What I see in the history of the industry is that the Americans started with the concept of varietal wines in order to kind of try to get attention from the French. If you didn't make wine in France, it was not wine. And then when the reputation was building the new world, then now is the time for us here in California to build upon the site, sit back and grab a glass. It's Wine Talks with Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul Kay. And we are at an away game
up in the Napa Valley. But to have a conversation with Enrique Herrero and Jonathan Tyer at Inglemook Winery is one of the most historic places in the Napa Valley. Hey, if you have something nice to say about what we're doing here at the podcast, go ahead and say it and give me a review and subscribe. If you have nothing nice to say, don't say it at all. But
that's what keeps our egos going here in this industry. But I want to continue this conversation that we just jumped in on about the consumerism of wine and the way Cal California is moving. You know, it's so refreshing to hear that because some of the conversation on the Internet and the Facebook and all that social networking is, we've got to come to the consumer what they want. We have to produce things that. And let's face it, wine is consumer driven.
And I'm going to highlight this by saying somebody posted on Facebook a conversation at Paris Wine and this guy had just sold 24 million bottles of peach flavored fermented grape juice. And I thought, okay, that's probably the quintessential opposite of what we're talking about right now. Yeah, no, no, no. And I believe that. And I'm sure that there is
that in the market. What I think is happening, what I'm trying to emphasize is the position that as a farming product, because it's a production that come from farming and winemaking, it's farming. Yeah. You are in some way tied to the side where you produce. So you can produce. As long as you do make genuine wine, you produce what you can, you don't produce what you want. So much less you will be able to produce something that is coming from a consumer. Say, oh, I would like
to have a wine that has all these features. Well, you produce what you can. To make it short, I always give the example of my son. It seems that the Coca Cola made in Mexico is preferred among youth cane sugar than the American wine than the American one. And they are able to differentiate Them. And for something that is so typified and so made as a Coca Cola, we are finding differences. Why do we want to make a
Cabernet Sauvignon the same everywhere? I agree with you and I had this conversation yesterday at Cathiar, which is owned by a Bordeaux house and they're bringing this Bordelaise philosophy to the table here at Inglewinnock. You are trying to represent now the Rutherford or wherever your grapes are on. Is that. Yeah, it's all Rutherford. It's Rutherford Bench here. We've been here for about 150 years now and it's really trying to express the best of this
site. And there's a lot of people in the valley who have moved towards this trend of picking a little bit earlier and really allowing the site to express itself through those wines. I'm glad because I think what happened in this 80s 90s was this movement toward this sort of monolithic, over extracted, juiced up Cabernet. And I, and I'm not going to throw any names out, you know, we're not trying to create any enemies here. But there's certainly a profile of what
Napa has landed on. And it sounds like what England wants to do is move away to expressing what wine really should be. And I guess that. But that kind of means staying the course, right? That kind of means on your guys behalf you must continue to say this is what we're going to do. Because you're working five years out at least, right. To figure out what's going to be on the table at a minimum. Yeah. And so you have to be pretty diligent to what you're doing.
Yeah. And you're right in the 90s. And we were part of that at some point we were proud to say, oh, it's 115% new oak. Yeah. Right. So dripping with vanilla and SAP. And then you realize that. Yeah, it's so difficult to differentiate when everybody does the same. How are these, how does this happen? Like, is there a board? The winery is still owned by Francis Ford Coppola, as you mentioned. It's not as it's his flagship,
it's what he wants to do. He creates, created this amazing brand. I actually bought the 1985 or 87 claret in the club back, back in the day. But how, how are these decisions made? How do you do you sit as a group and say, look, we are going to stay the course. We are going to bring to the table what we think Engle Nook represents. It's I Mean, you were here when it happened. But it all came from Mr. Coppola. He wanted to make wines that he could enjoy with food again. And
he felt the wines were going too far. And the pendulum had swung, especially in the Valley, too far, and really wanted to restrain it and brought in our director of winemaking, Philippe Pascal from Chateau Margaux. And so that happened in 2011. Enrique's been here now just over 20 years. I've been over here just over 10 years. Wow. There's some. Quite some tenure right here. Philosophically, I mean, not just. Absolutely. No, no, that is true. You were.
