A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [40]
When I arrived in the middle of harvest last year, both Brewer and Clifton were hopping between tightly packed tanks and barrels to the rhythm of a loud drum-and-bass beat, courtesy of a CD mixed by Clifton’s wife, Crystal, the air thick with the heady funk of fermenting Pinot Noir grapes. Their wine ghetto neighbor Kris Curran, who makes a hot new Pinot called Sea Smoke, stopped by to ask if she could borrow some red wax. (Wax?) Yup, the boys have wax; they use it to hand-seal the corks. Clifton pours me a glass of their Santa Rosa Chardonnay—which starts out deceptively fleshy and round, then zaps me awake with a towel snap of acidity— and explains that the Santa Ynez Valley, with its east-west orientation funneling Pacific air inland, “is a very extreme place; there’s some crazy fruit grown here, and you gotta go for it.”
Go for it they do—the Brewer-Clifton wines are controversial, and extreme. The duo first met at a Rotary Club tasting in Goleta when they were both working for other wineries. Both dreamed about how they would push the limits if they could make their own wine, and that’s just what they’ve done now that they’re on their own. One extreme practice: whole-cluster fermenting for Pinot—i.e., leaving in all the stems, since stems can contribute a green taste, which they believe gives the Pinots additional texture. The Brewer-Clifton grapes come from steep, cool-weather sites, and only a third of the crop is mellowed in new oak before being blended with the rest, which may partly account for the wine’s vibrancy.
Clifton drives me east from Lompoc to view some of Brewer-Clifton’s sources, the valley getting warmer—as much as a degree warmer per mile, he says. East of the kitschy town of Solvang it’s more than warm enough to grow Syrah and even Cabernet, but it’s the cool, fog-drenched Santa Rita Hills, between Lompoc and Buellton, that are ideal for the Burgundian varietals. The Chards and Pinots of this region usually have greater natural acidity than their north coast counterparts. None has more zing, more precision and tension, than Brewer-Clifton’s. Lovers of fat, buttery Chardon-nays and voluptuous Pinots may find them too high-strung.
Clifton points out Ashley’s Vineyard, owned by Fess Parker, of Davy Crockett renown, from which Brewer-Clifton purchases Chardonnay and Pinot grapes. On the other side of the highway is the mustard-yellow, Tuscan-style winery of Melville Vineyards, where Brewer is the winemaker and from which the dynamic duo also purchase grapes for their own label. Fortunately, for those who love the Brewer-Clifton style, Melville’s Pinots and Chardonnays are made in slightly larger quantities.
As a winemaker, Brewer likes to compare himself to a sushi chef: he’s a minimalist who wants to let the grapes and the vineyard express themselves without interference. Whether consciously or unconsciously, the former professor seems to be echoing Flaubert when he says, “I want to be invisible, I want to get out of the way, I don’t want a stylistic stamp.” The most radical expression of this philosophy is a Melville Chardon-nay called Inox, which gets no oak and doesn’t undergo malolactic fermentation—the secondary fermentation that creates that familiar buttery taste. Naked Santa Rita Chardonnay, as it were.
“We want to show provenance,” Clifton says. The twelve single-vineyard Brewer-Clifton whites and reds “are treated exactly the same, so that what comes through is the vineyard.” You’d never mistake their Sweeney Canyon Chardon-nay for their Mount Carmel Chardonnay, which comes from a steep hillside dominated by an eerie, unfinished