VINTAGE 2014: Part 1 of 3

WIL FERNANDEZ
I’m the kind of guy that’ll travel for good food.

One time, a friend told me about a restaurant just two hours north of Los Angeles. Supposedly they use all fresh ingredients from local farmers, so I decided to make the drive up the coast. Turning off the Pacific Coast Highway, I came over a mountain range, and saw this huge valley of farmland and endless rolling hills.

It was like I left the world behind.

I kept wondering, “How did I not know about this place, so close to the city?” Strawberries, olives, broccoli, almonds – this place was a foodie paradise. Ahh, vineyards. I mean, I had visited tasting rooms way up in Northern California, and seen vineyards before, but something was different about the landscape here.

I started spending some time exploring Santa Barbara County, and met some winemakers, who invited me to camp out in their vineyard after a night of sipping some of their wine. When I woke up that morning, I was alone in the vineyard. I went for a walk with my dog, and I could smell the grapes. Suddenly I made that connection between wine and the place in time when it was grown.

Winemaking wasn’t the pretentious subject I thought it was. It’s farming. I felt like I might be the last wine drinker on earth to make this connection, so the next day I asked some people who visited the vineyard, “What is viticulture?”

WINERY VISITOR 1
I don’t know.

WINERY VISITOR 2
I don’t know the answer to that.

WINERY VISITOR 3
Viticulture, um.

WINERY VISITOR 4
I have no idea.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Okay, it wasn’t just me. So I turned to Kickstarter to help me explore wine farming in Santa Barbara County during the 2014 Vintage.

WES HAGEN
[Answers phone] Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Hey Wes, it’s Will. We’re at the front gate.

WES HAGEN
Awesome dude, I’m glad you’re here. Just come on in, and I’ll meet you at the ‘Y’.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Alright. See you in a bit. Hey, Wes.

WES HAGEN
Will, welcome to Clos Pepe. I think we’ve got at least another week, and a week or two weeks of protection.
It’s going to be a year where we may see that the stresses and the environmental factors will put an indelible stamp.

Part of it’ll be drama, part of it’ll be excitement, part of it, “When’s the frost going to come?” But part of it is going to be tough year tends to make very expressive wine, and if wine is supposed to be that kind of time machine that kind of speaks of the place where it’s grown, this year could be really dramatic, really cool. Pinot Noir will show everything done to it, and every climatic factor involved.

So if there’s one grape to encapsulate what Vintage 2014 means, I think watching it happen here at Clos Pepe, and with Pinot Noir in the Santa Rita Hills, is one of the more exciting places to be because we’re going to end up drinking great wine, no matter what. But what type of great wine? Is it going to be an elegant vintage? Is it going to be a rich, ripe vintage? Are the wines going to be masculine and rich and ripe, or a little more feminine and elegant?

So we’re sort of getting these starts and stops. I mean we’re almost at the end of February. We expected bud break. You know, some people were talking about January bud break. It’s going to be way too early, we’re going to have terrible frost. And then the weather’s really participated. We’ve got cold at night, the vines are just starting to think about waking up. You know, the buds are swelling, we’re seeing a little tiny bit of green in various parts of the vineyard. But the drama has already occurred in 2014. I mean everyone’s talking about, “How early are the vines going to wake up?” I guess.

And when I’m looking at the vines, I’m thinking we’ve still got some time. You know, maybe a week, maybe two weeks. But as soon as the vines start waking up and we’ve got green material in the vineyard, then it’s all about setting the frost alarm. Hits 36°, waking up in the middle of the night, turning the fans on, turning the sprinklers on, coming back in all sort of wet and cold, and drinking. Drinking a little bit of scotch, and trying to go back to sleep.

So what we’re doing, put down a lot of water so when the vines wake up, they recognize that they do have some water at root level. And I think that’s exactly what we’re going to be shooting for, is trying to get these vines waking up happy.

WIL FERNANDEZ
With the warm winter in Santa Barbara County, bud beak did happen in the next few weeks. And along with it, some winemakers began losing sleep over what nature may do to their crop.

KAREN STEINWACHS
This is my favorite spot. This is just the whole Santa Ynez Valley, and it’s… I mean right now with the new leaves, they almost look neon. Exciting and scary time of year.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Yeah. What are you scared of?

KAREN STEINWACHS
Frost. The F-word. Yep.

WIL FERNANDEZ
I haven’t heard that one. It’s good. The F-word.

KAREN STEINWACHS
It is.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Yeah.

