Wine in the Valley

The Making of Radius 3

2008-05-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Because of their adventurousness, our wine club members provide me the great opportunity to focus less on what the typical retailer/restaurateur might need from a wine and let my wine blending imagination go a little bit off the beaten track.

Many of our members have been with us for years so I keep one eye on reproduce-ability (if members liked a particular blend in the past, I want to be able to keep the option of doing it again as long as wine quality is maintained). I also keep one eye on putting together new blends so that we don't give our long-time members a reason for being bored.

So there are two eyes: one more eye on the small lot varieties that are available from our collection of wines at any given time, one eye on the required volume of any one variety to make just enough for the club's needs; four eyes on overall quality, and three more on my responsibility to make wines that exceed our members' expectations. And so we have Radius 3. The picture below shows my work table during one blending session, and the picture below that is of my notebook which hopefully captures a little of what goes through my mind as I am putting the wines together.

After 8 different blends, No. G was the wine that best expressed itself in terms of flavor, aroma, structure, and "aliveness." In August members of our Future Release Program will receive Radius 3, a blend of Cabernet (from 3 different sites/clones), Merlot (from 2 different sites), Cabernet Franc, and Syrah.

If you want to get in on the fun, please join the club.

Quality, Critics, and Wines for Those Who Know

2008-04-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

A couple of fascinating articles and blog posts I read this morning have reverberated around in my head, knocking loose again these bedeviling personal questions.

What is Quality? How does the notion of a standard (with its implied underpinning of the "objective") of quality affect my business when the method of constructing that standard relies on mostly subjective inputs? How is the wine critic important to me and to those who love our wines?

My goal has always been to make wines from the Livermore Valley that are the equal in quality to wines made from any other appellation. The longer I make wine though, the more I come up against the ineffable, if not illusory, nature of the goal itself. In the larger world of wine, the standard for a variety's excellence is, at best, a confederation of opinions; the most important being that of the critic with the largest bullhorn at any given time. The bullhorn changes hands occasionally, and as it does, a new set of criteria for excellence seeps into the wine arena. Should our notion of quality then change too?

With experience and the coming to terms with what is really important in this adventure, the questions above become a bit more rhetorical. For the Steven Kent Winery, the only definition of quality, by necessity, has to be my own. Ultimately, every wine we release is the physical manifestation of a collection of decisions made by the Steven Kent Winery...everything from picking date to press date to yeast used to bottle chosen to artwork on label employed to how the wines are presented in our tasting rooms. The finished product is something we are proud of, that displays the maximum quality possible for that wine, that year. If we find enough people who feel that same way about it and the other wines we make, as we do, we might have a successful business.

Ultimately, I think this is the only kind of trade I want to be involved in...our efforts as a group
to make wine that hews as closely as possible to the personal vision we have of excellence in exchange for the passionate "yes" from those who respond the same way.

The real goal then becomes passionately making our wines as well as we possibly can for those wine lovers of like mind and heart. We'll leave it up to them to tell us if we've succeeded.

Child-like Awe

2008-04-10T06:17:00.000-07:00

Every year it happens. Centuries have gone by, hundreds of vintages, thousands...you know it will happen, you even know about when it will happen, but still...there's a moment (when the first buds break and infuse your dormant vineyard with a living energy) of child-like awe.

Well, here it is.

On March 26th, bud break occurred on our HRV Sangiovese block, and was followed a couple of days later by Barbera and Cabernet. Though there really isn't any first step in this circle of life (cue the music!), bud break is generally acknowledged as the beginning of the growing season. From the buds come the shoots that serve as the nutrient bearing architecture for the fruit that will set in another month or so (depending upon the variety, of course).

In the next six to seven months fruit will set, shoots become canes; we will drop unripe fruit, thin leaves and canes, take numerous fruit samples testing for acid and sugar levels; we will move wires, harvest fruit, press and ferment. All these things, we've done before; they've been done for millenia...but it starts now, and it is inspiring.

Better Driveways Make Better Wines

2008-04-09T06:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it is the little things that can have the largest and most important impact. And while the addition of a couple of thousand square feet of concrete doesn't make the world safe for democracy, it sure can improve the overall experience our guests can have.

Years of waxing and waning potholes led us to pave the entrance and part of the exit to our two tasting rooms. We hope that over the course of the next couple of years the entire roundabout will be similarly beautified.

Being a small company requires constant choices in how we spend our very limited resources. I think we finally have a handle on barrels and fruit sources (more important to the wine making process perhaps, but only a part of the entire equation), and it came time to make another quality statement.

