San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The vineyard freedoms of Paso Robles.
Paso Robles in summertime: hot. Sticky, heavy, close heat. The kind of heat where it’s uncomfortable to wear a hat, but you can’t not wear a hat.
Such are the conditions in Paso during a visit over the summer. We have the air conditioning on full blast, winemaker Jeremy Weintraub and I, as we drive up to see the Hoffman Mountain Ranch (HMR) Vineyard, 400 steep and sprawling acres in Paso’s west side owned by Weintraub’s employer, Adelaida Vineyards & Winery.
“So, is this Syrah?” I ask as the truck climbs into the vineyard. If not Syrah, I assume, maybe Grenache or Tannat, Tempranillo or Cabernet — grapes that can thrive in hot conditions.
The last thing I’m expecting to see here is Pinot Noir, that famous lover of cooler climes. But that’s exactly what we’re looking at as we pull up to HMR.
“It was a surprise to me, too,” Weintraub laughs. “Pinot is not what you think of when you think of Paso.”
Granted, HMR’s Pinot isn’t just any Pinot. These 22 acres of vines were planted in 1964, likely making them the oldest Pinot Noir in California’s Central Coast, and some of the only Pinot in California that’s planted on its own roots, not grafted onto rootstock. Reaching 1,725 feet above sea level, the vineyard is rich in calcium carbonate, Pinot Noir’s ideal bed. (Limestone, the predominant soil in France’s Burgundy region, is composed of calcium carbonate.)
“We’ve found whale bones in the soil,” Weintraub says as we step down from the truck. As the crow flies, the Pacific Ocean is 12 miles away, and here on this peak there’s a pleasant breeze — a startling reprieve from the sticky heat we felt in the valley below. The leaves on the vines are quivering. It doesn’t feel so hot anymore.
When Weintraub first visited HMR, while interviewing for the Adelaida job in 2012, he had trouble squaring this Pinot planting with his perception of Paso’s climate. “I was dismissive,” he says. “I was one of the conventional-thinking majority, that Pinot Noir grows best in cold climates.” He’d made Pinot in New Zealand’s Central Otago, where it sometimes snows during harvest. How could sweltering Paso Robles come close to that?
That’s what’s so confounding about the HMR Pinot Noir: It produces a wine of structure and restraint, high in acid and relatively low in alcohol. Every year. I’m struck, when I taste the 2016 rendition later, by how earthy it is, as if full of cumin and sage — nothing like the candied, cough syrup-laden Pinots that can sometimes result in warmer climates.
“When I first tried the wines I was just stunned,” Weintraub says. So pronounced was the acidity, he says, that he assumed the previous winemaking team “must have been pouring acid into tanks by the bucketload.”
They weren’t. Due to some unknowable confluence of vine age, elevation, that cooling ocean breeze and that calcareous soil, these grapes stop producing sugar every year before they reach 14 percent alcohol. Why is a mystery. The surrounding vines at HMR — Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay — get plenty sugary. “The Pinot is literally smack-dab in the middle of that
“It was a surprise to me, too. Pinot is not what you think of when you think of Paso.” — Jeremy Weintraub, Adelaida Vineyards & Winery
ranch, and everything around it behaves as you would expect a Paso Robles vineyard to behave in terms of sugar accumulations,” Weintraub says.
“Even if I wanted to make an exuberant Russian River-style Pinot,” he continues, “I just couldn’t do it here.”
This is not to say that Paso Robles growers ought to be ripping out all their vineyards to plant Pinot Noir. (They definitely should not do that.) It’s rather to say that Paso Robles as a wine region is more nuanced and varied than it often gets credit for.
And that’s why it’s a very, very good thing the region has never been saddled with the burden of having a “signature” grape variety.
Think about it: Napa has Cabernet, an emulation of Bordeaux. Sonoma has Burgundy’s twin varieties, Pinot and Chardonnay. But Paso Robles is a free-for-all. Here, Rhone-inspired vineyards are planted alongside Italian ones. If Paso is known for anything, it’s for kitchen-sink red blends that throw historical precedent out the window: Tempranillo with Zinfandel, Mourvedre with Petit Verdot.
Is this a limitation or a freedom?
On one hand, the fact that Paso doesn’t have an old-world corollary has probably made it harder for some drinkers to take its wines seriously. After all, a region like Oregon’s Willamette Valley has staked its entire claim to growing fine Pinot Noir in its climactic similarities to Burgundy, the grape’s ancestral home. The fact that so many Burgundy wine companies have now set up shop in Oregon — Drouhin, Meo-Camuzet, Jadot, Lafon — gives the claim even more credibility.
