Cabernet Franc Is a Wine to Grow Old With

Class transcript:

All right, welcome, welcome, one and all. It is Sunday. We are thrilled to have you all with us. Thank you so much for joining us once again for a session devoted to Cabernet Franc with a very special guest, one of our foremost wine crush objects, Laura Grennan Bissell will be joining us. Zoe will be with me as always. We're talking Cabernet Franc, the other Cabernet. It gets short shrift, it is actually the OG Cabernet Franc, predates Cab Sauvignon, but doesn't get the credit it deserves for being as transformative and utterly delicious and terroir-expressive as it can be. But we're going to dispel those myths and proclaim its greatness today with one of California's foremost kind of non-interventionist, negotiant-style winemakers, and I think one of the most casually profound people in the wine business today, that being Laura Grennan Bissell, who is a Washington, D.C.

native, one of the few winemakers I know of that can claim the Black Cab. So I'm going to take that on her CV, which, you know, pretty much makes her the coolest person that any of us know. At any rate, she makes wine in California. She is joining us all the way from Kauai, the Garden Isle of the Hawaiian Island chain, and hopefully we'll get a fuller story on why she's out there, although you don't really need an excuse to be in Hawaii. I think Hawaii is excuse enough. Zoe is with us. Say hi to the people, Zoe. Hi, everyone. Happy Sunday. Lovely. A bit of mea culpa here. We had some issues with delivery, some related to our newest distribution partner for the sake of Laura's Wine, some related to the weather.

I wholeheartedly apologize. We will absolutely make it right. I'm going to cover the order in which we'll be drinking through the plates that we covered, that we offered. We have two flights for sale this week after we get everyone on board here. So, kind of stay tuned. You should never wait to drink. You know, please, please, please, you know, feel free to sample whatever you like. Don't wait for my permission to do so. That said, we have two flights this week, one devoted to the old world, one devoted to the new, with three fabulous archetypes for the sake of these individual wines. And I recommend, as always, having three glasses, if at all possible, so that you can move between wines fluidly, go back and forth, and use them kind of as dramatic foils, the one for the other, for the sake of this lesson.

So, without further ado, I'm giving you all a few minutes to straggle late into class. Thank you again for joining us. Laura Brennan-Drissel is with us all the way from the beautiful, the verdant, Hawaii. Laura, hello to you. Thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thank you for having me. And I'm sorry I was running a tiny bit late. I kind of tried to pack a couple things in. It's morning here. So I'm super stoked to be participating in something with the D.C. restaurant. And I, like, loved Bill's Wine List and the food you guys have for a long time. It's kind of my staple spot whenever I'm in the city. So this is very exciting. It beats the jumbo slices of my youth. They're still there.

They call tantalizingly to me at, you know, off hours, Laura, when I'm on my way home. And I'm only so strong. I can only resist that urge, you know, for so long. Laura makes wine in California. And some of you have purchased a flight that we offered featuring her wines. Sadly, I got shafted by my distributor. And the weather. FedEx did me no favors. So we weren't able to bring in as much of that wine as I would have liked. For those of you that got the New World flight, we replaced it with a very different wine from Wharton-Halgren out of the Finger Lakes. So some of you have Laura's wines, some of you have Wharton's wines. We're going to talk over Laura’s wine because she is with us, and I want you to drink her wine.

And we’re going all Oprah on her, like, special annual show. So if you didn’t get Laura’s wine and you promised to, you’re going to get a little bit of her wine. I really appreciate that. So if you didn’t get Laura’s wine and you promised to, you’re going to get a little bit of her wine. So if you didn’t get Laura’s wine and you promise to, you’re going to get a little bit of her wine. As part of our flight. We’re going to give you a full bottle of Laura’s Carpin when it comes in next week. And, I should say that for all of you that are joining us today, we'll have a special discount code in the lesson recap for you to stock up on all these wines.

Because the ancient root of sommelier is actually a word for one who provisions. Basically, someone that was looking after a nobleman's goods. And I failed a bit in that duty this week. You know, weather and fate intervened. But I apologize for that. Thank you all for joining us. And I could not be more excited. I actually got a little too excited for Laura to be with us because it was the first time I'd worked with this particular distributor. And they didn't do me any favors. But I was irrationally excited that Laura's wines were available again in this market because they haven't been for too long. And, you know, we've really enjoyed featuring them in the past. And are excited to be able to feature them going forward.

So without further ado, we are going to dive in. I just want to let you know for the sake of, you know, the order in which we're covering the wines, we're going to go New World first, followed by Old World. Then kick it off with Laura's Capronk. I'm going to move into the Finger Lakes, Virginia thereafter, followed by Chilele. And then move into the Old World archetypes for Guy, and Chino, to close things up. Laura, did you manage to track down a Cabernet Franc of your own to enjoy at 11 o'clock in Hawaii? I did not, unfortunately. I actually, I have another meeting after this. So I am drinking a Lagrino. I have one of those too. So you're in good, you're in good, you're in good company.

But I did, I did, I did a tasting the other day. And I also, they were drinking the Capronk too. And I had a rum daiquiri then, but I realized that that at 11 a.m. actually kind of screws up. No worries. Has the, has the Zoom featurette been a regular part of your pandemic marketing experience? No, I actually, so at the beginning of this year, I moved away from being on social media and like have just tried to move away from being like on my computer and on my phone, like trying to get my screen time down to like one, or one hour or two hours a day. And, you know, I, I have a farm up in Washington too now. So I'm, I'm outside most of the time.

And I've found that that's actually worked pretty well. Like I, I like these Zoom calls though. Like this is, this is kind of a newer thing. I've been in Kauai for a while alone with my kids and my husband just came to meet me. So now I have more bandwidth to do it a little bit, but it's, it's been really cool to connect. So I'm, I'm surprised how much I enjoy doing. They are insidiously fun. You know, no substitute for, you know, interaction across the bar, but we are on, you know, less than 44 now, and it's been a wild and fabulously fun ride. So without further ado, we always kick things off with a bit of a verse here at Tealco Wine School.

And this is by a popular demand, Rimbaud, which feels fitting for a lesson devoted to a very, classically French varietal. This is 'Time Without End'. We have found it again, what time without end. 'Tis the ocean gone for a walk with the sun. Soul, you sentinel, murmur and confess. Day is fiery hell. Nothing, or night rather, is nothingness. From the common urges, from the human highest. Far thy path diverges, following thou flyest. No expectancy, no around tour. Science patiently, punishment is sure. From your blaze alone, sat in flames of force. Duty's breath is blown. No one says, of course. We have found it again, what time without end. 'Tis the ocean gone for a walk with the sun. So thank you, Todd, for, you know, properly calling me out for the fact that I had yet to feature Arthur Rimbaud.

He is certainly one of the great celebrators of wine in his verse, and I can't think of a better way to kick off a Sunday for us devoted to a quintessentially French varietal. We're covering the other Cabernet, Cabernet Franc, here. Cabernet Sauvignon gets the lion's share of, you know, kind of press for the sake of the Cabernet siblings. But Cabernet Franc is the OG, very much. First documented in the 18th century. It's thought that actually Rabelais was talking about Cabernet Franc when he was speaking of the wines of Chinon and documented the excesses of his protagonists. But, you know, there may or may not be any scientific basis to that. It is, you know, indisputably has been established that Cabernet Franc is sufficiently old that its parents are lost to history.

You know, it was, you know, kind of first documented in the area of Bordeaux. It has spawned all these other progenies. So Cabernet Sauvignon is an offspring of Cabernet Franc. Carmenier is an offspring of Cabernet Franc. Merlot is an offspring of Cabernet Franc. So they are all, you know, part of this very incestuous bordelais family tree. Pratik Berlot is actually not the outlier, not related to anybody. And then Malbec is actually a brother of Merlot but by another mother, Cabernet Franc, had nothing to do with that. Cabernet Franc, you know, compared to Cabernet Sauvignon. Earlier ripening, softer in terms of the quality of tannins and, you know, much more aromatic, which can, you know, turn people off at times. But, you know, those of us that love the variety will find hugely charming.

You know, I think for those that, you know, are immune to Cap Franc's charms and, you know, prefer Cabernet Sauvignon, they would, you know, kind of prejudice the inky, you know, kind of more robust varietal. But Cap Franc is, I think, uniquely terroir expressive in a way that Cabernet Sauvignon misses. Cabernet Sauvignon kind of, you know, it just kind of has one speed for the sake of a lot of its wines. It can speak in a dimmer voice or a louder voice, but it doesn't, you know, change its tune all that much. I do find that Cab Franc, you know, grown on different soils, manipulated in slightly different ways, is a wonderfully dynamic grape in a way that my favorite varietals really encapsulate.

It's also very cold-hardy, so it does spectacularly well in the kind of marginal, cooler climates that, you know, I tend to love for the sake of acid-driven wines, for the sake of the kind of wines that we feature at our restaurants and kind of wines we love to drink at home. And it's spiritual home, it should be said, is in the Loire Valley in France, France's, you know, garden, as it were, established as such, you know, the 15th, 16th century, the French noblesse vacation there, established their home there, built castles there from the famous Tufon Jean that is, you know, so important to the Cabernet Francs of Chinon, Bourgail, and Saint-Marie-Champigny, which we're going to cover forthrightly.

But I want to keep this brief because we have Laura on the hook from, from Hawaii, making wine in California, but from Kauai. And I want to kick it over to her to talk about, you know, this grape and talk about her work with it and to introduce, you know, her as a winemaker to you all. Laura is this amazing, you know, kind of like punk rock, badass, Pachamama, like wine Buddha character, who is unintentionally profound every time she opens her mouth. I encourage all of you to check her out. She's a great person. She's a great person. Check out, and I will link to a great podcast she did, Women in Wine. Really cool discussion of, you know, how she wears multiple hats, personally and professionally.