From the very beginning, I have believed that ALL aspects of our winemaking and winetasting regimen need to be as perfect as possible to create the best possible experience. And though our wines have made a lot of friends, the entrance to our facility set the absolutely wrong tone for what was to come. Too often it takes too long to set the wrongs right. We've made a first step.

Magic in Every Bottle

2008-02-18T10:02:00.000-08:00

Mike Steinberger has an interesting post on Slate.com about his experience with the 1947 Cheval Blanc, seen by many as one of the greatest wines ever made.

I asked my father, an industry vet with 40 years of Bordeaux-drinking experience, if he had ever had this wine, and he recounts this story:

In 1969, my first trip to France with Dick Buck, Tom Keating and Sid Canal, Sid and I ended out trip in Bordeaux where he had set up some tours. We spent most of the day with Michael Broadbent at Mouton tasting 27 vintages of Mouton from the '29 on up. We left about 3PM starving, and drove to St Emilion. We were sitting outside at this little restaurant on the top of this knoll and tried to get something to eat. The restaurant was not yet open for dinner but the proprietor agreed to get us some cheese and meats. We asked for the wine list and there was a '47 Cheval. It was, however, $20 a bottle and we were on a very strict budget. After agonizing we decided , what the hell, at that setting we had to order it. In hind sight I doubt that there could have been a better time or place to have the first '47. The day, for a wine drinker, could not have been better and the '47 was very interesting. A big giant wine much like today's Cabs. but not seen back then. It was very controversial back then for it's difference.
It was never my favorite as I grew up with standards like the '45 Mouton but it was fascinating. We had the wine maybe a dozen times since that day. it was always extremely interesting, delicious and unique but never my favorite, except for that one day in St Emilion.

My dad's story of that first bottle confirms one wine-related truth (perhaps the only one!) It's rarely ever really about the wine. It's about the experience...the people you are with, the setting, the moment in time seen through a prism of green, bottle-shaped glass.

Wine has the power to evoke; like Proust's madeleine, to bring back the past. There is potential magic in every bottle of wine, then. Not just a Cheval Blanc, but the most ordinary of village wines, too.

Mushrooms and Feet...

2008-02-04T12:58:00.000-08:00

I had the good fortune recently to be invited by Kathleen Ventura and Dennis Lapuyade of Bar Cesar restaurant in Oakland to taste a selection of Burgundies for potential inclusion on their wine list. I brought along a couple of Pinots from our sister brand - La Rochelle - for kicks.

The tasting was fascinating for a couple of reasons; the most obvious of which is that I don't really anything about Old World wines. I commented to one of my partners, Phil Tagami, that the Burgundies (representing a number of Domaines and the 1991 - 2003 vintages) required a whole different vocabulary than CA and OR wines do.

My notes included comments such as mushroom custard, crab bisque, mint jelly, feet.... Even more to the point, these French Pinots have a shape to them that is very different from our own wines...much more austerity when young, a wonderful bracing acid that runs completely through the wine, and an emphasis on non-fruit aromas and flavors.

I enjoyed the wines, didn't love them, not like I love Pinot from the Santa Lucia Highlands or the Umpqua Valley of Oregon. Our wines (I mean New World here) have a vibrancy and exuberance to them that is missing from Burgundy. The French wines may have been more interesting in an intellectual sense (it's more fun than you think to separate the feet from the crabs) but they were not nearly as viscerally satisfying as the younger, more opulent Cali wines.

Thanks Dennis and Kathleen for letting me learn a lot more about the other wine world and for sharing the fantastic food at Cesar (which includes, at their Berkeley location, the greatest french fry I have ever had). BTW, my favorite Burgundy of the night was the 2001 Nuits St. Georges, Clos des Corvees Pagets, Robert Arnoux.

Purity vs. Accessibility

2008-01-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

I was at the Winery last week putting the final touches on the blend for a Grenache release for our club members later in the year (the wine will be called Symmetry, the label for which is at right and was created by Emma Alexander). I had gone into it thinking that I would probably add a bit of Syrah to the blend to round the wine out some, give it a touch more softness and a bit more fruit.

As I tasted through the 10 barrels of Grenache and picked the 7 or 8 I liked the best (I carry a little tape recorder with me and voice my notes on each barrel then transfer the info to an Excel spreadsheet...each barrel gets an A-F grade as well), the issue of varietal purity vs. a wine's accessibility made for lively conversation between me, Claude Bobba, and Brad Buehler (two winemakers at Wente Vineyards).