Jonathan was making an observation because we received wine, we become wine club members after 10 years. And he was looking at the roster of the people that were going to receive this wine and say, wow, we're 52 in this condition now, and we have 100 employees. Yeah, thereabouts. Yeah. Wow, that's a big winery. Yeah. More of the half of the staff here is 10 years, or. Wow, that's pretty good. Yeah, we were, you know, at the Wine of the Month club, I. My warehouse guy was 25
years. The other guy was like 15 years. And that's a very important part of business, is to be able to maintain a happy staff, to get the consistency in what you're doing. And nobody brings a new philosophy to the table. Accident, you know, not accidentally, but, you know, ad hoc. And then you have to deal with that. But here you have a group of people that have. Under the same banner for a long time. I mean, I'm assuming this dust behind you is part of that same history. Absolutely.
I swear, it almost looked like you placed it there, but I get it. It reminds me of Portugal when you go down to the cellars of the Portuguese wineries. So when you come from Argentina, and that's. When did you come from. To Argentina? I came here in 1997 because I was pursuing a degree in agronomy, a master's degree in agronomy. So I came here, and Davis at the time, well, and still was pretty much the, you know, the tip of the arrow in terms of evolution of science applied to plants and
crops. And so that's why I came here in 1987. So I started working here in 2007, went back to Argentina because I need to renew my visa. It was with a student visa. And then the winery offered me to come back again. So two years later, in 2007. So I worked here 2003 to 2005, back to Argentina, and came back at the end of 2007 and ever since then. And so you consider Argentina, South America, the United States, all considered New World in a sense. Did you bring
that philosophy with you from. Were you making wine in Argentina? Yes, yes. And actually I grew up in a vineyard and it has. The consumption profile in Argentina is a little bit different. We are pretty much descendant of people from the southern part of Europe. So we are wine consumer by default. So it's not like a fancy thing for us, but everyday thing. I remember having wine and water when I was probably 8 years old at the table.
So in my case, my family was producing bulk wines, kind of what you consider low quality wines, but it's for everyday consumption. So there are differences in that aspect. But the concept of New Worldly was dumped on us, you know, in Australia, the US but by whoever considered themselves to be in the old world. So the name, we got that name from them. That's true. So you are New World. Yeah, you're new, like meaning.
But I think that there are, if you look at the world map, there are areas between, I don't know, 33 north, where you can grow grapes with really good aptitude to make good wines and like music. Every country can have their wine. There is no better or worse, but it's just something that is coming from them. In California, there is, I don't know, a signature to the wines in California that is different. And we have to accept
that it's different from many. I think that's the premise and like I said, the reason wine has been around for 6,000 years and probably will continue at least 6,000 years and probably will continue with its same attraction to the human soul, because it does represent something from the soil. I mean, it is. I haven't been able to pin this conversation down or this articulate this feeling. And it's different than any other product in the world that way.
Nothing makes you feel like a glass of wine. I'm not talking about the alcohol though. That is. No, no, it doesn't hurt. But it has this deep rooted human impact on the psyche. Yeah. I think the sense of identity is what we find in wine that probably we don't find in other product. Probably there are some other things I don't know. That's well said. But the sense of identity that is kind of linked. Yeah, I think that's the new world, essentially the
winemaker and you. Would you. When you hear a New World, does that bother you to call it New World? Does it represent a style? What does it represent to you? It's for me it's just realizing we don't have the history that Europe does. Right. You know, the hundreds or thousands of years of winemaking. It's only been here for a few hundred years. And I mean, we're one of the oldest wineries in the valley and we're about 150 years old. Yeah. Which is amazing. Let's see. I was talking when I was at
Cathy Art. It was. It was Martini's place for a little while, and I think it started in 1885. When did Inglenook start? 1879. Okay. So a little predates that. But they also owned Smith, Smith o Lafitte, which was founded in 1385. And I go, wow, the 500 year difference between the two foundings. I certainly. You can learn something because I have this. Correct me if you think I'm wrong or you have a different idea, but all that history
rolls up to. I mean, you sit in these meetings, you sit in this room with this dust, and you sit with Enrique and you have these conversations and what you. I think impulsively, you carry that into the bottle. You can't define it as a piece of tannic acid or a fruit character, but the lessons you've learned along the way end up in the bottle. Yeah, absolutely. No, go ahead. And it's also. It's lessons you're learning along the way and then
always trying to improve. You can't get complacent in what you're doing, and you always want to make the best product possible. And so that. And that's. Therein lies the rep. What does that mean? Well, going back to that, I think that you get it very correctly, is the lesson learned that for me is the true meaning of heritage. Because otherwise heritage becomes something so abstract that you don't know what that
means. Yeah, you're right. But because we're transmitting knowledge from one generation to another, being in the same place, trying to know the. And we still think that we don't know our place. Yeah, no, right. I know you're. You never. This industry is great in that way. You never stop learning right now because. The more you learn, the less secure you are. Yes, right. That's true. Bless you, Noah. I don't know that much. Right.
