State of the Disunion

John On Wine – State of the Disunion

This piece was originally published in the Ukiah Daily Journal newspaper on Thursday, September 3, 2015

With roughly three quarters of all the grapes grown in Mendocino County bought and used to make wine by Napa and Sonoma County wineries, why is it so hard to bring greater awareness of the quality of our wines to the greater wine drinking public?

The Anderson Valley Pinot Noir Festival is outstanding, and features what many consider to be the county’s most focused appellation and their best wines. In 2014, the dinner held the night before the event was well attended by wine media; this year, I found myself alone with the gathered winery owners and winemakers.

Taste of Mendocino, an event held in San Francisco to introduce restaurant and wine shop trade, distributors, and wine media to the bounty of the county, our wines and food, saw underwhelming attendance this year.

Hopland Passport attendance numbers have dipped in recent years, although the best wineries continue to increase their sales numbers from the event.

Too often, I see money wasted on marketers who promise the moon but can’t deliver the basics.

In Sonoma County, all of the wineries and vineyards belong to a single organization, are taxed and the resultant pool of money is used to increase the demand for Sonoma County wines and prices for their grapes. Two initiatives of note for the Sonoma County Vintners: conjunctive labelling and sustainable certification.

All wine produced in Sonoma County carries the name Sonoma County on the front label, with more precise geographic information allowed additionally, such as Dry Creek Valley or Murphy Ranch. County wide sustainable certification, even when it is a farcical sham, with (allegedly) cancer causing Monsanto Round Up, and even more egregiously toxic chlorpyrifos grown fruit receiving such certification, will allow greater market penetration for Sonoma County’s wines in health conscious outlets such as Whole Foods.

Lodi was once a name that winemakers would not put on a wine label, choosing California instead, as the general impression of Lodi grapes and the wines they produced was not favorable. Again, Lodi’s vineyards self-taxed and over the last twenty four years, the Lodi Winegrape Commission has done a great job, working with grape growers to improve viticulture, and wineries to make better wines. Lodi has a sustainability program that is not a sham, and worked with their growers to certify. Public relations and marketing efforts, constant and thoughtful, have led to increased grape prices and an acceptance of Lodi as a respected area for wine production.

Mendocino County once had a similar organization, the Mendocino Wine and Winegrape Commission (MWWC), but no longer. The group started poorly, with a scoundrel for a director embezzling funds from the group, and another directing business to their own company. It took a while, but eventually the group hired Megan Metz who did a good job promoting Mendocino County’s wines, but it was too little too late for the county’s vineyard owners and they voted MWWC out of existence after only five total years, and just two functional years, in operation, in a fit of myopic selfishness, over unrealized unrealistic expectations.

Megan Metz now heads up the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association and is bringing a ton of the bay area’s consumers and trade to taste wines at the area’s wineries and events.

Lodi didn’t turn around their wine reputation or increase wine grape prices in two, or even five, years, but closer to twenty.

Our county is incredibly shortsighted and, worse, it is fractured. The Mendocino County wine scene isn’t just Hwy 128 vs. Hwy 101, but in each area there is division, with Yorkville cut off from Anderson Valley and Ukiah cut off from Hopland. Within the Anderson Valley, there is the Philo clique, and for Hopland there is the downtown crew. Meetings of each area’s local tourism group are often contentious.

Many wineries will not send wines for review or enter competitions, because of cheapness, and then complain that the county does not receive wine media coverage.

Out of the ashes of MWWC, the much smaller Mendocino Winegrowers, Inc. (MWI) was born, a voluntary dues paying collective of wineries and growers. Every winery and every vineyard should be paying members. If you own a winery or vineyard, and want to join and help increase the profile of our wines and prices for our grapes, visit MendoWine.com and then give Aubrey Rawlins a call at (707) 901-7629.

Here are some more recommendations to improve the county’s reputation for wine and prices for grapes: Anderson Valley wines, along with all other wines made in county from our grapes, should have Mendocino County included on the label. Every winery should submit all of their wines to all major publications for review, and enter all of their wines in at least four major wine competitions each year. Every winery should be involved in public relations, marketing, and communications for each event they participate in. Best practice marketing should be introduced.

