207: Benjamin Leachman - Walsh Vineyards Management and Vidi Vitis

Welcome to Inside Winemaking, your ultimate guide for professional winemaking created for industry insiders and passionate enthusiasts alike. Dive into the world of winemaking with host. Jim Duane, that's me, a Napa Valley winemaker with skin in the game, as I interview top industry professionals from California and beyond. My mission is to provide a unique, informative, and entertaining perspective on winemaking.

Each episode explores the backgrounds and expertise of winemakers, grape growers, and technical wine pros. Whether you're a novice or an expert, you'll enjoy first-hand stories and gain insights into grape growing and wine production. Join me to explore the challenges of winemaking, share valuable insights, and become part of a community of wine enthusiasts and industry professionals.

Hey folks, welcome back to Inside Winemaking. My guest on today's episode is my friend Benjamin Leechman, who works at Walsh Vineyards Management. Get into that in a second, but right now message from this episode's sponsor which is Innovant. Even as a small producer, tracking all of your winemaking matters.

It matters so much that eleven years ago, a winemaker and my friend, Ashley Dubois Lannard, decided to create better software for our industry. Software that I use at CV and recommend often to my peers. It allows you to track the growing season in the vineyard, your daily wine making in the cellar, and your costs along the way. It automates my compliance reporting too, which is a huge bonus.

And they even do case goods inventory management now. You can learn more by googling Innovent, I-N-N-O-V-I-N-T, or going straight to the website at innovent.us. Okay. I really don't have much business to get into right now. I don't have any classes or travel on offer at the moment. It's just the end of harvest right now, so I'm happy to get back into producing episodes and not squishing grape. All the show notes, everything can always be found at the website insidewinemaking dot com.

Okay. So Benjamin Leachman, who's my guest on today's episode. Ben and I worked together at C V. That's where we first met. He worked with me in 2011, 12, and 13. in both winery and the vineyard. And so we have a a lot of common shared background. So it was fun to sort of catch up on that. But also Ben has gone on and he's now working with Walsh Vineyard Management and he has his own brand, Vidi Vidas and Forgotten Union Wines.

And so this was a bunch of fun. We talked mostly about vineyard stuff, got a bit technical, but Ben also makes a bunch of wine. He likes to have hands in both operations. That's one of the things I've always liked about Ben. Anyway, I hope you will enjoy this. Thank you for listening. Here we go with Benjamin Lynchman.

Okay Ben, thank you for doing this. I'm excited to have this conversation. It's a long time coming. These are always the hardest conversations for me because we we know each other, we've worked together. So I do want to ask you to talk a little bit about your background for the benefit of people that don't know you that are listening. So let's start there and give me the the quick intro.

And how you got interested in wine and and how you got to where you are today, and then we'll take you from there. Please. I get kind of exhausted answering this question because it's not not a quick one. Currently I'm director of viticulture and uh winemaker at large at Walsh Vineyards Management. I oversee about a thousand acres in Napa. The company does more in Napa as well as Sonoma. I found that I really like working together with other hardworking people.

Like that gives me a lot of joy, a lot of of value, respect for other people, like hard workers, like like when I got to work with you at C V from twenty eleven to twenty fourteen, like We were both hard working and had a common goal and that was very fulfilling for me. And it's taken, you know, twenty two years in the wine industry to come to that. Two thousand four I was graduating with a degree in biochemistry from a liberal arts school and didn't know what I wanted to do.

My brother needed a roommate. He was getting a PhD at UC Davis, and I needed a job, so he took my resume and brought it around places he thought his younger brother should work. Which were breweries and wineries. So I got a job in a lab at a winery that at the time was the biggest estate Chardonnay producer in California. R H Phillips. It was sold multiple times while I was there, eventually to Constellation.

I'm sorry, but remind me what you were there'cause I worked there the harvest of two thousand two as a grape sand. Yeah. It was just a quick job. But were you there after? Yes. I started in You just said two thousand four, right? Two thousand and four as a they called it a harvest lab intern. Two weeks into the job they gave me a f you know, full time lab position.

And uh eventually I was assistant winemaker. Very cool. So I I helped manage the off site barrel facility. We did half a million cases of a single skew Chardonnay known as Toasted Head. that you can now find in Costco for$5.99 a bottle. It's kind of a blow, but that's what, you know, that's how I learned what Constellation was.

And it's where I got my first taste of the science behind winemaking. And the folks there, the staff were great, answered a lot of my questions, couldn't answer some other ones. So I eventually found my way back to school, got a second bachelor's in V and E at UC Davis. And I got a master's in horticulture and agronomy, which is where they put viticulture students at that time before returning to to the industry. Well, I I mean, I took the summers to do winemaking and internships.

But I didn't start back full time until C V in twenty eleven. So I hired you at C V a week after I arrived, the first of August. So you you and I were the harvest team for for that year. And then we stayed on to be the vineyard manager to take over after Mario, who was kind of a a fixture at the place. He had lived on the property and been there for for decades, kind of

built the vineyards with Bill C V, but what did you learn at C V? It's a huge like just the other end of the spectrum of of winery from R. H. Phillips. Yeah.

Well, I had a passion for making wine at home and and the physical labor of it. I liked the craft of winemaking. You know, C V was a chance to do that a on a a larger scale, but putting in to to use a lot of the technical knowledge that I'd I had. Barrels were something that I knew back and forth because of Toasted Head. So really i i you know, C V was an exploration into Cabernet Sauvignon. I wasn't a huge Cabernet Sauvignon fan.

