A Year in the Vineyard with Wes Hagen, Clos Pepe

We're Having a Heatwave!

Crew Meetings and Work Checking

Today marks a very important milestone in my career as a winemaker. A reefer truck is arriving to take all 831 cases of our 2007 wine to terravant in Buellton and my brand spanking new press, crusher/destemmer and a hopper that slides over both, are arriving on a flatbed truck. This heralds our complete independence as winemakers with our own bonded facility. The last 8 crushes we've been using the facilities of Summerland, and before that, Kahn/Avelina

So now we are completely self-contained. Sure, if I have a problem or a pump breaks I have Joe Davis, Morgan Clendenen, Steve Russell, or the Curran/D'alfonso team (all in winemaking bays adjacent to ours) to help me out-but I'm really looking forward to flying solo with the team of my wife Chanda, boss Steve Pepe and intern extraordinaire, Charlie Lane. It all seems very serendipitous, which is a beautiful thing

Yesterday I spent a bit of time hanging with my wife and giving her time to do the things she needs to do before harvest-we went to the barn so I could see her ride her horse, we went to Santa Maria and bought a new washer-dryer and some fancy bullets to kill ground squirrels, we took Oliver the Italian Greyhound to PetSmart-all those things that we will have no time for when the fruit's ready to harvest.

We also had a bit of a surprise when intern Charlie arrived home around 6 pm last night with a bucket of crawfish he'd caught with some of our workers. The preparation started a bit nervously for me...I wasn't really that stoked to eat them at first, until I got a broth of onions, garlic, potatoes and peppers to a roiling boil, had flushed our wild, live little friends with salt and clean water, tossed them in and saw how beautiful and bright red they turned in the pot. With garlic-drawn butter in abundance we set upon the critters with gusto-the tail meat was as sweet as a Breton Lobster and I even sucked every head dry-what doesn't taste delicious soaked in garlic butter? I can check off another critter that lives in the Santa Rita Hills that I've now cooked and eaten-no surprise 100% of them match perfectly with either SRH pinot noir (quail, boar, dove, venison, hare, chanterelles) or Chardonnay (crawfish boiled in beer, onions and spice).

15 separate frost events really decimated the crop this year at Clos Pepe. I ran frost protection 22 nights, used over a million gallons of groundwater (I put it back), and got so depressed about seeing the vineyard burn over and over (80% of the Clos is not frost protected and has never been frosted previously) that I really considered going back to my previous career of teaching.

But now things are looking pretty good-the canopy is full and green, the fruit that is out there is clean and healthy-the fact that Clos Pepe will make any amount of wine in 2008 is a bit of a miracle of farming-and we expect to make good wine to boot!

The slightly bright side of light yields is that I will have a reduced work load during harvest. Picking should be swift, winemaking duties will be lighter than usual. We really have the chance to take it slow and careful this year and really focus on quality.

But for today, the joy of light yields and fruit still changing color is that I'm out of the office at 1:30 pm today, off to our next door neighbor, La Purisima Golf Course. Bottling's done, the fruit has some time, and it's time to celebrate a winery with empty barrels and tanks. My tour this morning bought a bunch of wine too, so I feel like I've done a day's work. Well-maybe I should update the website first. Damn Scottish work ethic-good thing it dies after only a few fingers of Scotch. I think that's irony. Not Alanis Morisette irony, mind you, but the real thing.

I guess I should say something about Pinot Noir before closing. A recent visit from a Swedish wine critic offered me some insight. He told me that his conversations with vignerons in Burgundy lead him to this conclusion: Pinot Noir should have no richness and extract in the mouth. He said the wine should be all about perfume and fruit in the nose, and the mouth should speak only of earthy nuance. Something to chew on while assessing your next bottle of Pinot Noir.

And I suppose I should add a short rant on wine critics. (Why not?) The purpose of wine, in my world, is to integrate seamlessly into a meal. There should be gestalt between the food and wine and people-all three should become a wine experience, which is always better than any wine in a vaccuum. Except wine critics judge wine outside the context of how it is used. No people, no food. It's like Car and Driver reviewing cars solely on looks, without ever cranking the engine or taking it for a test drive. Of course food and friends are hard to emulate in the assessment of hundreds of wines a month-but it fascinates me how the market is still driven by scores generated during cattle-call tastings of a hundred wines in a sitting. How's a delicate and nuanced wine going to fare in that company? Not well at all. In those circumstances concentration becomes King-big blowsy wines are scored as superior even though they will fail at table, will obfuscate terroir, will age horribly, and two glasses can kill someone behind the wheel.