Although it is, you know, fascinating to me that you would never hear Albert de Volaine, who's a most famous, you know, winemaker in Burgundy, interviewed by Levi Dalton and have to talk about how he balances fatherhood in Pinot Noir. But neither here nor there. It's a great little podcast and speaks to, you know, Laura as much as, as a mother, as a human, as it does a winemaker. But we're going to double down on Cab Franc. We covered your DC roots, Laura. Did you always love wine? Did you grow up in kind of like a wine loving milieu or was it something that you came to over time? Because you've had a million careers. You've been like a secret agent, a tattoo artist, like a punk rock groupie, spoken word poet.

You name it. You have done it. You've done it. You've done it. You've done it. You've done it. You've done it in your incredible life. And I'm sure there's an autobiography coming, you know, someday. But where does wine figure in that journey? So interestingly, I had a not-wine family at all. We grew up, so I was born in DC proper, grew up in Northern Virginia, mainly in the South a bit too. I mean, my parents pretty much didn't drink wine, like a bottle of like Frisianette or Sutter Home would show up at a party or something. When I was in kindergarten, though, my best friend in Vienna, Virginia, her family was Hungarian. Her parents used to drink wine.

And when people ask me how I got into wine, I always like the short answer for me is always that I love the way things smell. And it's the truth. I mean, since I was little, like very young, I wanted to smell everything and, you know, to a level of like excess or, you know, maybe it seems a little weird. But I remember watching her parents, at a dinner party, like smelling their wine and talking about the way it smelled. And I was just like, people do that. Like it's, there's nothing weird about liking smell. Okay. So I became kind of like interested in wine from a very young age. Obviously, you know, when I was six, I wasn't like walking to a wine shop and, you know, asking about Cote Roti, but I was, I was open.

I, I recognized that there was this thing in the world called wine that people talked about the way it smelled and tasted. So as I got, you know, a bit older, I had a pretty brambunctious early life. I mean, and not even just in the like, you know, like punk rock way, but in the like having a kid when I was 15 way and stuff like that. And my high school boyfriend and I used to work at this hotel out in Loudoun County, Virginia called Lansdowne, which I'm sure some of you have heard of. And he worked in in-room dining and I worked in the buffet fancy restaurant and we used to steal bottles of wine from them and drink them on my like farm country house front porch, which is now a townhouse complex in Loudoun.

And we like started to like wine and like as high schoolers, we decided that we liked wine and food and would like go out to these restaurants and then, you know, Virginia, DC area. Like I remember driving out to one that used to be out towards Washington, Virginia called Four and 20 Blackbirds. Oh yeah. You may remember that's like where we went for dinner when I was like a junior in high school for Valentine's day, you know? Yeah. And we couldn't drink wine then, but we were both, you know, because we were in a restaurant, we were high schoolers, but we were like into like what was going on. And the kind of ebb and flow of my life, you know, brought me like into, you know, places where you wouldn't even be exposed to wine at all.

But anytime I was somewhere where I could be exposed to wine, I wanted to learn and ask everything. And then it kind of all crescendoed in Berkeley and around 2006, I was working at a, um, at like a beer bar, like a random beer bar. And, um, this like very handsome young guy came in and he ordered some beer and it was like, I was getting off and he went and sat outside and was smoking a cigarette. And I went up and, you know, bummed. Cigarette to talk to him or something. And I was like, 'What do you do?' And he's like, 'I'm a winemaker.' And it was just like, 'You can do that.' Um, so the trajectory kind of began there.

And again, it was like an ebb and flow of, I went and traveled in Asia for a while and learned that like, 'you know, the tribalism of being involved in subcultures wasn't what I wanted out of my life.' And then, you know, I came back. I will say ironically, 'Oh, for sure.' Yeah, absolutely. But it's, um, I would say it's less, it's less like tribalist than, you know, basically what I'm saying is like, how leaving, you know, for all intents and purposes, how I grew up, like, and, um, and stepping out into the big world, you know, even though backpacking through Nepal, isn't a wine culture extravaganza. I had to like, learn to become with friends, like friends with people who I had nothing in common with, or that I thought I had nothing in common with because they didn't like the same bands, you know, or something like that.

But it's, um, it was just like a wide-eyed opening moment and in my life. And then I ended up coming back to the Bay area for a little bit. I never actually was a tattoo artist. I only apprenticed. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. It's okay. It's okay. People like the one, I think it's because I have a lot of tattoos, which I got. I was like 18 and 19,, in DC. Uh, and, but back in the Bay area, I then just got more and more interested in wine. And finally it was like, I'm going to Spain and I'm going to ride my bike into France and learn to make wine.

And I got to Barcelona with like $2,000 and like a four-month round trip, which was not enough money, uh, to ride my bike into France and learn to make wine. And I ended up staying in Barcelona and then getting more, more into food and wine, eventually coming back to California and learning to make wine here, but with no credible experience, my resume was laughable. So, but I love, I love that that didn't stop you. And, and I, I think, you know, you, you have this like a force of nature quality about you that, um, you know, for, you know, the massive men that, you know, are more easily dissuaded, um, is, is really, you know, amazing and inspirational.

Um, and, uh, I read that actually that, or I, I heard on a podcast, that, um, Cab Franc was the first, uh, wine that you made. Yes. Um, sorry. I, if I, if I get off topic, you just, and I will, uh, so Cabernet Franc, um, even to this day, uh, you know, when we close our eyes and we imagine our like memory house, like, like the foyer of smell and wine for me is Cabernet Franc. Like when I stick my, like, I'm getting chills even, I'm thinking about a glass of Cabernet Franc and like that Párazine that's like not bell pepper, like you can get with underripe Carménère Merlot, but it's like that Párazine that's like pea tendril and like carrot top and like, kind of like good green smells.

And then the petrichor, you know, like the wet earth smell and, and the bloodiness that can be there and the kind of like brambly berry and everything like that is what I love about red wine and Cabernet, Franc, when executed properly, you can just build all of those things into one wine. And it can be a, you know, a, I wouldn't say a big wine, but I mean, there are wines from Chinon and some more that are not small wines. They also have Cabernet Sauvignon in them. Um, but the typicity is Cabernet Franc. Um, but then the flip side of that is there's plenty of like beautiful Vanda Tabla, which is more like the La La Lou Cabernet Franc that you guys are drinking.

Um, but the first wine I ever made, it was a Cabernet Franc, uh, from Carneros, which, uh, Sonoma Carneros is an excellent, um, growing region for Bordeaux varietals. I don't know why it's full of Pinot Noir. It drives me crazy. Um, and, but that was a, that was a more, I would say like more Chianti style, you know, as where this is to me, like kind of like a, like Vin de Table, almost like it'd be more in the, like the Burgundy kind of realm. Cool. You know, a little warmer. Now, for those of you that, you know, kind of think of a winemaker as somebody that, you know, has more money than God and owns their land and owns a farm and all the, you know, means of production, um, you know, how is your mode of operating, you know, kind of different than that?

Um, well, when I started making wine, um, um, the, uh, the same guy that I had walked up to in, um, in the beer bar. You know, in 2006, uh, we stayed friends. He's actually, he's an Orthodox kosher winemaker, um, for coming in. Is that Jonathan Hadjou? Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly who he's still one of my best friends. Awesome. Um, but Jonathan's one of the people who like, like the first time I understood what an Appalachian was or a wine region or different varieties. Like I learned all that from Jonathan very early. Um, but he, um, basically after I worked at Vintage in 2011 at Unti and then in 2012, he knew I wanted to make wine and I didn't have any money.

I mean, I was on like Medi-Cal and food stamps, you know, trying to figure out how to have a life where I could actually do something meaningful in California, where it's really fucking expensive. Pardon me. But like, you know, when I was in school, you can drop it, you can; it's F-bomb friendly. It's okay. You can punctuate things with the occasional F-bomb. Yeah. But like working a million jobs and you know, Jonathan was like, 'You should make wine this vintage.' And I was like, Jonathan, I don't, I don't have any fruit. And he's like, 'I'll buy you some Cap Franc.' Cause he knew that's what I wanted. He's like, we'll find you some Cap Franc. I'll buy you some Cap Franc.' And I was like, Jonathan, I don't have anywhere to make my wine.

And he's like, do it in my cellar. And I was like, I don't even have a barrel. And he's like, if don't just stop making excuses. Like, I will get you your half ton of Cap Franc. I will get you a barrel. You can do it in my cellar. Like, you're making wine this year. And I was like, okay. And that's really like the, you know, I had no capital. And then it was basically from 2012 through 2014. I just worked my ass off and, you know, worked for wine distributors, ran a wine bar, worked for another winemaker. I worked with Matthiessen for a while. And Steve's kind of been like my fairy godfather in winemaking as well, Steven Jonathan. I didn't realize that he's also kind of a punk rock kid.

Like, yeah. You never guessed that about him. Like I, he doesn't, he doesn't necessarily like, you know, fit that, uh, he looks cleaner cut. We were both bike messengers too. Right. He's in San Francisco. No, he was in San Francisco. I was in DC. But yeah, no, but that was like, I remember the first time I went out to meet Steve because I briefly met him at a tasting and just driving in a car and having a conversation with him about Petrichor. And, like, sometimes if one of us read an article now about Petrichor, that's interesting geek out about it together. But I also like, he immediately saw that, like, I wanted to learn, but I was also trying to make something and that I, you know, wasn't California pedigree wine person or like a tech dude who had millions of dollars, you know, and he just kind of like was always there when I had questions.

And the day I realized he was a punk rocker was when I gave him the gate code to, um, a vineyard that I was in. And he was like, 'I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know' what it was but I was like, 'I just want to make some of my wine.' And he was like, 'Oh, like the pump band nine, nine, nine.' And I was like, 'ah', that's a pretty like obscure cut to the uninitiated. Petrichor is one of my favorite tasting notes of all time. It refers to the smell of earth is smell pavement after rain and there's a lot of actually like academic inquiry into it now because it's thought that it essentially yeah, smells are always there and the rain volatilizes a lot of odors that are already present in the earth and if you are a smell junkie i think you know it's something that you know is really visceral for you and i think if you love smells you don't really like you know discriminate between good and bad it's just they're all like really interesting to you and and petrichor is one of those that like um is is really you know evocative especially you know if you're you know living on the land and there's dirt roads everywhere and stuff like that and you know i think when it emerges in in wine it's like this aha you know kind of you know tuning fork you know short short circuit the brain kind of uh moments um for the sake of your cab fronk here which you know we have an adorable cardboard cut i was just really pathetic um so i didn't know what was going on when i first saw it well come on we need we need an exemplar i'm like the worst vandal white ever um so how tell us how This one is made so you, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, you, you called it a bond to swap, how do you, how do you make it so, so that the you have the you guys have the 19, so that's for a few different vineyards, um, one being a certified organic vineyard and then the other uh two are not certified but they're farmed without uh conventional pesticides or herbicides.

