Feature Article
For winemaker Mike Dashe, picking grapes at the right time is like bringing the vineyard into the winery.
Bringing the Vineyard into the Winery: How Mike and Anne Dashe Just Do It
“The best way to ensure that wine reflects the vineyard is to pick the grapes at the right time. That way, you get the best flavors, while maintaining elegance and reducing the amount of alcohol that can detract from the flavor.”
~Mike Dashe
by
Thom Elkjer
December 19, 2006
Thom Elkjer (TE): Our fundamental premise at AppellationAmerica is that terroir is a sense of place which you can taste in a glass. How do you define terroir for yourselves?
Mike Dashe (MD): I simply view terroir as the combination of elements—soil, climate, and aspect—that, taken in combination, result in a unique flavor profile in a finished wine. In my own experience, wines made from specific vineyards have a unifying thread—a flavor profile that spans every vintage. Even if the vintage is different (i.e. more tannic, softer, riper, etc.), the wine shows a unique character that is immediately identifiable as coming from that particular place.
TE: Have your notions of terroir changed as you have worked in different regions of the world and different parts of California? Have they changed as you have worked together?
MD: No, my opinions about terroir have only been reinforced with the range of places in which I’ve made wine—currently France, New Zealand, and California—since it is clear that even if you take cuttings from one vineyard of the exact same clone, the resulting wine from a different area is totally different. Our working together hasn’t changed my opinions, since I was originally a believer in terroir even immediately after graduating from UC Davis. I’m not a convert, because I saw these trends in wines I liked, year after year, even before I became a winemaker.
TE: You make wines from single vineyards and blends, from within a large appellation, Dry Creek Valley. What’s the difference in terms of how you approach the winemaking?
MD: I’m a great believer in evaluating a vineyard to see if you can identify distinct traits, and using winemaking to showcase those traits. If I see vineyards that make classic Dry Creek Zinfandel but are not necessarily distinctive, I put them into our Dry Creek blend (which exemplifies Dry Creek terroir but not really a particular vineyard). If, on the other hand, I see some truly unique flavor characteristics that I don’t see in other vineyards, I’m inclined to keep it separate and make a single-vineyard wine. This can even happen with young-vine grapes; I’ve recently found a very young vineyard that produces superb, very characteristic wine. I’d like to make a single-vineyard (or possibly “Reserve” wine) from these grapes because I’m so impressed with the qualities.
TE: How do you decide which vineyard blocks from Louvau Vineyard and Bella Vineyard go into a vineyard-designate, and which blocks you blend together?
MD: The Louvau Old Vine is a single 68-yr-old block out of the larger Louvau ranch, and is always kept separate and bottled separately. It’s unique by virtue of the age of the vines, the fact that it’s dry farmed, and its position in the vineyard. The Bella grapes all go into our Dry Creek blend, except a large portion that is kept aside for our Late Harvest Zinfandel.
TE: Describe the different flavors and related qualities of grapes coming from the Dry Creek Valley benchlands (Louvau Vineyard) and the ridges above the valley (Bella Vineyard and Shaddick Vineyard).
MD: Definitely, the hillside fruit is more tannic. But I must say that the Louvau vineyard acts more like a hillside vineyard than a classic benchland vineyard. The soils are very well drained and depleted, and the vines have to struggle a bit. Not much problem with vigor in any of our vineyards.
I would not say that the flavor profiles in Bella and Louvau are tremendously different—maybe the Louvau is more elegant and has rounder tannins. The Shaddick ranch is more effusively fruity. I think most of our vineyards can be described as hillside in nature.
TE: It seems that all winemakers say “wine is made in the vineyard,” but there is also a growing body of evidence that a fair amount of the wine which we drink is doctored in the winery. What do you do to keep the original, indigenous flavor of the grapes alive all the way to the glass?
MD: We definitely are low-interventionist winemakers. On over half of the lots, we use indigenous yeasts to conduct the fermentation, in order to keep the sense of place in the wines. We keep everything separate in small lots, until blending. We do what we can to maximize flavor (for example, we use submerged-cap fermentations using custom-made tanks with grids that hold the grapes below the surface of the fermenting juice), but mostly, we just don’t use a lot of tricks to make wine.
The best way to ensure that the wines reflect the vineyard is to pick the grapes at the right time. It’s done by tasting grapes in the vineyard constantly, during ripening and getting them right when they turn ripe and not substantially after. That way, you get the best, fresh, ripe flavors, while maintaining elegance and reducing the amount of alcohol that can detract from the flavor.
TE: Are there circumstances under which you would feel it’s reasonable or even best to introduce cultured yeasts or other non-indigenous substances?