You know, I really love the Merlot. I still love the Merlot from CB. I think it's one of the best Merlots in California. But you know, Chardonnay for what it's worth. was what we did at R. H. Phillips that really got me into wine. When I was there the I would viney sample and then I did a lot of checking bricks and temperatures in the barrel room. Mm-hmm. They would send me into the barrel room.

The HR lady would run through with the CO2 monitor, literally like open the door, run through, check that it was in the legal limit, and then run out. And she's like, Okay, now you can go. Yeah. And I remember the floors were just oozing with overspilled leaves. Was that still the case? In your era? Floor drains are really nice to have, you know. That's y if you walk into a winery that doesn't have floor drains, the the off site barrel facility didn't have floor drains.

And we had to have one of those machines that vacuums up squeegeees and vacuums. I think safety was kicked up a notch a bit at RH Phillips when I was there. Maybe after I put the uh floor grate into the floor auger. That'll make a noise. Get some attention really quick.

One of the things I thought was incredible about you taking the vineyard management position at CV was you were willing to do frost. And Art C me asked me if I was willing to do frost and I said Hell no. I will be here, I will do all your winery work, I'll do all the wine making, but I'm not A, I don't wanna live here, and B, I don't wanna spend all night Out in the cold, in the dark, I'm afraid of the dark. And I know there's coyotes and all this stuff, but I remember Mario just

talking about how I mean remember the wonder bread? He always talked about how you gotta have a a loaf of bread in the back of the truck to shove in the pipe to plug it if it's if you gotta dig up and fix a bread. Yep. He also gave me his twenty two Winchester. and told me that you never know what you're gonna find out in the dark.

Oddly enough, not the weirdest thing somebody has told me about vineyard management. I applied for a job once where they wanted the applicant to have a concealed carry permit. And I said, Are uh now, are you serious? This is some you know, one of your one of your requirements? He said, Yeah, during the fires we had people from Lake County coming down through our vineyards and, you know, we really wanted somebody there

Pack in heat. Wow. Like not not the job for me, but I could carry a twenty-two in the in the truck. I was up for the challenge of frost, and for better or for worse, I never did an overseas harvest. But I think I learned a whole lot, you know, about the entire process at C V. I was feeding cows before it was cool to do that in vineyards, right? We ran the, you know, Saturday tasting room.

But frost, boy, I remember that little sensophone, you know, starting to to ring in my ear at eleven PM thinking, Oh my gosh, I gotta get up and get wet. But you have a feel for the for the vineyard really well, you know, if you have a forty acre vineyard that you're at, you know, seven days a week, waking up, feeding the cows. seeing the work that's out there. That was an experience I wouldn't give up.

Now with vineyard management I see, you know, twenty-five of those and I don't have I don't know the vine that I pass, you know, seven times a year on a tractor and see, boy, that really needs to, you know, address. You know, I don't have that vine by vine relationship. But I know you can you can get that at some point though it's it's

What Barry Bergman told me at R. H. Phillips was Ben, being a good winemaker isn't about doing all the work yourself. It's about hiring the people you trust to do it the way you want it to be done. And I think it's the same way with, you know, vineyard management. I trust the people that I've hired to manage each each vine the way it needs to be managed. Okay. So you leave C V.

Take us through your your journey to to get to where you are now. We gotta talk about your your job at Walsh, but also your independent winemaking too. Yeah. Well, I saw something shiny while I was at C V. You know. I saw something. It was uh director of winemaking position. that didn't have have the right f fit. after all. But it looked like a really awesome position in a really cool

place. I mean just amazing, immaculate, twenty thousand square foot cellars, but just not the right fit for me. And that was a pretty quick harvest. You know, I think that when I hear somebody is applying to work at Checkerboard, my advice is, you know, I pride myself on being somebody who can work with quote unquote difficult people, but boy, I met my match.

So I I actually was on disability for six months after checkerboard. And it was tough. You know, the industry was still pretty compacted with applicants, you know, people would talk about three hundred applications. It was before AI, so people didn't know how to whi whittle those down or game'em. And I basically stayed on winejobs.com and was refreshing, you know, every hour trying to see what was out there. And actually my wife

Talked to one of her friends that got me the job eventually at Walsh. So it was uh you know, once again, like the whole nepotism side of things like Really you just have your friends found their family get you jobs. Yeah. It's like it's it's kind of Being older, you kind of look back and think, why was I so like upset about taking advantage of my connections? Like that was really dumb and really held back my, you know, my growth. Like I don't know what the ego is there that

I thought it there was something dignified about not trying to t make use of of who you know in the middle of the state. Well, I think that's just a young thing. You wanna go out and st strike on your own and you know, build by your own sweat. But Part of that is building the network and then using it. Yep. So night and day starting at Walsh versus starting at C V.

I felt like I had absolutely no impact. At C V I felt like, boy, if if I don't do this job it may not get done today, you know, like like this is dependent on me running the frost, you know, system. 'Cause it it's C V just for so people know it was You as vineyard manager and then three guys in the vineyard at that time? Four. Four, okay. Four. And then a a mechanic

slash tractor driver when he wanted to. Yeah. When he was sober. So at Walsh I got to reflect on my vineyard management at CV and understand the way a large company has to do all those tasks was significantly different than the way an estate winery has to do all those tasks.

