Greg La Follette. Photo: La Follette Wines.

Greg La Follette ‘listens’ to his wines and that may be why they ‘speak’ to some of us. Earlier this year I tried a La Follette Sonoma Coast Pinot Noir and was hooked. It was a lovely wine with great acidity and subtle tastes of raspberries and spice. I later found out the winemaker was a kind and quirky scientist, with a reverence for the land and a knack for the bagpipes. With his chatty personality, and jamming wines, La Follette could easily be one of those rock star winemakers but he may be too humble for the limelight.

La Follette started at Beaulieu Vineyards in 1991 and spent time overseas as a wine consultant. His work included being a consultant at Yarra Ridge in Australia. Back in California he made a name for himself at Flowers and then at Tandem wines. Last year La Follette went out on his own to make cool climate, Burgundian style, Sonoma Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays. I recently found a few reasonably priced La Follette Pinots at Bottle Barn in Sebastopol and plan on breaking them out for Thanksgiving.

Besides eavesdropping on his fermentations, La Follette generally avoids commercial yeasts, gravitates toward unconventional equipment built by hand using pieces from salvage yards, and experiments with practices such as fluff racking.

Greg La Follette was born in Iceland. His wife came to the U.S. from Germany and together they have six children. I recently had a chance to talk with La Follette at his shared winemaking facility in Sebastopol.

How do you describe your style of winemaking?

I see myself as more of a translator of the land rather than a dictator or someone who just wants to do everything in a prescribed way. I let the land take the lead on things. I have a strong collaboration with growers and am on call 24/7 with them. A lot of winemakers don't have the plant biology training that I do. Nowadays many more winemakers are realizing that wine is best made in the vineyard and so winemakers are getting more viticulture training.

Why do you say you practice unsafe winemaking?

Well, we take risks. Safe winemaking is when you inoculate something, put in plenty of sulpher dioxide to knock out the bad guys, you put it at a temperature where its going to go through safely, you follow a formula. For us, frequently our fermentations don't finish until June, the following year from harvest, which adds layers of richness. If you like the taste of forest floor and mushrooms in your pinot, that’s a compound produced by grapes and it's brought forward when you provide oxygen at just the right time. It’s also about using your body, I have had broken ribs, torn rotator cuffs, concussions and other injuries. Our style of winemaking is a full contact sport.

Speaking of dialogues with your wines, why do you listen to your fermentations?

I am listening for the activity in the wine. That is a good clue for us to tell when we need to do things like add sulphur dioxide. Most winemakers, when the malolactic is done they say, “ok, lets add the sulphur dioxide now." And I say, “no, let's wait until they quiet down.” I am really focused on mouth feel, which means getting away from the hardness. By the way, the secondary fermentation has a different sound than the primary fermentation. But you have to spend the time listening, it's not that different than listening to your spouse or your kids. It makes for better relationships.

How do you describe mouthfeel?

It’s what I focused on when I was getting my Masters at U.C. Davis. Mouthfeel is how all the parts in the wine work together. It’s what brings pleasure to your mouth. They are broken down into three parts, entry, mid-palate and late palate. You have to tie together the whole union of the wine.

You follow some natural winemaking techniques which include using native yeasts and little filtration. What do you think of this trend which has received so much buzz?

Well, I think of minimalist interventions. But here is the problem, there is less manipulation with the more commercial style of winemaking. We are playing with our wines all of the time. We really and truly live the wine and are on top of our fermentations, literally, several times a day, smelling, looking, tasting.

La Follette with assistant winemaker Simone Sequeria. Photo: La Follette Wines.

How did you choose Pinot Noir as your grape, it is so challenging to make.

I like introducing people to what Pinot Noir can do. It can just love and caress your tongue. I finally had to surrender to it and say "take me I'm yours." Pinot is great to make if you have Chardonnay to give you a rudder of sanity. I wanted it to have weight and structure but be light and have it at a price point where we can make friends. It's a new label so that's important. (La Follette’s wines range from $29.99 to $49.99).

La Follette’s talent as a Pinot Noir maker may never have come to fruition had he not reached the conclusion that his first love, playing the bagpipes, was not a practical career. His dream as a teenager did not match his parents' career expectations of him. La Follette saved his milk money to pay, secretly, for lessons and eventually became a ship's piper on the Queen Mary. Now the bagpipes are a hobby to wind down from winemaking.

Since I have Scottish ancestry I assumed the bagpipes might be something I could pick up, after all, I can blow a lot of hot air. But I was quickly humbled after one short lesson from La Follette.

You can meet Greg La Follette and check out his wines at the “In the Cellar with Greg” series. The next one is scheduled for Friday, December 2. For more information you can go to "events" on his website.