MD: Yes, we regularly use cultured yeasts if we feel the grapes have any kind of detrimental conditions that contribute to mold or bacterial growth (bird or bee damage, botrytis, broken grape skins, etc.). I’d be foolish not to inoculate with yeasts under these conditions.
TE: Anne has said that when you grow up in France, “you don’t find wine, wine finds you.” Let’s transfer that to California. Did you two find Zinfandel or did Zinfandel find you?
MD: We started with Zinfandel simply because I loved Zin before I got into the business, and then I worked at Ridge and loved the wines which we made there. I made contacts with great growers, and in a sense Zinfandel found us since most of our vineyards were discovered by growers calling us and asking us to make the wine from the vineyards. They thought we could do a good job with their grapes—most of our vineyard owners have great pride in their land and their grapes, and wanted a winery who could make wines which would show off the grapes.
TE: You also make Bordeaux varietals. Let’s take Merlot as an example: give us your impressions of how Merlot and Zinfandel behave in the winery.
MD: Zinfandel is lower tannin, and therefore we can do things like submerged cap fermentations to extract maximum flavors without getting a wine which is too harsh. Zin ferments easily and rapidly, but you have to keep an eye on it to make sure that it’s getting the flavors which you desire and is not fermenting too rapidly or at a too-elevated temperature.
Merlot on the other hand is easily fermented—just crush, pump over regularly, and it makes itself. Zin requires more skill, and is more easily made into inferior wine if you don’t look, taste, and make decisions on a timely basis.
TE: To what extent do your customers rely on you to deliver the qualities of the vineyard and vintage no matter what that means, and to what extent to they expect your wines to deliver similar qualities year after year?
MD: I think our customer base absolutely expects us to create wines that are characteristic of the vineyards. It’s our trademark. They know that there will be vintage differences, but they expect our Todd Brothers Zin to have chocolate, coffee, blackberry, and earthy flavors and our Louvau Zin to have spicy, black raspberry flavors, every year. We deliver it.
Most of all, though, I think our customers expect that if they buy a bottle of our wine, it will have the mouthfeel and texture that is our trademark. All of our wines have a velvety, sensuous mouthfeel and are very complex and layered wines. They’d be disappointed if suddenly we started making big, fruit-bomb wines.
TE: Is there any difference between the people who visit your tasting room in downtown Oakland and those who visit the tasting room which you share with other wineries in Healdsburg?
MD: We just opened the Oakland tasting room, so we really don’t know yet. However, the Healdsburg people are classic wine country tourists who want to find out about wine and enjoy a wine-tasting experience. I will say that more than half of the people who visit the Healdsburg tasting room come in because they say they’ve heard of Dashe and want to try the wines.
The Oakland room so far is made up of our die-hard customers who know our wine and want to taste everything that we’ve made. They’ve been unable to find our single-vineyard Zins, for example, and want to try out the wines. Or, they’re die-hard Oakland fans who want to support a local winery. Turns out that Oaklandites are very loyal local supporters—they’re excited about having a winery in the neighborhood and want to support us.
TE: Anne, you considered a career in perfume blending in France, and you also worked for a brandy producer in California. In what ways is wine similar to or different from those other two luxury products?
Anne Dashe (AD): I would say that wine and brandy are similar to perfume in the blending aspect. To create a perfume, you blend small amounts of components together and the result is something that is much bigger than the component parts. It is the same result when you blend tiny amounts of different lots of one varietal or different varietals together. The final wine will have much more layers and complexity and will be more interesting. However brandy and perfume are different from wine in the sense that the aromatic components are more numerous and cover a much wider range.
TE: Mike, what is the most important lesson you learned while working with Paul Draper at Ridge Vineyards?
MD: Paul taught me an endless amount—where can I start? Mostly, he focused on vineyard styles, and tasting grapes in the vineyard to evaluate how a wine will be made and will evolve. When I taste a grape now, I have a very clear picture of how the resulting wine will evolve. He’s a wonderful evaluator of vineyards—I learned quite a bit about how to select vineyards, and how to work with growers to enhance the natural terroir characteristics in the vineyard.
Because Paul is a master blender, he also taught me much about small-lot fermentations, and keeping everything separate before blending. Much that I know about creating complexity and layering in wines come from him. I love blending wines, and you can’t work at Ridge without learning a tremendous amount about the art of the blend.