So I'm trying to I'm looking at this map, so you're in Clarksburg right? It's a con, so that's actually mostly I would say it's about 50 percent Contra Costa, 25 Clarksburg, 25 Sierra Foothills cool. So the the kind of lighter style like part of that wine comes from um Contra Costa, which is like just above Oakland, I'm looking at your map too and seeing if I can like give you a a good old hint in um yeah okay. So Contra Costa, like look at the San Francisco Bay conquered and then down is Contra Costa but like yeah the way that the the way that I so I lived in Berkeley so the way that I would get into that vineyard is I would be up in Berkeley and I would drive through La Morinda and then it's like at the tip of where Contra Costa like like kind of is it's not it's it's like more in the in the northern part of what would be Contra Costa where you get a pretty massive wind that comes in from the San Pablo Bay so like. Blows down like where Richmond is, it's like east of that um and because of that area it's very sandy soils it's you know a lot of clay loam some people dry farm there most people should dry farm but everybody's afraid of that in California and reasonably so um and the water is high and you can get like like people have higher yield lighter wine from there usually unless they're like over extracting something because it's it's almost like an island wine so to me it's like you either pick really early and you have this like light, fun, bright kind of juicy wine or like Bedrock for example is a winery that works with fruit.

From there, but they let it hang for a long time and have a more dense wine, um, and then up, um, north of there, the exactly the delta breeze also blows up, and I like that great delta breeze just feels like uh it's like a soap or a deodorant or something on those ones, like, yep, I uh, so I call it Clarksburg Luar Cali as like a stupid little joke um, it's warmer than the Luar but it is a lot of old decomposed river soils so there's a lot of decomposed granite alluvial soil and I think you get some of the like the shenanigan make from Clarksburg I think has some of those same kind of like wet earth granite flavors um, and that comes through in the Cab.

Franc, and then there's like a tiny, like more structured backbone, and that is from a vineyard up in the Sierra foothills, that's like all decomposed granite, no till, um, and the wine has a bit more structure there, so it's a combination of three parts which is very common in like a Vanguard toddler village wine, um, and it's just the but the point of that wine when I go to make that wine I want to make something that's just like light and thirst-quenchable, that you want with a little bit of a chill, you can have it with your meal or you can just drink a glass of it by itself or with a little charcuterie or you know pickles or whatever.

Your thing is, and the wine's just going to be a nice backbone to what's going on, like it's not um a wine that's supposed to be like you know a like electric yellow jumpsuit, it's more of like a you know just like a I don't know like a cornflower blue room, you know, sorry, like a safe space or um I uh that's fine, I'm, I won't go into it, but I had a very interesting conversation the other day and it's like, yes, to me, it would be kind of like a like a taste safe space, you know, like where it's just by most people's palate that wine will just be something where it's like, this is nice, and I think there's not enough wine, at least in California.

That like tries to be in that place, I feel like there's a lot of statement making that happens. Well, it's just this like kind of classic old world you know fabric of the table, you know work-a-day wine that is, you know something you know that's not um you know one-dimensional um but something that's wildly thirst-quenching that you would you know never get tired of drinking um and you know it's very much of a moment and you know there are a lot of different French terms for that. You know, bond the swap on the glacier they say 'blue blue' so you know. I think any time uh you know a language has a lot of different words for something that Reflects, you know the value that they they put on it and um, you know I love that, that's something um, so do you have any questions for for Laura um or any tasting notes from the commentary uh on on her wine for those uh that do not have it uh in the midst um?

I will say, you know what I love about you know this style of kind of like Cali um, you know on the top is that you get this like fullness of fruit, this rightness coupled with this like really bright acidity, um that's you know very different than the old world but in the spirit of um and I think uh, you know especially in this vintage really embodies that um, Kristin and David I do like blending. Cabernet, I do like, like, I like blending. Period. Um, I very seldom have a wine that goes into bottle that's actually just a monovarietal wine. Um, it's always a tiny bit and I don't, I mean people feel differently about this but to me it's just like if you're just adding a little salt or pepper to something.

Like, I don't feel like it's changing the whole thing. It's not a steak, you know, doesn't cease to be a steak if you season it. Yes, exactly. And I think that that's um, you know, that again like in in the old world it's very common to just blend a tiny bit of something into something to amplify um the qualities that you want so I do almost always blend a tiny bit of cabernet sauvignon into cabernet franc like that wine even has like i don't know probably five percent cabernet sauvignon from clarksburg and and i find that that just kind of i don't know like it just adds this little element of structure in it um and then interestingly on the flip side i like blending cabernet franc in a small amount with merlot like with merlot i would want to blend a tiny bit of cab sauvignon a tiny bit of cab franc it just you just get a different like the wine just expresses itself in a nicer way that way

but um that was the the question i saw also interesting you're much you're much Better at, uh, you know chewing gum and walking than I am, uh, I struggle, I struggle with the the chat while we, while we talk, but uh, no like this is, I'm, I like I'm very not a good reader, but uh, all right so, uh, Lord, we're gonna, we're gonna taste through um, some different exemplars here and uh, feel free to please weigh in, we're gonna come back to you in a minute and we're gonna talk about you, I want to you know talk a little more about you know um, you know your branding and you know some some

other things that came up in the context of you know diving deeper into your um, you know uh career as a winemaker in California but I want to talk to you about These different manifestations of Cab Franc, and we're going to move from a California Bondi Pliaser to a cool climate okay, from uh the Finger Lakes uh I fucking love the Finger Lakes um as you all uh know um we've already dedicated a class to the Finger Lakes and I'm going to talk a little bit about the Finger Lakes Cab Franc has become their kind of signature uh red varietal. Have you tried any uh Cabernet Franc out of the Finger Lakes? Laura, I have but it's been a long time and I can't speak to the producer.

Okay, there's one that called In or something, there's one with like a brown label but I, I like them; I just haven't. Had a lot, well, no, and, uh, I talked to those winemakers about the difficulty of of showing their wines on the West Coast, and a lot of them said, 'Well, you know it can be a challenging market to break into.' Oh, sure. Um, so uh the Finger Lakes, um, is you know kind of an unlikely place for Cab Franc, but Cab Franc is a very hardy vine uh, it has very thick, um, kind of budwood, um, so it thrives in a cooler climate. You can see that the aforementioned lakes here, I love this image because you see, uh, the Finger Lakes in the snow and you get a sense of, you know, this uh thin strip of land on either side of the lakes, the biggest of which

is here, because the wine comes from that area and you get up you get comes out of the mountain and a lot of times I've baited the vineyards for the sake of the wine those of you that have the ravines are drinking some Riemann and�ren and his wife lisa uh he's a Dane who cut his teeth at code est sok wontyl um and his family's estate in Provence uh but decamped to uh the finger lakes to make wine uh you know in the new world uh in his own image works with Riesling and Cab Franc. And Cab Franc, very cold hardy. In this corner of the world, they're harvesting about a month later than they would in a place like Virginia and, you know, probably a month and a half or, you know, later than they do on the west coast.

This comes from multiple vineyard sites, one of which is kind of more limestone heavy on the northwest corner of the lake, the other which, you know, is even more limestone heavy on the southwest edge of the lake. It sees time in large neutral oak, about 600 gallon large oak. Not entirely neutral, I think, you know, they just purchased the barrel so they haven't used it enough that it's fully neutral as of yet. But, you know, they find that, you know, Cab Franc in this environment needs kind of a more gentle, you know, a more gentle hand in the cellar. They don't want an overt new oak influence because that would overwhelm the wine. And I love the tart fruit quality, of this one.

I find, you know, Cab Franc in these cooler climes can take on this really awesome earthy, herbaceous, you know, almost medicinal, but not in a bad way, kind of character that this one embodies and is definitely like long and lean and super bright. I have another wine from Early Mountain out of Virginia here. And, you know, we're going from kind of cooler climates to progressively warmer ones. And Virginia doesn't make, you know, you know, a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon, you know, a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon, you know, a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon, or good Cabernet Sauvignon. That's because Cab Sauv wants its feet dry, but Cab Franc does really well in cooler, damper environments. Laura, have you had a chance to hit the Virginia wine trail at all?

No, but I mean that, again, that like as soon as I can travel again, I actually really want to. I've been hearing some cool stuff. And then I had the one, the wines from the guys in DC that you turned me on to, and they really, they're very exciting wines to me. And I mean, being from DC, Virginia, I'm, I just, I'm fascinated. So it's, it's something I really want to do anyway. And when that, when I do that, I will ask you for many. No worries. So this is actually, so you had the Lightwell Survey, the Piedmont Sing and Riesling Blend. And this is from the same winemaker, but this is basically his day job. So he does that as a side project.

I feel like, I feel like winemakers are kind of like musicians that way, like their side projects have side projects, but this is his steady job, like his session musician gig for Early Mountain, which is owned, a historic property owned by Steve Case and his wife, you know, and they have, you know, quite a bit of money to pour into it. They have that like crazy AOL money. This is from two different sites in the Shenandoah Valley. And what I really dig about it is, you know, it is, it is lusher, it's more luxuriant. I think, you know, the quality of fruit is much more velvety than the Finger Lakes offering. And I think it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's really fun to juxtapose, you know, one against the other for the sake of these two, you know, but nonetheless, you know, it still, you know, reflects the character of a cooler climate.