This event is one in an occasional series on California winemakers.

La Follette Wines
4900 West Dry Creek Road
Healdsburg, California 95448
Phone: 707.395.3902
info@lafollettewines.com
Facebook: La Follette Wines

Photo: Robb McDonough

It's a day that wine growers, wine makers and wine drinkers all look forward to. This year the wait for that day was longer than usual. Cool summer temperatures pushed back the beginning of harvest by nearly two weeks. I visited one of the first wineries in Napa Valley to start picking grapes this year, Mumm Napa Winery. Workers began in the cool, pre-dawn hours at nearby vineyards picking Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris grapes for sparkling wine.

About 9:30am the first trucks rolled in loaded with yellow bins filled with grapes. Once a vineyard starts picking grapes, it's really a flat-out process to get everything off the vines. At Mumm, it was expected that the first day of harvest would bring in more than 60 tons of grapes. Tomorrow, Mumm will ratchet that number up to 180 tons. Workers wore powder blue t-shirts that said "Endless Summer" on the back as a way to describe just how long vintners in both the Napa and Sonoma wine countries have been waiting for harvest to begin.

This year’s crop is light and late and that is because of a wet spring and a long, cool summer. I talked with Mumm’s head winemaker, Ludovic Dervin and he told me that the wet spring meant the crops were uneven, there were big grape clusters and small grape clusters. Also, because the vineyards were so wet, they had to be thinned out. The late summer pushed back harvest as grapes needed more time on the vine to ripen. The good news for consumers is that low yields usually mean high quality. The bad news is small wine crops can sometimes mean pricier wines. We won’t have the full picture until early November when the entire harvest in both Napa and Sonoma is over. Sparkling wine grapes are the first to get picked. In a few weeks grapes for white still wines will be harvested and then red wine grapes will be picked.

In wine regions around the world there is a lot of ceremony involved with harvest time. Mumm Napa is no different. In something out of Napoleon times, winemaker Dervin donned safety goggles and yielded a saber that he used to slice off the top of a magnum of sparkling wine. Dervin then sprayed the contents on a few bins of grapes for good luck. The ceremony, often called "The blessing of the grapes," also involved handing out splits of sparkling wine to all the Mumm workers who ceremoniously popped them in unison and began spraying one another. All this celebration is a way of hoping for good luck for the coming year.

Mumm Napa seems to be doing well. According to management, sales were up more than ten percent last year. In fact, despite the struggling economy, demand for California wines is once again on the rise. According to the San Francisco based Wine Institute, California produces ninety percent of U.S. wine exports. The industry is a huge player in the state's economy with a retail value of more than 18 billion dollars last year.

Outside Lands Windmill -- recycle, compost, trash.
All Photos: Wendy Goodfriend

Outside Lands, now in it's fourth year, drew nearly 180,000 visitors this past weekend. I was one of them. On Saturday morning, as I walked along a dirt path through Lindley Meadow into a eucalyptus grove with parachutes and rope swings dangling from the trees, I thought of how this seemed a cross between Burning Man and the board game Candy Land. Ok, Outside Lands was fifty degrees cooler than Burning Man and it's in the middle of Golden Gate Park, rather than the desert. Still, the music festival has this collective feel where everyone comes together to appreciate artistic expression, be it music, food, wine or other artistic endeavors. Then, everyone leaves the land no worse for wear, hopefully. In fact, this was the most organized compost and recycling program I have ever seen at a big outdoor event.

Wind Chime Swing. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Choco Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Outside Lands also has this feeling that everything happening on the periphery is just as interesting as the bigger events, whether they are major rock bands or pyrotechnic shows. And just like Candy Land, curvy dirt paths take you from one fun land to the next. Instead of Candy Cane Forest and Gum Drop Mountain you have Food Truck Forest, Choco Lands, Wine Lands and Eco Lands. Wander down a dirt path away from the polo fields, which hosted the likes of Phish and Arcade Fire, and you might end up, as I did, amidst cypress and eucalyptus trees watching a tiny carny opera with mime faced performers dressed in kilts playing Appalachian ballads and doing their own version of the River Dance. Before the opera I visited Eco Lands, which honors San Francisco's commitment to sustainability, with all sorts of educational booths, valet bike parking and emerging artists performing on a solar powered stage. This year introduced urban agriculture to Outside Lands with yet another land to discover, Farm Lands. Here you could play games like "Veggie Twister," take an urban gardening class and munch on organic watermelon slices from Full Belly Farms.