Bringing people to taste and buy our wines, wines labelled Mendocino County, and creating a genuine, not sham, county wide sustainability program, will increase demand, bring media attention, and yield higher prices for our grapes.

With a more robust MWI, events like Taste of Mendocino can be brought home and marketed to consumers, with invitations going out four months in advance, with follow ups three months, two months, one month, two weeks, one week, and two days out; and the marketing materials should be provided to each participating winery or food vendor, to send out the invitations to each of their email lists. Taste of Mendocino could be, should be, as successful as Winesong, but it would take increased participation from all of our wineries.

I would love to see wine writers asking us to come taste our wines, because of the disproportionate number of awards taken by Mendocino County wines in competition and staggering number of 90+ rated wines in review, because we created must-attend events through planning and cooperative marketing following best practices, because over and over wine labels carry Mendocino County’s name, because we defended and enhanced our claim of being “America’s greenest grape growers”, because we grew up and behaved like adults for the betterment of all instead of like petulant selfish children with no thought or plan for the future.

Until we start acting responsibly, in larger numbers, in a cooperative participatory manner, Napa and Sonoma County wineries will be happy to continue to buy our grapes on the cheap, and wine writers will continue to dismiss us as the county that couldn’t get along.

 

Mendocino Winegrape & Wine Commission renewal referendum called.

Every wine region that wants to successfully compete for the public’s attention and good prices for grapes and wines has an organization tasked with promoting the quality of the grapes grown and the wines made in their area.

Lodi uses the Lodi Winegrape Commision to do effective work convincing buyers that their central valley grapes are being grown in a green fashion. Sonoma County is represented by Sonoma County Vintners and the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission (these two share the same physical address). Napa has the Napa Valley Vintners Association. Paso Robles has the Paso Robles Wine Country Alliance.

As a peripheral member of the local wine industry, I am thankful that Mendocino County has the current incarnation of the Mendocino Winegrape & Wine Commission (MWWC).

MWWC represents 343 winegrape growers and 91 wineries in Mendocino County.

Megan Metz is MWWC’s Executive Director, having been promoted to the position in October, 2011 after a successful turn as MWWC’s Director of Marketing and Communications beginning February of 2011.

Megan and her incredible staff including Gracia, Courtney, and Jen, assisted by Josh and Jan, help Mendocino County’s winegrape growers through an ongoing series of viticulture educational forums aimed at helping growers increase the quality and value of their grapes, by acting as co-hosts of  eco-wine symposiums, and working with growers to contain and eradicate the European Grapevine Moth (EGVM) in the county.

MWWC is instrumental in collecting and making available information vital to the county’s winegrape growers like the recent water updates concerning Russian River frost regulations.

Hosting an online grape marketplace, MWWC helps our winegrape growers sell their fruit and, through focused marketing events that focus on the county’s vineyards and growing areas, MWWC works to maintain the price that Mendocino County fruit commands in hard times and help that fruit increase in price in good times.

I know Megan and her crew at MWWC professionally through my dual roles as tasting room manager for McFadden Vineyard and Secretary of the Board of Destination Hopland.

At last year’s incredibly successful Taste of Mendocino event in San Francisco, MWWC brought Mendocino County’s bounty to San Francisco and played host first to trade and media and then the general public for tastings that saw winery tasting rooms grouped by the AVA, growing area, their wines predominately came from.

My boss, Guinness McFadden, was proud to pour his wines ordinarily tasted in our Hopland tasting room under a banner for Potter Valley. As the first grower to plant grapes in Potter Valley, growing organically from day one, that Potter Valley sign flying in San Francisco was enormously important to Guinness.

Social media savvy, MWWC had trade and media guests tweeting using the #TOM12 hashtag. From my tasting room over 100 miles away, I was able to steer attendees directly to Guinness using those same tools.