It doesn't really have any tannins to speak of, you know, the fruit, the fruit is, you know, kind of broader and riper and darker in character than you'd expect on the Finger Lakes wine. You know, but again, there's not a huge new oak influence. They save that for, you know, some of their more traditional cuvées, you know, but, you know, there's, for me, Cab Franc when you hear it right, just has this, like, really, like, gorgeous texture. You know, it's not devoid of tannins, but they're really soft and, you know, enveloping in, in a wonderful way. And then the last wine as part of our New World flight, kind of working backwards, is from ungrafted vines in Chile. Chile is a land without phylloxera and has some of the oldest ungrafted vines in the world.

It's from a large wine company. I'm going to pull up a proper image of Derek Mossman, who does the winemaking of 110-year-old ungrafted vines, dry farmed. It's a hard place to dry farm. It's an act of faith, a leap of faith, much like it is in California, but Cab Franc is really well there. That said, it's much riper, kind of chewier style than, you know, you're likely to encounter, certainly, than the East Coast. Has a lot more in common with what you find predominantly in California. How would you, being on the West Coast floor, how would you kind of classify, you know, obviously Cab Sauv is the, you know, kind of, um, bell of the ball there, uh, on the, you know, red grape side of the world, but, you know, people who are working with Cab Franc, you know, what stylistically, what are most of those like?

Um, I mean, I think there's a lot of variation, um, you know, like the big Napa producers basically try to make Cab Sauv the same way they'd make, or make Cab Franc the same way they'd make Cab Sauv. Um, and I mean, it sounds like the Matthiessen Cabs or Cab Franc is one that you have in this lineup. Like, I think Steve is kind of more in the wheelhouse of like what I love about Cab Sauv. Brock Sellers has made a really pretty Cab Franc in the back. Those are your Berkeley neighbors. Sorry? Your Berkeley neighbors. Yeah, exactly. But, um, you know, I think that California is still very much the wild West as far as, uh, wine style. Um, so you really get the whole spectrum.

Um, I think that the thing that the big delineation between New World wine and Old World wine for me, like, and I don't have a large, um, dictionary for like a Chilean Cab Franc. I've probably come across one along the way, but I don't, I can't tell you what that would taste like. Um, I think that a lot of times it's warmer in New World climates and, um, there is less acidity. Um, and that can, to me, create like a, um, I don't know, just like a complicated formulation in the wine where people will then try and do the same techniques that they would in Europe, like stem inclusion and stuff like that. And sometimes you end up with a wine that doesn't, like it just kind of doesn't, it doesn't flow necessarily.

So sometimes I'll get that in New World wines. Like, you know, I know that Steve actually does do a small amount of stem inclusion in his Cab Franc, but he picks it early enough that it works. Um, so there's just kind of like a whole spectrum of what you're going to get in the New World. Like I'm up in, so I have 20 acres of vine on Underwood Mountain in Washington now, which is like cold, dry farmed. There's like three feet of snow there right now. And I'm planning on planting Cab Franc up there too. And I think it's going to be fine. It's just going to be really different, you know. Do you find yourself getting frustrated with, you know, your California neighbors that treat Cab Franc like they would Cab Sauv?

Do you, you know, want to shout at them like, you know, stop, you know, that's not, you know, what you're dealing with here? Yeah. I mean, it's, I think that the same people who are doing that are making Cabernet Sauvignon, not the way that I would, like, I make a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon too. I actually may make more Cabernet Sauvignon if I added it up. It's either Cabernet Sauvignon or Merlot that I make more of. Um, but I think that's just like an overall style discrepancy. And I think that that style can work better on Cabernet Sauvignon because you can get more extraction, you can get more color and tannin and character while still maintaining some acidity, but in Cabernet Franc it's like, once it blows its acid, it kind of like, it doesn't have all of the dimensions that you would need to have like- It just kind of falls apart.

Exactly. And then when you try to get into a big wine, it's just like hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Or you try to, you know, throw new oak at it or whatever. It just ceases to be what it was in the first place. And still you just miss a big part of the palate. And the funny thing is, is I actually feel like the kind of new school of wine that tries to make Cabernet Sauvignon more in the like classic style where they do a ton of stem inclusion and stuff like that, like they create the same problem. It's just not as big of a problem because there's not a ton of new oak and extraction and stuff happening too. Or the wine kind of misses like the mid palate. Great.

So now, I'm irrationally excited for the next Old World lineup. Zoe, do we have any questions about the New World Offerings we just tasted through? Yeah, we have a ton of questions, mainly about you, Laura. I think everyone just wants to know your whole life story because we heard a rumor that you were involved in some spoken word poetry in Barcelona. And we were wondering if you could elaborate on that. And also what made the decision for you to go to California instead of going to France or making wine around the DMV area? So I, when I lived in Barcelona, I was part of a poetry project called the Prostiblo Poetico, which was like a branch of the poetry brothel in New York. And it wasn't as much spoken word as it was like a poetry cabaret.

It was like a poetry cabaret. And it was like a poetry cabaret. And it was like a poetry cabaret. And it was like a poetry cabaret. So I did that. And then I also play music. So I would like play music as part of that cabaret. Like I play guitar and sing. And then I would play like experimental shows as well. So that was a big part of like what I did over there. I also taught English and like created this hustle where I taught English to chefs and I would like meet them and like hang out at Pinocchio and like eat, you know, drink sherry, and then we'd walk around the market and talk about food. So I mean, I kind of I was like, I had a bit of like a vagabond life when I was over there.

I mean, I did. I was a hustler. You were like a little bit of a hustler. The reason I stayed was I met a Catalan guy who, you know, we fell madly in love and like got engaged within a week. And he was really into food and wine, too. So when we were together, we ate out and drank a lot of wine. And, you know, I was like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I mean, the real reason I decided to go back to the US versus versus staying over there was because I was undocumented. So, I might have stuck around longer. I mean, it was also hard because I didn't have a lot of money.

And like, I did have a kid when I was very young, and she and I are still very close and like, getting to like, you know, like getting to spend as much time with her as I wanted living overseas would have been really hard. It was a wonderful experience to be over there. I mean, I learned, I think that I learned more about food than anything else. But I think to be a good winemaker, like you have to understand the principles of like beautiful, simple food. But yeah, the poetry stuff was fun. I still like California. Sorry. What took you to California? So that was where I had lived in California. Prior. And I was able to get an internship there. So I basically wrote this resume that was absolutely full of lies.

Embellished. Come on, it was embellished. Well, yes, that's usually the word I use. It was embellished tremendously. And I sent it to a bunch of different wineries that I had like no business applying for. And I I heard back from them. And I was like, 'I'm going to go back to California.' I'm going to go back to California. And I was like, 'I'm going to go back to California.' And I was like, 'I'm going to go back from a few.' Because the main thing is I wrote a cover letter. My cover letter was like, to me, wine is like a confluence of like, you know, science and art and alchemy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it said that I was a poet and all this stuff.

And a few people like from actually very credible wineries got back to me. I was written back by Chateau Montelena. Oh, gangster. The Oren Swift guys who do The Prisoner. And then Unti, which was like an organic. Organic, biodynamic, small winery. That works predominantly with Italian varietals. Yep, exactly. But they had a French winemaker who was really cool. And like, I went out there, like I flew back because basically, you know, I was like, okay, cool, I'm going to be able to get a job. And I went and met him. And like, he didn't tell me it was very clear that I didn't know what I was doing. But I could just tell like he was kind of like anytime I like started to be like, wine, wine, wine.

He was like, yeah, whatever. Okay. Anyway, like, um, but we've stayed friends too. And I think maybe a year and a half ago or something, we were having lunch and laughing about my resume. And he was like, yeah, the only reason I gave you a job was because you're a poet. So this is the quotable Laura Brennan Bissell. I was actually going to read this to start, start the lesson. But this is straight off your, your website bio. The truth about winemaking is that it embodies and emboldens all your senses. And while it's invigorating the smell and taste of vintage, you can even see the color expressed as a rosy prison before you. TV, able to hear the wind inside your head and remember the smell of what the previous year's precipitation promised is when it becomes a form of synesthetic life support, synesthetic life support.

I love, I love that. I mean, I felt like that could be a punk band synesthetic life support. Like, we are No, it's like kind of like a coil. Yeah, our first our first track has been to swap. Yeah. Anyway, um, so without without further ado, we're going to taste through these. I promise time for more questions. Um, and I want to show a provocative question. So we're going to consider where you see yourself sitting in, you know, the modern wine middle aged cafeteria. You know, are you with like the hip Natty wine kids. Are you at your own table, you know, who's, are you, are you, putting between tables, you know what, what is the, you know, what is the relationship that because we have three of my favorite wines and these are from the lower valley.

I'm going to pull you in. Up an image, uh this is a flashback first of all to, uh the wine that we just tasted so, um this is an own-rooted vine, uh it's not Cabernet but, uh that, uh um, uh this gentleman, Musmann, works with, uh in Chile, um he makes the Garage Wine Company wines, I just love these vines, you know they look like old olive trees, they have this like force of personality that's just fucking amazing, um and uh really special thing on rooted vines, uh because we're going to move, uh next into a wine that is own-rooted, uh that comes from, uh Master of the Arts, uh Thierry Germain, who is a, uh huge advocate of biodynamic farming about as, um forceful an advocate as anyone outside.

Of Nicolás Jolie or Rudolf Schein, yeah, oh, and no till, awesome gangster, we've actually, uh, talked extensively about no till, uh, on this podcast, uh, or whatever the hell this thing is at this point, but um, yeah, yeah, Oh, awesome, um, and, uh, Melanie Fister, uh, who's an amazing, uh, female winemaker out of northern Alsace, uh, is a fierce, uh, advocate of no till, too. I actually poured next like I'm pretty sure I've met her as well, like she is awesome, um, Zoe actually has, uh, used her, uh, snippets of her podcast as her ringtone, uh, now for which I feel like I don't know how Melanie would feel about that or, uh, but anyway, she is, uh, she figures she's Into poetry, as well, right?

