Making the Movie - Part 1
And the perils of becoming your subject
I never planned on becoming a winemaker. I’m a documentary filmmaker and book publisher, and it was only by happenstance that I made a film about winemaking. But you have to know the story behind making that film in order to understand the curiosity and then utter obsession that effort would eventually ignite in me about the alchemy of turning grapes into wine.
Prelude - An excerpt from my journal
June 13, 2017 - I’m on walkabout in California. Things are not good at home. Haven’t been for a while. A friend treats me to a birthday wine-tasting experience in Napa. I’ve never gone wine tasting, at least not at a real winery. In fact, I’ve never been to “wine country” before, or even seen a proper vineyard. But I like wine, and posture like I know something about it.
We begin the morning at the renowned Silver Oak Winery. My friend’s neighbor Kathleen works there so we’re treated to a VIP tour. It’s amazing, particularly when we go into the cellar with all the giant fermentation tanks—and tasting really good wine at 9:00 a.m. is a hoot! At the end of the tour I’m given a bottle of 2013 Silver Oak Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon signed by the winemaker. At around $100 it’s the nicest bottle of wine I’ve ever owned. I’ll probably never drink it.
Early lunch at the Rutherford Grill, then on to a serious tasting at Hall Winery. It’s eye-opening and simply palate-blowing! I’ve probably now drunk close to two bottles of wine.
A brief stop at Chateau Montelena, made famous for it’s ’73 Chardonnay, which won first place at the 1976 “Judgment of Paris,” putting California wines on the world map and years later inspiring the movie Bottle Shock.
Then a final, incredible tasting at Caymus, sitting out on their terrace bathed in the afterglow of sunset. I have now been drinking wine all day. But instead of making me sleepy, it feels like some kind of awakening.
I have begun to ferment…
8 months later
The opening lyrics of The Weight, blasting on my car’s stereo to keep me awake, pretty much summed it up.
I pulled into Nazareth, was feelin’ ’bout half past dead / I just need some place where I can lay my head / “Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?” / He just grinned and shook my hand, “No” was all he said
However, instead of the Nazareth, Pennsylvania (home of Martin guitars), that Robbie Robertson was singing about, I pulled into Sonoma, California. I was road-weary from the 18-hour drive from Colorado and an emotional wreck from finally calling it quits after a (mostly) wonderful 35-year marriage.
Still, after turning off Highway 121 on the outskirts of Napa onto the famed Highway 12 into Sonoma, I couldn’t suppress a tiny feeling of excitement. Vineyards, acres of vineyards, rolled away from me on either side of the road like the fields of winter wheat in my native state. The sight elicited a tired and barely audible “Well, will you look at that…” and left me a bit awestruck as the rays of the late-afternoon sun backlit row after row of grapevines, iconic in their just-pruned silhouettes, and seemingly poised to erupt into a new season.
Arriving in the small town of Sonoma, I reconnected with a friend I’d known since high school but hadn’t seen in over 40 years. Deb owned a little house in the idyllic, wine-themed burg, and generously offered me a place to stay. I was finishing up a documentary film project with several segments filmed in California and being near those locations, and closer to the film markets in LA, would certainly be advantageous. I also desperately needed to find a place of peace and solace to heal my fractured heart. I accepted.
It only took a few days exploring Sonoma and the surrounding area for the filmmaker in me to emerge. I simply couldn’t believe the visual beauty of the valley’s vineyards and how the fields turned green with new growth when the cover crops bloomed in winter—so opposite to the frozen, dead look of Colorado this time of year. My enthusiasm soon got the better of me and I announced to Deb, with great bravado, that I was going to make a big documentary on wine and winemaking in northern California. Surely the world needed to know about this place and the magic of grapes!
After only a day or two thinking about it I was backpedaling humbly. Yeah, right, as if I were the first filmmaker to ever visit wine country. There were probably hundreds of films already produced about winemaking in Napa and Sonoma. What on earth was I going to do that would be any different? I quietly ditched that idea.