Destination Hopland is charged with hosting two major events each year, a Spring and a Fall passport event for our area’s 16 member wineries, our Hopland Passport. We are fortunate that under Megan, MWWC partners directly with Mendocino County’s various wine region organizations. In addition to Destination Hopland, MWWC also directly helps A Taste of Redwood Valley, Yorkville Highlands Growers & Vintners Association, and the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association.

MWWC has helped Destination Hopland improve our website, making Jen available to provide the text on each page. MWWC has also helped with advertising and marketing, aiding with ad placement in upscale glossy publications, while tasking Jan with disseminating effective press releases to help Hopland achieve the media notice we wish to gain for our local winery members.

Megan also stepped in to host a winemaker dinner for visiting press members to Hopland Passport last year, leading directly to beneficial media attention.

Last November, at the Mendocino County Wine & Mushroom Fest event Wine and Mushroom Train that MWWC and Visit Mendocino jointly hosted at Camp Mendocino, Megan appeared at my side as I poured wines for an exuberant crowd. Megan calmly told me that she needed my help, that a speaker came down ill, and that I would need to give a talk to assembled media including writers from Sunset Magazine, Edible Marin & Wine Country, O – The Oprah Magazine, Taste of Home, Vegetarian Times, Popular Plates, Intermezzo, Newsweek, and Cooking Light.

Megan made clear that as an emergency guest speaker, I wasn’t to be wearing my McFadden hat, or my Hopland hat, but that she wanted me to speak about all of Mendocino County’s wines, focusing as much as possible on the different growing regions throughout the county.

Megan and MWWC saw that every wine growing region in Mendocino County enjoyed press attention from the gathered media, that the focus was on the winegrape growers as much as it was on the wines of the county.

I started at McFadden in March last year, and joined the Destination Hopland Board in July last year. For me, Megan and her crew are the only MWWC I have ever known.

MWWC became effective in 2006, and late in 2011 the California Department of Food & Agriculture announced a February 1, 2012 hearing in Ukiah to consider the continuation or suspension of MWWC.

I attended the hearing and spoke in support of MWWC, of Megan, and of the incredibly effective crew that has been assembled to help market the winegrapes and wines of Mendocino County.

Let me be blunt, not only is MWWC doing a great job but with even the central valley wine organizations engaging in what appears to be a bit of greenwashing, without MWWC the other wine areas are poised to eat Mendocino County’s lunch.

I was surprised to find semi organized opposition by some growers at the meeting, with a saddening lack of civility, cogency, or willingness to acknowledge any of the positive works MWWC has accomplished for growers and wineries under Megan. Some of the speakers were unpleasantly ugly, repeatedly interrupting testimony in support of MWWC’s continuance and spewing vitriolic comments tinged with a paranoiac worldview that I don’t share.

I am grateful to one grower who would not want to be identified, who I know to be intelligent through our shared involvement in Hopland wine industry events, who explained that the opposition by some growers stems from the notion that MWWC was forced into existence at the insistence of a major buyer of fruit within the county, under threat of blackballing the county’s growers if MWWC was not voted for back in 2006. My serious thanks to you for sharing your passionately held view, you provide a much needed perspective lacking in the presentations made during the hearing.

MWWC during the first four years of existence, prior to Megan and her crew taking charge, is not the Commission I know, it was explained to me. Malfeasance bordering on criminal and ineptitude bordering on tragic were common, I was told.

I came to understand some of the opposition to the continuance of MWWC, but I think that such a stance is both myopic and irresponsible.

Getting rid of MWWC just as it is well formed and ready to build on the last year’s marketing successes seems nearly stupid, akin to cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Myopic, because growers can expect to see their grapes valued less, and prices remain flat or decrease, if their opposition is the majority view, as other areas continue to successfully market their grapes to buyers through their commissions, organizations, alliances, and associations. In the ‘bad’ past, MWWC’s director and staff operated under the guidance of a board made up of member growers. If malfeasance and ineptitude were the order of the day, then it seems to me that those board members – and those Commission members who didn’t bother to join the board or a committee – are the people ultimately responsible for the first four years of Commission failure. Every person who spoke against MWWC’s continuance spoke of the past; not one spoke of the present.

