W
inemaking from the Ground Up
Nicholas O'Connell talks with author and viticulturist, Mike Medberry, about his new book,
Crush: My Year as an Apprentice Winemaker.
The book provides an exclusive, behind-the-scenes look at the daily operations of some of the world's most prestigious wineries, including Washington's Betz and DeLille Cellars, California's Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Cain Vineyard and Winery, Opus One Winery and Oregon's Beaux Frères, Soter Vineyard and Ken Wright Cellars. It reveals a side of the business never fully explored elsewhere at a time of record interest in wine.
Crush is the tale of my apprenticeship at Betz, DeLille Cellars, and other great wineries on the West Coast. Like Bianca Bosker's bestselling
Cork Dork, and the movie
Bottle Shock, Crush will provide an insider's view of the wine world, the intense competition for the best grapes, the bizarre lingo of the tasting rooms (barnyard, leather, wet dog, cat-pee), and the visionary winemakers who magically transform grapes into high end wine. It's a world that includes not only romance and refinement but long hours, back-breaking labor, mind-numbing repetition, and fanatical dedication to quality that resulted in the 1973 Stag's Leap Wine Cellars Cabernet that won the best red wine at the 1976 Judgment of Paris and transformed the U.S. wine industry.
Unlike
Cork Dork and
Bottle Shock, my quest to master the art of winemaking begins in my garage, bringing a hands-on, approachable angle to a story that includes conversations with some of the world's most gifted vintners, including Warren Winiarski, former owner of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.
What inspired you to write Crush?
I really wanted to tell the full story of wine. Wine is perceived as a fairytale land where everybody's wearing white pants with no wine stains, sipping wine on the deck, no work being done. Everything is just fabulous, and the wine seems to come out of nowhere. I knew this wasn't the full picture.
As I started making wine myself, I found the process fascinating, from growing the grapes to crushing and fermenting them to getting the wine out to people. That's what inspired me to write the book. I've written a lot about the glamorous world of winemaking, but I wanted to get at the full process. That was my motivation.
What is the main thesis in Crush?
It's the story of my search to make the best wine possible. As I was saying, I had this illusion early on that winemaking was all about wonderful moments and everybody enjoying themselves. But it's really hard, physical labor. The book is a quest narrative about my search to make the best wine possible given my particular circumstances and what I learned along the way. There were all kinds of steps, learning from famous wine makers and then experimenting by trial and error myself. The thesis is there's more to wine than we think.
How did the book grow out of your winemaking?
I started making beer with my friend, Tom Remmers, who ended up becoming my winemaking partner. Fermenting is magical. The transformation from barley into beer or from grapes into wine is just amazing. I really got caught up with that. I ended up making wine with some Italian soccer friends. They had a particular way of doing it. They didn't use cultured yeast, for example. It was very fun and very communal, but I wanted to get the best grapes and move in a more focused direction. As I did, I thought, "This is a great story and nobody's really ever written it." There were pieces here and there, but nobody has revealed the actual process, the unvarnished aspect of it. That's not to say it's bad, it's just that it's not the glamorous view. It's the real view. And if you love that aspect, it qualifies you to make wine because you have to love every part of the process to do it well.
When did you first start writing about wine?
I've written about it for decades. I've been interested in stuff like this for most of my life. When I was a kid, I thought I might have a career as a produce broker because I've always really noticed the taste of fruit. I thought, "This is something that I'd like to do." Eventually that transferred to wine as there are so many flavors in it. That's how I got started.
I was a newspaper reporter in the early 1980s. Then I began writing about wine for magazines, which gave me an entrée into the world of wine that I could not have obtained in any other way. As a writer, people were willing to talk with me. I've always taken advantage of that because I have a lot of curiosity. So that's when I started thinking, "This is a great story." I wanted to go beyond writing magazine articles and write a book about it.
How was writing Crush different from your other writing?
It's not that different from the other stuff I've done but it's more focused on this one subject, wine, and is a book-length narrative. I'd never done that in nonfiction before.
Is it a kind of memoir?
Yes, that's an aspect of it. The book is organized around the wine year. It starts with the crush and it ends with the bottling party. But I wanted it to go deeper than that. I wanted more about the history and my experience of traveling to France and volunteering at these wineries up and down the West Coast. If you know this stuff, it makes the experience of drinking it much better. I wanted to give a full accounting of all this, which included memoir, profiles of famous wine makers, and the description of the full experience.
After all this travel and work, what's your favorite wine?
I don't really have a favorite wine, but I really like wine that's an expression of place. I like wine that tastes like Napa or tastes like Red Mountain and is interpreted by a particular wine maker. One of the people I just adored was the late Warren Winiarski, of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, who won The Judgment of Paris. His wine is fabulous but different from his protégé Michael Silacci of Opus One Winery or Chris Howell of Cain Vineyard and Winery. I really love wine that's an expression of place with the added element—and I think of this as the definition of terroir—of the personality of the wine maker. What does the winemaker like? What kind of stamp is he or she trying to put on those grapes?
How did you choose the winemakers to work with and write about?
I chose carefully because there are so many wine makers doing great things, but I wanted certain people like Warren Winiarski, who was such an outstanding historical figure for the Napa Valley. And I wanted to choose people whose wines I loved like Michael Silacci and Chris Howell, Mike and Mikey Etzel, Ken Wright, Tony Soter, David Lake, Chris Upchurch, Bob Betz, Chris and Gary Figgins, and others. And I needed them to grant me access because it's not easy to get access to some wineries. Some people said no.
What have these winemakers taught you?
They've taught me so much. Somebody like Warren started out as a professor of political science, and that guided his winemaking. Above all, he taught me about the pursuit of excellence. I don't think people realize how talented these people are and how hard they work. Chris Upchurch at DeLille Cellars and David Lake at Columbia Winery were some of the giants of the industry. Tony Soter was a star in Napa and now he's a star in Oregon. I learned from their winemaking and their character and hard work. These are important lessons. If you want to succeed, you don't just throw a big party. You've got to be watching the wine every step of the way and then you have to sell it.
One of my favorite interviews was with the late Robert Mondavi. He was a freight train of a PR guy who really made a name for the Napa Valley. I learned so much from all these folks.
What did they teach you that goes into your wine?
First, you have to get great fruit. You can be the best maker skill wise and produce mediocre wine if you don't get great fruit. Part of what I've been looking to do throughout was to get better and better fruit. Fortunately, Ciel du Cheval, a premier vineyard in Washington state, agreed to sell me fruit every year. I've learned you have to get great fruit to make great wine.
And I've also learned you have to pay great attention to each part of the wine-making process. We hired the oenologist Erica Orr to help us with fermentation because she's such a knowledgeable person. We just took our juice sample to her for advice about how to ferment this year's wine. So that's another thing that I've learned: you have to rely on talented people to help you. These are just a few of the lessons I've learned.
What's your next project?
I'll keep writing about wine, but I'm also writing a novel about a Jesuit high school where there's some sexual misconduct, a how-to-write book called
True Stories, and a sequel to my novel
The Storms of Denali. I'm always working on something and I just wait to see how the next book falls into place.
