Grafting our Grapes

When we bought our property five years ago, it was planted with Merlot grapes. After the first harvest, we made a small amount of wine from the Merlot and sold the rest of the grapes to another winery. The quality of the wine from that first year wasn’t very good. We thought that our soil wasn’t a good match for Merlot, and that we would eventually have to graft all of the vines over to another variety.

grafting

Typically when grapes are planted, the bottom half of the grape vine, called the rootstock is planted first. Then the top of the vine, or the budwood, is grafted on. Grafting is an age-old practice that allows you to plant rootstock that is resistant to pests and diseases and/or grows better in drier conditions. However rootstock produces grapes that don’t make good quality wine, so it’s necessary to graft the variety of grape that you want for your wine onto the top.  The variety that is grafted onto the top of the rootstock (the budwood) doesn’t take on any of the flavors of the rootstock.


The first spring after we bought our property, we grafted a small section of the vineyard with the variety Ribolla gialla (an ancient variety brought to California from Fruili, Italy) onto our home vineyard. Ribolla gialla is one of the varieties in our White Wine blend. In 2008 we made a 100% Ribolla gialla from that small planting and it was part of our first Wine Club shipment.

this tiny piece of a stick will turn into a grape vine

Since then we have grafted more of the Ribolla into our vineyard as well as Refosco  (another variety brought to California from Fruili, Italy), Cabernet franc, and Petit verdot. We made small amounts of wine from these limited graftings, and they turned out so well that we decided to graft some more. We also grafted another variety typically grown in Fruili, Italy called Schioppettino. So more, fun, unusual wine to come from our vineyard!

the results from last year's grafting

And this week was the week of grafting. Because it’s a highly trained skill, we hire professional grafters who travel around the world following the grafting season. It’s a pretty amazing process.

Our Spring 2012 Wine Release and Some Great Press

bottling

We are very excited to announce the release of our 2011 MATTHIASSON Napa Valley White Wine and our latest Wine Club shipment.

The 2011 White Wine, a blend of Sauvignon blanc, Ribolla gialla, Semillon, and Tocai fruilano, is our most complex vintage to date. It's almost Reisling-like at first, and thanks to the extremely long and cool growing season there is tremendous natural acidity tempered with a lot of flesh and ripeness. Flavors include white peach, kafir lime, lychee nut, grapefruit, and pineapple, along with stones, oyster shells, and freshly baled straw.

You can order your 2011 White Wine by clicking here

*orders of 12 or more bottles ship for free

We have recently received a lot of great press about our wines, and the wines are selling fast. The blog Vinography, considered by many to be the top wine blog in the country, recently posted a detailed story of who we are and how we came to be, and gave great reviews of our wines! In the article, blogger Alder Yarrow states “If Napa is going to evolve and change as a wine region…. it will do so in the hands of people like Steve Matthiasson. His two flagship wines are so unlike anything else being made in Napa Valley at the moment that they are enough to stop any seasoned Napa wine lover in their tracks. Not just that, though. They are also phenomenally good.”

Matthiasson wine in a keg (for restaurants)

You can also buy our wines by joining our Wine Club where you will get access to our tiny production "passion wines." The May Wine Club shipment will include our newly released 2011 White Wine, the 2007 MATTHIASSON Red Wine, the 2009 Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, described in the blog Vinography as "a nerve-tingling wine that nearly knocked me out of my chair," and the 2011 MATTHIASSON Rosé.

 Join our Wine Club now by clicking here

Wine Club Member benefits:

• Allocation of our flagship, Matthiasson Red and Matthiasson White wines
• Discounts of a maximum of 20% on all our wines for every order you place
• Access to our “Passion Wines” (unique, tiny production lots)
• Access to Matthiasson home-made goodies from our organic fruit orchard (such as jams, jellies, olive oil, home-made vinegar, etc…)
• Invitations to Matthiasson exclusive events

As always, we thank you for your support!

Steve, Jill and the boys

Spring in the vineyard - big changes every day

Photos by Harry Matthiasson

Our Sonoma Coast Chardonnay Vineyard: Part 2

Duncan Meyers (left) talking to Steve and Jack

Last week in our blog we talked about the trials and tribulations of planting our Chardonnay vineyard in the Sonoma Coast because of the incredibly rocky soil. The silver lining has been that the wines that have resulted have been worth the effort! The type of soil in a vineyard can have a huge influence on the quality of the wine. In a vineyard where the soil is as rocky as our vineyard in Sonoma, the grapes are forced to struggle to produce the grapes. The rocks also help the roots reach down very deeply, and the rocks carry the warmth from the sun down to into the soil. The presence of the rocks and the amount the vines struggle bring out all sorts of interesting flavors in the wine.