Can you give me an example? ECPs. Oh, a requirement for Walsh. If we're gonna touch a redevelopment project, we need ECPs. Just in case people don't know what that is. Erosion control permit. In nineteen ninety three, a big part of a mountain that had been freshly ripped by a vineyard manager slid into Bell Canyon, which was the water source for Saint Hena. I believe. And that created the requirements to to monitor and control how vineyards are operated in Napa County.

And um the erosion control permit restricts you from being able to do certain things during certain times of the year and in some cases at all. So anything over a thirty percent slope is not to be developed in the vineyard. Things between five and thirty percent can have varying degrees of operations take place on it.

based on a number of factors including the soil type and the the slope. It's enforced through third parties in Napa. So erosion engineers are the enforcement, but they're also the vendor. For the the plans. So they have an odd, there's they're in a in a tight spot. The county pushes them to make it hard on the vineyards.

The vineyards don't want it to be hard, so they'll find the easiest or you know engineer to work with. There are a number of vineyards that eschew the whole process altogether. At Walsh, you know, no, we're not going to touch it if it doesn't have an ECP. I mean it's Halloween tomorrow, so late October, so I spent, you know, a third of my day working with our engineer for

the erosion control work that we're doing right now to make sure that we're fully good and signed off for this our control for this year. Well you're in the Yeah. You're in the Lake Hennessy watershed. That's a municipal watershed. Uh September fifteenth, I believe, is a cutoff for for that erosion control things, unless you get an extension. But it it's yeah, it's a lot of work, but not something that was a major focus when I was at C V.

There are other things too. At C V I felt like we always started early on one side of the block and finished late on the other, you know, a at the end with whatever practice we were doing. I mean that was on a much larger scale at Walsh. You know, we ha we would throw a crew of let's say sixteen people at something and and knock it out and be done with it and then move them somewhere else. How big is Walsh?

In terms of people. We have about a hundred and twenty-five full time what we call seniority folks that we try to give. Ten months worth of work too. During vine handwork season. So Mm late April to early July when we're doing all the shoot tucking and leafing and cluster thinning and all that good stuff. We may ramp up an additional 400 people during harvest. We have about nine Palanc. For mechanical harvest

They take care of, you know, maybe half of the harvesting that we do. So we only need well, I mean, we need we use less laborers during harvest than we do during the peak vine handwork season. We had about twenty four crews. of eight people join us for harvest. So a hundred and ninety two people I guess. How much fruit can a good crew harvest on flat land in an easy situation in a shift? Yeah.

Well, you know, if it's if it's an eight foot row and you're carrying like like six or eight tons per acre I think you can expect to do gosh, one crew. This is a math that I haven't had to work on. Usually I my math is like. You know, a person a ton for an eight hour shift. Okay, well, that's the question that way. That's fine. I would say that

When we push it in the right situation, we can probably pick that in three hours, you know. There's a there's a a calculation to fill a box, you know, is a certain amount of time. Uh a macro bin. There's no good like nomenclature for vineyards versus wineries. Like we call macro bin boxes, we call valley bins bins, you know, then the seven gallon

you know, valley bins that I call valley bins'cause I'm from the Central Valley. They call tubs. So there's there's kind of a a mismatch of of nomenclature. But we look at it that way and try to staff accordingly and a lot of what I help Walsh with is try to staff each pick with the correct amount of people. And boy, is it clone four Chardonnay or is it, you know, clone clone ninety-six?

Uh is it So clone four would be big clusters, big berries, Dijon clones, smaller clusters. Yeah. So so one you know m one cluster might be half a pound. Or it might be a tenth of a pound. And that's gonna really change the amount of speed that that a harvester is going at. But I say in general, you know, we we expect a ten ton night, boy, that maybe two crews, four hours, I guess, is how I would look at that. Okay. But That's math that that usually Excel does for me. Fair enough.

Okay. Sorry, I mean we're in harvest mode. I know, you know, you gotta get to bed so you can get up early and pick fruit in the morning. So like fruit is on the mine and these logistics are on the mine, but Tell me a little bit more about your role at Walsh and then let's talk about some of the other wines that you make independently. Well, I started as just kind of a database manager.

A lot of vineyard management companies use this software called Ag Code. It's maybe the only good one. It's a little expensive and It's sort of a equivalent to maybe AS four hundred. Not as as rudimentary. AMS is pretty low, you know. I don't know Winemaker's database as well, but it's not as I think the last time I used Winemakers database there was a lot of weird windows and pop ups and this doesn't have that that kind of graphical uh stumble, you know, that

You know, ag code is mostly just a point and click. We do all our payroll through it. I manage all the block data and the historical data in it. But that morphed that morphed into uh client relations. my history in wine making I think gave me a special skill. You know, not only can I speak a little Spanish to the farm workers, but I can speak a little winemaker to the wineries. And that was a skill that I think is still valued.

I in at my company. So I get to interact with a lot of different winemakers. I mean when I was on the winemaking side, I would go visit a winery and I felt that there was a little bit of a tension. with the you know, like maybe they were concerned I was judging them a little bit. As a vineyard guy, like they don't care. They know you're a joker. Like they're they know like it's a little bit more easy going t to visit a winemaker and discuss all their processes with them.

