San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
At Phelan Farm, tastemaker brings a ‘brave’ new take on grape agriculture
California’s most influential sommelier-turned-winemaker wants to radically change farming
Three miles from the ocean, Raj Parr, a sommelier-turnedwinemaker who has become one of the wine industry’s biggest celebrities, is farming what could be California’s most radical vineyard.
To prevent mildew, Parr sprays the vines with milk, not traditional fungicides. To add potassium to the soil and aid photosynthesis, he applies fermented nettles, rather than the typical fertilizer. “I try to treat the plants like I’d treat myself,” said Parr, whose arsenal of farming tools includes things he likes to eat, like honey, turmeric and seaweed.
His approach at the fledgling Central Coast vineyard, Phelan Farm, eschews interventions that even the crunchiest organic adherents would find inoffensive. Parr believes his techniques are not only better for the Earth — building healthy soils may help mitigate the farm’s contributions to climate change — but will yield better-tasting, more interesting wines.
When grapevines are “sanitized” with chemicals, in Parr’s view, the resulting wines no longer channel their terroir — the unique flavor of their location. “You lose the expression of the place,” said Parr.
Phelan Farm represents a new chapter in the story of California natural wine, which has until now largely focused on questions of winemaking — whether the wine is filtered, whether sulfur was added — and less on the details of farming. Parr is challenging many of the movement’s widely held tenets, suggesting that there ought to be a different standard for what qualifies as “natural wine.” Certainly, it’s a standard that not every farmer or winemaker could easily meet.
“I think the farming is exemplary,” said Isabelle Legeron, a master of wine and the founder of the influential Raw Wine fair. “Not using copper, not using sulfur — it’s pretty extreme. It’s brave.”
The wines themselves are also something of a naturalwine novelty. Unlike the reigning approach to natural wines here, which buck European traditions and embrace unusual flavor profiles, Parr is aiming to make classic, decidedly European-style wines. “Stylistically they seem almost anomalous within the natural wine world in California,” said Bradford Taylor, owner of the Oakland natural wine bar Ordinaire.
“Fancy is maybe the word,” Taylor continued. “Composed, delicate. Raj wants to make really nice fine wines.”
Here in Cambria, a small town 40 minutes north of San Luis Obispo, Parr is a long way from the beginning of his career, which began as a suitdonning, grand cru-pouring sommelier in high-end Michael Mina restaurants in San Francisco. That life — he lived in the Millennium Tower — couldn’t be more different from the one in which I discover him at Phelan Farm, wearing work boots and jeans in this untamed coastal wilderness.
Parr has been such an influential figure for so long that tracing his career can reveal the dominant wine trends of every era. He participated in, and boosted, the fine-wine boom of the late aught’s in the Bay Area, presiding over restaurants like RN74, which became renowned for its cellar full of collectible Burgundy. He co-founded, with winemaker Jasmine Hirsch, the organization In Pursuit of Balance, which helped change the paradigm of California wines in the 2010s, shifting from the boozy, bold style of wine that had been popular toward a loweralcohol, higher-acid ideal.
During that period, Parr transitioned from sommelier to winemaker, starting two brands in Santa Barbara County with partner Sashi Moorman: Sandhi and Domaine de la Cote. Those labels wouldn’t have been called “natural wine” at the outset. But over time, in tandem with the explosion of natural wine, Parr’s preferences have gravitated increasingly toward the category’s ideals of minimal winemaking intervention.
Phelan Farm, which he began in 2020, represents his full-on commitment to natural wine: zero-zero winemaking — the most extreme form of natural winemaking, in which nothing is taken away from or added to the wine — paired with his radically natural farming philosophy.
One of the more attentiongrabbing elements of his practice is the fact that he does not apply sulfur, which can combat fungal issues, in the vineyard. Natural wine lovers will be familiar with sulfur as a lightning-rod issue in the winery — some winemakers won’t add this preservative to their wines, fearing it will diminish the wine’s character — but virtually all vineyards in California, even those farmed organically and biodynamically, are treated with sulfur.
Parr makes a provocative argument: A wine isn’t really sulfur-free if there was sulfur in the vineyard. “The effect of sulfur in the wine has to be very similar to the effect of sulfur in the vine,” he said: It reduces bacteria — both bad bacteria and good bacteria, which may contribute to the wine’s expression.