Nathan Roberts (left) and Jacky and Jim Young

A few weeks ago, the owners of the Chardonnay vineyard, Richard and Susan Idell, who have named the vineyard
"Michael Mara" after their children, hosted a tasting with all of the winemakers that make wine from the vineyard.  On hand at the event were: Duncan Meyer and Nathan Roberts, of Arnot-Roberts; Kevin and Todd Roland and Stephen Tebb of Rowland Tebb; Johanna Jensen of Scholium Project (winemaker is Abe Schoener); Jacky and Jim Young of Young Inglewood (with winemaker Steve Matthiasson); as well as the the Chardonnay made by Idell Family Vineyard (with winemaker Steve Matthiasson); Kesner (by winemaker Jason Kesner); and Iconic Wine (by winemaker Dan Petroski), plus our own Matthiasson Sonoma Coast Chardonnay.

One of the remarkable things about the vineyard is the distinctive flavors that are produced from the grapes there - terroir often shows itself in the finish, and all of these wines have a stony, rock dust flavor in the finish. They also have an eerily similar texture in the mouth, a weight that is hard to describe, but is almost like ground oyster shells or sea salt. But they all had a certain uniqueness to them that made them very special.

The Wines

Our Sonoma Coast Chardonnay Vineyard: Part 1

harvesting the '09 Chardonnay

When Steve and I got married, our dream was to own a farm. We were living in Davis, California, which is smack in the middle of some of the best farm land in the world. We didn't find anything that fit what we were looking for, and then Steve got a job as a viticulturalist in Napa (where he plans, supervises and coordinates the growing of grapes), and we started looking for land to farm in the Napa area.

Then in 2006, we met someone who had just bought land near the town of Sonoma and wanted to plant a vineyard, but had no idea how to do it. We were very excited because the soil was very rocky and very close to a vineyard that is famous for producing great quality wine (called the Durell Vineyard). So we leased the land and planted the vineyard. Because of all of the rocks, it was a much more difficult job than we thought, but the result is worth it...

Originally, we planned to sell all of the grapes to other wineries, but the vineyard site was so amazing, that we decided to make a small amount of MATTHIASSON Chardonnay from that vineyard and the wine is fantastic! We included the first vintage we made, our 2008 MATTHIASSON Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, in our wine club shipment last Spring, and the 2009 MATTHIASSON Sonoma Coast Chardonnay will be included in our Spring shipment this year.

Art+Wine

In the background
"It's A Good Time To Lift The Sun Into The Sky"

Winemaking is delicate balance between art and science. MATTHIASSON wines are definitely made more as an artistic statement....Though they are carefully crafted, there is less measuring and lab testing and more tasting and using intuition.        We are always happy to support friends who are trying to scrape by in the art world and the other night we poured wine for our friend Dusty Kramer at his art opening in Napa.  Here's Dusty's art....they're all for sale.

Dusty next to "Facing Gravity"

"We'll Meet Again"

"We'll Teach Them to Fly"

"Here Comes the Sun"

"It Was You That Opened My Eyes"

"Please Tell Me There Is Time"

Fermentation (this is not only about wine)

When I was pregnant with our older son, Harry, Steve planted a bunch of daikon radish in the garden with the idea to ferment it and turn it into pickled daikon, a Japanese delicacy. Luckily our attempt to ferment a baby turned out better than the daikon radish experiment, but it started us of on a path of fermentation and we have never looked back! 

Making Kimchi

Soon after our first failed attempt at fermenting, we discovered a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon, where we learned that fermenting foods is not only an age-old way to preserve food, but that the process of fermentation actually makes the food more nutritious.

Different types of fermentation yield different results. With beer and wine, yeast ferments sugars and carbohydrates into alcohol. Another type of fermentation, called lacto-fermentation, uses a bacteria called Lactobacillus to ferment things like milk into yogurt. Malolactic fermentation, which is a type of Lactobacillus fermentation, is part of the secondary fermentation which some wine varieties, such as Chardonnay, go through (that's where Chardonnay can get it's butteriness).

It includes Napa cabbage and watermelon radish

Since we have a big garden, we are always trying to figure out easy, healthy ways to preserve the bounty. So over the years we have learned to successfully ferment the vegetables as a way to preserve them. By trial and error, we have gotten pretty good at making lacto-fermented sauerkraut, pickles, olives, and much more!

This past weekend, the cabbage was turned into sauerkraut and Kimchi (a spicy Korean type of sauerkraut) and the weekend before, we made pickled cauliflower (yum!). If you come by the house, you will almost always find something in the fridge that's been fermented. This might even include several experiments which are sometimes amazing, like green tomatoes, sometimes not, like the unripe nectarines. 

The best recipes for fermented veggies are from a book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. In his book, Katz reminds us that many of our favorite foods and drinks are fermented including bread, cheese, wine, beer, chocolate, coffee, tea, pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi, miso, soy sauce, vinegar, and buttermilk.

the finished product

And be sure to check out his recipe for the Best Sauerkraut Ever!




Jill Klein Matthiasson

Balanced Wines and My Tasting with the Owner of DRC

I’m in a wine tasting group made up of a motley bunch of winemakers.  We meet once a month and this year the eight of us decided to focus our monthly tastings solely on the wines of Burgundy. We all love these wines, but feel tremendously ignorant about them.

