San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Top winemaker hails Monterey varieties.
Ian Brand wants to bring Monterey into focus.
If only you could see Monterey like winemaker Ian Brand sees Monterey.
Where you might see miles of homogeneous-looking row crops from the sidelines of Highway 101, Brand sees an agricultural Garden of Eden. You might see tony seaside resorts; Brand sees a coastally influenced climate with ample sun and cooling wind that makes grapevines sing. You might have seen, from the wine shop shelf, an indistinguishable fleet of middling Monterey Chardonnays, with a smattering of fruity, luxurytier Pinot Noirs thrown into the mix. Brand sees a rich heritage of historic vineyards and family farmers that have the potential to make some of the most distinctive wines in California, and at some of the best prices.
“Monterey is the last major coastal region of California that hasn’t been completely blown up,” says Brand, 41, who produces his three wine labels, Le P’tit Paysan, La Marea and I. Brand & Family, in a warehouse in Salinas.
By “Monterey,” Brand doesn’t just mean the city of Monterey, or even the county. He means a roughly 50mile radius comprising land in Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties whose conditions are defined by the Monterey Bay itself: the wind, the temperature swings, the diversity of soils, the positioning on the Pacific Plate.
Of course, in one sense this region, nebulously defined as it is, has blown up. This stretch of the California coast has long been one of the state’s agricultural hotbeds, ever since the Dust Bowl diaspora settled in the Salinas Valley. And the greater Monterey Bay area is no stranger to wine grapes; Monterey County’s grape acreage exceeds that of Napa. “But a lot of what is grown here is still brought out in truckloads,” Brand says: industrially farmed grapes, blended away into big-volume wines that don’t articulate the nuances of individual vineyards.
Brand is after something different — for his own wine company and for the Monterey Bay at large. He sees this region’s wine industry as ideally poised for a comeback.
California wine occupies an increasingly bifurcated landscape. The state’s wines have never been better; they’ve also never been more expensive. As our most established regions, Napa and Sonoma, grow more crowded, expensive and inaccessible, innovation necessarily pushes to the geographic fringes. But too often, the prescription for elevating the fringe region is to hire a Napa consultant, install meticulous new vineyard plantings and wait for prices to rise. This pattern all but guarantees that the remaining $10 California wines are mass produced, engineered to please the lowest common denominator and less often grown in coastal regions.
Brand’s plan for a Monterey Bay comeback suggests a different road. He wants to preserve the vibrant, value-packed middle. And so far, he is succeeding: It’s hard to name a better $22 California bottle right now than his Le P’tit Paysan Chardonnay. Brand’s plan involves making a lot of wine — he’s at 10,000 cases and growing — and it involves attracting more talented winemakers to his region to compete with him.
Most important, Brand believes that the success of the Monterey Bay wine region depends on recapturing a sense of history: honoring vineyards that have stood the test of time, and returning to an old sensibility of California winemaking that got lost along the way.
His approach may be rooted in the past, but it also represents the only way forward. That’s why Ian Brand is The Chronicle’s 2018 Winemaker of the Year.
Brand ended up in the wine business haphazardly, the final act in a drama of nomadic adventures. Born in Connecticut and educated at Middlebury College in Vermont, Brand spent his post-college years as a grizzly bear tour guide on the Alaskan peninsula, in the Peace Corps in Ecuador and as a ski bum in Tahoe. He got jobs washing buses in Washington state, building houses in Nantucket, Mass., and working the Salt Lake City Olympics. He was living out of his car when he ended up, like many lost twenty-somethings before him, in Santa Cruz.
After a stint supervising juvenile convicts cleaning up highway medians, Brand got a job doing maintenance at Santa Cruz’s most freewheeling winery, Bonny Doon, which led to a job in the winery’s cellar. “Bonny Doon was a great cauldron of ideas and experimentation, and not every experiment worked,” says Birichino winery owner John Locke, who worked with Brand at Bonny Doon. “Ian was, like all of us, wandering around in the wilderness then.” But Locke could tell that Brand began to long for something more focused: “Ian really wanted to be bringing grapes from a particular vineyard and figuring out what they do.”
Brand landed an assistant winemaker gig at Big Basin in 2004, a new winery that was just starting up in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Jeff Emery, owner of the stalwart Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, leased cellar space at Big Basin at the time and worked closely with Brand.
“Ian was always very innovative, wanting to try new things,” says Emery. “It makes sense to me that he broke out on his own, because there were things he wanted to play with that he wasn’t going to get to as long as he had an employer.”
Meanwhile, Brand had met Heather Tidgewell, a friend of his sister, at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco. Following the dot-com bust, she’d abandoned a venture capital career and was working at Andalu wine bar in the Mission. They married in 2007. Between her business sensibilities and his winemaking knowledge, the couple figured they had the foundation to launch a wine business of their own.