But then, over the next month or so, I became more and more aware of a reoccurring scene almost everywhere I went in Sonoma. Vineyards. Tiny vineyards. Not the behemoth ones of tens of thousands of vines that butted up to the city limits. These were tiny ones, anywhere from a dozen vines to maybe a few hundred, planted in front yards, back yards, side yards, and vacant lots throughout the town. Who took care of these vineyards, and who harvested them? What did they do with the grapes? Were all these people actually making their own wine?!
And right then and there my idea for a film gelled.
Where to start?
I pitched my concept for a movie about tiny vineyards and home winemaking to Deb, this time with a little less overt ambition; “Just a short, maybe 15 or 20 minutes long...” And to my delight she responded with genuine enthusiasm.
“Do you know anyone who has one of these small vineyards,” I asked.
She remembered participating a few years back in the harvest of a boutique vineyard planted in front of a wonderful old stone barn out on Seventh Street near the edge of town. But she was pretty sure the owners had since moved away.
We drove out there anyway—just to check it out—and discovered one of the most beautiful tiny-vineyard settings in Sonoma. The old stone barn was still there, recently restored, and behind it stood a second barn, painted red and weathered to a beautiful hue. There were several tiny vineyards in front and a large one out back, along with spectacular palm, fig and olive trees, and…what’s this?…a brand-new house under construction.
No one was outside so I jumped the fence and followed the sound of hammering into the new residence. I found two workmen trying to install a heavy countertop in the kitchen and I inquired as to where I might find the owner.
After a brief conversation about my interest in the vineyard they seemed satisfied I was no threat and gave me the phone number of a guy named John Diserens. Little did I know then that Mr. Diserens and his wife, Gail, would play a profound role in the film idea I was trying to hatch.
So we had contact info for one owner of a tiny vineyard, and hopefully he’d be an enthusiastic home winemaker as well. Perhaps I could follow him around a bit and film him at his hobby. But we needed more than just one participant. I figured we should document the best eight to ten tiny vineyards in Sonoma to get a real feel for the subject.
But how to find the really good ones? Sure, there seemed to be a tiny vineyard of sorts on every other block in some places, but were they the best ones? I could certainly drive up and down every street in Sonoma and within a week or so canvas the entire town (it’s only 11,000 people). But there was one big problem: Sonoma doesn’t have any alleys. There’s no way to get a visual clue as to what might be growing in people’s backyards, and the city blocks are pretty big, with lots of room behind each house.
Then Deb had a brilliant idea. Google Earth.
With a little practice we soon came to recognize, with great accuracy, the telltale orderly rows of grapevines versus fruit and olive trees, or other row crops. Examining an entire town this way—from the virtual air—was quite a revealing exercise.
I printed up a flyer explaining the project and left it in the mailboxes of the houses adjacent to tiny vineyards I wished to consider for the film. Folks would now be able to contact me if they wanted to participate. The response was immediate and very positive.
Around this same time I happened to notice a small announcement in the local paper for a new-member-invitational meeting of the Sonoma Home Winemakers club—of all things! Perfect. I attended the meeting, pitched my idea to the current members and was received in mostly a positive manner, though maybe a little guarded. As it turned out I would have to prove my intentions to a few of these folks before they would allow the intrusion of a filmmaker, but that would come quickly.
By the end of March I had identified 20 potential vineyards with eager, engaged owners all willing to let me document their grape-growing and winemaking efforts throughout the upcoming season. A season that was only days away from beginning, as most everyone’s vines had swelling buds on the cusp of exploding into new growth. Bud break, it was aptly called, and the official start of a new vintage.
It would be one thing to simply follow these garagistes (a term originally used in France for renegade, small-lot winemakers) through the year, but I needed to somehow show certain progression in a quicker, more fluid manner.
Winemaking is the ultimate slow food and there are large gaps of time where very little happens, at least visually. If you figure that it takes at least three years from the time you first plant a vineyard to when it grows grapes you can actually harvest, and then at least another two years after you pick those grapes before the wine you make is ready to drink—it’s at least a five-year cycle!