By a crazy stroke of good fortune, we were lucky enough to be joined in our tasting group this month by Aubert de Villaine, the propietor of Domaine Romanee Conti. Domaine Romanee Conti (aka DRC) is considered by many to be the best wine in the world (and is definitely the most expensive), and Aubert is the owner and a legend in the business. In his mid-70s, he still is extremely passionate and fascinated with wine. He’s been making wine from the same vineyards for over 50 years, and he told us that he wishes he had a tasting group at home in Burgundy so that he could keep exploring wines other than his own in the way that we do with our tasting group!

One of the nuggets that he shared was the critical difference between “natural opulence and contrived opulence,” This ties into the concept of restraint—a restrained wine can still be opulent, but it is a natural opulence, an opulence that comes with the fruit, not the manufacturing. I’d never heard this verbalized, but as soon as he said it, I felt a huge “ah-ha,” since it confirmed what I’ve felt but hadn’t brought into focus in my mind.

Another nugget that he shared was importance of balance in wine. Aubert stressed that it is the small nuances that transport the wine into another world—the exercise of experiencing wine is about discovering those nuances in the wine—without balance the nuances can’t be detected.

It is really striking to me that the very few times that I’ve had the opportunity to taste with true legends of the industry, I’ve always been struck by their fascination and appreciation of  balanced wines.

The influential sommelier Raj Parr articulated the importance of balanced wines in his interview in the Wall Street Journal this past Saturday, where he uses our MATTHIASSON White Wine as an example and describes it as having..."racy minerality. Dry, long, great balance."

From different parts of the globe and different personal histories people in the wine business converge in their appreciation of wine. After spending the evening tasting with Aubert,, my opinion was reinforced that wine appreciation is not relative, and that our goal of creating singular wines with classical balance is the one and only way for us to make wines that will truly stand the test of time.

Steve

Learning by Doing

Viticulture (grape-farming) is an apprenticeship based discipline. The poet Gary Snyder said that with one’s education the four years after college are as important as the four year’s during college (paraphrasing). 

Jack in the vineyard

Our intrepid employee Jack Roberts is starting his third season with us—the first year collecting field data for my consulting company, and last year working for Matthiasson Family Vineyards on our tiny farming operation. For years we were too small to justify hiring an employee for the farming. We just didn’t have the cash, so I had to either do it myself, or get a crew in on a Sunday for the big pushes. Our farming and winemaking business is finally getting to the point where we could justify hiring an employee, thus we can now share the journey with Jack.

Since an apprenticeship is truly what’s required, it’s a tough balance between education and work output. There has been a lot of investment, and it’s so exciting and gratifying to see Jack’s proficiency develop. This year he pruned the Michael Mara vineyard in Sonoma, a super rocky and tough site, which makes for complicated pruning, in half the time it took him last year. And I feel that the vines are better pruned. The vines suffered a bit from being practiced on last year, but that’s part of the process. I shudder to think of the vineyards I screwed up while learning the trade of viticulturist—Jack hasn’t yet approached the level of inexperienced blunders that I’ve made—thankfully there haven’t really been any blunders at all.

bud break

So pruning, fixing trellises, operating equipment, fertilizing, killing gophers, spraying vines, racking wine, bottling, crushing grapes, delivering wine, packing jars of jam for the wine club, all these skills are being mastered, and not only making my life easier, but giving a lot of gratification at passing the long tradition of farming along to someone else.

And, our kids are next in line to gain that knowledge. Our son Harry asked me how to prune this winter, so we pruned the fruit trees and blackberries around the house. Next winter it will be the grapes.

Getting the Wine in the Bottle

We started making wine in our garage in 1995. It was always small quantities, and bottling and labeling the wine wasn’t really a big deal.

Our biggest home winemaking project was in 2002. We made a barrel (25 cases) of Napa Valley Pinot Noir and a barrel of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Bottling that wine was a much bigger deal, and I have to say, lots of fun. We had a big party and several friends were put to the hard work of bottling (and drinking) the wine, while Steve and I fed everyone. We called that wine “Chateau Mom and Pop.”

Bottling the MATTHIASSON White Wine

But the whole game changed when we bottled our first vintage of the Matthiasson Red Wine in 2005. This was a bottling of 125 cases of the 2003 vintage. We had to decide on a label design, get the labels printed, choose and order bottles, capsules, and corks. Getting the whole thing coordinated with all of the supplies arriving at the winery at the same time was a huge feat. I was surprised at how hard bottling was the very first time.

We are starting to get ready for our 8^th year of bottling. We’ve increased the amount and number of wines that we bottle, so it still seems like a very complicated process. Now we have 13 different wines to bottle with new labels, new capsules, and new bottles.

bottling the peach wine with the boys -- old school

Yesterday was spent at the printers for the “press check” on a new wine brand that we will be starting (more on that soon). And tomorrow will be sorting through all of the different bottle samples that we ordered..... and it goes on....

The great thing about this business is the finished product. Once all of these wines are in the bottle, we get to drink them! (and so do you!).