And try to figure out what their goals are for a specific block. Yeah, can we go into that a little bit? Like what are the questions you ask when you're trying to figure out what a winemaker needs specifically with the the grapes. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean ideally money is not part of the equation, but almost all the time it is. So budgeting is a big part of that conversation. And there becomes a tirage. Okay, well, we really like these blocks, so let's focus on what we can do in these blocks.

And then if we can't do it everywhere, at least we've got, you know, our A tiers like uh flag. And so what is it about your A tier that you'd like to improve? What's there that that we need to maintain? As you may have noticed when, you know, Mario at C V the vineyard manager stepped back. you know, I didn't go and change every, you know, rootstock decision or irrigation like I'm not a I I don't flip over the chessboard. I try to kind of ease into it.

learn how it's been done before, you know, don't try and reinvent the wheel and make little changes as you go as you learn. I think I have a lot of respect for those who came before, which is, you know, benefited me in some ways, but maybe hindered me in other ways. So finding out what they'd like their block to do for them is important. Right.

what's important to the winemaker then needs to be important to me. We need to have a shared vision for what that finish line looks like and and we go for it. And I love that vineyard management relies so much on data and experimentation. You know, it's never really focused or or drilled down on great quality outside of terms like BRICS, PH, TA. So it doesn't have all the solutions.

But I think it's a little bit more measurable than than wine quality on the winemaker's side. So it it's a little easier to make decisions for other people on the vineyard side than I think it is on the winery side.

So that's kind of where I I try to make all my decisions be rooted in, you know, good practices or or sound science and go from there. So if you were meeting a potential winemaker client And they said, okay, I've got this vineyard. I want three to five tons per acre. I want it at this ripeness.

It's cabs, so we gotta have the canopy open so we don't get green. Maybe that was a problem for them in the past. They have some like basic things they want from a wine perspective. What are the other key things that you need to talk to them about? to assess the vineyard and assess like if this is a good fit and how to manage the vineyard. That's you mean an established vineyard. Yeah. Not a villa. I think a lot of it comes from what value can I bring to the to the vineyard?

what's inherently valuable to the winemaker? Is it is it owl boxes? Do you want to have photos of owls for your social media? Is it a reduction of input? I love to work on re you know, reducing inputs in a vineyard if I can. So you're talking about tractor passes and things like that. Yeah, any any and all. I mean chemical input.

There's a lot of activity in in, you know, the regenerative, organic, sustainable world. And I think there's good things to be had, uh good discussions to be had in that space. You know, some of it I just have to trudge through and, you know, check those boxes. Okay, we we you know, we wanna be fish friendly and bee friendly and sometimes those may conflict. You know, what what are we prioritizing? The vineyard guys know how to run the vineyard.

You know, the vineyard supervisor, the field workers, they've done it on a million grapevines by this point in their their lives. I'm not gonna tell them, you know, the right way to do anything, but I want the way it ends up to be what the winemaker expects it to look like. If the winemaker says, Boy, that Cabernet's really green, we should leaf it more next year. What do you think about that? Is do I have your buy in? We're gonna go do it. I'm also uh a pesticide oh gosh, what's the DPR?

PCA pesticide pest control advisor. There it is. Thank goodness. Also a C C A, a crop. Yeah, I can't remember anything now. Uh totally it's like way past my bedtime. So there are things that I'll watch out for. I found a number of invasive species at vineyards in the past. Some of which I had to report to the county and try to get those ad addressed. But it's kind of a tough question. What else do I bring to a to a vineyard

Maybe I can phrase this better. A winemaker very often might not have a deep knowledge of viticulture. They know what they want the grapes to look like and weigh when they show up in September.

There's a lot of things obviously there's a lot of things that go into getting the fruit there. Yeah. You know, a lot of winemakers aren't necessarily thinking about buying nutrition fertilization programs and you know, uh soil amendments and and things like this and, you know, th obviously they they don't want powdery mildew or any sort of

pathogens and on their their grapevines, but there's a lot of nuance to that. I'm sort of curious, like, what's the dance with the winemaker to try and understand how they want to approach these things that maybe they're not thinking about or involved with very often. I I think the m one of the larger tasks I do is not surprise anybody. If there is a client that wants to, you know edge with powdery mildew, like I I will go down that route with them, you know?

One of my favorite quotes from Roger Bolton was, you know, if there are multiple ways to do one thing, probably doesn't matter which one you do. Like probably it all works out fine in s in various situations. So growing grapes, for me, boy, there's a a big spectrum of how to do it. I was fortunate enough to go to Davis with a wide spectrum of folks.

who are out in the world doing crazy things, trellising grapes on trees in Oregon, you know, like uh one of my friends bought Uber vines, which are thirty six inch vines. and rather than taking advantage of the extra height and planting them in a foot hole, He dug a thirty inch hole and planted the whole thing down in there.

You know? So like th there's a lot of experimentation. With the scion roots potentially Well, so with Ubervines it's all rootstock up to the very the graft union is is the very top of the ground. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So he wanted that extra rooting potential. Yeah. Take advantage of all that extra rooting potential. Okay. So so you you can do it a lot of different ways. And If I'm showing up, you know, on at harvest with, you know, half the fruit that they were expecting or twice as much of the fruit, I think that causes more issues than whether something was, you know, leafed appropriately or not. I mean there are some. really cool ways of analyzing the phenolic And the the anthocyanins

And there are tweaks you can do. We're still kind of experimenting with those and seeing if we can make what happens in the vineyard relate to what happens in the winery. But there's a little bit of a disconnect there. I think that If a client says, hey, just make this the best quality Cabernet that we can, that's my time to play a bit. and take a little bit more risk and and and and a little bit more of an extreme stance.

on grape growing, but usually there's a there's a cost implement you know, constraint that makes the whole thing boring. What is some of the things that money enables you to do such th that situation where you were describing where you want to you know, they money's not an issue. They want Super high quality. What might you do that you wouldn't do in a more constrained situation?

