Viva la Garagiste!
Evoking the French Résistance, a shocking revelation, harbingers of a perfect season to come, dinosaur wine from ancient vines
I sat in a garage and invented the future. ~ Steve Jobs
Derogatory term or backhanded compliment?
From the Garagiste Festival web site: Garagistes (garage-east) is a term originally used in the Bordeaux region of France to denigrate renegade small-lot wine makers, sometimes working in their “garages” (anything considered not a chateau), who refused to follow the “rules,” and is now a full-fledged movement responsible for making some of the best wine in the world.
It was, quite honestly, everything it was billed to be. Which was good, as I had shelled out 375 smackers to be one of 30 or so participants pouring wine all afternoon to a steady stream of wine aficionados. I spent another 100 clams to have an ad in the official program because, well, I didn’t want anything standing in the way of me and success. As it happened, I . . . or more accurately my unfettered ambition to get my wines in front of folks, almost got in the way. More on that in a minute.
To participate in a Garagiste Festival you have to be a commercial winemaker but you can’t be producing more than 1,500 cases per year. And you have to sign up for a specific event pretty early as they’ve become quite popular with artisan producers. And I can see why. The moment you register you are sent a bunch of no-nonsense information and options for making the most of your Garagiste experience, and their highly experience staff seem to genuinely have your success in mind, gathering information on your brand and getting it integrated into their marketing materials and web site. Here’s a blog post they did on me several weeks before the Sonoma event.
I was stoked about this event as it seemed like perfect timing. We were bottling our 2021 Vintage on March 30th, and the Sonoma Garagiste Festival was on April 29th. Exactly a month to get everything lined up, which we did. I designed and placed an ad in the event program, I designed and printed table placards with QR codes, and 4”X5" take-a-way cards with a great photo of our wines, our web site URL in big type, and a mission statement and invitation to participate in our advance wine sale. I even bought three little metal wine bottle holders for displaying your wines on a table. As for everything else we needed, table, tablecloth, signage, ice bucket, ice, spit bucket—the festival provided that.
We were set!
Yet, in hindsight, I might have made the observation that maybe, just maybe, this 2021 Vintage might still be a bit young—at just one month in the bottle—to be pouring at a major public tasting. But as you know from my post a couple of weeks ago, I had tasted everything shortly after bottling and although the two red wines were “a bit tight” I was sure that could be overcome by opening the tasting bottles a half-hour or so before pouring, or even decanting them or using a bubbler. I was determined to go for it.
Festival day finally arrived and I was lit up with excitement. After literally years of rigorous education, trial and error winemaking, onerous licensing requirements, and enough money disappearing into the ether to give one pause, I was finally going to present my commercial wines to the public—and ostensibly get real feedback in return.
I arrived at the Veteran’s Memorial Building (where the festival was being held) a bit early, and already the place was abuzz. I found my spot amongst the participants tables and set up my display. At 30 minutes before the already gathering line of attendees would be let in I opened a bottle of each of my three wines to let them “breathe” a little, and “open up.” I then just stood there for a moment waiting for Deb to arrive, and tried to engage with the nervous anticipation building in my body.
That exercise lasted for about a New York minute, when my attention deserted to the open bottle of Chardonnay I had placed in the ice bucket, and the two bottles of red wine standing beside it. “Oh, what the hell . . .” I murmured as I poured myself a decent lug of the Chardonnay. I might as well taste them all just to make sure.
The Chardonnay was exquisite. Honestly. The nose was pure perfume, and the wine released in my mouth with a refreshing burst of bright acidity wrapping fresh pear, melon and zest of lime into a long finish of soft creaminess with just a hint of butter. Holy shit! This was amazing. It was just what I had wanted to make, only way better, and absolutely ready to drink.
I couldn’t wait to taste the two reds, but I took the time to rinse my glass and then poured a more reasonable one ounce “taste”—what I would be pouring for everyone that afternoon—of my Requisite Red Blend. I swirled it seductively in my glass noting its dark claret color and ample legs. I exhaled fully and sunk my nose into the glass ready to breathe in Nirvana.
Nothing.
And I do mean nothing. Absolutely no wine aromatics at all. It was like dead air on a radio station when something goes wrong, or the guy spinning the LPs falls asleep right before the end of the record. No music, no aroma. All I smelled was glass.
I was gobsmacked, shocked. Bottle-shocked, I would come to find out. My big, beautiful Red Blend was nowhere to be found. Same thing with my Malbec. Both wines actually tasted okay. Tight for sure, but they at least had some flavor if you went ahead and tasted them. But imagine eating a slice of pepperoni pizza, or a salad with blue cheese, or a bowl of clam chowder without any aroma. If you were blindfolded, would you even know what those were?
It turns out both of my red wines were suffering from bottle shock. After 18 months of relative equilibrium in the barrel they had quite literally been shocked apart during the rigors of bottling, being pumped through coarse filtration, and subjected to the oxygen uptake, jostling and filling of the bottling line. It’s common, it happens to almost every wine, and it takes most of them anywhere from four to ten weeks to recover. But recover they will (at least that’s what my wine guru Ken Wornick had “absolutely” assured me), sometimes reconfiguring into something even better than before. But they can’t be expected to do all of this on the totally unreasonable schedule demanded by some winemaking newbie intent on displaying his highly questionable enological chops before their time.