But as Jonathan said, this is just is conveyance of learning over generations. How long have you been doing this? I'm sorry, go ahead. No, no, that. That is what comes to me as the most defining meaning of heritage. Otherwise it's kind of a blur thing that I wouldn't know how to define. And before I get to that question, I was going to ask you there. Part of this conversation that I like to have these, to have with folks like you is. Comes from a woman in
Bordeaux. Her name is May Elian Long song. She was 15 when the Nazis came into her parents chateau at Pesche to Pichon Longueville and literally shot it up. And I had, actually, I was down the street at Barono, the hotel, and her grandson called me and said, if you want to talk to my grandmother, she's available in an hour in Paris time. So I got on my computer and got her on the, on the call, and she just told stories for 45 minutes. But I kept thinking,
how is that not in the bottle today? How is those, the, the, the drama and the history and the stress that in the lessons learned by those folks in the vineyard aren't in the bottle today? They must be, because that's part of their history. So you've been doing this 10 years here, and what brought you to this place? Honestly, I was really excited to work with Philippe Pascal, our director of winemaking. He came from Chateau Margaux to come here, and I wanted to
learn from him, to kind of take that next step in my career. And it's really become a home for me now. It's kind of interesting because there's a guy in town, Chris Phelps, he worked at Margot, he worked at Petrus, he's got his own brand. But we're bringing these guys from, from Bordeaux. We're not making much Pinot here. Do we make Pinot? No. Yeah. So we're bringing Bordeaux winemakers. I guess that goes back to our old world versus new
world. And I think for the old world, if you're going to talk about a geography, you know, I guess you can define it as a style too. It's sort of that musty old style. But I think you really want to just look at it as, as location in some cases. In those cases, like Margaux or Pesic Leon or San, they're bound by the rules of the Appalachian. And I think that's part of the definition of old world Argentina. No rules. No rules. You want to grow, you know,
Torontes and Salta, go ahead. Right. If you want to grow Pinot Noir in Patagonia, you know, that's what you get to do. But you're bound in those parts of the world. What would be considered old world? Does the director of winemaking have this sort of freedom here that he gets to do? I would say he's a lot more Freedom here. We. Especially when we're blending for our premier wine, Rubicon, we're tasting everything blind, and we've got all the Bordeaux varieties in there, and we're not making
decisions based off variety. We're making decisions based off what is the best wines of that vintage that will make blend. So you all get together Blind Taste 5, the five border varietals, all the. Different parcels off the property. So we don't have Malbec on. On site here, but we have the other four, and that's not good for him. He's a Malbec. I know it's very offensive. But it's. It's always about figuring out what's the best expression of that vintage. Yes. You know, let me test your.