I think the biggest boy, the the biggest thing that I would love to have the money to do in any situation is if there are replants. you need to have a second drip line to irrigate those replants. There's so many situations where they try to shoehorn replants into an an operating vineyard and it fails every time. Like that is one investment, you know, that you can't Yeah, overload. Water uniformity, or rather uniformity in your vineyard, is exacerbated by about the time your vineyard's fifteen.

Your drip line was designed to last for ten years and you're gonna try and get another ten years out of it when it's already five years over its prime. No vineyard I've worked with has taken the step to tear out the drip line at fifteen years and replace it entirely. I think that for water savings and for wine quality and uniformity, I think that's something I'd like to get to. All right. That's pretty cool. Yeah.

So you said that you're the I forgot the actual words that you use, but special projects winemaker for Walsh. Yeah. So does that mean you're actually making some wine for Walsh? We're not a bonded winery. Yeah. Uh so we custom crush. But I have got to to custom crush for a number of clients. We f have estate winery clients as well as grower clients.

Past couple of years growers have had more fruit to deal with and don't have a winery to to try and salvage the value of their crop. So I've got a chance to to dip my toes in that a bit. So you're working with like a custom crush place and are you writing protocols for the wine making? Wow, okay, cool. Also looking at a project now, we we have had a long term relationship with Byron Cusegi making some Pinot Noir for Walsh that Walsh grows, Walsh owns.

And we're talking about when Byron retires, who's gonna make that wine, and and so I'm expecting to to make a little bit of Pinot Noir for the Walsh brand itself, which is an exciting project. Pinot's not my forte either. Um I guess this is the third, you know, cult of our reinvention, but here's a secret. Spend most of your time talking about how hard it is to make and how sensitive it is. So thin skinned. Yeah. And then you have to go to all the Pinot Noir festivals.

There's like nine of them per year. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's a big commitment. Okay. Tell me about the beginning of your own wines and brand. Yeah. Well, in twenty fifteen, um It was a really light crop year. It was a drought year. Yeah, really really tight year. one of our clients ha had seventy acres in Stag's Leap and

They picked early. Stagsleep district. Stagsleep district. Thank you for the correction. Uh or for the for the detail. This winemaker, you know, if something hit 25 bricks, he would come to me and say, Ben, we missed it! And it was not uncommon to pick twenty two and a half Cabernet. Wow. And it wasn't worn when Yarski. Yeah, so so we missed a pick. We missed a pick. And these grapes were at like twenty six and well the wine winery couldn't be bothered with it.

So there was about a ton of Stag Sleep District Cabernet that I'd farmed all year. Oh my god. That wasn't gonna get harvested. Because it was twenty six bricks.'Cause it was twenty six bricks. And, you know, it was in an area along the Napa River rife with Pears' disease. And actually I worked on

This is maybe a a side topic, but we were going to replant the area with with Andy Walker's Pierce Disease Resistant uh cultivars that I helped make the wine out of when I was at UC Davis. So these vines were gonna be torn out. They weren't going to be harvested and they had PD. So I went out there and I started checking things out. And Pierce Disease blocks the xylem of the the plant. And stops water from being able to transpire out of the leaves. So the leaves get hot.

If a grapevine is transpiring, the leaves will be cooler than ambient temperature because of the water it's transpiring. Not the case for Pierce disease affected vine. So I could touch some of these clusters and th and the clusters were noticeably hot compared to the healthy clusters. So I had to do some thinning, but I ended up with about a ton of Stag Sleep District Cabernet. And I needed a winery. And I went to you first and and you said, There's no way the C Vs will it may make it here.

So I got a I found a another friend to help me make it into wine. Walsh provided me with the equipment and the people to pick it and the delivery to the winery and that's what started my my commercial brand that I call Vidivitis. Uh there's a Latin phrase veni vitivici. I came, I saw, I conquered. Uh Vitus is the genus for grape in Latin, so Vidivitus is I saw grape with the suggestion that I conquered it. And my friends convinced me that nobody

in a restaurant would try to order Venny Vidy Vada Svichi. And I I agreed with them. I said, You're right, that's not gonna work. So it started twenty fifteen, you know, just fifty cases of stagsleet cabernet, but it was fantastic. Even though it was twenty six break. Right? That's a whole nother conversation. How how you know you can't let your opinion of when grapes should be picked

interfere with that relationship with the winemaker. Like I will never tell a winemaker when they need to pick because that that needs to be their personal decision. Yeah. I've I've done it one time. I've told uh winemaker has to own one decision in the meaning. Yeah. Sorry. In twenty twenty two during those heat waves.

I had some hillside vineyards up in the Vaca Mountain Range, uh kind of around Rector Ridge or Rector Reservoir, and I had to tell the winemaker he had to pick it. And I was like, no, you can't leave it out there anymore, like you have to. Everything was just toasted. It didn't get below like ninety at night during that heat dome that we had and it was just gonna get worse. So anyways back to Vidivitis.

