Spring Ridge Vineyard, and after the Varner brothers retired, hired Sekhar to make estate wines for them.) Four vintages in, Sekhar has proven herself a worthy successor to the Varners’ Spring Ridge legacy.
Her style embraces structure, though she’s not as wild about wholecluster fermentations — a popular technique among Pinot producers in which the grape clusters are not destemmed — as many of her counterparts. Her wines always have plenty of generous fruit, but they never veer too rich. She uses as few interventions as possible, but she’s not afraid to use science when a wine needs improvement.
Sekhar credits a string of great bosses with helping her carve out a fulfilling career. But she’s all too conscious of how unusual her path has been, as she frequently finds herself to be the only woman or person of color in the room. “Being Indian American, wine is not my story — I didn’t grow up with it, and that’s a disadvantage,” she says. “I hope someday in my career I can help give people some of the opportunities that I’ve fought to have.”
Try Shalini’s wines:
The 2015 WaitsMast Deer Meadows Vineyard Pinot Noir (13.2%, $58) comes from a highelevation Anderson Valley site now owned by Littorai winemaker Ted Lemon. It’s concentrated and enveloping but still highly aromatic, with the impression of purple flowers and Chinese five spice. From the Mendocino Ridge AVA, the 2014 WaitsMast Mariah Vineyard Pinot Noir (13.4%, $42) shows earth, black cherry and salted plum, with a veil of fine tannins. Moving into the Santa Cruz Mountains, look for the savory, refined 2015 Neely Hidden Block Pinot Noir (14.5%, $38), which recalls boysenberry and tobacco, and the stunning 2016 Neely Amphitheater Block Chardonnay (14.8%, $55), which smells like fresh linen, honeysuckle and lemon curd.
Nicole Bertotti Pope
Location: Cambria (San Luis Obispo County)
Watch her because: At Stolo Vineyards, she’s defining a corner of the Central Coast as prime Syrah territory.
California’s Central Coast is a large, unwieldy appellation, stretching from the Bay Area to Santa Barbara, encompassing subAVAs as distinctive as the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Sta. Rita Hills. Nicole Bertotti Pope, winemaker at Stolo Vineyards in Cambria, works with one of the Central Coast’s most unique — and yet most poorly defined — neighborhoods. Fewer than 3 miles from the Pacific Ocean, Stolo Vineyards sits on ancient seabeds whose mineralrich clay and rocky calcareous soils produce fresh, vibrant, windswept renditions of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Syrah and more.
“There aren’t a lot of vineyards out here at this point,” says Pope, whose husband, Lucas, is Stolo’s vineyard manager. “But the few that do exist all show similar, beautiful qualities.” Pope has a special knack for bringing these qualities out.
Pope, who grew up in Novato, became interested in wine during her senior year at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, when she got a job at a Pismo Beach wine bar. To her surprise, she quickly became the wine buyer. “I realized I had a good palate,” she says. “I just ran with it.” After graduation, she and Lucas worked a harvest season in Australia and, later, South Africa; she put in a few years as the enologist at Domaine Carneros in Napa. But she always wanted to get back to the Central Coast, so she jumped at the chance to become assistant winemaker at Talley Vineyards in Arroyo Grande.
When Lucas got a call from the Stolo family, who had first planted vines in 1998, to help expand their plantings, the couple moved onto the Cambria property. Soon afterward, in 2011, Pope became Stolo’s winemaker. In the eight years since, she and Lucas have cultivated a productive symbiosis between the estate’s vines and its cellar: While he’s been pushing toward more sustainable farming practices, she’s experimented with the winemaking, honing the qualities that this place can offer. (The Popes also have a new sparkling wine project in the works, Haliotide Wines, to be released in 2020.)
She has shown herself particularly adept at coaxing out a brawny, savory, highly aromatic expression of the site’s Syrah. Pope produces two versions — one from young vines planted on the vineyard’s clay soils, the other from older vines planted on the rocky hillside. The Hillside Reserve Syrah could pass for the French wine St.Joseph, at once peppery, meaty and floral. “The great thing about these coolclimate wines is that we can capture those fresh aromatics,” Pope says. “When I’m going back to a wine, smelling it over and over again — that’s what I want.”