Your brain a little bit, because I brought this up the other day with a French winemaker, and I said, you know, there's really no bad vintages, because by our definition, if. If it. A wine expresses that time in that place, then it's accurate. As long as, you know, you did the best you could to blend it and come out with the best result, then, yeah, some wines may taste better than others to certain people, but by
definition, there's no bad vintage if it's properly made. I'm glad that we're recording this, because this is the best explanation I have heard from, you know, being criticized that every vintage is the best. Yeah, right. You know, when critics say, oh, you always say the same, but actually, what you just said is really good. This is Jeff. Because we try to make the best of what we have for the vintage, and that is kind of a justification
to say yes. I think that's what we're doing. Yeah. And who's to say that, you know, like the 89, for instance, here in Napa was a harsh, tough vintage, and many of them didn't even Release. And the 90 was such a luscious vintage, and they released them, I made a fortune, quote, unquote. I don't say fortune on the 89s, because they came around eventually. Oh, yeah. And they were great. And of course, you can't release the 89 after the 90s already
on the shelf, or even the 91. So, you know, there's all this 89 in bottle that had done a great job of softening, and there were some really good wines that came out of that. So. And again, it kind of flies in the face of a bad vintage versus a good vintage, but really, I think defined by if you're making an honest glass of wine, that's my latest term meaning not played with. No, no, I agree with that. It's very tricky to say, I'm not going to make my best wine
this year. Yeah, right. That's a good point. And the other thing is that when confronted to that situation, how many are we deciding? How much our blend? Seven of us. Seven of us, more or less. Yeah. And when you think that, let's hypothetically, we might have, I don't know, 5,000 consumers of Rubicon. So seven people are deciding that they will not have our wine. Wow. A little bit too much. So why don't we do our best job and then decide them to, I don't know, to judge it.
So you have how many different varieties are you bottling? Yeah, Varietals on site? There's 13. And so this Inglenook has 13 different labels on the shelf? No, we have five different wines that make. So we have two Cabernet Sauvignon driven wines. We have Rubicon, which is our premier wine, and then also a Cabernet Sauvignon. And then we have our other red is RC Syrah for Mr. Coppola's son, Roman. Okay. And then we have two whites. We have a Sauvignon Blanc, which we also add some
Semillon into. And then we have a RN white blend of Marsan, Rousson and Viognier. Wow, that's quite a diversity in varietals. It is, yeah. Yeah. That's pretty interesting. And I mean, my wife won't drink Syrah as much as I've tried to trick her into drinking something that was made from Syrah that hopefully she wouldn't notice. But she 90% of the time catches me. She's a Bordeaux woman. That's all she likes to drink. And Pinot. She likes Pinot. But how are those
received by the public? The Syrahs and the Rousseau Marsan, I mean, those are unusual. Is it club member type thing or is it broad market? The Syrah now is wine club only. Just because productions dropped over the past few years, we've had to do some vineyard replants. But the Marsan Rousseau vignette, we do the majority direct to consumer, and then a chunk of it is able to go out through distribution in the US And a little bit throughout the world. I have to tell you, when I took over my dad's
company, I actually bought it from him. He'll tell you that I bought it for a dollar. It's not true. I have the contract. So he passed away a couple years ago. But I found the contract. That's why I said that I was going through the handoff documents that he gave me, which was the P and L from the company at the time. And we had about Maybe we had 900 members or a thousand members, something like that. And the competition, which
there was no third party competition. One of the month Club was the only sort of independent company featuring wines. All the rest, there were five were winery and England Oak was one of them. It was like Martini.
I could find the document, but there was five and those. That was the competition, so to speak, which I never really considered winery based clubs competition because people join your club because they come here, they experience the wines and every time they get that package they go, oh, I remember that day we were, you know, talking to Enrique and Jonathan. It's very important part of our industry today. How, how has the DTC side supported what you
guys are doing? It's the backbone to it. It's really building those relationships with those customers and, and having those longtime wine club members. We've got a whole section of our wine club that's been with us for over 20 years. Wow, that's amazing. My average tenure, which was really good for an independent club was two, two years. But when I sold the club in 19 two years ago, I did find people, you know, that were around from the early 80s that
were still buying. And there's just a, you know, a reliance and a. Really for you folks, it's a, a trust built between you and what you're producing and what these people can tell the stories. And here's my problem with today's industry. The Internet is, you know, it's there obviously it was not going anywhere, but it's created bargain hunters and Groupon created bargain hunters. It clobbered my business in the beginning because Groupon, everybody's just looking for a deal. And I think