I forgot to make any wine in twenty sixteen because I had my first kid. And in twenty seventeen I was consulting for a winery that was buying fruit from the UC Davis South station. They had switched vineyard managers at the South Station. They uh Mike Anderson had recently left. And Nathan Cale, maybe Nathan Cale took over and they sent me to go look at it and make sure, you know, the new guy wasn't missing anything.

So I went and started walking the South Station with their venue manager and I just said, Hey, and if you have any fruit to sell, give me a call. And whether to ingratiate himself to me or or, you know, just the stars aligning, they had a cab available from the North Experimental Station, which is surrounded by a vineyard known as Tokelon. That UCDFS doesn't have a trademark to use. I think I got it because all of their research projects were being confounded by Red Log.

Red Blotch was identified at the Oakville station in twenty eleven by one of my m UC Davis, you know, m uh masters uh acquaintances. and they had, you know, complete randomized designs, replicates of five vines each, and one of the vines would pop up with red blotch and they'd have to scrap all the statistics. So what may have been meant for experimentation was now up for sale and I started buying that fruit from twenty seventeen on.

And that's kind of the backbone of my Vidivitas brand at this point. And it's it's an amazing vineyard with a very, very pure sense of expression. Not unlike C V, that regardless of the clone of Cabernet or the vintage has a a very telling profile. It's a pretty awesome fruit to get to work with. Yeah, I mean it's probably some of the best

Oakville land for Cabernet. On top of that, some of the neighbors have made more prudent viticultural choices in the rootstocks they see they select. There's nematode pressure. O thirty nine sixteen is the major root stock that Beckstoffer uses. There is some concern that O thirty nine sixte leads to more green vegetal flavors and cabernet because it's a a subtropical species. Muscadinia is one of the parents.

And so it tends to grow more during the summer than any of the other rootstock that we use. And UC Davis doesn't use that. UC Davis uses 110R and a couple other non uh O three nine sixteen root stocks which I think makes uh impact of the grape quality. Mm most of Rutherford, right? Yeah, most of the valley floor, yeah. Yeah, wow. Yeah. So so you could say

Well, what is bringing that greenness? Is it the vigor from the valley floor or is it the O thirty nine sixteen? You know, and and and it's hard to pull those apart. Yeah. But certainly Certainly having a spot, you know, in Oakville that's not 03916 makes them really rocking grapes.

So what did you want your wine style to be? Hmm. Well, unlike CV, where you're really trying to rein in those tannins, you try and coax them out on Valley Floor Site. So did I have a style in mind? I would say that I followed a lot of the same protocols that I learned previously. Philippe Melka has a way of of making red red wine. Martha McClellan has a a different way of making you know Cabernet. I maybe picked and choos what I liked from both of those kind of styles. to see what I like. I mean

First and foremost, California born and raised, I love fruit. Like I love ripe fruit. So you're not picking a 22 bricks. No, I'm not 22 is off the off the table, you know? I remember we picked some cab franc that was 32 bricks. at a previous job and it was just ridiculous. It was like, how how is this even possible that this isn't just a pile of raisins? That's a little extreme, but I think that it's it's one of those things where if you get a really good site for grape.

You know, it's gonna make some good wine unless you really mess it up. Mm-hmm. And that's kind of what I've focused on is single vineyard, you know, unfind, unfiltered, you know, the cabernet from my Vidivias. I do a a Chardonnay from the Fire Tree Vineyard that's in the Carnero. that is becoming a brand that the Jimenez family is working on. Julian Fayard. who who maybe consulted with Philippe or worked with Philippe in twenty thirteen. Yeah. You know, met him at C V, he's the their winemaker.

Um so I get to talk with him a little bit. That's great. I'm gonna pigeonhole him into the French style of of Chardonnay making. Uh that's pretty interesting. What what do you mean by French style? What is that? Chardonnay picked, you know, twenty one bricks, I guess. Okay. Um I didn't thought it was maybe like smoking a cigarette while you stand by the press or something. So is that kind of the the portfolio now, the the Chardonnay from Carneros and the the Oakville cab?

I mean those are the those are the du cores for those two brands. Yeah. I think'cause you always have access to these these last minute opportunities. Yeah. Yeah, and I don't let those pass up, I I guess, when everything works out. Obviously I I butted over uh half an acre of Alionico and Casino Mavro to Tarrega Nacional in twenty twenty three.

in twenty twenty four those grapes weren't gonna be picked. Boy, I'd like to make some triga national. That kind of a thing, like playing around with that that kind of opportunity, it really for me is really fun.

That reminds me. So we've got a block block ten at C V planted in nineteen ninety eight. We were looking at redeveloping it recently. It's the lyre. It's it's close to the reservoir. Yeah. That's right. Luis came to me and he said, Let me cut you know, the trunk with chainsaw and I'll cut down until I see uh till I s don't see, you know, disease, whether it's U type or whatever it is. I don't see visible disease. And then I'll regraft in, you know, Cabernet back on the Cabernet.

and we'll regrow it and retry it. And the benefit of that is then by cutting the vine to the trunk we can pull out the existing trellis, which was like almost a lyre, like insufficient lyre. And you can put in a neutrellis, which we did. And I said, okay, well that's not going to work. So these these vines have all sorts of disease and whatever virus they have is going to be systemic through the plant. So even if you graft on clean buds, the virus is gonna spread.