Try Nicole’s wines:
Both of the Stolo Chardonnays show a pronounced seasalt character; try the 2017 Estate Chardonnay (13.5%, $30), which also calls to mind creme fraiche, golden apple and lemon zest. The 2017 Hillside Reserve Pinot Noir (13%, $68) is full of deep, dark fruit that’s ripe but fresh, with pleasantly herbal and earthy undertones — raspberry, mushrooms and wet earth. If you think you perceive a little eucalyptus, you’re picking up on the stand of trees near the vines. But the Stolo stars are the two Syrahs. The 2017 Estate Syrah (12.9%, $46) is still young and rowdy, needing some time to mature. It’s got blackberry, sweet baking spice, violets and black peppercorn all wrapped up in a thrilling, unruly package. By contrast, the 2017 Hillside Reserve Syrah (12%, $72) is quieter and leaner, with baconfat girding the wine’s black currant, black plum and grilled rosemary flavors.
Byron Elmendorf
Location: Placerville (El Dorado
County)
Watch him because: At Boeger Winery and Clime Wines, he’s proving how diverse and dynamic Sierra foothills wines can be.
From a distance, it would be easy to see Byron Elmendorf as an anomaly in the Sierra foothills. The loweralcohol wines of his Clime label stand in contrast to many of the bigger, riper wines that the warm, inland region is known for. But Elmendorf, who is also the head winemaker at Boeger Winery in Placerville, sees himself as part of a larger generational shift. Many of the foothills’ pioneering winemakers are reaching the ends of their careers, “and now they’re making room for new people to come in and start a new era,” he says.
By making the wines for both Clime and Boeger, Elmendorf gets to play with two faces of the foothills — and he plays both very well. Barbera, the Piedmont variety, provides the starkest example of this. Boeger Winery has been producing Barbera since 1975; owner Greg Boeger was an early advocate of the variety, which has now become one of the foothills’ signatures. For Boeger Winery, Elmendorf produces a richer version of the earthy red wine, while for Clime he picks Barbera earlier, preserving more acidity.
Elmendorf brings a worldly perspective to his winemaking. The son of foreign aid workers, he was born in Honduras and raised in Ecuador and India, then studied plant biology at Brown University in Rhode Island. After spending a few years as a climatechange consultant in Washington, D.C., he entered the life of a traveling harvest intern, working in New Zealand, Canada, France’s Rhone Valley and California. He joined Boeger full time in 2015, making his first vintage of Clime that same year.
He has since narrowed the focus of Clime to Italian grape varieties: Falanghina, Aglianico and, of course, Barbera. That’s informed in part by his environmental background. “Climate change is easier to perceive every year, and the laterripening varieties are starting to look more and more appealing,” he says. Grapes that thrive in warm Mediterranean climates, like Spain and Italy, tend to withstand heat in late summer and early fall, holding out until the later part of the season when it gets cooler. “They don’t get upset by the hot weather and lose their aromas in a hot spell,” Elmendorf says.
Stylistic visions aside, these are realities that apply to Clime and Boeger equally. For now, Elmendorf is happy he gets to work with both. “Clime really gets to be my creative outlet,” he says. “It doesn’t have to interfere with what I’m doing at Boeger. It helps me scratch that itch.”
Try Byron’s wines:
Start with Clime’s 2018 Viani Vineyard Falanghina PetNat (12.6%, $28), frothy and gently sparkling, with a pronounced lemon verbena aroma and a refreshing, bitterlemon flavor. His 2016 Boeger Vineyard Aglianico (13.8%, $28) — a Clime wine made with grapes from Boeger’s estate — is a structured, ageworthy example of the variety, showing red cherries, wild herbs, tarry earth and iron. Finally, Clime’s 2017 Harde Vineyard Barbera (13.2%, $24) smells like cherries and cigars, with a laserfocused line of bright acidity penetrating through the finish.