I implore you to educate your own palate and support winemakers who make wines for table, and not to kowtow to the Gods of Concentration. The pendulum is swinging back to balance and nuance...it has to...where will you be when the opaque, overripe glycerin-heavy wines are considered unusable and ponderous at table? I hope you will be able to say you were in front of the curve. I can't think of another stylistic element (overripeness) that has so hamstrung the wine industry globally. We are losing our sense of place for the benefit of two or three palates.

"A critic is a one-legged man trying to teach the world to run." -George Bernard Shaw

I always say that making beer is like writing a poem while making wine is like writing a novel. It should take you to a time and place and be a narrative of flavor, passion and craft. Wine, when correctly considered, takes two to three years of my professional life. If I make a bad wine, it would be like three wasted years. That's an odd thing to say professionally-so I prefer to make good wines, and wines that last the test of time.

Pinot noir should be that time capsule that takes you back to a place and a time. And in building that time capsule, today is one of the more nervier moments: bottling. The wines have been racked, tanked, and now filtered. They are clean, happy and ready to pushed into the fancy new bottling truck and find their new home in glass with a cork stopper.

Then they go deep into a cellar at terravant in Buellton where they will spend almost 6 months at 58 degrees, and then they will be released to my ‘List' and those trusting sould who have already purchased these wines as futures.

The day will fly by in slightly nervous flashes of pallet wrap and winding hoses, cleaning tanks and checking fill levels. My wife and intern will be applying capsules in the truck and we will be throwing glass around as quick as possible-it will be about feeding the machine today: feed it empty glass, bags of very expensive cork, keep the capsules popping on the bottles, feed the roll with more new, clean white labels.

In the end some magic happens: the wine goes from filling a tank to being portable, sexy and packaged. It suddenly goes from taking space at the winery to being a concrete flavor document to be shared and celebrated.

Here we go again!

I'm sitting here at the Clos looking at the drizzly fog over the hills and dales of green pinot canopy, waiting for my filtration expert to show up and lead me through the first filtration using a shiny new cartridge filter. We were able to get all of the 2007's racked clean out of their barrels into 3 sterile tanks. The new ozone machine and the new pump performed admirably (I love all my new toys at the new totally independent production facility), and the tanks have been gassed and await today's light filtration on the pinots and the pre-filtering and then sterile filtering of the Chardonnay.

I know Chardonnay may be a bad word on a Pinot blog, but Chard in the Santa Rita Hills is a special creature. The wine shows such wonderful balance between ripeness and structure that I almost wish we could reclassify Chardonnay grown in the perfect place as a different varietal.

There's White Burgundy, there's Chablis, there's some very nice New World Chards from Sonoma, Margaret River, the Santa Rita Hills and a few more awesome climats, and then there's the commodity stuff that gives Chard a bad name. Soft, buttery, gutless. I love Chardonnays that have something to say in the nose besides what the winemaker inflicted. Real Chard has a great nose that almost hints of sweetness and richness, and then finishes bone dry with surprising acidity and mineral character.

Oh well, better get off the Chard topic before I get in trouble.

The 2007 Pinot Noir in tank is a very exciting blend. When we put it together we were quite surprised how plummy it was-bright and dense fruit character-which is made even more thrilling by the level of structure and acidity evident. I will be very interested to see how this wine tastes after a few months in bottle. We really hope we have something special there.

So today we get all the wines cleaned up a bit, playing musical wine tanks, then on Monday it goes into glass! There is something very special about seeing a wine going from a big lot in tank into a bottle with a label and a cork. It is suddenly portable, but more importantly, sharable. I always feel like a kid with a new toy when the wine's in a bottle...I'll take samples to other winemakers and restaurants and invite them to commit infanticide to share my excitement.

I'll check in with more bottling stories soon!

Wes Hagen received his viticultural and winemaking training from the University of California at Davis extension program. He is the Vineyard Manager and Winemaker for Clos Pepe Vineyards in Santa Barbara County, California, where he grows Chardonnay and Pinot Noir for a variety of wineries including his own. Wes’ Pinot Noir was recently ranked as one of the top 30 Pinots in California by Wine Spectator. Wes also covers the world of backyard vineyards for WineMaker magazine writing our “Backyard Vines” column every issue since 2000. He kicked off his “Backyard Vines” blog for winemakermag.com in September 2008 featuring his insights on growing great grapes and making great wine from homegrown grapes.