I'd never been to this location, driving up the driveway. The whole experience is the experience. And I think that's critical to today's industry. Not just Inglenook, but for us to grow as an industry is to develop these experiences. Yeah, yeah. You create loyalty by offering things or by. Yeah, by having things that consumer can find that they will feel linked to the place, to the, through the
experiences. For me, you were saying something before about the history and how it's not in the bottle. We say here that, well, depending on the vintage, but sometimes a good percentage of the wine is outside the bottle. That's right. With the attached history, whatever happened in that vintage with the Heritage, as defined as previously we said that we have here. So is part of that outside part of the wine is that experience that you have when you come here and there is like a
loop of people that. Let's say we start with a member here that goes out and talk about us, and then somebody else go to the market, buys the wine, and then he wants to visit here and becomes also a member. So there is a. I would say, retrofitting of. You're exactly right. Yeah, yeah. Which is really useful and healthy. You put on events for the club members, obviously. Absolutely. They come and experience the same people come every time. Or do you have, like. There's honestly a chunk
of people who come every single time or to a majority of events. And then there's lots of other club members that come when they're in town or it's always fun to meet new wine club members that signed up and then that's their first event. And trying to build those relationships and really try to secure them. As an advocate for the winery for. The future, I think it's a critical part of where wine is in the world today. We know that
consumption is down. We know that the Gen Zs are being bombarded with flavored drinks and White Claw, which. I don't know how you drink that stuff. And non alk is becoming a thing. I don't think it's a real thing necessarily, but I went to the fancy food show in Vegas a couple years ago. We used to go every year in San Francisco. And the preeminent theme of beverage that year was non alk and non alk Prosecco, non alk champagne, non alk
whatever. And then non alk distilled spirits. And I thought, oh, my God, this is horrible. It was undrinkable. I mean, how do you drink it? Why do you drink it right when you can have an ice glass of wine? But we're against those pressures. There's a lot of pressure on the marketplace right now to that. And I think, and I say this all the time, is probably to the consumers. I say it not too much, but, you know, the story can't be when I'm at dinner. I got this for five bucks on the Internet.
Is that a story? No, But I went to Engle Nook and I sat and I sat with Ryan and Enrique, I mean, Jonathan, Enrique, and they told me the stories of Francis Ford Coppola. And we walked the vineyard and we looked inside the barrel room and we did all those things. And it's kind of an escape. Every Time you get that package, you open up the box, you see the label and you kind of drift away. You connect again with that experience. Yeah, absolutely. And sorry for going
back down. No, please do the conversation. But I don't know, Jonathan, if it happens to you talking about the loyalty of some of the wine club members that they start talking to you about people that you never. So in the winery. Because they were. They have more seniority than ourselves. Yes. That's interesting. So people that aren't here anymore, that. Yeah. So we're learning from them. Yeah. Oh, I remember when he was this. Oh, never heard about that. So Gustav Niebaum,
right. Was he the founder. He founded in 1879. He was a Finnish sea captain. Really? Yep. You know, that's interesting to me about Napa's history. So much immigration, almost all immigration right at that point. Now we have Argentina, but we had Finnish, we had Swiss, we had. The Christian Brothers were already here. But I mean, that's a pretty interesting part of this, the history of the valley. Oh, absolutely. He made his money selling furs from Alaska and then he made probably about
$10 million at the time. So today that's ungodly sum of money. Yeah. And really could have bought any chateau in the world and decided to start one here because he thought it was the best terroir that he could find. As a Finnish fur trader. Fur trader, yeah. He had loved wine. Was. It was. Had to be one of the first. We were, I think, the fourth oldest winery in the valley. Yeah.
I find that interesting and fascinating that the immigration, particularly in today's political environment that how important immigrants to America and just founding our industry alone, let alone many other industries. My father was an immigrant to facilitate the wine. I mean, it's incredible. Really. I would like that. That's why I do this is to tell those kinds of
stories, to figure out that there's so much impact. And California is a special case of immigration because even many Americans are immigrant into California. I mean, really. My dad was from Cairo and, you know, started, you know, created the direct consumer wine business in America. It was. He was the first and still own the. I don't own that. I sold the name, actually. But the Wine of the Month Club was a trademark name of ours. And you know, the funny thing is we.