But where to go? “Napa and Sonoma were out,” Heather Brand says. Grapes were too expensive, the market too saturated. They thought about Mendocino and the Sierra foothills, where she grew up. But ultimately the Brands saw the most potential in the areas radiating out from the Monterey Bay.
“We saw a lot of vines in the ground in Monterey, but not a lot of boutique operations,” says Heather Brand. It seemed like an opportunity begging to be taken. As a fine wine region, it was underdeveloped. Acid and minerality came to the vines naturally. And grapes could be purchased for relatively cheap.
That was critical. At the time, “it seemed like all we saw was supermarket wine and luxury wine above $35,” Brand says. They sensed a need for high-quality table wine — not precious, not pricey. Where was the great $20 bottle?
In 2008, Brand made 200 cases of Chardonnay at Emery’s Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard facility. (Initially his business was a partnership with the Coastview Vineyard; Brand later sold his interest.) “He was somewhat hyper-critical of his wines,” Emery recalls of the initial vintages. But within a couple of years, Brand began to fine-tune his stylistic identity. Liberated from the Coastview partnership, he called his wine Le P’tit Paysan, “the little peasant.”
The early years were not without their challenges. Brand had trouble finding good vineyards whose managers were willing to deal with a small fry like him rather than shipping off big chunks of their inventory to a high-volume winery. Heather Brand was holding down a corporate job, as director of business development for Delicato Vineyards, to support the family.
That’s when Brand realized: “I have to get in a weight class where I’m mattering.”
The decision to scale was partly a business decision (if you want to make a $20 wine, you should probably be making a lot of it) and partly a farming decision (you typically only get to influence a grower’s farming practices once you’re buying a lot of fruit from him), but it also addressed an existential issue for Brand. By making his wines more visible, could he help spread the word about Monterey?
He grew Le P’tit Paysan from that original 200-case production to 1,000 cases, and eventually to its current 8,000 cases. Few American wines represent a better bargain than these bottles, which are blends from various vineyards and often carry the catch-all “Central Coast” appellation. They pass for wines twice their price: the bright, lemony, mineral-tinged Jacks Hill Chardonnay; the layered, savory, supple Cabernet Sauvignon; the Grenache-based Le P’tit Pape, a burst of pure, clean, tangy red fruit.
The Brands’ twins, Isaak and Eleni, were born in 2012. That same year Brand released a second line of wines, the Spanish-inspired La Marea, founded on single-vineyard interpretations of Grenache and Albarino. The Albarino, from the wind-battered Kristy Vineyard in ancient seabed soils near the Salinas River, has become something of a calling card for Brand in the Bay Area, and for good reason: It’s bright and refreshing, with exceptionally expressive floral flavors.
Bernabe de Luna, a sommelier who now works for the Mirabel Restaurant Group in Carmel, recalls meeting Brand and tasting his Kristy Albarino in 2012. “My impression of Monterey, really, was white wines with almost no character, overoaked and overripe,” says de Luna. When he tasted the Albarino, “I was like — what is this? It’s from Spain? He said it was from here. I’m like: impossible.”
“I think an outsider would look at how Ian makes wines and consider him to conform to what most people consider natural winemaking methods,” says Locke. “I’m quite sure he would not call himself a natural winemaker. Cleanliness in wines is profoundly important to him, as it is to us. Wines that are really bright. Figurative clarity and actual literal clarity.”
The plan was to stop with La Marea. But the more Brand dug his feet into the Monterey Bay region, the more he began to find vineyards that seemed to be telling a different set of stories — vineyards that required a few more resources and a little bit more care. To accommodate these new vineyards, he launched a third label in 2016, calling it I. Brand & Family. It would be his most
“This vineyard is the crown jewel of this area. It needs to be seen.”
Ian Brand, winemaker
personal, though it would also have to be more expensive. That’s when Brand’s winemaking career truly came into focus.
Like many California winemakers today, Brand is drawn to the idea of what California wines were like in a bygone era. He sees this modern age as a race to technological mastery — clonal selections, vertical shoot positioning in vineyards, scientific advancements in the cellar. But did precision come at the expense of soulfulness? “It’s almost like there was this two-decade aberration,” he says. “And we gained a lot in terms of technical knowledge for farming and winemaking, but we kind of lost an idea of who we are, as a place.”
This sort of narrative is in vogue right now. It’s become trendy to talk about reviving elements of California wine’s past: returning to an old-school style of winemaking that privileges lower alcohol levels, higher acidities and less high-octane polish — a rejection of the paradigm of opulence and ripeness that stormed California wine in the ’90s and early aughts, arguably to its detriment.
For some winemakers, pursuing this old-California ideal is simply a matter of picking their grapes a little earlier. Brand goes deeper. For him, it’s about helping to keep the only true conduits of the past — older vineyards — in the ground. It’s not a matter of following a trend. It’s heeding an imperative.