KAREN STEINWACHS
We had two bad ones. ’08 was devastating. We usually pick about 120 tons of grapes here, and in ’08, we picked 57. You get a second crop, so they’ll grow back. What happens is, the frost will blacken the chutes, and then they’ve got to grow new leaves and new clusters and everything else, which they do, but you don’t get as much of a crop the second time around, and it’s just, it’s just not quite the same. But the survival of the fittest sometimes gives you tremendously delicious wine, and in ’08, even though we didn’t have very much, it made really good wine. Economically disastrous, but you know, from drinking the wine from ’08, they’re just, I loved them. I loved them. Just you know, the owners didn’t love it too much because you know, we’ve got to still sell the wine, and we’ve got to make a living. That’s part of it too. That’s part of sustainability. Yep.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Yeah. Nobody’s buying the wine? You’re not making another…?

KAREN STEINWACHS
I mean, I can drink a lot of it myself, but not all of it. Not all 8,000 cases.

WIL FERNANDEZ
That’s one of the perks of being in wine country: plenty of wine to drink. One night, I sat down with some of the people that I initially met; a wine farmer, a winemaker, and a winery manager (Laura Booras).

WES HAGEN
Do you think…? You were mentioning that somehow sometimes getting into the vineyard gets you away from the moments where you’re called by the phone, and the pressures of the people calling, and vendors, and bills, and all this stuff?

LAURA BOORAS
Yeah. I definitely use the vineyard as an escape, and i… I’m a farm girl at heart. Like I grew up with dirt.

KAREN STEINWACHS
I’m out there every day, and Will has seen me. I look like a cow out in the vineyard. I’m just like, when the cover crop is there, I’m chomping on fava beans and sweet peas.

LAURA BOORAS
I even chew bark. Like I love to chew little pieces of bark, just to kind of see where the vine is. I’ve been known to eat dirt.

KAREN STEINWACHS
Is that asphalt? Is that like, you know?

LAURA BOORAS
I like the smell of manure. I love chicken shit. Like I love smelling like really funky stuff in a wine. Like to me, that, I read about those. I’m like, “Oh my God. I want that. I want…”

WES HAGEN
Let’s be honest. Anything that’s on a plate that cost more than $100 smells like ass or a woman.

LAURA BOORAS
I want that. I want that.

WES HAGEN
White truffles cost £2000 a kilo because they smell like…

LAURA BOORAS
I can’t get enough.

WES HAGEN
Nature’s woman’s’ part. Right?

LAURA BOORAS
What is that saying about me, Wes?

WES HAGEN
There’s something, no. There’s something either fecal or vaginal about every great food in the world.

WIL FERNANDEZ
I feel success right now. I feel successful.

WES HAGEN
Think about like…

WIL FERNANDEZ
We’re there now. Now we’re there. Alright.

WES HAGEN
A hundred dollar cheese…

WIL FERNANDEZ
Start rolling now.

KAREN STEINWACHS
And I started it. I’m sorry.

WIL FERNANDEZ
Start rolling. Start rolling now.

WES HAGEN
What makes a hundred dollar cheese a hundred dollar cheese? Because it smells like ass. What makes truffles worth $2,000 a pound?

LAURA BOORAS
Ass.

WES HAGEN
Because it smells like ass. In the, in the hopes of a smooth transition, if not a segway, tell us about this chardonnay.

LAURA BOORAS
Well thank you, Wes. Riverbench Vineyard is on an ancient river bed, so it’s this flat slab of rock, covered in sand and a little bit of clay, were older vines planted in ’73, so the root systems are super deep. Who knows what’s going on down there? They probably hit that rock, and just go all over. And so you really do get that kind of minerality. It’s not your traditional minerality either. It’s more of that saline-like dead sea life kind of…

KAREN STEINWACHS
What kind of rocks do you have? I love rocks.

LAURA BOORAS
It’s mostly sandstone, but it’s layers of just packed shells and sea life, and you can actually… Like the rocks we have out there, you can see where the animals have died, and there’s these little pockets of just like…

KAREN STEINWACHS
So you have like fossils. Fossils and stuff.

LAURA BOORAS
Oh yea, I have some really cool like scallop shells, just packed down flat. And they’re like layered, stratified, really cool rocks.

WES HAGEN
And as it turns out, chardonnay is one of the most expressive and beautiful noble varieties on the planet. Chardonnay, to me, is the Pinot Noir of white wine.

LAURA BOORAS
It’s been interesting. When Clarissa (Nagy) came on board in 2011, that’s when, I mean she started doing things like fermenting at cooler temperatures, and she’s really into stainless steel chardonnay, so it was kind of a whole different animal to work with her. And with her bedrock, and this is one of hers, like you really do taste the vineyard. Like you taste the rock, you taste the like the river, like the salt, a little bit of salinity, so.

WES HAGEN
Let the long hair guy say the ‘stoniness’.

LAURA BOORAS
Go for it. Now you’ve got to flip your hair though.

WES HAGEN
Do a little Bruno D’Alfonso. Stoniness.

WIL FERNANDEZ
The fact is, no one knew exactly how Vintage 2014 would turn out, but you got the feeling that it was going to be a dramatic year. So follow along as I meet more people, explore Santa Barbara County vineyards, and document The Stories Behind The Vines.