I wouldn't be surprised if she wouldn't surprise me if she is um, she's she's a just an amazing woman, but uh, at any rate, I need to pull up a map of the Loire Valley, uh, because you need to situate yourselves, uh, we're dealing with the three most important designations of origin, um, pretty much in France for uh Cabernet Franc based varietal wines. We're gonna begin in Sancerre Champagne which is in red here, move on to uh Bourgueil, uh, which is one of the most uh vexing uh French words pronounced ever, uh, my French is bollocks, it's pronounced Bergay, it's like one of those it just kind of gets lost in your throat and

becomes something else i apologize to the native french speakers uh in the mix here um that's how i say it um you know i do the best that i can uh spanish was my second language and then chino um and ogre foe um which is just like timeless um at any rate um uh you're in the kind of part of the loire valley um this is uh chateau country um the characteristic of the loire valley is that it's a little bit more of a moody've uh mountainous area and again starting to meet the um maroon right now but some ways and methods um are um in an artistic way sometimes it's uh you know ourselves um having three different right so it's like you know It's cellar bad um if you have a bachelor or a professor like a professor or something like that like you He's a little more rainfall than Chinon, which itself is warmer as well in the southern bank of the Loire.

Bourgaille, the coolest and probably the wettest of the bunch, produces the most kind of brooding, you know, Lord Byron, anti-hero, Luke Perry kind of wines in the mix for the sake of these offerings. That is, you know, what we're dealing with here. The Thierry Germain is Franck de Pied, which is to say it's own-rooted vines. That is very special because most of the vines in the old world are grafted because of the Phylloxera louse, which spread its way from the lower Mississippi Valley to England because the English love to pluck plants from everywhere and plant them in the greenhouses. And then, you know, bada bing, bada boom, you find your way to Bordeaux and everyone is, you know, feeling like they're living in the midst of, you know, the end times.

But there are a few fearless, brave souls like Thierry Germain who continue to plant own-rooted vines and give something special to the wines. I've heard it said that it makes for kind of a more savory wine that, you know, regulates its nutrient flows to the fruits in a much more poetic and profound and expressive way than is capable with the grafting wound. I don't know. It's really hard to isolate grafted, ungrafted as a independent variable for the sake of tasting, just to say pretty much impossible. So, you know, we're working, you know, as much with myth as we are. With the scientific understanding of wine tasting. That said, you know, the wines I've tasted from ungrafted vines, I found have this, you know, more expressive streak, higher acid and slightly lower alcohol, you know, across the board.

And I find that to be the case with this one. That said, it's on sandy soils, which tends to give breadth to wines and expressive fruitiness. This wine is showing stupidly well as of 2014. It's awesome. It's gangbusters. I really adore it. And then the. The Bergai here, it comes from, sorry, Galachet is a single vineyard. To pull up my notes, I've forgotten. Castelot, Pierre Castelot family, it stays back to 1640. This one is not unrooted, or self-rooted rather. Traditionally grafted vines, but 50 plus years old. Harder mother rock, deeper soils, but more limestone across the river in Bergai. The cellars are like picture book. Here, if you want to get a sense of, you know, what the middle Loire is, this is the cellar at Domaine de la Chevière.

And, you know, you can see the rock, the Tupoujón, that the very vines above our heads are planted on, into which the cellars themselves are dug poetically. And when the proprietor of this estate, Pierre, used to, he passed away sadly, his three children are taken over the domain. But. He used to say, 'Welcome to paradise,' when he descended the winery stairs, which I thought was super badass. And then this last one is 2004, which is not a celebrated vintage, but it is showing stupidly well. I had to bring it in kind of through the grey market. This is Ogier Fau's wine. There should be a Hollywood biopic about Ogre Faux. This is Ogre. Her husband passed away in 1947. She never made the wine. She basically kept the estate alive in the very difficult post-war period.

She did so with the support of a former German soldier who found his way to the winery in the waning days of World War II. Ogre's husband passed away in 1947. And the legend goes that on his deathbed, the German gentleman who had been working with him at the end of the war, and his name was very, very Germanic in and of its own way. But Ernest Zenninger. This is the only photograph I could find of him. It looks super sketchy. It looks like he's like a post-war criminal or something. Very much not. You know, going to be kind of withheld for war crimes. The opposite of it. This is one of those great stories that speaks to the way that people can come together in spite of war and all the political forces that pull us apart.

And Ernest. Ernest, for the better part of Oga's lifetime, helped her sustain the winery, make the wines. Through the current day, Oga's granddaughter now running the roost with her husband and their fabulous people. But this comes from a vineyard called Le Picasse. It is the thinnest soils, the most structured. It's a miracle of a wine for a grape that turns out relatively light offerings, structured, profound. For a 2004 that was in half bottles, mind you. Stupidly long, stupidly young, apparently still from a problematic vintage in 2004. And truly a signpost of greatness for this grape and an Appalachian in Chinon, just as gorgeous as it is. All of which is to say that these are wines that are made essentially the same way. Native yeast, they are aged in neutral oak.

And then they are bottled with very small, but not insignificant addition of sulfur. I would consider these very natural wines. But there are a lot of people who wouldn’t consider them as such. Where do you land after that long discourse, Laura, for the sake of this whole natural wine debate? I hate to be the person to say this, but Ruffo is not organic. He’s not organic. I love those wines. I have respect for the umpteenth. Matter of fact, if I was at a cafeteria table of people, I would want to, I know this is maybe like shooting the moon, but I’d want to be with Lalu Bisler-Hua and Olga Ruffo and some of these baller ladies that have been behind some of the best wines ever made.

There could be a couple dudes there, but like, I don’t know. I'm wearing an all-black-like cashmere sweater and a nice-like vintage Hermes scarf. What's your footwear like? Are you wearing like Docs or what's the? Oh, footwear? Yeah. Oh, if we're, if we're, you know, if we're like just having lunch, like I'm wearing some nice shoes. Oh, nice shoes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wear, I, in the, so I, I'm also like a giant, like I'm like a really big nerd about mobility and I power lift and stuff. So my vineyard shoes are actually not that cool. Like I wear, I wear UltraSpas a lot. So I have like waterproof, like ugly hiking Ultra Boots. The footwear would be practical. It would be.

I mean, I used to wear like the Blundstones and the Rossis and all that stuff. But now I just, I'm more worried about like my toes being mobile. But, but I still will wear some, some nice, nice shoes and even break out a pair of heels every once in a while. If it's time to look good. Yeah. So as far as the natural wine stuff, I don't care. I believe, I believe that the best wines in the world have been made under the principles of what I was introduced as natural wine in the beginning, which is organically farmed, low intervention in the cellar. And I'm not afraid of sulfur. I actually think that like a lot of, like as a winemaker, I kind of came to this on my own and I have been told that this is very common in other cellars of other people who don't care about the term natural wine, but probably make what could be considered natural wine.

I sulfur after mallow instead of a bottling. I think that's sulfuring only at bottling is actually limiting your controls. I heard that a lot. And actually I encountered that with a lot of Georgian winemakers I worked with who will sulfur after mallow before a large bottle of wine. So I think that's a very common thing. And then you can have a longer elabage on the skins. Yeah, yeah. Just to ward off, yeah. Exactly. Or you like, like what I typically do is it's like a 20 ppm sulfur at crush. By the time that fermentation is over, there's no sulfur left. You can't even test for it. It's all blown off. And then I sulfur again after mallow and it's like a very small addition, you know, 22 parts.

And then I typically can bottle like my earlier ones. Like that wine maybe has 20 total, probably I bottled with around three free or something really low. Yes. But I think like, I'm just, now the sad thing is, is that when I hear people talk about natural wine, I don't even think that they're talking about how it's made. I think they're talking about how it tastes. Flavor profile, yeah. Yeah, and that to me is problematic because it's like that, like, if you like funky kombucha wine, like that's cool. That's fine. Drink that wine. But like, I don't understand trying to like, have a conversation about how that's how wine should be. Cause it's not. Like there's thousands of years of development of wine and flavor and people working towards beautiful things.

And then I think it's kind of like, like to me, natural wine is like Dada art. There's a few really cool Dada artists. It's like a urinal on the, it's the urinal on the, like in the gallery of the, it's like the Marcel Duchamp of wine. Yeah, yeah. By the way, by the way, I did a tasting group years back where we read, God, whatever in Gargantua, the Rabelais book. And every time we got together to have a group, we'd drink Cabernet Franc. Pantagruel, Gargantua and Pantagruel. Pantagruel and Grundle, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I, yeah, I just, the natural wine thing, like I'm, I'm an old lady. Like I, I just don't, I don't care. You're not trying to impress anybody anymore. Sorry? You're not trying to impress anybody anymore.

You're just there. Yeah, and it's funny because I think people think that because I have tattoos and like, I'm, you know, relatively young as a wine maker, that I'm going to be this like big natural wine, you know, broadcaster. And to me, it's just like radio fuzz about something that I really care about, which is like beautiful structured wine that people dedicate their lives to making. Yeah. And, you know, on the, on the sulfur question, you know, does it equally horrify you that, you know, something could come to a consumer and be fundamentally flawed if you didn't make those additions, even if it tasted, you know, dupendous in the, in the cellar? Sorry, I, you froze in the middle of that. Oh, no, no worries, no worries. You know what I mean?

With, with sulfur, you know, do you feel like it's a necessary evil or do you feel like it's a really important part of the winemaking process that, you know, people should just speak more openly about? I think that it's a really important part of the winemaking process that people should speak more openly about. I think that every once in a while you have a wine that has enough acid and you're going to bottle it at a soon enough time that you don't need it. To me, it's like, would you buy a mustard that didn't have sulfur in it? Or like, you know, it's like there already. It's like part of the compound of the mustard or like, like, like dried fruit.

Like, if you didn't put sulfur in it, sulfur on dried fruit, like it's going to go bad in a couple weeks, um especially if you put it in a package and that's what sulfur is, it's a preservative, and you use it, and really, you know, it is an elemental thing, like you use it in a very controlled small amount, and it doesn't matter. I mean the sulfur argument in the beginning wasn't no sulfur, yes sulfur, it was like people are using prescriptive amounts of way too much sulfur, and it's ruining the terroir and the wine, and it's creating a flavor that is the flavor of a very sulfury wine not the flavor of a wine, and that again is why I think that, like when you put it in also matters because

You know, like the natural wine prescription is like oh 20 to 30 parts at bottling, and it's like well when you do that you shut your wine down, your wine has never experienced sulfur, if we want to think of wine as a living thing why are you going to introduce something that's completely foreign to it at the absolute end right before you shove it in a bottle, I mean it's like it's like the wine is going through labor and you just add trauma to it, you know, versus like introducing this thing earlier on to help preserve it and help keep the wine from going volatile or becoming mousy or having you know all sorts of other undesirable qualities.