The premise of it in 1972 that I carried through all my career and I kind of sold it for two reasons. One was, you know, the industry is getting very tough. I'd done it for 35 years. And, you know, we had other things to do at this point. And the economies of scale are growing down because it took a social networker, a digital designer on staff, videographer. All that became overhead. But more importantly was I wasn't finding the stuff that we used to find. There weren't the
overstocks of interesting wines. Let's just face it. I faced the 10 year old charbono, which is incredible in the bottle at the time. But you know, I would find those kinds of wines at the price I could afford to show customers. And those weren't happening. We were getting, you know, 50 cent a liter white from Spain, in the middle of Spain from Valencia, that was shipped over here in 20,000, literally vinyl bladders, you know, and that's what
we were getting for the same price. And I didn't want to show that. I didn't want to show wines like that. That wasn't why I had started this and fell in love with the industry. Did you, did you fall in love with winemaking when you started or did it take a little bit of time to realize this is really it? Actually I come from a complete non winemaking background. I grew up outside of Boston and not really known for the wines out there. Yeah, right.
But my grandfather was an old world Italian and made wine in the basement. So I grew up helping him make wine. And then he passed away right before I was about to graduate college and decided to keep the family tradition going. And I fell in love with it and really wasn't as enthused with my day job at that time. Yeah, that's what happens. Was it corporate America? It was, it was. I was working in tech at the
time. I was a entry level programmer. And so I moved out to California about 20 years ago now, worked my first harvest and haven't looked back. And that was it. Yeah. And you, you want to have a brand one day? I do not, you know. No. You don't have to market it, sell it. You like these out of it. I love to make wine and talk about wine. I just don't want to be having to hold up to the sales part of
it. Yes. I think that's what happens when people, particularly you make your money as a surgeon or you're a government contractor building freeways and you go, I'm going to go to Napa Valley and I'm going to buy a Chateau and I'm going to have this wonderful lifestyle that I see. And then I think eventually they get tired of losing money and it's like, oh, we got to figure this out because it's a whole different part of the business. I think the complication of it is
what confuses most people before they get. Into it, is the unseen part of it. Yes. Oh, yeah. The distributor side. And I don't know. Working in a vineyard is. Oh, it's so romantic. And then when you have to spend hours there in the cold or heat. Yeah. This part I didn't know about. Or hours at the sorting table during harvest. And I kill everything that I put in the ground, so I would be a lousy wine guy. But I loved marketing it and. But I liked it because
I like telling the stories and telling people these stories. Having. I'll go back and I'll tell the story of our conversation. And this is an interesting part of it. Maybe you can shed some light on it. As intimidating as the subject can be for some people, and this is a whole social. I'm gonna. I'm gonna dumb down wine and make it approachable. I think that's impossible because it's complicated and it's interesting, and the more you want to learn, the more you can.
Right. But the conversation at dinner time always ends up on the wine. Is that accurate? Yeah. Yeah. And that's not intimidating. People want to hear it. Yeah. And talking about intimidation and wine, I think that sometimes there is a mistake in making it too kind of an expertise, this field of conversation. When I hear people, you know, at the dinner table saying, well, I don't know too much about wine, so I. You don't need to know. You don't. You need to enjoy and
see. And your personal preference is the main driver of your opinion. It's fine as long as you are honest and not try to like something that you don't like. And if you like a wine of $5 a bottle, that's great. You're lucky. Yeah. Yeah. You're lucky because you found something for $5. You know, it's funny. I think everybody, Even though there's people like, it's too subjective. And it is. I can like something, and
you. You may not. However, I think almost everybody agrees when a proper glass of wine, an honest glass of wine, when a Rubicon is set. Set in front of you, that there's a recognition of its value. Definitely. Everybody can appreciate it because it's. Because why? Because it's expressing. It's expressing its sense of place. And there's not many areas of the world that can provide that and really show that incredible
sense of place. And especially here in Napa, we've got people who are doing so many different styles of wine where you could have vineyards like Tocquelon down the street and all the different winemakers of it, and you put 10 of those side by side by side, and you could think they're completely different vintages and vineyards just because of how differently they're made. That's really interesting. And people will. They. You know, it's funny because I have friends
that recognize. They go, yes. You know, same winemaker, two different vineyards, same vintage, same grape. They go, they're different. Yes. Yeah. And let me introduce something. I was thinking of Jonathan yesterday, thinking of the concept. This may sound a little bit weird, but we don't make wine here. We don't make wine. That does sound weird. The wine comes in some way from the side.
