A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [16]
At a slightly more ambitious level are Dragonstone from Leitz, J. J. Riesling from Christoffel, and “Jean Baptiste” from Gunderloch. Robert Weil’s top Rieslings from the Rheinghau are among the most sought after and expensive in Germany, but he bottles a Kabinett and a wine called simply Riesling, which, particularly in the last three vintages—′02,′03, and ′04— should be approached with caution, lest you find yourself developing a serious Riesling habit. It’s a little like reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Next thing you know, you’re neck-deep in Ulysses or, God forbid, Finnegans Wake, which, come to think of it, is the literary equivalent of Trockenbeerenauslese.
THE SHEDISTAS OF SANTA BARBARA
In recent years the archetypal fantasy of starting a small winery has become more and more fantastic; in Napa the start-up cost for a small vineyard with a winery is now generally reckoned at around seven to ten million dollars and the ATF bonds required to open new wineries are scarcer than magnums of Screaming Eagle. But down the coast in Santa Barbara County there are dozens of tiny new bootstrap wineries operating out of sheds and warehouse spaces in rural industrial parks, and they seem to be multiplying like Kennedys. While Pinot Noir has become the established star of the region, these upstarts are mostly making Syrah, in their aluminum-sided sheds—in part out of necessity, good Pinot grapes having become scarce and expensive, and in part out of a conviction of its great potential in the area, thanks to pioneering Rhône Rangers like Alban and Qupé.
The typical Santa Barbara shedista narrative goes like this: you start working in the cellar of a bigger winery and learn the ropes: the region, the vineyards, and the growers. Eventually you borrow from relatives and max out your credit cards to rent a shed, buy a few tanks and a few tons of Syrah, design a label, and make your own wine. You share equipment and wine notes with friends. And you keep your day job in the meantime.
A classic example is Kenneth-Crawford, started in? I by Joey Gummere and Mark Horvath. (The name combines their two middle names.) “Mark and I met working in the cellars of Babcock,” Gummere told me recently. “You see how things on a smaller scale can be so much better.” Gummere moved on to Lafond, another midsized winery, before teaming up with Horvath in ?I to produce four barrels of Syrah from the Lafond and Melville vineyards, two relatively cool sites in the Santa Rita Hills appellation. As of the ′05 vintage they are producing fifteen hundred cases—quite a lot on the shedista scale. When I visited a couple of years ago, Kenneth-Crawford was sharing a 2,400-square-foot shed with Jason Drew, another Babcock alum, who started Drew Family Cellars (sounds better than Drew Family Shed, I guess) in 2001 and who has been producing beautiful red monsters ever since.
Benjamin Silver, of the eponymous Silver Wines, identifies 2001 as a watershed vintage for the new landless winemakers; that’s when a number of non–winery affiliated vineyards started producing Syrah in sufficient quantities to sell. “This offered access to Rhône varietals to us smaller guys and gals,” Silver says. Some of these vineyards were planted in ′95, when the ′93 Zaca Mesa Syrah made the No. 6 slot of Wine Spectators Top 100 list, at the same time that Manfred Krankl’s first Sine Qua Non bottlings were drawing attention to the potential for Syrah in the Santa Barbara area. Silver, who worked at Zaca Mesa at the time, has since gone on to create his own label, which includes several Syrahs.
“I used to make Pinot under my own label, and then it got hard to find,” says Santa Barbara native Kris Curran, who turned to Syrah after losing her Pinot sources in the 2000 vintage. Curran made a name for herself as the winemaker for Sea Smoke, the new Santa Rita Hills star. She makes Sea Smoke Pinot and Curran Syrah in an industrial park in Lompoc, which its winemaking denizens refer to as the “ghetto.” The ghetto is home to half a dozen small, ambitious Syrah