The 8-barrel composite blend of 100% Grenache (this is the first one we have produced) made a wonderful wine...delicious upfront notes of vanilla-tinged berry and citrus, a long, well-balanced finish. What made the wine unusual, apart from its unique fruit palette, were the quite obvious and sturdy tannins that came on like gangbusters on entry and persisted throughout the wine.

The addition of 12.5% Syrah softened the early tannins and rounded the mid-palate as I thought it would. This wine was also wonderful.

So here we are...two very different wines, both delicious; one more singular than the other, and requiring more open-mindedness perhaps...the other, still varietal, more likeable, but less interesting, maybe.

We have made our decision regarding the final blend, but I don't know if it's the right one.

What's more important to you...exposure to NEW wines that are interesting and delicious but may be a little too different or a wine that prizes comfort over differentness?

Does it Suck Getting Old?

2008-01-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

The Wine Spectator's James Laube posted a conversation (subscription needed) with Bill Harlan of Harlan Estate on his blog recently that had to do with the ageability of his wine.

Many of the commentors on the blog seemed offended that a wine as expensive as Harlan, with the kinds of ratings it has received, was not necessarily made to age.

Notwithstanding my personal feelings about the quality of the Harlan wines, the comments made me revisit the question of a wine's ageability. Below is the comment I made:

The question of ageability fascinates me. When did a wine's ability to age become so closely related to its inherent quality?
It would first seem that enough wine drinkers had to accept that the qualities of older Cabernet-based wines were "better" than those of the "younger" wines for that criterion to attain its level of importance.
Then it would seem that this group of wine drinkers would have to agree that the same criterion for quality that is appropriate for Bordeaux should be used for California Cab, which, to me, is more unlike Bordeaux than it is like it.
Bordeaux, I understand. The wines were lower in alcohol/higher in acid, more tannic, less defined by fruit than California when young so their charms needed time to be revealed...I get that.
But using a Bordeaux paradigm to qualitatively describe California doesn't seem particularly useful to me. Nor does being beholden to this arbitrary criterion for quality. There is nothing objectively fine about aged wine; this is a "truth," which like most things wine-related, is a function of fashion.
Then again, maybe I am just hopelessly obtuse and am trying to re-capture my own fleeing youth in each glass of fruit-bombish Cali Cab.

Am I hopelessly obtuse? Or on the right track? Let me know what you think.

Getting to Know You...

2008-01-14T08:54:00.000-08:00

My greatest fantasy, still, is riding the 1 line in New York and seeing someone reading my novel and being able to ask if she liked it.

At this rate the book will be done in about 25 years and I'll be too old to get down the subway stairs, but I do have the honor of learning pretty immediately whether we are doing a good wine job or not.

This past Saturday we released Fiore della Vita, an estate-grown Barbera to members of our Collector's Circle wine club at a party to commemorate the wine's debut. 177 club members joined us and I got a lot of valuable feedback.

Our Club members are truly the foundation of our business. For a small winery like ours, there is too little love in the wholesale end of the business...and I mean that literally. One of the most valuable things we can know is if we are creating the right kind of experience for those most enthusiastic about our wines. In the "broad market" the only real indication of "success" is getting another order from your distributor, but even then, you don't have any real sense of how the wine drinker feels about the wine...what pleasure, if any, it gave him.

Every day our club members and guests to the winery teach us more. Every day we get the opportunity to take the bad with the good, face-to-face...and do better the next time. And in a business setting, where real connections are hard to make, this is best kind of interaction we can have.

So, keep it up, make us better...let us know how we can provide an extraordinary experience for you.

Death of the Twinkly Grapes

2008-01-05T15:45:00.000-08:00

Twinkly Grapes
Aug. 2005 - Jan. 2007

January 4, 2008 marked the end of the twinkly grapes out on the Steven Kent Patio. Done in by wind gusts that neared 50 mph, our hardy twinkly grape lights twinkle no more. Twinkly grape lights...we hardly know ye...

The first major storm of the year dumped 2.6 inches of rain from January 3 -5 on our estate vineyard, uprooted trees, and destroyed the tent that covers our patio. Livermore averages about 11 inches of rain a year (our weather station recorded a total of 5.36 inches in our vineyard), getting half of last year's rain in one three-day period is pretty awesome (in the inspiring awe sense).