Arcade Fire. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Flotsam's Wonder World Opera. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Full Belly Farms Farmers Market. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

With my appetite whetted by healthy produce, I set out to explore the higher caloric choices at Outside Lands. There are more than fifty local restaurants and food trucks at this event. For a little hog in the fog action, one could try Flour + Water's porchetta sandwiches. Head Chef Thomas McNaughton said, because they only work with small farms, it took six months to prepare for the concert. Eleven acres of arugula had to be planted and, to be honest, I couldn't listen when he explained how many pigs from near Nicassio were slaughtered, let's just say it was enough to make 7,000 sandwiches over the weekend. McNaughton said the idea was also to create a little buzz for Flour + Water's two new projects, also in the Mission, Salumeria and Central Kitchen. Maybe I just knew too much about the porchetta sandwiches but I ended up trying a different meal with pork, Korean tacos from Namu. They were not really tacos at all but rather pork or chicken wrapped in seaweed with a delicious kim chee remoulade. I also had a taste of a veggie samosa from New Ganges Indian Food and a grilled cheese sandwich, with peppers, from The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. They were both good but not as interesting as the "tacos." You can also read about my time at Wine Lands where i discovered some very delicious small lot wineries.

Thomas McNaughton and porchetta sandwich assembly line. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

The American Grilled Cheese Kitchen. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

I am thinking Outside Lands might be worth another visit next year. I mean, what other festival can you listen to the arena-rock jams of English Band Muse while sipping a spicy Pinot Noir preceded by a worm composting workshop?

Muse. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Related posts:
• Outside Lands Recap 2011 at KQED Arts
• Guide to Outside Lands 2011 at KQED Arts

Wine Lands 2011.
All Photos: Wendy Goodfriend

In the hit song, "California One," indie rock band, "The Decemberists," pay homage to the grape with the line, "Take a long drown with me of California wine." The fact that the band appreciates a good bottle of wine makes sense once you find out every member carries a Zagat iPhone app for culinary guidance on long road trips. This band appears right at home at a festival like Outside Lands where food and wine vendors seem to share top billing with the music line up.

Decemberists at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Outside Lands gourmet fare is a far cry from rock concerts of yesteryear where the best one could hope for was a warm draft beer and a lousy hot dog. Beer might have a history with young people and big, outdoor events but this weekend micro-brews took a back seat to local, small lot wineries. By late Saturday afternoon the line was more than fifteen people deep as I waited for a taste of 2009 Mendocino Pinot Noir from Navarro. As usual, Navarro did not disappoint. While in line I overheard the following conversation, "That is such a butterball, you should really check out Wind Gap, their wines are so balanced." Am I at a rock concert?

Wind Gap wine booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

The idea of Wine Lands, which has now grown to thirty artisanal wineries and one hundred wines all under one big open-air tent, is the brainchild of Peter Eastlake. Eastlake is co-owner of Vintage Berkeley, a wine shop that focuses on small production wines -- most under twenty five dollars. Eastlake believes that wine and, well, nearly everything go together. He even had some favorite pairings for this year’s music line up.

Peter Eastlake. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Phish:

For Phish, give me something lunar, hippie and refreshing for all that spinning, scooping and dumping. Bonny Doon's biodynamic spaceship adorned 2010 Vin Gris de Cigare all the way.

Erykah Badu:

When Erykah Badu sings, people listen. She’s a strong woman with a vocal range that can howl, scream, screech and make you cry. There is one wine for her show, and it rhymes with pink bubbles, Gloria Ferrer Blanc De Noirs.

The Roots:

These Philly boys are so versatile, funky and flat out likeable. Our man in Sebastopol, bass player Les Claypool, is pouring his spicy GSM blend called Purple Pachyderm.

Phish at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Oh, let's not forget the other star of the show, the food. This year's Outside Lands included more than fifty local restaurants and food trucks and asked Eastlake for a couple of suggestions for pairings. For the Mac and Cheese from Oakland's Homeroom, Eastlake recommends a California Chardonnay like Hess Collection, Hirsch Estate for a special treat or Lioco's 2010 Sonoma County on tap.

I thought I was going to stump him when I asked about the very popular Fabulous Frickle Brothers fried pickles. Without blinking, Eastlake said, "It's a little known fact that deep fried pickled gherkins are only found in two places in the world -- Tennessee and Germany's Mosel River. Summer of Riesling. If you don't like Riesling, try the Riesling."

Fabulous Frickle Brothers' Frickles. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir wine bar in New York, is on tour. He is traveling around the country in a Winnebago preaching the gospel of Riesling. Grieco wants people to know Riesling is lots of things including, not always sweet. Says Grieco, who even has a Riesling tattoo along his forearm, "Riesling is the best grape in the world." I tried the 2009 Toni Jost and liked it a lot.