Even following grapes picked from a mature vineyard to when they are just bottled as a young (though probably not yet drinkable) wine takes at least a year. And the vines have their own story arc that also takes that long, as they go through all their stages from bud break to winter dormancy and pruning.
How was I supposed to make a documentary like that?
I figured I could start by arranging the film in the traditional seasons of winter, spring, summer, fall, and then fast-forward through time, introducing my different participants at different points of the year doing the different things winemakers do. I could revisit a few key players multiple times until they all participated in their own harvests in a chaotic crescendo.
As for the vines? Time-lapse, baby!
Just in time I received a call back from John Diserens, the guy who owned that first tiny vineyard we looked at with the great old stone barn. I explained my idea for doing a year-long time-lapse in one of his vineyards, and in his thick Aussie accent he agreed immediately. This wasn’t exactly a little ask, as it involved sinking a ten-foot-tall 4X4-inch pressure-treated post into cement at the edge of his vineyard and mounting a waterproof metal camera housing about the size and shape of a watermelon, along with a separate solar collector, on substantial metal support bars on top of the post.
I had recently finished another documentary called Saving Places where I had worked out a lot of the kinks in long-term time-lapse photography and had used it quite successfully for documenting weeks-long progress on restoring threatened, historically significant structures in remote areas with iffy weather and no power (think historic fire tower on the top of a mountain).
But the idea of keeping one of these systems running for an entire year seemed daunting. Would the solar collector keep the batteries charged in sustained cold temperatures, and how do you keep the camera from being jostled by wind or animals, or fogged out by rain and condensation? And can a microSD card really hold thousands of hi-res images taken hourly for 365 days without being downloaded? And will the computer program you uploaded into the system’s intervalometer to do all of this… really work?
In order to hedge my bet I set up a different system in another beautiful tiny vineyard; this one owned by the current president of the Sonoma Home Winemakers club, J.W. Nickel (you’ll hear lots more about him). It had a different style of weatherproof housing and separate solar collector, and was mounted on a shorter 4X4 post sunk into cement (pictured above). I’m happy, and somewhat amazed, to report that both systems worked flawlessly for the entire year.
TECHNICAL NOTE: In John Diserens’s tiny vineyard I used a Cyclapse time-lapse system from Harbortronics with a weatherproof housing for a standard-size SLR camera, and separate solar collector. In J.W. Nickel’s vineyard I used a GoPro Hero7 Black camera and a Cam-Do time-lapse system, also with a weatherproof housing and separate solar collector.
The opening scene
I have a routine I rely on with any creative project, be it a film, a book, or some other form of media. I need to give the project a working title, and I need to develop an initial look for the content—like designing the book’s cover, or shooting the opening scene for a film—before anything else happens. That doesn’t mean these elements will stay the same until the end; far from it. Titles change and design evolves, but at least there’s that initial commitment to start you on your journey.
Tiny Vineyards was no different. The title was easy and apparent almost from day one, but the opening scene was inspired by the Scriptures, which was a little embarrassing because it involved nudity. Harmless for sure, and hardly full frontal, but nakedness nonetheless!
I don’t remember if the idea came to me in a dream, or in the shower, or hiking the Overlook trail above Sonoma (all places that seem to spawn sometimes outrageous ideas). But I decided that the opening scene to Tiny Vineyards should be a reenactment of Eve in the Garden of Eden, only she takes a bite of grapes instead of an apple. And the Garden of Eden is revealed to have once been where Sonoma—specifically J.W. Nickel’s vineyard—is today.