In a larger sense, the change agents are everywhere. In this case it was Mother Nature who caring not a whit about our goings-on, had an action plan of her own. It might be the economy, changing wine tastes, a bad review...a good review; whatever the cause, for small businesses like ours, limberness in the face of mutability is no vice.

Honest Right Back Atcha!

2008-01-03T14:00:00.000-08:00

Probably, this should have been part of our first post...but if we do this blog-thing right, we will be able to give you more clarity about the wine-wise progress of our Valley, some of the behind-the-cellar-door stuff, some of what makes this such a great biz; and you'll tell us when it's good, and -more importantly- when it's not. And if we do it even better...this thing will morph into something completely different and even more interesting.

So, let us know what you think; what you like and don't like about our wines, wine in general, your experience at Steven Kent...whatever's on your mind. We'll be honest right back atcha!

What It has to do with Wine

2008-01-03T13:22:00.000-08:00

In December, among other things, we sold the following items from our Tasting Room...

Bling Tee - Long Sleeve (1)
Bling Hat (1)
Hot choc-Creamy (1)
New Tree Big Bar (1)

I don't have any idea what a "New Tree Big Bar" does or what flavors it comes in or what need it fills...and that's the point. It is really hard to predict what part of what we do is going to resonate. Everyone's taste is different...everyone will get something a little different from his or her experience here at the Winery. Though we may have intended a right turn and got a left instead, hopefully you get out of it something a little bit better or a little more meaningful than the right turn down the road.

By the way, this is a "New Tree Big Bar" ------------->
...yummy!

The Perfect Pillow

2007-12-30T12:37:00.000-08:00

Just saw a great movie last night, an Irish film called Once. Small budget, made with great passion, and if you like music...incredible soundtrack. The acting was done by amateurs (both leads are musicians), there were no special effects, the performances were not actor-ly (but just what was called for!). What struck me right about the movie, and I felt this way about Lost in Translation the first time I saw it, was the absolute perfection of the tone of the movie.

There was a feeling about the movie that was just so authentic and natural and proportionate that to tweak any part of it would have been like drawing a mole on the Mona Lisa. Knowing when to leave well enough alone is one of the hardest things, though.

I fret a lot about this viz. the tasting experience we try to give our guests. It's not just the wine or just the staff or just the sign out front or the glassware...it is ALL of these things in a balanced, appropriate mix.

We strive to have just the right pillow in the chair (in a figurative sense, of course) for everyone who comes to visit. We don't want any discordant tone to interfere with the stories we are trying to tell through the wines we make.

What is most important to you in a Tasting Room experience? What is your perfect pillow?

What is the Price of Acceptance?

2007-12-28T17:25:00.000-08:00

With apologies to Seth Godin, who is much better at this than I am, his recent post inspired my New Year's promise:

If you work in the wine business and read and believe what the major wine press says about the Livermore Valley, it would be easy to be discouraged. It would be comforting, in a perverse way, to accept that we will always be second-rate. It would allow us to stop competing with the larger world, to only pick off the low-lying fruit that are the folks who already know and are satisfied with what they have right outside their door. We wouldn't have to worry about trying to be as good as Napa or Bordeaux; we would be comfortable being cute...a local wine region whose grasp can't exceed its reach because it doesn't stretch for anything.

We have always thought of our Valley differently. Knowing what we know about the conditions needed to grow great fruit and having a firm idea about what great wine is (hey, our palate is only ours!), we have always known that greatness is possible in the Livermore Valley. It will take a lot of effort certainly. It will take a long time, too. It will take dedication to farming for quality, not for a small profit. It will take the desire to compete with the big boys...the need to prove to everyone that all our ascendancy took was time because we put into place all the other vital things.

It will also take not just an acceptance of risk, but a welcoming of it. We are a podunk wine region in most afficionados' eyes; we must push the envelope and stretch our arms out farther; we must strive to make statements, to make foolish(?) boasts and to work really hard to back them up. The only true glory comes in hanging your ass out over the line and seeing it pay off. This is what the Livermore Valley really could be. We know it...and welcome it.

That ass you see hanging out will be Steven Kent's.

Wine For Those Who Know

2007-12-27T14:12:00.000-08:00

We have never thought of ourselves as outsiders (outside of Napa, in this case), but rather as missionaries. We know what kind of quality our home is capable of delivering, and we figure if we tell the story often and well enough, our audience will eventually find us.