Why are American wine regions obsessed with this idea of being just like some place in Europe? Weintraub recalls his early career in Long Island, N.Y., where everyone was trying to draw similarities to Bordeaux in order to justify growing Cabernet Sauvignon. The argument, as he recalls it: “There’s two bodies of water surrounding Bordeaux — just like the North Fork!”
Weintraub cites Napa’s lack of grape diversity as one of the main reasons he left his previous job, at Napa’s Seavey Vineyard, to join Adelaida. “If I’d wanted to make Cab my whole life, I probably would have retired at Seavey,” he says. (Seavey is one of Napa Valley’s greatest and most distinctive estates. I can see why it would be a hard job to leave.) But Weintraub began to feel shackled by Cabernet Sauvignon’s iron-fisted hold on Napa.
“Napa prides itself on its soil diversity,” he says. The valley contains half of the world’s recognized soil orders, as its marketers love to point out. “And yet there’s very little crop diversity.”
He gets it: Napa Valley Cabernet grapes sell on average for more than $7,500 a ton, whereas Napa Syrah commands $3,700, and Zinfandel just $3,600. In other words, if you own land in Napa, you’re taking a major financial risk if you plant anything other than Cab. The Napa wine industry operates “more like a commercial bank,” Weintraub says, “and less like a hedge fund.”
It’s not that Paso hasn’t tried to promote a signature grape variety. It’s just that groups like the Paso Robles Cab Collective, Zinfandel Advocates and Producers, and the Rhone Rangers have never quite succeeded in doing so.
The whole question of finding a signature grape variety just doesn’t really interest Weintraub. “It’s a marketing question. And a political question. And a financial question,” he says. Ultimately, to him, it is not a viticultural question. “What I love and what I embrace about Paso is the willingness here to try new things,” he says. (Weintraub also owns his own small — and very good — wine label, Site Wines, featuring Rhone varieties from Santa Barbara County.)
Indeed, when cardiologist Stanley Hoffman and his vineyard manager John Whitener planted Pinot Noir vines at HMR in 1964, the prospect of planting Pinot in Paso Robles didn’t sound any more outlandish than planting any other type of wine grape. At that time, the area was mostly barley fields and nut trees.
No records have survived that would point to the source of the plant material. Even Whitener’s son Mike, who has lived in the HMR Vineyard since he was a child and still farms the site, doesn’t know what clone of Pinot Noir these vines are.
What has survived are the records kept by André Tchelistcheff, who was Hoffman’s consulting winemaker in the 1970s. “Color — deep, elegant with little orangey ‘pele d’onion’ reaction,” read Tchelistcheff ’s notes on the 1976 HMR Pinot Noir. “Artistically built in palate with beautiful equilibrium in alcohol, acidity and glycerol extract. Long lasting elegant aftertaste.”
Adelaida Vineyards & Winery bought the HMR Vineyard in 1994. (Hoffman’s original winery is now owned by Daou Vineyards.) Five years later its owners, the Van Steenwyk family, bought out their longtime partner John Munch, who now makes wine down the road at Le Cuvier Winery. Despite some very impressive land holdings, HMR among them, for many years Adelaida Vineyards & Winery was not producing wine to match the vineyards’ potential. Weintraub’s work was cut out for him when he came on board in 2012. In addition to changing the wine labels, which still featured a drawing of John Munch’s wife, Weintraub convinced the Van Steenwyks to cut Adelaida’s production volume nearly in half and introduce organic farming techniques at the estate vineyards.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to some price increases, but Weintraub insists it’s necessary in order to honor the extraordinary gift the winery has in HMR.
“You can’t plant a 50-year-old vineyard,” he says. He likes to imagine the blissful sense of experimentation that must have possessed Stanley Hoffman when he planted his vineyard in 1964, with a smattering of Zinfandel, Cabernet, Chardonnay, Chenin Blanc, Riesling.
Like all the California vineyardists before him, back to the Franciscan missionaries, Hoffman was trying to see what worked best.
“People have been making wine for a long time,” Weintraub says. “People tried stuff, tasted it, said this is crap or this is fantastic. Whatever the grape happens to be.”
Adelaida Vineyards, 5805 Adelaida Rd., Paso Robles. 800676-1232 www.adelaida.com. Tasting room open daily 10am to 5pm.