For tanamyces that can grow inside of a wine as it's aging in your cellar or you just add a tiny little bit of sulfur, which is a preservative and helps preserve the wine, and it's like, um, the health side I think isn't good. Well, you know, I'm like I used to say in the past, I can't actually get a rash if I drink wine that has a lot of sulfur in it, like some German wines are confirmative wine a headache and I still drink it sometimes though, but like, I just ever you can't uh you can grab justin tired oh no no no no no really good mom but um he's so good it's it's just this cycling and I think people like to talk about sulfur because It's the most understandable thing, so people who don't even know a lot about wine can be like, 'What's the sulfur?' And I'm like, 'Do you want the free the total of the molecular motherfucker?

Like it's just such a silly little thing, well you know. And then the natural wine thing too, unfortunately a lot of it's just marketing and branding. I mean everybody thinks Olga is organic, everybody thinks that you know Pepe Muscadet is organic, they're not. I mean, I love the Dresdner portfolio, it's a beautiful portfolio of wine, but because it is like one of the OG natural wine portfolios, everybody just assumes it's organic and that. a lot of producers in particular in california get away with too like they just market themselves as this natural winery and they're this natural wine guru and they're doing so good for the world and like you pull up the curtains and it's just like and i don't think it diminishes the

you know pepe and repose of the world to say that they're not organic you know they're they're responding to a very challenging place to make wine in the loire valley and you know i think i think it's important to contextualize things as opposed to making these like gross generalizations that are dogmatic about what you shouldn't shouldn't Be doing in the service of wine, they're also responding to decades and decades of like brainwashing from millions, billions, and billions of dollars that you know, Bayer and Monsanto and other like giant fertilizer companies have been indoctrinating these farmers with, and they're all like, 'none of them are like trying to give people cancer and do the wrong thing for the earth, you know.' They just are misinformed and misinformation as we all know now takes a long time to shift.

So it's sad they just are at ground zero permission information here. Um, um... so I wanna so we should toast and uh, if you still have time um Laura, we'd love to. I'm sure there's some more questions for you, but I wanted to honor um, uh, in the spirit of um, you know, your bravery and making your own wine, uh, one of our, our very own former servers, uh, who's a newly minted assistant winemaker at a local Maryland winery, uh, Rocklands Allegra Barnes if you're out there, uh, stopped by earlier today and dropped off her um, winery's um, Cabernet Franc, uh, and Zoe and I are drinking it right now, and uh, we wanted to toast, uh, to you, uh, Allegra, um, it's so exciting that you know our staff has pivoted, um, and you know found a home on um, you know, the land. Allegra had a long, uh, history in organic farming. But has you know, kind of dove headlong into winemaking, um, in a way that you know reminded me a lot of uh, your uh career arc, Laura, and uh, it seemed uh, really fitting uh, to toast so, you got Pellegrino there, we always toast, um, uh, to everyone at home alone together, thank you all so much for joining us, uh, cheers

that's delightful, um, uh, so what do we have for the sake of questions, uh, additional questions for Laura? Yeah, can we dive a little bit into um, dry farming, um, we have um, viewers from all different types of levels to maybe go through exactly what it is within the pros and cons in particular about dry farming in California. Um, so dry farming is basically letting grapes grow without at like, without irrigation, whether it's flood or drip irrigation. Um, so you're adding no water to the farming system and you're just solely dependent on Mother Nature. Um, I have over the past few years become very radicalized in the like dry farming, you know, no-till regenerative side of agriculture.

Um, at this point as a winemaker, I'm like actually moving away from a lot of the wines I've even made because I don't feel that they're like... I feel that they can be organic and they can be moving in the right direction, but like... I actually don't feel that they're... like that wine. in California, I'm sorry to say this is like very environmentally sustainable. Have you chatted up on Mimi Castillo at all? Mimi and I are really close buddies; yeah, yeah, she's she's. Mimi has been um so I moved up to Washington in October 2019 um to start a second project up there and you're in the Columbia Gorge exactly, yeah, on the Wood

Mountain, so I'm 1,400 feet like very big diagonal shift climate but we get 44 inches of rain a year um so I'm able to dry farm up there which is pretty unique for Washington because Washington is incredibly dry especially like the the winemaking corners of the state Walla Walla and I think there are a few vineyards out there, like in the rocks or whatever that area. I feel like some people can dry-farm out there. Um, but I actually like, I'm really moving in the direction of, with a luxury good, like wine. I almost am getting to a place where if you can't do it that way, I don't love the idea of doing it unless you have, like, an endless reservoir of water and you know that's not the way the world's moving right now.

Um, so for me, like dry farming in California, in most places is not very practical. People do it in Minaiso, people do it in Contra Costex, the water table... um, people there are a few old dry farm vineyards. You know, in Napa and Sonoma, not many [um], but it's like I conscientiously am in like a very interesting, like precipice in my life or crossroads where I'm moving towards actually making less wine, but making wine that's like a higher price point, which was interesting because you can't buy it like in the middle of the state, antithetical to what I had originally set out to do, because I wanted to make an egalitarian wine that it doesn't feel very... it doesn't feel very punk rock.

Well, it actually so interestingly, it doesn't feel very punk rock at a face value, but uh, but like farming in a way that's sequestering carbon um and integrating Animals get into my farm, and food um, and that way I feed my crew. I have a free food stand at the bottom of my road where we give food away; we donate food to like the you know, indigenous fishing villages. Like, we're looking long-term on having um, having a restaurant where we'll have a soup kitchen a couple days a week um, and basically just use the farm's like the food from our farm to feed our community um, and you know create more opportunities for people to come to our farm, and you know create more opportunities for the people working with us, you know, like educational opportunities, more pay, you know, paid vacation crisis pay, all of that stuff.

And to me, it's like if that means that as a winemaker, I say hey, this is a luxury good, and I have a lower yield because I grow my grapes in a way that is actually better for the environment. Like, why not drink wine a little bit less? You know, like you don't need to drink a $20 bottle of wine every night. I mean, we I think that we like to pretend like we don't need to drink a $20 bottle of wine every night. I mean, we I think that we like to pretend like that's good for us, and it's not. Um, but it's like, drink wine every four nights, and buy an $80 bottle of wine, that's going to be a lot better.

And I just think that, like, at this point in my life, like I'm thinking About every place I put my foot down, you know, like, in the sense of like what am I stepping on, what's lived there, how has it been, and what can I do to, like, make sure that as I'm moving through the world, you know, in a world that unfortunately likes you know some level of exchange of money and goods is necessary um how can I be a better person um so I think that's pretty fucking punk rock honestly I didn't mean to do I didn't mean it's always it's always funny to me like what that means to some people because uh we had I worked with uh Brooks Headley who's this awesome um he was the drummer for Born Against once upon a time oh yeah yeah but uh

he um used to talk about he was kind of like he was in like the Bugazi like you know kind of like uh like clean like hardcore kind of uh camp and he is now a James Beard award-winning pastry chef but he got into pastry because he didn't want to serve meat you know he's he was like a vegetarian like and they would you know do these like you know basement shows and go to a local vegan restaurant and and stuff like that and he always bemoaned the fact that you know there were all these like you know supposed punk rockers that had all the external signifiers but none of the none of

the spirit and um you know I wouldn't consider Myself, you know, as having a punk uh aesthetic aesthetic at all, but I love the you know, the DIY, um, you know, like any establishment, like up from, you know, the bootstraps kind of like ethic of it all, and also, you know, the sense of you know, social responsibility, um, that that comes with that movement. And, um, DC has like this amazing history of punk rock, and I think it's, it's, it's, it's, you know, in that scene that I don't think people give you know, necessary weight to, and I think it's like a really important corrective, and it's a really important, like, you know, inspiration for people trying to, um, create a small business.

Particularly, you know, in you know this problematic world that that we live in, yeah, I mean that's been a big differential for me being in the East Coaster moving out to California, like um, I would just had a conversation with a friend of mine the other night who's from BC and I feel like Canadians can kind of fall into this too, like, more East Coast in a weird sort of way than um, like California, and like this is like such a crude, gross analogy, and like hopefully I never have to punch anybody in the face again in my whole life in BC if you talk shit, you get punched in the face, and like, in most of the world, it's or not not most of the world.

But, like, most of like where I am now and like in this weird movement and like I don't know, I don't know, I don't know of like marketing and branding and trying to make yourself look like your things that you're not because that's what everybody wants to be right now, like. I just I think it's like, why I wanted to pull out of social media and just like put my head down and just start working on like what I want the world to look like for my children and like our future, and that's like...like I don't look like a punk rocker anymore, besides the tattoos that I decided to get into when I was a teenager maybe the bang so a little bit.

Like, uh, I call these crisis bangs, exact same haircut, it's the only hair I know how to do, um, but, um, yeah, I just, I, I don't know. I mean, I think that like there's something really like DC is a really hard place, um, you know, at least it really used to be and I imagine it still is because there's like an incestuous tentacle of politics that bleeds into everything, and you know when you meet somebody in DC, you're like 'Hi, I'm so-and-so,' what do you do? You know, and it's not like that everywhere else. Um, well, I mean, I think about that a lot in the context of like visiting Baltimore, you know, where it's just like it's hugely different. I mean, Baltimore.