And I will equate you to Michelangelo in the sense that you remember that they said that Michelangelo saw the sculpture behind the marble block, and the only thing that he had to do was to kind of peel it, bring it out. Well, I wouldn't like to be in his shoes, in Jonathan's shoes, because it's your ability to peel off what you need to peel or to reveal the wine by trying to. Not to mess anything up. So. And that is more difficult than making something, because when you
make, you have a goal. You kind of build something and, you know, and you have the recipe for that. And this is not the recipe thing. This is revealing something that is hidden there. And you have to have an ability that is much more difficult, that is to see what is behind there, to kind of remove what you have to remove to make it.
That's sort of separating the art from the science, isn't it? Like, you can have all the metrics, the bricks, and the phenolic ripeness and all the things that go into the ph, but that's not really what you're talking about. No. There's so much art in our craft, especially in the vineyards as well. I mean, yes, we have all the science, but you're trying to make predictions on what the weather's going to be like a few months down the line. None
of us know what's going to happen. You're rolling the dice every single year and hoping you make the best decisions possible. But I think what Enrique is saying is that at some point, when you get to harvest, your ability to taste the grape, understand the vintage prior, understand, you know, the whole process from Bud break to now, and say, okay, this is what we're going to craft from this. This is what it's giving me and not screwing that up. The giving. Yeah. You are
getting something to feel it. And that is more difficult than making. It's like those conversations they have. They got. The tap roots are going down. We're down 30 meters, and we're getting this nutrient. We're in this kind of soil. And it doesn't explain why grapes grab all that information and create a beverage. That explains that information. Absolutely. It just explains it how.
Right. How it's doing. Well, we have tap roots, and we have the little micro exchanges of things going on, nutrients, and they had to go down and get the water. But whatever it does, it asks me why. And I. And I have. No one can articulate why grapes do that, why wine expresses something. It doesn't happen. With pineapples, you go to Maui and get Maui Blanc. It's not as interesting, right? It's just pineapple juice. Why? Why? No, it's true. It's true. It's. And probably
there is no need to know why, but. That's right. But to acknowledge that there is a. Probably a very complex process through that will give you something that is. Could be unique to your place. And the only thing which is not a minor thing you have to do is to try to bring it out. That's really interesting part of the conversation. We don't care why. We just know it does. And our job, and your job, not
mine, your job is to visualize this. Just like visualizing David behind the block of stone before it gets done and understanding that you got there when you finished it and getting out of the way. That's why these acidulated wine, sugared wine, all those things kind of doctor things up. And you never really get there because you've played with it. That's highlighted by this one conversation I had with a local friend of mine who has a winery. He
has a small vineyard, and he made his first vintage out of it. And it's not even appalated. It's just this part of Southern California. And, you know, it was palatable. But he took it to a custom crush. And I talked to the winemaker, and I said, well, you know, the acid was high and whatever, you know, as you'd expect, he goes, oh, we can fix all that. And that's, you know, I don't want you to fix it. I want you to have it understood, you
know, in the bottle. Not. Not fix it, because that's just playing with it. And that's the part of wine that I think. But we need these things, right? We need Josh, we need apothec red. We need the wines on the supermarket shelf to bring consumers to the table. That otherwise may not right something for everybody out there. Yeah, yeah. And it's true that there is a. I think that there are only not that many products that have such a
huge range of prices. And you can go from a bottle that is probably like we said, $5 something thousand dollars and everybody finds the reason why to pay what they pay for different levels of wine and is so diverse and complex. There's some very honest wines at all price ranges. The other night I opened a bottle of Cheval Blanc for my wife because it was her birthday. And my son in law says this is really good. I said yeah. He goes, is it really
worth. Let's say it's a thousand dollars a bottle. He said, were they worth 200 more? You know, 200 times, 20 times a 50 bottle of wine? I said that's hard to acknowledge from a character standpoint. But you just had Cheval Blanc. So regardless, you know, it's got the mystique around it. I think we, we are in a position to break out of this doldrums of wine that we're in this pit sort of. It just ebbs and flows. But I think what Engelnook is doing is moving the needle to the direction that
in general we want the industry to go. We want it to be expressive. We want to tell people about how a good glass of wine feels and what it does for you. Do you guys chase medals and honors and scores? We don't. Our goal is to always just make the best expression of the site. If we happen to get good scores, that's a bummer bonus. But they're sent to the various places suckling and enthusiasts and all that. Yeah, they are judged by. Do you think those are
pertinent these days? Do you think they're relied upon like they used to be when Parker started kind of thing? I don't think so. I don't think they're as important as they were 20ish years ago. What's your sense? And the other thing is that it depends. I don't want to make a very general statement, but let's say that I become a critic of wine and then there will be wines that I enjoy more than others. And then am I a guidance for
anybody? Just because I'm kind of placing my values on different type of wine. And I would be sad if a consumer goes and say okay, oh, let's see which one Enrique like the most? Because that is. Well, that is My taste? Yeah, you know, right, that's a good point. Why don't you experiment by yourself? That's a really good point.