One such vineyard is called Enz, a remarkable mountainside collection of head-trained, 120-year-old vines including curiosities like Cabernet Pfeffer in Hollister’s Lime Kiln Valley. After years of selling most of its grapes to Kenneth Volk Winery, Enz’s star has deservedly been rising as winemakers like Brand, Tegan Passalacqua and Hardy Wallace have bottled its Mourvedre — “Mataro,” if you want to be old-fashioned about it.
In an unusual arrangement, Brand has become a kind of ambassador for the vineyard, helping the Enz family put their grapes in the hands of ambitious wineries from the North Bay like Broc, None Such and Newfound. Wouldn’t Brand rather just keep more of the fruit for himself, to make more of his excellent (and it is really excellent) Mourvedre? He shrugs.
“This vineyard is the crown jewel of this area,” he says. “It needs to be seen.”
He has taken on a similar role at the Durney Vineyard, which rests at 1,200 feet above Carmel Valley, planted in 1970 to Bordeaux varieties, Riesling and Chenin Blanc. Under its original owner, Bill Durney, the site quietly produced beautiful wines for decades, but fell into disrepair after Durney’s death. When the Massa family, a major Salinas farming dynasty, bought the property last year, Brand jumped at the chance to help them revitalize it. He is making Cabernet Sauvignon for himself from some of these half century-old vines (and is helping the Massas develop their own brand), and as with Enz he has brought a range of talented winemakers from other parts of the state, including Rajat Parr, Ryan and Megan Glaab, Matt Nagy, Jaimee Motley (see profile on Page L9) and Riley Hubbard, who might not otherwise have sought out old-vine Cabernet from Carmel Valley.
Most curious of all is the Brigantino Vineyard, located in a backyard in a gated Hollister subdivision called Vineyard Estates. The subdivision rests on what was once a 120-acre contiguous vineyard for the jug-wine producer Almaden, but it was divided into 5-acre parcels during the 1980s housing boom, each outfitted with a cookie-cutter house. Driving through the neighborhood, you can see manicured lawns where some vineyards once stood, while other plantings are languishing, untended.
One homeowner, Vincent Brigantino, was getting ready to say goodbye to his 5 acres in 2016. “Vince had had a couple of very small harvests,” Brand says, “and was thinking the vineyard wasn’t worth farming anymore and he probably should pull it out.” Brand frantically intervened, offering to buy all of his inventory if he promised not to rip out these 65-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon vines. It turned out to be a wise decision: After three years of blending the Brigantino fruit into his Le P’tit Paysan Cabernet, Brand thinks it’s proven itself worthy of a single-vineyard wine in the 2018 vintage.
The Brigantino Vineyard is a perfect case study in why this area, especially this neighborhood of San Benito County, is ripe for rediscovery. Undervalued, forgotten viticultural gems are hiding in plain sight — sometimes as lawn decorations.
Brand’s arrival marked a sea change in Monterey, de Luna believes. “I think it was very bold of him to start that way when there was still a big movement of oaky Chardonnay from Monterey,” says de Luna. “I’ve lived in the area for two decades, and I don’t think there’s a winemaker I’ve seen that has that much knowledge of Monterey’s vineyards.” Now, de Luna sees other local wineries, like Joyce, moving in a new stylistic direction.
Still, I’ve never interviewed a winemaker who spent so much time taking me to other people’s vineyards and opening other wineries’ bottles. Brand is proud of the local talent and wastes no chance to praise his peers. Certainly, right now there is a groundswell of exciting projects, new and established, around the Monterey Bay area — Joyce, Caraccioli, Albatross Ridge, Eden Rift and Martin Ranch among them.
“Our major investment is in the betterment of the region,” Brand says. “We’re trying to create an environment where young winemakers can make their way.”
Challenges remain. Not enough Monterey vineyards are farmed sustainably, for example. But perhaps the biggest question for Brand is the future of the $20 California wine — the reason he and Heather launched a wine business in the first place. While demand for the higher-end I. Brand & Family wines is growing, “we’re finding more headwinds to the growth of P’tit Paysan,” he says. He’s trying to make a Chardonnay to rival Petit Chablis in quality and price, “and my distributor says it’s not oaky enough.”
Meanwhile, the refined drinkers who are looking for a lean, mineral-driven wine at that $22 price point are gravitating toward funky natural wines and esoteric grape varieties. In that crowd, Monterey Chardonnay has no currency.
“You’re stuck in the middle where you’re not a natural wine, and you’re not a country club wine,” Brand says.
Yet the middle is precisely where Brand still wants to be — and the middle, he maintains, is what the Monterey Bay can do best. He reject extremes. What’s left, in the space between, is timeless.