And he really talked me into it. And so I said, okay, well, five rows. You can do five rows this year. We'll see how it goes. So that was our compromise. And we did that, and the vines look fantastic the next year. He budded in two buds per plant, and he's very specific about that. He thinks if you bud just one plant like

He went on this whole rant about how you're you're never gonna be successful when you just when you top graft with just one bud. So two buds and the canopies looked great. I mean the like the color green was just healthy again and the fruit looked good. And but obviously I can't I can't know that wine quality, you know, uh on a year basis. I said, Okay, well, five more rows next year. So we did five more rows.

Again it looked great and the the first five rows looked even better the second year. And so I said, Okay, well let's try this and N you know this and but what I'm not saying is like block ten is one of the most important blocks a C V. It's always part of the The CV cab, sometimes the founder's reserve. It's one of the two main blocks at CV. So I'm very hesitant to experiment on this block.

And so by the third year I said, okay, let's just redo the rest of the block. It looks good. We're waiting to see on wine quality. That's more of a long term project. But this year, so I had Essentially, you know, I had fruit from Top grafting done in twenty two, twenty three, and twenty four. And in tasting the fruit just on the vine, not in the wine, but tasting the fruit, I felt like the the older graphs, the the first two years, were significantly better.

Where I was not impressed with some of the fruit that had just been grafted the previous year. So I ended up fermenting those separately. I had to put the one in with another block, so I don't have it on its own, but I could tell it wasn't as high a quality. But do you think there's something about Like I'm trying to understand when you when you redevelop or when you develop a vineyard

The fruit is often not great in the first few years. Obviously the the first time you get a crop's not great. There's not a lot of leaves and canopy to cover the fruit. It's very exposed. It can be all sorts of issues. Tannins can be weird and hard. But I I thought in top grafting, well I was I didn't have a a preconceived notion, but I was wondering like how many years is this gonna take to get to like its its stasis where it's at full quality again.

And I can say that definitely that first year of fruit, which is the year after grafting, was not as good. But I'm curious and wonder if you have any thoughts, like, is there a year when you kind of expect the the vines to be rolling at full good capacity again in this situation. Yeah. Full good capacity.

I mean so yield wise or quality wise or quality. Two different yeah two different things. Yield yield was there right away. Yeah. So my my way of thinking about it is When the vine is young you're still trying to to grow out permanent structure of the vine. So if you're if you're building cordons or or arms or you know training it out, like you're you're you should be farming that for the plant and not for the grape.

I think that's why quality suffers in in the young vines. I have had the chance to work th with some really smart winemakers with a l you know, present company excluded, that that You didn't like that joke? Never mind. Okay. That have have really dug into that and there are certain situations where young vines can make very high quality wine.

I've also spoke with winemakers who say no at fifteen years the vine r changes and you really, you know, you don't need to wait as long for the grapes to ripen because it's kind of gotten through its adolescence and its hormones have have rided themselves. And now the fruit tastes good, you know, four bricks lower than than what you were picking it up before.

So to me that's still a little bit more of a a mystery, like what is the magic? What is the growing season while they're young? You know, are you scrutinizing them more when they're young than when they're old and you're chalking it up to their youth rather than the vintage? In some situations, I'm not sure. But, you know, I've made what I think is some pretty successful wine out of young vines. So and if you're a client of mine, I'll tell you that

there's no point in dropping the first harvest to the ground. Like that there are studies that show you'll never make up economically for that loss, either in year three or or whatever year of development it is. More recently I've experimented with only having one full year of development. So I'll I'll take a Ubervine or a tall vine and plant it in November. So I have I don't have any spray costs, I don't have any training that first year.

I planted in uh a tall vine in November. I don't have to worry about watering it in because these tall vines have a really steep water requirement in the first two weeks of planting. And I can get away with that planted in November as long as it's a wet winter. I have one year of establishing canes. These are going to be cane pruned tall vines. Maybe I spray it two or three times. Probably I don't do any leafing, I don't do any canopy management, I just let it grow out. The next year I get

Two and a half tons an acre. You know, and so I i it's a production block at this point. And I think that in the current condition of we need fruit yesterday, that's a nice solution. You know, it it saves water. You're not wasting a bunch on getting the vines established. But what is the quality of those grapes? Boy, they tend to be more tannic. You know, the tannins are really not in balance. They're not mature. The vines have been pushed a little bit. I see the grapes as a sink.

that balance out, you know, the source of the leaves that are that are growing. So I I wouldn't ever cut them off whether or not I'm gonna harvest it. I like having that kind of anchor on the vine. But there is something, if you're pushing a vine like that, the quality of the grapes just don't don't hit where they should in that that year of development. I think after that, you can start getting, you know, better structure, more balanced.

hormones in the plant and and expect your tannins to ripen appropriately. We redeveloped block sixteen at C V in twenty twenty three. Planted rootstock in the spring, grafted Sign in August. So we had a little bit of fruit this year, 2025. Is it Merlot? Half Merlot, half cab. And so I was going through tasting the fruit, trying to decide like I was thinking we would pick it for rose, right?'Cause I wasn't expecting much quality out of this fruit.

But I was also nervous that like th you know, these vines were not gonna have much in the way of acidity, which wasn't gonna be good for making rose. So in tasting the fruit on the run up to harvest, I decided okay, it's it's not gonna go for rose. It's it's not It just doesn't have the acid structure for that it's gonna need. And Merlot tastes good, tannins were nice, so I ended up

Harvesting that blending that with some the new malbeck planted in the same generation, and that's a nice wine. Not much of it, but that's fine. But then tasting the cab. I I haven't tasted monster tannins like that, like really harsh coarse tannins in a long time. And I said, like, there's no way I'm throwing this cab in with the Merlot or anything else. Like it's it's it's gonna ruin the other wine.