Well, that's why we got then this uniformization of taste at some point that you were talking about in the 90s or 80s, that everybody pretty much was trying to make the wine to satisfy whoever was a given score so the consumer could buy your wine. So it's true that it's good as a guidance.
Like with movies, you sometimes go and see what the critics say and sometimes you say, okay, but if there is an honest description behind it and you might say, okay, the guy doesn't like this because it features this characteristic, but I do like those things, for me, that could be useful, then the value part of the thing is possibly less useful. You know, that's a good point because that's the other thing. We're out of time actually. But there's so much to talk about.
There are contemporary thoughts on LinkedIn and social that say we need to change the language of wine. And I'm thinking like I go back to my father's days with Michael Broadbent and Harry Waugh and all these English tasters and they had a specific list of things they used except explain the value of a glass of wine. And it was just confusing to the novice to listen to Michael Broadbent, as it is today for
a novice to listen to suckling. Right. If you change the language and you make it more like Gary Vaynerchuk and you talk about, you know, Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch, it's just as confusing for the next person. Like, I don't understand what that means because I never grew up with those. So I don't. You know, these descriptors that people use. Changing the language of wine is not going to change anything. It's just
going to make it just as confusing for the next generation to figure out. But, you know, the point I was going to make was I had a Canary Islands and I can't remember the varietal now, but it was obscure varietal from the Canary Islands. It was really incredible, all volcanic, all that stuff. And it had 90 something points. And if I, if I'm a point shopper and I go buy an Engelna cab that's got the same 90 something points and I put them next to each other,
they're entirely completely different wines. And so you're just going to go, I didn't like that so much one way or the other. And so I'm not sure this point system really Works in that realm. And I think what you're saying is an important part is which. Well, if you do find somebody that tastes wine like suckling or one of those guys that you trust, their judgment because of what you've bought from them is a good
indication. And I always said this in the club. I said, how do you know when you don't like a wine, it's a Sonoma cab, that it wasn't. It was just not a good version of that wine? Or you just don't like that varietal from that location? How do you know that? And I think that's what these magazines and raiders do. And to make things more confusing, first, the definition of quality is also another concept that is very difficult to grasp, is what is quality quality?
So what we discuss internally here is that I think the best definition has to do with expectation. So you say, okay, I'm trying to achieve this characteristic in a product wine in this case. And as much as you can achieve that, you will be closer to your best quality. And that within that concept, you allow for people to say, yes, it's good quality. Achieve what, you know, you were pursuing. But I still don't like it. So I cannot like a wine that I consider, yeah, is
good quality. Because it got to the point where it was, you know, they wanted to get. Yes, right. But I still. Not something that I enjoy perfectly fine. As long as you, you know, now, you know, like my wife Sira, I mean, and I stumped her a lot of times. You know, I give her coat, the Rhone. I gave her stuff from different parts of the world. It's like, I don't like this. I'm like, oh, my God. How do you figure that out? But
she can still say, it's a good quality syrup. It's quality. I don't like it. I can't tell you how many times I said, no, you don't understand. This is fine French Burgundy, you know, I said, and you liked it two weeks ago. We're out of time. And I. I hope we can do this again one day. I want to shoot some B roll stuff, but we have so much more to continue to talk about. And as this industry evolves, we're going to have
different subjects to touch on. But it's already been 50 minutes, if you can believe it. Wow. It was a very pleasant conversation. Yeah. I really appreciate the time and not been here. Really feel like I'm sitting in a piece of history, and I think that's the story. And accolades to both of you guys. For taking on this role because you're defending. Really, My opinion is you're defending this industry by sharing these experiences in this place. So cheers. Cheers. Cheers.