I’m the new guy. I don’t see the past. I don’t know the politics. I judge things on their face. MWWC under Megan Metz and the crew she has assembled are doing a fantastic job, and they want to improve their efforts on behalf of Mendocino County’s winegrape growers and wineries.

I respect a difference of opinion, and am able to place disagreement in context thanks to the perspective shared by others who have been active locally in this industry for decades. I know that the opposition by growers is not monolithic, and the vote will be close. I also find that those who spoke in support of MWWC’s continuance spoke intelligently, citing specific events and results, mostly from prepared statements, while opposition was offered in incoherent and angry rants. I am heartened that most growers I know are not like the speakers I described, but instead are intelligent, thoughtful, friendly, and open to fair consideration of a reasonable proposition. I believe that this is true of most of Mendocino County’s growers.

I’m a tasting room manager, not a vineyard or winery owner, so I don’t have a vote, but I urge the voting Commission members to return a favorable vote when a referendum is called. According to MWWC’s twitter page, “MWWC renewal ballots to be sent out within 60 days from 2/23”

 

Free film in the field Sunday night 9/5 at sunset, Julie & Julia at Campovida in Hopland

Campovida is the name Anna Beuselink and Gary Breen gave to the 51 acre Hopland property that had once been the site of the Fetzer Wine Hospitality Center. The property was owned by Brown-Forman, and while in negotiations to buy the property, Anna and Gary met Owsley Brown III, a Brown-Forman Brown, and the owner of Magnanimus Wines.

Campovida means Field of Life, and when I visited this week, every field, vineyard, and garden was bursting with life.

From Campovida’s website:

Campovida is a family owned and operated rustic farm and working vineyard. This unique place offers deep connections with nature, wine tasting, a professional culinary kitchen, a 10-room retreat center and multiple spaces for conversations both big and small. It’s a place where you can relax, enjoy and create your custom gatherings.

Come. Play. Stay. Explore.

Anna and Gary are not just the owners of Campovida, but see themselves as stewards as well.

Anna and Gary invited Owsley Brown III to move his Magnanimus Wines tasting bar and art gallery to the building at Campovida that previously housed Fetzer’s tasting room.

Magnanimus Wines has four wine labels, Ukiah Cellars and Talmage are made using sustainable practices, Old River is made organically, and Mendocino Farms is made bio-dynamically.

In the California county best known for green practices, all four labels of Magnanimus Wines are verdantly green.

The marriage of wine to place, Magnanimus to Campovida, Owsley to Anna and Gary provides a perfect synergism, the whole much greater and more pleasing than the parts.

I visited and wrote about Campovida and Magnanimus four months ago, was met by Megan Metz and tasted wines poured by Josh Metz, during a soft open coinciding with the Hopland Passport Weekend.

Here are my tasting notes from then:

2008 Ukiah Cellars Chardonnay, Beckstoffer and McDowell Vineyards, $16 – Clear, brilliant, pale gold. Apple & pear nose, tart fruit, but not aggressively tart. Light cream and vanilla apple flavors.

2006 Old River Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon, Ponderosa Vineyard (near Grass Valley in the Sierra Foothills), $19 – Nice, lush fruit. Supple and complex, approachable black berry fruit.

2006 Talmage Collection Pija Blend, Mattern Ranch, $25 – A field blend, roughly 50% Zin and 45% Petite Sirah (with a smidge, about 5% Charbono from Venturi Vineyards). Bright, lush, bursting fruit of cherry and berry, with integrated acid, oak, and tannin.

2006 Talmage Collection Syrah, Maria Vineyard, $32 – Dark purple, chewy cherry nose gives way to more full flavors of cocoa, black berry and currant.

2005 Mendocino Farms Redvine Series, Heart Arrow and Fairbairn Ranches, $25 –75% Cab, 13% Petite Syrah, and 12 % Syrah. Cab fruit is obvious. Blackberry rich. lush, juicy, soft, and delicious.

2005 Mendocino Farms Syrah, Fairbairn Ranch, $32 – Delicious burst of fruit, black berry and raspberry mix. Berry fruit medley. Lush, more than the typical Syrah.