Shooting it was fun. I was a little nervous but Deb came along as my grip (okay, my chaperone), to hold reflectors, position lights and re-glue our cluster of grapes to the grapevine for the two or three takes it took. Our Eve model was Amber Kortney, booked through the Bay Area Models’ Guild, and she was a total pro—strolling around J.W.’s vineyard au naturel totally unabashed. The only issues that arose were a few tattoos Amber had that we couldn’t hide with makeup, and a nose ring that she couldn’t seem to remove. J.W.’s wife, Janie, a professional jewelry designer, resolved the nose-ring problem with a pair of special pliers, and the tats were eventually retouched in post by our motion-graphics maestro John Brisnehan.
It was all over in about an hour, and a re-clad Amber headed back down to the city while Deb and I giggled like two embarrassed little kids as we rehashed the shoot. The scene stood the test of time and worked very well in segue as Eve fades to white, which in turn becomes heavy fog and the start of the next scene.
Valley of the Moon
Before I could focus on the daily doings in my subject’s tiny vineyards and garage wineries I had to develop some establishing sequences about Sonoma and why it was such a great place to grow grapes and make wine. I wanted to explain about fog, where it came from and why it was important. I hoped to showcase the true spirit of the local residents and document the ritual and pomp of the town’s winemaking Zeitgeist. And I needed to celebrate the natural heritage of the area, known for decades as the Valley of the Moon. Watching a harvest moon rise over fruit-laden vineyards is indeed a breath-taking moment as the celestial light cast upon clusters of inky black grapes reflects back in a surprisingly bright, ethereal phosphorescence.
Again, I went to time-lapses to try and capture the beauty.
One particularly stunning sequence was from an all-night time-lapse of a single vine in a tiny vineyard on Sonoma Mountain as the day ended and melted into darkness only to be re-illuminated from the light of a full moon rising. As the moon crossed the sky it was partially eclipsed by trees further up the mountain, resulting in an ever-changing painting of shadow and moonlight on the grapes and leaves of the vine, while stars spun in revolving circles and jets, inbound to San Francisco, streaked across the sky (see video above).
Drone footage
When you view a large vineyard that snakes its way up and around the contours of small hills and ravines it is beautiful in its pattern and depth, especially in late-afternoon sunlight.
But a vineyard on flat land, viewed from ground level, often lacks dimension and is sometimes revealed as just a wall of grape leaves. This is even more the case with tiny vineyards that are further hidden by nearby houses, trees and other growth. To get around this problem I shot many of the tiny vineyards in the film with the use of a drone, resulting in some beautiful, unique footage.
I was an early adopter of drones and have been using them with great success for aerial photography since 2015. They pretty much eliminated the need for expensive helicopters or planes, and they can also be the perfect solution for when you need a long boom shot, or to follow action, or feature a big reveal.
The downside to drones is that they can be noisy and annoying, and they are often overused in films—ironically turning a unique perspective back into a tiresome, one-dimensional look. After a while good filmmakers learn to use them sparingly, which happened somewhat by default in Tiny Vineyards, as the town of Sonoma didn’t allow drones to be used within its city limits. Hence, I was limited to which vineyards I could fly over.
And so we begin
Other than the time-lapse cameras set up and running in John’s and J.W.’s tiny vineyards, it was April before I could begin principal photography on the film. Fortunately spring is traditionally still a pretty slow time of the year, relatively speaking, but for me there was already lots of activity that I wanted to cover.
Ken Wornick, a professional vineyard and winemaking consultant to a variety of boutique vineyard owners, and his partner, Anastacio Enriquez, were putting in a perfect tiny vineyard (90 Cabernet Sauvignon vines) for a client and gave me unlimited access to document it from start to finish. J.W. Nickel and Walt Baccala, both hands-on grape-growers, were hard at it “suckering” unwanted sprouts and spraying their tiny vineyards with a natural sulfur solution to prevent mildew, while Tiffany Baumann, a feisty, soccer-mom-ish tiny-vineyard owner with some serious winemaking chops, strong opinions on viticulture, and a very refined and unforgiving palate, held court for me amidst her front-yard vines.