Always felt like Oakland, or even mid-Atlantic, to me in like a great way because I fucking love Oakland, and um, but uh, you know. By the same token, I think in DC, the cool spirit of it is, and I think this has changed a lot since I grew up here; that increasingly, you have these like really um, you know, like social justice-oriented people, like progressively-minded folks who burned out on politics that want to find other ways to, you know, kind of um, you know, support, uh, you know the political causes that you know they that are important to them; and you know I sling wine for a living, but I still try to include myself in that.

group and I think there are a lot of people that you know want to make this a you know really amazing you know place to live um that is a place to live and not just you know a you know kind of seat of federal government and you know also like 90 percent of us voted against you know the outgoing president so that that's pretty cool DC it's always like that it's like yeah yeah democratic but I I agree I mean I think that I just I um action is really important to me and I think that's a really important thing to me and I think that's a really important thing to me um and you know inaction is basically moving backwards um and uh not that we Don't need to take time sometimes to like reorganize things, but I do find that in the food, like, and this is where kind of natural wine is really problematic for me.

In the food and beverage industry, there's a lot of inaction, but a lot of like simple um optics and like um pageantry and like um you know I think that's a really important thing to me. And you know I think that's a really important thing to me. And you know I think that's a really important thing to me um and you know I think that's a really important thing to me um about being good or doing the right thing, and it's really just shit that they put on Instagram and it's nothing to do with what that like the way that the that they travel through the world and I don't know I mean that

you know we're not talking about wine necessarily right now so I don't want to diverge too far off topic but I I just I I do I do you know like I see you guys at Tail Up Road I know that you guys are are you know a business of action and it is really cool and and I think that there is a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of like a lot of that in dc because it's like people are pushed to experience and acknowledge some some of the inequities in that City, at least hopefully, at this point, even more because it's it's it's a completely different place.

I like Columbia Heights; I don't even recognize it. They targeted now. I wish I didn't like Target, so I do. We have any more questions? Absolutely, absolutely um on that same vein um great question: what was your favorite experience of the Black Cat in the old days? Oh, they also it should be said, like R.I.P. I don't know if you know this, but they 86'd the first floor; no, there's no more like the so the best part of the Black Cat was the fucking back bar and the backstage, which is where like I saw my favorite shows i ever saw there like But it doesn't exist anymore, no more red room I mean so

when you work there like like certain people, the staff every night would play like the same Elliott Smith song and stuff, like the best part about working in the Black Cat was like getting off work at the Black Cat, we're just kind of linger for a while and hang out sometimes at the end um I actually uh when I worked there was sober so I didn't uh I wasn't drinking as much I drank there a lot underage before that um it's actually kind of infamous there's there's a few people in the in the booze industry still that I run into, um there's a guy named Johnny who bartended there forever. And I see him

in Portland sometimes, and he's still is like your motherfucker, like fake ID and everything that's like this is before this is like before 14th Street was safe; this was like uh oh yeah oh yeah a very different like a black cat, black cat Bill, yeah R.I.P., yeah yeah yeah but um yeah I remember I lived at 11th and U, and then I lived at 9th and Ass like I remember walking home from work sometimes um even before I worked there but just walking home from the Black Cat and like having to run you know um but yeah I mean or like you know getting off at the Black Cat and going down to Kingpin when it was still around and you know it was an after hours bar um my best friend still to this day and sharveen who owned kingpin now own a bar in

santa finna or something like that and i was like oh my god i'm gonna go to kingpin i'm gonna go to new mexico which feels exactly like a kingpin so that's awesome but yeah i miss i miss the old dc but it but it is nice to kind of see that there's like a really cool evolving food and wine scene there yeah but i mean there's still the kingpins of the world i mean the closest thing would be like showtime or donald is still there right yeah but it's not it's not like yeah i haven't been there in a minute uh not not that i'm i'm not the arbiter Of cool, I feel like

my presence is like the opposite of it's like the probably like the the rubber stamp that you know things that have gone awry but anyway what else do you have um La Gitana is that in the sherry your test piece no actually it was because my best friend Caesar's mother used to call me like La Bohemia and La Gitana and I got this when I was 19 at Jinx Proof did it um and uh I had no idea what the sherry was at the time which was very funny because when I went to live in Spain and I had La Gitana tattooed on my chest mostly people were just like, why do you have Gypsy tattooed on your chest like because There actually is a Gitano culture, um, and then in the booze industry people very frequently think it's for the sherry, but oh it's not; the worst I'm cutting this oh yeah, no I'm okay with it,

yeah, uh, could you talk a little bit more about the winemaking process of Havrdrup particular, is it like finicky, like you know, noir? Um, is it more like hearty? How would you describe growing up? Sorry, someone just said did I say you were sober and wasn't drinking then? Yeah, so I was sober like I didn't drink um the year I turned 21 like I was around 20 when I quit drinking and then didn't drink until I was almost 22 um, I when I lived in DC pre-working At the Black Cat when I used to hang out at the Black Had, I had a lot. Um, uh, involved in, like, I had a very hard life at that point.

Um, and it's something I, I know, I talk openly about, like, um, basically I was trafficked into sex work when I was a teenager, and was involved with that and a lot of drugs when I lived in DC too, uh, and then when I quit using that, you know, quit using drugs, and you know, was trying to rehabilitate myself into being, you know, a happy normal person. I had to quit everything for a while, um, we call that my feral period, um, but yeah, so I was, I was sober like going to a meetings sober, um, Laura, so we just need to, so I who would Play me in the autobiographical movie of myself which is going to come out at some point and be an Oscar winner, I don't know but she's uh no come on I have no idea I don't.

Okay a size 14 though that's no, no. I think that would be amazing, no. I um, I yeah I mean I I know I've had a really crazy life and and I think that's part of why I try to be open about it because it's like a very, like in particular, like the the sex work side of it and stuff like that which was maybe about two years ago that I started to be more open about, like that's actually what my early life was and it was in DC's so it was like very dark and weird and you know because of the people. Who are seeking things like out there, um, but it, um,

it's important for me to talk about it though because I think that there's a lot of women and people, you know, who are in those places are stuck in those places in particular right now with the discrepancy of wealth in our society, who are afraid that that's where they're going to be for the rest of their lives, and I think that's a really important thing in our society is to know whether or not they deserve this respect, whether or not they can feel that it's right that they don't deserve that knowledge to live a truly interesting life. Often women face problems and whether it's about them or about own situation i'm just worrying about

like is there a fair impact whether or not that might not be able to buy military power if that's what people feel or maybe we're not valued as individuals or whether or not you know what's important to them um and that's going to be it's really important to learn and we need that let's get in that space for that size where we can be able to share your story if we're having a tough time imoul and i love it think i i did a great job looking we did a great job our business in the wine business it's important to acknowledge that we're dealing with fire like alcohol is potentially Hugely destructive, yeah. And, and it's important to you know, equally acknowledge that you know, while we you know celebrate it, yeah.

Um, and Heidi, the saddest part about um, the situation is that the women are ashamed of trafficking, not their sex work, not the traffickers. Um, it was actually two women; it was an older lady couple that um got me and my young friends involved in that, so it's kind of like a weird like I think that's been a part of you know understanding and moving through that that's been a little hard. Um, but it uh, it's it's still yeah sadly, like the people who are being traded essentially, who walk away. With the shame, not the people doing it, um yeah, sorry that was like I had like I didn't mean to like have a big but I just I when I get to the point where I'm like trying to explain it and everything I'm just like oh, fuck it!

This is what happened. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, I think that since I've been really open about that, a lot of young people in our industry or people trying to crack into the wine industry have reached out and it's like been really nice, and you know I'm a big subscriber to the each one teaching philosophy and you know I try to be there for other people who are you know coming through some sort of adversity and ending up in an Industry of luxury which is really weird um, you know if you feel like that's where you're being called but you have a low self-esteem because of things that happened when you were young, like working through that, it's important, yeah I imagine it could have some of the same, you know, exploitative kind of undertones as uh 100, I mean that's

that's a big part of like where I'm ending up with you know being like well fine I'm just going to make a more expensive wine and making a more expensive wine I'm going to take care of the earth and the people who you know are working for me like and you know and make sure everybody is like heard. and everybody is part of the conversation you know like the communication i have with my crew is never like hey you do this like we talk about what's going on and i don't want to be your natural wine eight-year-old you know i'm going to do this like i'm going to do this like i'm going to do this you know, I want to do my own thing.

Oh, yeah, no, and that, that happened, like, actually, very early on in my winemaking career, I got a lot of that, like, ooh, young, like, natural wine attention, I mean, fortunately, around the same time, I was also pregnant for which is we we met you so we we first met you just like shortly after you'd given birth and uh yeah um but um that was I was think I was able to like not get pulled into that but like I felt it and I mean I felt the like if I wanted to grab onto that and be some sort of it girl I could have but like that's not like I was talking to a girlfriend of mine right now who's trying to start making wine or she's making wine and she's a young beautiful incredible

like super smart talented woman and like I really hope you know for everybody who's getting into this that you choose that you want to be a part of this because you believe in it And you make the decisions that, like, that attention, like, maybe getting all that special attention in the beginning isn't what's going to, like, make you a happy, long-term, successful winemaker, like, like, again. I really like that analogy you had about, you know, where, which table would you be sitting at, because I don't, I don't want anything to do with, like, the, the table that's constantly trying to tell everybody who they are, and what they do, or, like, take any attention they can get. Winemaking in its ultimate place, and grape growing in particular, are very quiet, and internal practices, and, you know, that's.

Like, what I want people to take away from it is that there's a lot of people wanting to become, like, or it seems like wanting to become winemakers, or part of the winemaking community, because there's a lot of attention around it right now, and, like, that will never, you'll never find what you're looking for if what you're looking for is attention. Especially, especially working on a vineyard. Well, yeah, or, like, you know, like, making wine, like, people just think, oh, I made a wine, well, now I'm going to put it in a bottle, and it's going to have a cool label, and, like, it's going to be easy, and it's, like, no, like, you're going to do that, and you'll maybe have a few thousand dollars, and then you have to do it again.

You know, so, but on the, the Cab Franc note, do you, do you pronounce it Zoë? Okay, I have a my older daughter, the 22-year-old, her middle name is Zoë, but we just say Zoë in my family, because for her, it doesn't help things, Laura, because I just, I call her, I am, I'm notoriously impatient when it comes to names, so I'm usually, like, dealing in monosyllables, so I just say Zoë, even though, you know, I know that her name is Zoë, so. You have the perfect name for that. I do, I do. Yeah, so Cabernet Franc, and, like, the traditional Cabernet Franc making in the Loire frequently is around 30% whole cluster. It's not, like, it's not prescriptive, really, but that's typically what you're going to get.

