Ageing has has to do with the initial alcohol, the acidity. That's not true! Specifically when you think about great Burgundy Chardonnays, Rieslings, wines from the Jura, or dessert wines. I want to squash the idea that you can't age a white wine. What misconceptions about wine do you think people should forget? They’ve been selling too quickly, so I’ve increased production and every year I've organically grown in size. I’ve been able to make a traditional method sparkling out of Pinot Noir (Blanc de Noirs), but also a Brut Cuvée (blend of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay). I buy my grapes from a friend who is close to the ocean and has a long growing season. I've always admired entrepreneurs, and it's a whole new world that I wanted to understand and to learn more about owning a winery. There's not a lot of pomp and circumstance. Then we have individual designates and we want them to be as expressive of the site as possible, and best representations of the parcels. It’s not too tannic or structured, but with one sip, you think ‘that was beautiful’. Our Pinot Noir Santa Rita Hills blend are typically more approachable earlier on and still have density from dark fruits we get. We make a Chardonnay that has ageability and is not overtly buttery or oaky. So it’s a very coordinated dance between the ownership and the vineyard and production team. And with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, it's condensed to 2 months. With wine-making you have one opportunity each year. We think about the growing season, and how it affects the challenges and benefits. Year after year we aren't trying to make the same wines. There are subtle patches that we know that change the personality of individual blocks. Our wines have subtle nuances - from the appellation and the differences that it offers. The first step is to know it's made by so-and-so, but the next step is to think about the vineyard.Īt Sanford, there’s a lot of family history and dedication. I hope when people purchase a bottle of Sanford or Loubud, they think about the people and the place. It's off the beaten track, in a well-established, but a youthful region, where Sanford are original pioneers. I saw an opening at Sanford and I was gung-ho about going after it. I started looking for something in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay because my passion is in cool climate wines. I needed to learn more from a bigger team. I worked in Napa at Dalla Valle Vineyards for Naoko Dalla Valle where she was carrying on the estate, and I realised a very small winery wasn't quite where I wanted to be. From there, I traveled in South Africa for 4 months, and then came back to the US. And that was amazing - we were a young, small team, and had the energy to get a lot done. I was placed in Domaine de la Vougeraie in Nuits St. So when I finished UC Davis, I went to work in Burgundy. The oenologist there became my friend and she really encouraged me to think about where I wanted to go in winemaking, and what opportunities I could find that would really give me what I needed to take from them. Through my time at Davis, I met the right people at the right time, and I had my first internship at Schramsberg Vineyards. I’m a work-with-my-hands kind of person, so it really spoke to me. The course touched on all regions and I was really intrigued by the relationship between agriculture and crafting a product. Hildegarde Heymann) who opened my eyes to seeing the world through winemaking. I got into an intro course on viticulture and oenology, where I had an amazing South African professor (Dr. My grandmother was reading an article about women winemakers and she saw this overlap of all of my interests in how these women spoke so she encouraged me to check it out at UC Davis. I was interested in science and math (chemistry, specifically), but I also loved jazz (I played Alto Sax) and was into French culture. I had gotten into UC Davis, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I discovered winemaking as a recommendation from my grandmother. When do you think you fell in love with wine, enough to make a career of it?
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