He feels fortunate to have been given a relatively blank canvas in Phelan Farm. This property has been owned by the same family, the Phelans, since they homesteaded it in 1851. Until 2007, when the Phelans planted grapevines here, its vast, sloping hillsides had been used mostly for cattle grazing, with fruit trees here and there. Parr initially visited the vineyard when he was scouting possible grape sources for Sandhi. He got to know the owner, Greg Phelan, who eventually agreed to give Parr a long-term lease on 11 acres, giving him carte blanche.
Parr knew what he wanted: to emulate the classic wines of alpine French regions like the Jura and the Savoie. He traveled there, convincing some of his favorite wineries, like Overnoy and Tissot, to let him take vine cuttings from their vineyards, then propagated those here. The result is a hodgepodge of grape varieties that are scarcely seen in California but are beloved by geeky, Francophile somm crowds: Poulsard, Sauvignon Vert, Jacquere, Gringet, Altesse, Mondeuse.
He decided not to rip out the Chardonnay and Pinot Noir vines that the Phelans had already planted. But he had little desire to plant more. “There’s enough Pinot in California,” he said.
The basic idea underpinning his farming — which Parr does mostly himself, with help from two employees — is to cultivate healthy soil. Creating and applying compost is a major component. While it’s common to treat vineyards with compost, Parr believes compost is worthwhile only if it’s made from the site to which it’s applied. “I want to use the inoculum all around us,” he said, referring to the protective immunity that the farm’s native microorganisms can confer.
His enormous heap is composed of the leftover wood from the vines after pruning; manure from the cows that roam other parts of the farm; and pomace, the pressed grape skins of the Phelan Farm wines. He puts this concoction into a large machine that works like a tea steeper, then spreads it in the rows between grapevines.
It might sound woo-woo, but Carlye Peterson, a climate and carbon consultant with a Ph.D. in earth science, says the science is sound. “By having an intact ‘soil sponge,’ which includes a diverse soil microbiome, the soils are more resistant to climate pressures like drought, flood and (extreme) temperatures,” she said. It helps the grapevines “get all the nutrients they need to thrive.”
That’s not to say it’s working perfectly yet. Phelan Farms’ proximity to the Pacific Ocean means the site has high mildew pressure, which can render some grapes unusable — and Parr’s natural treatments like milk don’t eradicate mildew entirely. Because Parr is dry farming, not irrigating any of the vines, his yields were 60% lower than he was expecting last year.
Despite the small quantities, Parr manages to produce 12 distinct wines from Phelan Farm — some varietals, others unconventional blends, like Misturado de Cambria, a mix of the Spanish grape Mencia and the French grape Trousseau. Across the board, the wines are lithe, savory and slightly wild-tasting. They don’t veer into territory that could be described as “funky.”
Among the more intriguing efforts is a wine that Parr calls Chardonnay Rosé, made from a mutation of the Chardonnay vine with plum-colored grapes that Parr took from Jura winemaker Stephane Tissot. He ferments the wine on its skins, then ages it in a globe-shaped glass vessel, rather than oak, resulting in a salmon-colored wine that tastes like bruised citrus.
To Taylor, of Ordinaire, the Phelan Farm wines are thrilling because of how closely they channel these European traditions. Many of the natural wines that Taylor tastes from California, he said, are “complicated wines that might have flaws.” By bringing a classical approach, Taylor added, Phelan Farm is diversifying the stylistic spectrum of California natural wine.
Legeron agreed, calling them “restrained, saline, almost at times austere — really beautiful, delicate, chiseled wines.”
They’re also relatively expensive, for California natural wines, many of them $60 to $80 per bottle. That puts them in line with many established, sought-after European natural wines, Legeron said. “Particularly after COVID there seems to be this sweet spot of trying to keep wines under $25 in the natural wine world,” she said. “But making good wine comes at a cost.” She said she’s happy to see Parr’s California bottles inching closer to finewine territory.
In pricing, as in farming and winemaking, Parr is setting a new trend. If his past track record is any indication, the influence of Phelan Farm may soon reverberate far beyond Cambria.