2008 Mendocino Farms Zinfandel (Barrel Sample), Dark Horse Vineyard. – Really nice round fruit, accessible dark berry fruit. Incredible potential.

I tasted these again this week with John March, and must say that I LOVE the 2005 Mendocino Farms Redvine, it drank well then, and again now. Lush, velvety, plummy oak fruit, smoky oak, delicious. With apologies to Bambi lovers, I would love to pair this wine with venison.

I tasted a wine this week that I did not taste previously, a 2007 Mendocino Farms Grenache Rose Dark Horse Ranch. First, because it doesn’t taste like it, a warning: this little blush wine is packing nearly 16% alc by volume! The flavors include strawberry, vanilla and cream, and reminded me of commercial candy strawberry taffy. Genuinely tasty, and charming for being unique.

The Magnanimus Wines tasting bar and art gallery does indeed have art. With an intention to rotate artists every three or four months, or so, the Art of Jack Stuppin currently graces the walls of the main room. Available for purchase at prices ranging from $3,200 for a 15 x 10″ acrylic on canvas Cottonwood Abiqui to $40,000 for 44.5 x 63″ oil on canvas Summer, Elephant Mountain, Stuppin’s paintings are beautifully contained bursts of color capturing nature.

Cottonwood Abiqui, 2005

Summer, Armstrong Woods, 2010

Summer, Elephant Mountain, 2010

In an adjoining room, I found a bookcase with books going back to the Fetzer days, including books that I sold to Fetzer eight or nine years ago. It was all I could do to not “merchandise” the books for Magnanimus.

Ken Boek took me on a tour of the 13 acre organic gardens at Campovida four months ago, and while beautiful, the gardens were being brought back from years of neglect. I walked the gardens by myself this week and was stunned at the transformation, the reclamation, and by the lush bursting growth of the plants.

The gardens are overwhelmingly lush, scented powerfully with floral and vegetal notes. Apples fallen on a path make me yearn for some flour, sugar and an oven.

A wet beautifully earthy smell enveloped me, and I stopped to savor the primal sensualness of the aroma.

Birds rustled in the foliage. Spiders cast webs between branches.

I tasted the tartness of morning side blackberries and contrasted that with the fall apart over ripeness of the blackberries grown on the afternoon sun side of the same plant.

I breathed in, broke off and tasted fresh basil.

I love to cook, and ingredients matter. I was near flush with desire as I imagined the food I could create with the bounty from Campovida’s gardens.

Ken Boek will be leading a 1 1/2 hour tour of the gardens this, and every, Saturday at 1:30 pm. I can not encourage you strongly enough to take a guided tour with Ken.

I am excited beyond telling that Campovida intends to share the fruits of their gardens through a Community Supported Agriculture program at some point in the future.

Last year I wrote about my trip to Oregon, and gave a paragraph to seeing the film Julie & Julia.

That Friday night, after dinner, I went to the local drive in movie theater to see Julie and Julia, a lovely film that blends food, blogging, and a little romance. I loved this movie; but really, I’m a foodie, you’re reading my blog, and I am a huge romantic.

I have seen the movie twice since then, I just love the title characters. Amy Adams as Julie Powell and Meryl Streep as Julia Child. I don’t cry often, but this movie usually leaves me with tears running down my cheeks.

Anyway, I have seen movies outdoors at vineyards in Sonoma and Napa as part of the Wine Country Film Festival, I saw Julie & Julia outside at a drive-in, I love Campovida and a bunch of the Magnanimus Wines, so you can imagine my delight when I heard that Campovida is hosting a free outdoor movie night this Sunday with Julie & Julia.

Come out to Campovida this Sunday, September 5, 2010 to watch Julie & Julia under the wine arbor, stars and moon. The movie will be starting at sunset, about 7 p.m.-7:30 p.m., show up early, meet new friends, get comfortable. Bring a low chair, blanket, plan on dressing warm as it might get cool-cold, and don’t forget to bring a picnic dinner. Campovida is providing the place, the film, and popcorn. Magnanimus Wines will be selling wines by the glass $5-$7 or bottle $18-$25.