That whole cluster input gives it a bit more of, like, a tannin, in particular, like, so the, it's, like, usually, a neutral barrel, and, like, a partial whole cluster fermentation, and that, the whole cluster quality, like, gives you this kind of, I don't want to say chewy, because when I feel like people describe it as chewy, it's usually, like, carbonic and whole cluster, and it's, like, too much, but it gives it this, like, more, like, The French have different words for different kinds of tannins, which I always find really helpful, you know. Yeah. So, it's just, it's like the, yeah. Crunchy, I actually think is a bit, like, chewy is, like, you know, like, like, like, caramel on my teeth, but it's, it's a crunchy tannin, a brighter tannin, and then, in California, like, a lot of the, a lot of the, kind of, conventional Napa winemakers, it's all about, like, they pick really late to get all of the sugar.

Yeah. And the extraction that they possibly can, and then, a lot of times, they'll add back some acid to, like, put, you know, to fill in what's been stripped out. Or water, just to make more wine. Yeah, well, a lot of times, they add water and acid, and then, illegally, if they can't get enough bricks, we'll even add sugar. I mean, it's, and then, and then, purple colored stuff. Like a burp. Purple juice. Yeah. But, it's a bigger, like, more formulaic. And then, as far as, like, like, the type of wine that you guys were drinking, for me, that has no stem inclusion. That's just a stemmed and fermented with, like, really nothing going on. I punch, like, the main difference is that I'll punch down, so, like, you know, move the cap to the bottom once a day instead of twice today, twice a day, because I'm not looking for a ton of extraction in that wine.

I want it to be, kind of, light and fun. And then, you know, I'm not looking for a ton of extraction in that wine. But, in general, like, the, kind of, modality of, like, new California winemaking, it's probably somewhere between what I do and what they do in Europe. Like, I know that Matthiasen does some stem inclusion. I think Brock does some carbonic. And carbonic is a different type of fermentation where you, you seal the fermentation vessel and then carbon dioxide builds. Either you can add carbon dioxide externally, or if you just keep it sealed, eventually it will be a fermentation. And then a different type of fermentation will start, a regular fermentation, fill the vessel with carbon dioxide, and then a different type of fermentation will happen inside of the berry called carbonic fermentation.

That, you usually get, like, more brighter smells. You can get, kind of, like, a gasoline smell or a bubblegum smell. Like, usually, if you stick your nose into a really young glass of wine and you get, like, fruity, kind of, like, fruity. God forbid banana runs. Oh, yes. You'll get these, like, fruity, bright smells. And, and that can, that, that can be a sign of carbonic. Does Laura have any special vessels that she prefers, concrete eggs? Oh, yeah, we're, so, Laura, you need to know that we, we are all about alternative vessels for the sake of fermentation. So, concrete eggs have taken on a bit of a vogue in class. We've done a couple of classes on Georgian wine, because I love Georgian wine. So, everybody knows what a cababrie is.

So, there's a lot of interest in, in, you know, vessels. I, mainly because I just didn't have a lot of money when I started making wine, don't have any special vessels. I use T-bins, and I have some, some nice VCs I bought off a guy who was getting rid of all his winery stuff. So, like, a variable capacity tank. And then I use tanks, and I don't really, so interesting in Cal, interestingly in California, I'm not really even a big fan of, like, barrel fermentation with white wine, because the pH is higher. So, you have less acid. I think that with my Washington stuff, because that's mountain fruit and I have ripper acidity, I'll probably do a little bit of barrel fermentation. Do you invest in concrete? I'm not.

Like, I'm probably, what I'm probably going to do is get some, like, big old bariques. Okay. I like the what neutral oak aging, like, especially large format can do to wines. Concrete. So, you know that you have to, like, climb into a concrete tank and treat it. Yes. And they're, they're way more fragile than people commonly let on. Well, yeah. And you have to, like, treat it with all of this crazy acid so that, like, it doesn't destroy your wine and also, like, and your wine does leach the concrete. Like, I, like, for me, concrete, I like wines that are made in concrete, but I can always taste it. All right. And that's just, like, and I, I can enjoy it, but I think it's why I'm not super into it.

I mean, I think Quiverys are really cool, but I also am not making wine in Georgia and it would just feel like a poser. They're, they're actually, they're a huge pain in the ass. They're easier. They're also easier ways to work in clay than working in Quivery. Yeah. It's just, I don't know. It's, it's an interesting, I always, it's, it's, for me, it's like concrete, it's a discernible signature on a wine that I enjoy because it, you get this, like, rapier-like acidity on those wines. You know, it elevates this, like, savory dimension that they, you know, wouldn't have otherwise that I find kind of beguiling and fun with food. Yeah. I mean, I like it. Like, I like it. It's like fake petrichor. Again, another, there's another, there's another pump can name.

Like fake petrichor. Um, like it's really, We're holding petrichor on our bingo today. Yeah. Yeah. Later. Um. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, we'll see. I mean, I, you know, when I was, when I was younger, I really wanted, because at Unti, we did work with, uh, with concrete, we had an egg and we had tanks. Um, and then I did like a very short, um, very short internship at Domaine de la Côte where they had tons of them. Um, but, uh, yeah, they're cool. I like them. I just like, I feel like, I think that I do just feel like I'm cheating. No, I think, I think too, like, um, you can, you can respect art, but not embrace it as your own.

You know, you can, you can like, you can respect the way someone else is working, but, you know, acknowledge the fact that you can never work that way, you know? That's what I feel about whole cluster Carignan. I mean. Oh, I love whole cluster. In a nutshell. I love, so I love the, I love the STEMI wines. Uh, um, and it's funny, like I was just tasting some of those from like Roussillon makes these amazing like whole cluster. Like gems. And they're like ridiculously, I mean, yeah, I mean, they kind of have a seller in print because the whole cluster has its own, you know, signature, but I think they're, they get like Pinot, like and it's really cool way. Yeah. They're, they're fun ones.

I, you know, the only time I've done a STEM inclusion was with, um, I have a little, uh, vineyard, I farm in Carneros that's dry farmed Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo Sangiovese. And I do a little STEM inclusion with that. Um, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, in 18, I did a little, in 19 I actually did a lot. Um, and then in Washington I have a Syrah Vionier blend they make. Um, and I do STEM inclusion in that. But it, to me actually, it's funny cause like, I don't like a lot of the Southern French, like, like bigger, like kind of like. Like another, so actually more working.

So one of my favorite wines out of region is from Gord De Chalet, which is another like a three generations strong, like a matriarchy, uh, like. Wiring, yeah, yeah, yeah, but it just isn't that I gravitate towards, not to say that it's it's not good, you know. I, I just, I'm probably never going to make a carbonic Carignan, um, and Laura, what's the name of your project in Washington? Um, so I think we're going to call it Lorelei, um, if we can get that name. We're working on it right now because there's a couple beers called Lorelei in a beer bar, um, and yeah, so that that's the hopeful name. And then we're working on the plans to building a winery right now, currently I bring the fruit to California which is not optimal but I have a winery down there so it's easier than trying to find in two places, um.

But uh, yeah, I mean it's if any of you guys are up in the Columbia Gorge area, you're welcome to reach out and I'm happy to show you the property, it's beautiful, um. But yeah, we have uh right now it's 20 acres, and then I farm the neighboring vineyard which is like another 10, 15 acres, um, and then I have like a three-acre area where I have pigs and goats and chickens and anatolian shepherds i'm training for when i get my sheep that's incredible uh was when we first it's really cool to see you you know have your own bit of land when we first met you you were hoping to uh make riesling in montana but i feel like you know uh you know columbia columbia gorge you know not so carbonic herignon or you know uh cat prompt is is you know equally worthwhile well i'll plant uh definitely be planting some riesling right now i have mainly like alsatian stuff and some chardonnay

and pinot noir like you know lots of pinot gris girths um vionier um but it's uh and sauvignon blanc But it's like a really aromatic Sauvignon Blanc that's super cool. Um, Sabi B doesn't... we, we love Sabi B; it's a have you had wines from Bona Notte? Uh, no, okay. So he gets um, some of my Sauvignon Blanc, oh, cool! I'll look for it. Um, have you ever had the High You Alberino? Uh, I know those guys... uh, I fucking love those wines; their cider is like, oh, I love their cider, yeah, really good! I haven't had the... I'm not familiar with the Alberino... um, yeah, so that's the vineyard I'm farming now. I'm actually trying to buy the um, the house on that vineyard. Proper hippies, oh, yeah!

Nate, Nate, I, I, I love I love Nate to death; like, yeah, mine are dear friends... up in the Gorge, we carry their wine at uh tailgate, oh cool, that's awesome, that makes sense, yeah, um, all right, we should, we should let you go, you have to get on with your day, it's uh, it's going on one o'clock, uh, Hawaiian standard time. We are honored that you spent this much time with us, Laura, thank you so much, uh, for being, you know as you know, honest and you know just awesome, uh, as you are, uh, and uh, it's been super fun to talk through Cat France and to talk over your winemaking journey and we hope to do it again shortly.

Like this is this is wonderful, I, I, I love you guys, this restaurant, I love what you do, um, every time I've talked to you, Bill. It's always an absolute pleasure, pleasure, and yeah, and, and, thanks to all you guys for for listening to me blab on about Capernet Franck, so it was a pleasure to have you, thank you, Zoe. I like, I, I have met you right? Okay, yes, I'm so, I'm sorry, like I'm last couple times I've been through DC, I have either had a very new baby with me or it's been insanity um, so yeah, I look forward to like when the world is not a burning tire fire anymore, like having a glass of wine with you and hanging out more because it was really nice to have this chat absolutely thanks so much, we are, we're ready for this disaster to be over, so we can all travel as. Well, yes, well cheers to you Laura in Paradise, uh, cheers everybody; home aloha, thank you; bye.