There are several reasons wineries don’t release their wines right after bottling, and I was getting firsthand experience of just what one of those was. I had also forgotten (ignored?) that most truthful tenet of winemaking that I myself had realized right here in this very newsletter just a week prior, and that is to wait.
Fortunately, the Chardonnay carried the day, which is interesting given that it went through even greater bottle shock being sterile-filtered in line. But it seems to have recovered quicker, and folks were definitely captivated by the aroma and taste. A well-known broker even called back this week wishing to place an order.
But I’ll admit I winced every time I poured someone a taste of my Red Blend, or my Malbec, and they lifted their glass to their nose for a whiff. Once they finally tasted the wine there was usually a pretty good response, but I’m sure more than one attendee walked away from our table muttering, “What the hell is wrong with my nose?”
And while the preponderance of attendees was made up of just everyday common folk with an adventurous spirit about wine, there were some real experts scattered amongst the crowd. I was both humbled and mollified when one of them would come up to our table, smell (or not smell!) and taste the wines, and then tell me all about bottle shock and what was going on with my wine. However, they usually ended their critique with a very positive, “Yeah, but I can tell this is going to be a great wine when it finally gets itself in order.” Thank you for that!
All in all it was a great experience, the attendees were engaged and interested, our wines were a hit . . . okay, sort of. Folks loved our labels and the stories about our wines, and the Tiny Vineyards Wine Company got its first bit of public exposure. The only negative thing I can say about the Garagiste Festival is that, due to state liquor laws, we were not allowed to sell any wine at the event, so capturing an actual customer was difficult. We literally had several different people wanting to buy wine right there, credit card in hand, and we had to refuse. Hopefully we’ll be able to convince them to visit our web site and buy—but you know, a bird in the hand . . . and all that.
Yet, on a very positive and reaffirming note, the night before last I opened the first bottle of Red Blend since the Garagiste Festival (I know, I know, it was only a week ago. But I need confirmation here!). As the cork slid out of the bottle the air filled with the fruity nectar of strawberry and dark cherry. Praise every god in the heavens (and thank you Ken, you were right), my wine is back!
And, as I drank the remainder of that bottle last night, while I typed these words, the deeply satisfying taste of that remarkable wine I have been in full communion with for almost 20 months reminded me that it has all been so wonderfully worthwhile.
It's sucker time again, I'm going to leaf ya . . .
We’ve had an amazing spring, with enough rainfall to quench our years-long drought, and cold enough temperatures to shock everything back into a “normal” schedule. Bud break was across the board nearly a month later than it has been in the “new normal,” meaning it was back to the way it used to be in the “old normal” . . . oh, you know what I mean.
And with all that moisture supercharging the ground, the moment the sun finally came out for more than a few days and temperatures actually climbed up near 80 degrees everything exploded into growth. And there is no collection of vines amongst Sonoma vineyards that exemplifies growth more than Bobbie’s ultra-vigorous Malbec vineyard with its dinner-plate-size leaves and canes that have been known to grow twice as high as an elephant’s eye way before the sugar corn is even worthy of that name.
While Bobbie’s vineyard may be an anomaly under any conditions, there is growing speculation and excitement that 2023 is on its way to being an exceptional grape growing year—and the preponderance of flower clusters—soon to be baby grapes—on vines throughout the valley supports that prediction. Of course, we’ve still got to navigate four months of summer heat and fire season, but what if . . .
Dinosaur wine from ancient vines
In the last couple of years I’ve started making wine for private clients, often from grapes that they have grown in their own vineyards. It’s one of the more enjoyable things to do in my commercial winemaking endeavors, as it forges partnerships of like-minded folks all after the same righteous result. One of those is the whacky continuous single row vineyard owned by Amit Garg and Preeti Suckerkar that grows around the perimeter of Casa Sol, an AirB&B property they have developed off of Bennett Valley Road.
The vineyard consists of truly ancient Grenache and Syrah vines that I’ve been working to rehabilitate, interspersed with new Syrah and Mourvèdre vines that we planted to fill in all the places where the old vines have died. Subsequently the vineyard is way out of balance with different vines coming into ripeness as much as several weeks apart from each other. To get around that, last fall we field-picked everything and made a more forgiving Rosé. I’ve written about it a few times before, most recently here.
Besides being an accomplished radiologist, MD and PhD at Stanford Medicine and UCSF Health, Preeti is a self-avowed dinosaur freak. So when she and Amit came to pick up their newly bottled 2022 vintage of Rosé yesterday, I surprised her with a dinosaur label that I had designed using a piece of tattoo art that I then had printed on clear plastic to appear as though the T-Rex was coming right out of the bottle.
Preeti literally squealed with pleasure at the label, and Amit let out that satisfied snarl a T-Rex would most likely make. I only hope they find the wine as agreeable!
An incredible read from start to finish! Thanks :)
As high as an elephant’s eye?
I’ve got a beautiful feelin’…….