Press Conference at Outside Lands 2011. Damien Kulash of OK Go, Thomas McNaughton - Salumeria by flour + water, Sommelier Paul Grieco - Summer of Riesling tour. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend.

Although Eastlake curated all of the wines under the tent, star sommelier Rajat Parr picked a few for the VIP tents including: Kermit Lynch's Bandol Rose, Qupe's Syrah and Navarro's Pinot Noir. Parr was also pouring his own brand at Wine Lands.

Sandhi wine booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Sandhi Wines is a boutique winery focusing on the grapes of Santa Barbara. Parr makes a Chardonnay and a Pinot Noir. The Pinot is elegant, complex and superb. Parr uses only native yeasts in his wines, part of a trend toward a more natural way of making wines. Taking this effort several steps further is Natural Process Alliance which also had a booth at Wine Lands.

NPA is minimalist winemaking which, briefly, includes: Sustainable vineyard management, organic grapes, native yeasts and very little to no added sulfur. NPA delivers natural wine in reusable stainless steel canisters to restaurants and wine bars within a one hundred mile radius of their Santa Rosa cellar. Like kegs, NPA stays clear of corks and heavy glass bottles. I tried the 2010 Chalk Hill Pinot Gris. It was not my favorite but I appreciated the unique, flavorful taste.

Kermit Lynch booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

I thought it was kind of cool to see legendary importer Kermit Lynch hosting a booth at Wine Lands. This was their first foray into the world of big outdoor events and would probably do it again in an effort to attract a new generation of drinkers. My favorite Kermit Lynch Wine that day was a 2010 Bandol Terebrune Rose. I found it spicy and herbaceous.

Chris Hall, VP & GM of Long Meadow Ranch at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

The big winner for me at Wine Lands this year was wine on tap from Long Meadow Ranch. Besides, being eco-friendly and less pricy, the wine tastes just as good as if it was in a bottle. I tried Long Meadow’s 2010 Sauvignon Blanc, poured through a stainless steel tap. It was vibrant and crisp with a little of what seemed like effervescence. I thought it must be the keg but, no, that’s their Sauvignon Blanc. Delicious. Personally, I think the keg is a winner but winemakers are still trying to decouple it from the image of frat parties. Maybe hip, rock musicians can help lead the way. Rumor has it band members from MGMT were seen hanging out at the Long Meadow booth sipping on a 2009 draft Cabernet blend.

MGMT at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Related posts:
• Outside Lands: A First Timer's Take on an Eco-Friendly Gourmet Music Festival
• Outside Lands Recap 2011 at KQED Arts
• Guide to Outside Lands 2011 at KQED Arts

Stephanie Miller, the assistant vineyard manager at Robert Sinskey Vineyards, pulled back the lid of a knee-high wooden bin and plunged her hand wrist-deep in a thick layer of squashed mulberry-colored grapes. Sweeping them back to reveal the bright purple juice below, she dipped in a glass and held out a taste. A little sweet, a little sharp, the cloudy juice was speckled with bits of grape and froth, buoyant and lively with yeasts and natural sugars.

A couple of years from now, this same stuff will be a suave Napa Valley Pinot Noir. But on this warm morning at the beginning of the 2009 harvest, these grapes are just a day or two off the vine, busily fermenting their way from juice to wine.

Surrounding these wooden bins are the hulking stainless-steel vats more typical of a modern winery, into which most of Sinskey's juice goes. But, as Miller explained, for this small pick, taken from one particular vineyard block that ripened early, letting the grapes ferment the old-fashioned way seemed just fine.

It fits right in with the style of the vineyard, a family-run place where sheep roam as four-footed weed whackers during the winter, munching down the weeds and cover crops before the fruit sets. Around the blocks of grapes are hedgerows and trees dotted with raptor perches and owl boxes, providing habitat for birds and beneficial insects. Hawks soar overhead, keeping hungry eyes on the mice and gophers below. Organic since 2001, the vineyards were certified biodynamic in 2007, following the methods laid out by Austrian philosopher/educator/polymath Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), under the down-to-earth eye of vineyard manager (and livestock wrangler) Debby Zygielbaum.

Sheep on the farm. Photo by Robert Sinskey

There are many layers to biodynamic farming, but the basic premise involves taking organics one step further to create a holistic, "closed circle" ecosystem whereby all the land's fertility needs can be met on site. Animals provide manure, for example, manure goes into compost, compost goes into soil that then grows grass to feed the animals.