Chicago transplant Les Bosche was planting new vines and bringing a neglected, hidden tiny vineyard back to life for the new owner, all the while suffering through a recent knee replacement, and mad scientist (literally!) Rick Suerth told the heart-wrenching tale of the original owner of “Larry’s Vineyard,” which he now manages. Then there was Sonoma High School’s own vineyard, tended by the AgriTechnology Academy and 4-H kids who groomed the vines for optimum grape production.
There was also the historic General Vallejo Vineyard (the general founded Sonoma in 1835 and planted one of the first vineyards in the area) with several 80-year-old vines thought to be cloned from original cuttings. It was now lovingly tended and protected by Ron Chapman, Lynn Luzzi and Ria van Ornum. This vineyard, a seemingly hexed victim of pest infestation, was stripped clean of its grapes two years ago by wild turkeys, and then again last year by deer. Everyone is holding their breath this season to see what happens.
So there was a lot going on and it just seemed to multiply as spring blended into summer, ushering in all the bottling of last year’s vintages, the various farmer’s markets, art- and wine-themed gatherings in the town square, and July 4th celebrations—including sensational fireworks, and one of the best small-town parades in the country.
This is the time of year many home winemakers entered their wines into various upcoming amateur winemaking competitions. Just watching the excitement of Dr. Don Kitt (Chief of Neurology, Neuroscience Institute CPMC in San Francisco) as he entered a bottle of Syrah from his tiny vineyard in Sonoma into the County Harvest Fair contest, and, later, the sheer satisfaction winemaker Colin Perry gleaned from winning four medals (including a double gold) in the same competition, was enough to inspire anyone to become a winemaker. Hold that thought!
And this was the beginning of high season for a couple of “older folk” vineyard stewardship groups, helmed by two longtime Sonoma residents and veteran home winemakers, Doug Ghiselin and Sal Troia. Affectionately known as the Leveroni Group and Sal’s Group, they each consisted of a half-dozen to a dozen (depending on state of health) members who tended various tiny vineyards around town, made wine from the grapes, and celebrated it all with lavish lunches and the fermented fruits of their labor.
Filming these guys (and one gal) was always fun and I tried to cover most of their outings. I even began to pitch in on their efforts whenever I could, sculpting the vines through suckering and canopy management, or thinning out young clusters of grapes, even though I was in constant fear of making a mistake. I knew nothing of viticulture, but actually getting my hands dirty was cathartic.
We only ever worked a few hours and then had long midday meals where the oldsters traded endless, good-natured trash talk fueled by bottles of homemade Pinot, Merlot, Cabernet and Zinfandel. These were country wines, dark, unctuous and unfiltered. They were poured from unlabeled, hand-corked, recycled bottles and occasionally wafted odors of hydrogen sulfide that quickly “blew off” to reveal the true nature of the varietal within as it integrated with oxygen, allowing amazing flavors and aromas to expand and breathe.
To me they were like drinking a magic potion. You can actually make this stuff yourself?!
Help, I’ve created a monster!
By midsummer it had become painfully obvious that my idea for a simple, short film was totally unrealistic. This project just seemed to have a life of its own, and as I kept meeting more and more fascinating people involved in endless aspects of viticulture and winemaking the film morphed into a full-length feature documentary.
This was not a good thing. I was a one-man band, with no crew and no budget, embarking on a project that would normally have required at least a second camera person, a sound person, a field producer and later an editor, not to mention upwards of a hundred thousand bucks to do it right. But by that point I was committed, and I geared up for a run-and-gun, almost cinéma vérité style of filmmaking.
Then a new opportunity emerged that would make it even more challenging for me to make this film—but would also become the driving force for actually getting it done.
Watch your email on February 7th for Making the Movie - Part 2
Good Stuff.. And you know me: I can come crash a drone (or other cameras) for you anytime- just give me a few weeks notice ! lol
Hello!! I live in Colombia (South America). I found the information about your movie and the tiny vineyards. I would love to see it soon... I also have a small vineyard (200 vines of Pinot Noir and Muller Thurgau). http://ciklope.blogspot.com
Congratulations for your work and greetings from Colombia.