If you are competing against the best in the world, there comes a time when you have to put it in the glass. The "underdog" points you get from producing wine in the Livermore Valley get used up quickly when the discussion turns to world-class Cabernet.

January 1, 2008 marks the date that our career-long aspirations finally run head-on into reality. On the first day of the New Year, our finest Cabernets to date will become available to order.

Our Premier Cabernet Collection represents our highest winemaking achievement of the vintage...2006 yielded six spectacular, singular examples of Cab...all sharing a wonderful depth of flavor and ageability, and each made in extremely small quantities.

I'll be blogging about the genesis of this program, what goes into our evaluation of the wines, and why we think they are worthy of passion, as we move forward.

Piemonte in the Livemore Valley

2007-12-19T12:29:00.001-08:00

Exciting and frustrating at the same time was the New World's predilection to plant everything in the same place. A whole new world of potential offerings was available, but you didn't know what you were going to get for several vintages, and a lot of expenditure.

At Steven Kent (and before that under the Ivan Tamas name), we have been producing California-Italian varietals since 1991. Though Trebbiano has gone by the way side, Barbera has thrived.

From our 1.5 acre HRV vineyard in Livermore, we produce a Barbera (grown mostly in the Piemonte region of Italy) for one of our wine clubs that exudes rich aromas of black plum, leather, soy, and subtle citrus notes. And while 5 vintages isn't long history, there is no reason to believe that the grape isn't suited just right for our Region 3 climate.

Called Fiore della Vita in honor of the artwork (above right) created by Thom Roberts (the handsome guy, also above right) one of our Barrel Room staffers, this wine is available to taste for the next 60 days in our Livermore tasting room.

Size Matters?

2007-12-18T08:17:00.000-08:00

This article from the San Francisco Chronicle points out the difficulty in storing half-drunk bottles of wine.

Maybe the answer is a smaller bottle?

All Wine is Local

2007-12-17T12:58:00.000-08:00

A story in the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat yesterday caught my eye. The largest wine company in the world, Constellation Brands just bought 5 more wineries for nearly $600 million. This same company, which produces 110 million cases of wine a year, bought the Mondavi group of brands a year or so ago for $1.5 billion.

While the gigantic getting more gigantic makes selling wine to stores and restaurants much harder for wineries like Steven Kent and La Rochelle, it underscores again what we have come to learn...the best part of wine is local.

Being local is not the same thing as being close to home, not in the wine business. In the last several years, with the Supreme Court decision in 2005, being local means being able to send a bit more of the winery across more state lines to those who want our small-production wines. It also means, at least for us, that most new relationships we create come about face-to-face.

You come to the Winery, taste our wines, hopefully like them and the experience we shared together, and we get to continue to tell our story to you through each new release. This way of sharing can't be done by the mega-wineries.

All wineries lost shelf space today to Constellation, but a real and true and LOCAL relationship just got that much harder for them.

Past, Present, Future

2007-12-17T12:16:00.000-08:00

For those who drink wine regularly it seems as if California wine, in its present state of world-class quality, has been around forever. The truth is, though, that it wasn't really until the late 1970s, early 1980s that California wine earned the "but, of course" status when high quality was the issue. And California wine as an industry is only nearing its 100th birthday. Compared to Europe, our wine industry and culture are still in their infancy.

A few decades can seem like forever and when a strong moment of inertia meets a critical ossification of thought, a sense of inevitability is the end product. All truthful winery owners (me included) would love to have the built-in "Napa premium" that our neighbors to the north enjoy when it comes to the critics and to the wine shop owners. Plenty of great wine is made in Napa, and no region has done anywhere near as good a job at telling its story than them.

And while this is true, it does not mean anything else but that. The fact is that there are more good wine regions than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. The difference is that they are in the process of living up to their natural gifts and being discovered.

My appellation - the Livermore Valley - is just this sort of area. One of the oldest wine growing regions in California, blessed with warm days and cool evenings (there's your ripe fruit and acid retention), a wide variety of soil types, a bunch of micro-climates, etc. All the things that one needs to grow great fruit. What Livermore is discovering now is the real hard work of making really good wine..the slavish attention to detail in the vineyards, the farming for small yields, the buying of the best barrels, etc. This is a work in progress, and the progress is picking up pace every year.

Napa Valley produces great wine. And it will never produce anything surprising or exciting again. It has had its time. Areas like Livermore, Paso Robles, Santa Lucia Highlands, these are the areas where the excitement will be created. Our growing number of visitors each year are getting it. Some day the wine press may too.