Hence the sheep, and the on-site composting program that transforms a good portion of the winery's spent grape pomace into a rich organic soil booster. That's just the tip of Steiner's philosophy, however. As a philosopher with a mystical Christian bent, Steiner's agricultural experiments in the face of industrial, post-WWI devastation blended time-honored Northern European folk traditions (planting by the phases of the moon, assigning the calendar "root days" and "fruit days" based on planetary movements) with his own personal beliefs in astral energy planes and more.

Walking a path between the grapes, Miller quotes a friend and fellow biodynamic farmer as saying, "You can farm on your knees or on your feet." Meaning that you can follow Steiner's dictates as a spiritual practice or as a practical how-to; either way, the results speak for themselves. Do you have to believe that a cow's horn symbolizes a kind of bridge between the earth and the sun, and that adding manure aged for months inside a buried cow's horn to your compost will energize your plants?

Perhaps, perhaps not. But there's no denying that building an intimacy with every aspect of a piece of land, from the way the wind moves over it to what weeds grow there, builds an awareness that translates into deep knowledge, informed by care and maybe even love.

Grapes on the vine. Photo by Robert Sinskey

Hanging on the cusp of harvest, the grapes are vividly indigo, green-gold, rose amber or plum black. The land itself feels rich with life, from the bees darting in and out of the flowering weeds below to the birds pecking their portion of the harvest from the ends of the rows.

The Zinfandel grapes are almost comically huge, ripe-to-bursting clusters hanging blue-black in the hot early-autumn sunshine. The Pinot Noir berries are smaller and shyer, almost dainty, the Cabernet Sauvignon vines looking straight out of a Claude Chabrol film. Muscat, clear gold, is unmistakable, the juice sugar sweet with a hint of musk. I remember reading a description of a summer morning in Venice as having "light like pink grapes" and these clusters of rosy Pinot Gris turn the simile suddenly clear.

All well and good. But how do the wines taste? After visiting numerous blocks of Sinskey's grapes, growing in the Stag's Leap and Carneros appellations, Miller takes me back to the elegant public tasting room on the Silverado Trail. Here, too, the idea of a self-fufilling ecosystem continues.

Wine is, after all, meant to drunk with food. So there is a small but lovely open kitchen adjoining the tasting room, where house chef Alex Bolduc whips up small complementary palate-teasers to accompany the $20 tasting flights, using produce harvested in the surrounding kitchen garden. The winery also runs special culinary tours ($50 per person, by appointment), in which guests get a guided tour through both the caves and the gardens, followed by a wine, cheese, and charcuterie tasting. It helps, of course, that Sinskey's culinary director is his wife, Maria Helm Sinskey, well-known cookbook author and formerly the highly acclaimed chef of San Francisco's PlumpJack restaurant.

The open kitchen in the tasting room. Photo by Robert Sinskey

The day I visited, Bolduc was simmering a batch of pear butter on the stove, made with green pears harvested from the Sinskeys' backyard. Once finished, it would jarred and sold in the tasting room or used on the menu of one of the winery's popular wine-club dinners, held every few months. While wine-club members get first dibs at reservations, interested diners can always call to see if any seats are available. Upcoming dinners include a Fall Equinox Dinner on Sept. 19th, and a Harvest Dinner on Oct. 24th. The price for six courses accompanied by wine is $175 per person.

In the tasting room, I nibbled a bit of aged gouda dotted with homemade plum jam, alongside a buttery mini-quiche filled with tatsoi, roasted onions, and cream, a moist gougere and some delectable slivers of pizza hot from the wood-burning oven. (Pizza Thursdays, a new development, are not to be missed).

And then there were the wines. I've long been a fan of Sinskey's Vin Gris as a elegant summer cooler. But the pours were more autumnal that day, starting with the Vandal Vineyard Pinot Noir. This parcel gets temperatures some 10 to 15 degrees warmer, bringing out the juicy richness and depth of the fruit, with hints of leather and smoke. "It's a more masculine wine," suggests sales manager Meg Barkley, and I have to agree: it seems to call out for leg of lamb, deep leather armchairs, dark wood paneling and a roaring fire.

A Pinot Noir from the Three Amigos parcel, some 5 to 7 miles away, is quite different, leaner and lighter, with less smoke and more cherry. "This one's my duck wine," says Barkely.

Sinskey only recently started doing single-designation Pinots, and the choice of vineyards changes from year to year, depending on the quality of the fruit.

It's one more part of the winemaking philosophy espoused by owner Rob and his longtime vintner, Jeff Virdig, who has been working with Sinskey since 1991: bring the fruit to its peak, then get out of the way and let the grapes express their own truth.

For information and reservations for upcoming dinners, call 800.869.2030 or 707.944.9090, ext. 119.