And so I was looking, trying to figure out what I was gonna do with it. Ultimately I just decided like I just gotta pick this on its own, isolate it, do its own fermentation. It's not a lot, just like a ton of fruit. The tannins and the grapes were. So rough and soft.

So coarse, like I know. I don't need to wait till this is wine. We're gonna press it off at five bricks. No, I pressed it at twelve bricks. Whoa. When I say press, I mean drain. I didn't press the grain. You didn't press at all. It was free drain. Cool. I drained it at uh eleven bricks. And I'm waiting to see what this does. But yeah, I I was just

That reminded me when you're talking about the tannin structure of of Young Cab being real rough. That was true this year. Yeah, and and you're doing it on Elkhorn, right? You've got the T post that's kinda bent up. Yeah. That's a really uh you know, that's a unique trellis and I think that leads to m much more exposure on the fruit.

So I could see the tannins being pretty I mean even worse than my situation. I mean the goal is that we have some good coverage of the canopy ultimately, but as we're developing the vine, yeah, it's really exposed. Yeah, and that's kind of a vigorous spot. I think

I think a lot of folks try and put that trellis into like lower vigor areas. Mm-hmm. And I see that failing because you're you're trying to make this mont this big vine. Yeah. I mean this block sixteen has i it's relatively flat in the C V sense of

what flat is, um, but it's fertile. Uh so I think you could you could get a big vine to support that. All right. We gotta get you in bed soon, but tell tell me about what you're looking forward to. Any special projects or wines coming down the line? Well, there's a lot of opportunity out there, a lot of really delicious fruit that I tasted through this year. I made a call on some Coombesville Merlot. Uh actually I farm a couple acres of organic head trained grenache. Up Soda Canyon.

I think I asked you a couple of questions about inventing that already. Yep, it's It's sugar dry, it's going through malolactic right now. Okay. Um, but it's still sounding pretty good. I had a bit of a scare. I think the guy who wrote it made his nine look like a four, and so it looked like it had it was stalling out when it really wasn't stalling out. So I think that was just a scare. But it'll be my first grenache.

Boy, I have two tons of that Grenache, so I have ten barrels of it. That's the equivalent of two hundred and fifty cases. Not the right time to really start, you know, a new, you know, two hundred and fifty case program of Grenache. But it'll be a challenge, you know, and Really as a as a winemaker seen what the best cab I can make

you know, from the same vineyard every year, you know, is kind of a study in and of itself, kind of like Picasso painting forty of the same paintings, you know. That's one way of exploring an art or craft. But getting to do my first Tariga, my first Grenache Zinfandel, casino Mavro, playing around with completely new, you know, colors of grapes, I think.

for me is really exciting as a as part of my career in in in the wine space. Very cool. Yeah. Okay. Tell people where they can go to find your your wines. Ooh. Well, uh, you can go to www.forgottenunionwines.com. I also made vidivitus.com redirect to the same site. There's great support for me at Acme Fine Wines in Saint Helena and over at Wine Access, so I think I can say that legally without getting in trouble with Tidehouse laws. Yep, you're fine.

No, I'm not a lawyer. Okay. Ben I know you grew up in the Central Valley. Tell me what your childhood smelled like. Ah, you know, I thought about this question a lot. So my grandmother had fake plastic lilac. flowers in her bathroom, but she had she had the scent of lilac in a spray can next to it. And so it you know, it was evocative of of lilac and and

It's more of a cooler climate, shrub or tree or whatever they want to classify it as, but it's a pretty n neat smell. I also really like rediscovering smells from my childhood. Coming across like geranium. There was a scratch and sniff book that I had as a kid and and finding geranium like, whoa, this is that smell from that book. That's a cool experience to be had. But I think the lilac. Awesome. Okay. And then Walsh Vineyard Management. I assume people could

Find it if they're search Walshville in your management. I w I was stuck at an intersection the other day coming home and there was a Walsh truck just on the side of the road and I was looking at that and I was thinking of you and then I'm looking at it, I'm like Is that the worst logo I've ever seen? What's that kind of vine is that? Yeah. No, a lot of people I mean, it's not the best head trained vine. You know? And It's like Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.

You have to know what a head trained vine looks like to to to think to even have the chance of understanding what it is. Better farmers than you are, uh graphic designers, I guess. Yeah, we did that in house. All right, Ben, anything else we need to uh mention before wrapping it up? No, just it's a pleasure. I sorry this wasn't as interesting as some of the other ones. Oh it was great. All right. Good luck with your pick tomorrow and uh the rest of harvest. Thanks, Jim. Thank you.

Alright folks, thank you very much for listening. You can find show notes for this episode and all previous at insidewinemaking.com. Don't have anything else to promote today, so we'll get right into this episode's sponsor message from Innovan. If you're still using spreadsheets or notebooks to keep track of your winemaking, I've been there. But there's a better way. Innovant makes it easy to stay on top of vineyard notes, seller work, even case goods, all in one place.

Go to innovant-in-n-o-v-in-t.us to learn more and see what it can do for your winery. Okay, be well. Catch you soon.