~ Thom Elkjer, Regional Correspondent
To comment on Thom’s writings and thoughts, contact him at t.elkjer@appellationamerica.com
Mike Dashe (MD): I simply view terroir as the combination of elements—soil, climate, and aspect—that, taken in combination, result in a unique flavor profile in a finished wine. In my own experience, wines made from specific vineyards have a unifying thread—a flavor profile that spans every vintage. Even if the vintage is different (i.e. more tannic, softer, riper, etc.), the wine shows a unique character that is immediately identifiable as coming from that particular place.
TE: Have your notions of terroir changed as you have worked in different regions of the world and different parts of California? Have they changed as you have worked together?
MD: No, my opinions about terroir have only been reinforced with the range of places in which I’ve made wine—currently France, New Zealand, and California—since it is clear that even if you take cuttings from one vineyard of the exact same clone, the resulting wine from a different area is totally different. Our working together hasn’t changed my opinions, since I was originally a believer in terroir even immediately after graduating from UC Davis. I’m not a convert, because I saw these trends in wines I liked, year after year, even before I became a winemaker.
TE: You make wines from single vineyards and blends, from within a large appellation, Dry Creek Valley. What’s the difference in terms of how you approach the winemaking?
MD: I’m a great believer in evaluating a vineyard to see if you can identify distinct traits, and using winemaking to showcase those traits. If I see vineyards that make classic Dry Creek Zinfandel but are not necessarily distinctive, I put them into our Dry Creek blend (which exemplifies Dry Creek terroir but not really a particular vineyard). If, on the other hand, I see some truly unique flavor characteristics that I don’t see in other vineyards, I’m inclined to keep it separate and make a single-vineyard wine. This can even happen with young-vine grapes; I’ve recently found a very young vineyard that produces superb, very characteristic wine. I’d like to make a single-vineyard (or possibly “Reserve” wine) from these grapes because I’m so impressed with the qualities.
TE: How do you decide which vineyard blocks from Louvau Vineyard and Bella Vineyard go into a vineyard-designate, and which blocks you blend together?
MD: The Louvau Old Vine is a single 68-yr-old block out of the larger Louvau ranch, and is always kept separate and bottled separately. It’s unique by virtue of the age of the vines, the fact that it’s dry farmed, and its position in the vineyard. The Bella grapes all go into our Dry Creek blend, except a large portion that is kept aside for our Late Harvest Zinfandel.
TE: Describe the different flavors and related qualities of grapes coming from the Dry Creek Valley benchlands (Louvau Vineyard) and the ridges above the valley (Bella Vineyard and Shaddick Vineyard).
MD: Definitely, the hillside fruit is more tannic. But I must say that the Louvau vineyard acts more like a hillside vineyard than a classic benchland vineyard. The soils are very well drained and depleted, and the vines have to struggle a bit. Not much problem with vigor in any of our vineyards.
I would not say that the flavor profiles in Bella and Louvau are tremendously different—maybe the Louvau is more elegant and has rounder tannins. The Shaddick ranch is more effusively fruity. I think most of our vineyards can be described as hillside in nature.
TE: It seems that all winemakers say “wine is made in the vineyard,” but there is also a growing body of evidence that a fair amount of the wine which we drink is doctored in the winery. What do you do to keep the original, indigenous flavor of the grapes alive all the way to the glass?
MD: We definitely are low-interventionist winemakers. On over half of the lots, we use indigenous yeasts to conduct the fermentation, in order to keep the sense of place in the wines. We keep everything separate in small lots, until blending. We do what we can to maximize flavor (for example, we use submerged-cap fermentations using custom-made tanks with grids that hold the grapes below the surface of the fermenting juice), but mostly, we just don’t use a lot of tricks to make wine.
The best way to ensure that the wines reflect the vineyard is to pick the grapes at the right time. It’s done by tasting grapes in the vineyard constantly, during ripening and getting them right when they turn ripe and not substantially after. That way, you get the best, fresh, ripe flavors, while maintaining elegance and reducing the amount of alcohol that can detract from the flavor.
TE: Are there circumstances under which you would feel it’s reasonable or even best to introduce cultured yeasts or other non-indigenous substances?
MD: Yes, we regularly use cultured yeasts if we feel the grapes have any kind of detrimental conditions that contribute to mold or bacterial growth (bird or bee damage, botrytis, broken grape skins, etc.). I’d be foolish not to inoculate with yeasts under these conditions.
TE: Anne has said that when you grow up in France, “you don’t find wine, wine finds you.” Let’s transfer that to California. Did you two find Zinfandel or did Zinfandel find you?
For more information on Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel read the report on AppellationAmerica’s Discovery Tasting with Dry Creek winemakers:
Identifying the Appellation Characteristics of Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel
MD: We started with Zinfandel simply because I loved Zin before I got into the business, and then I worked at Ridge and loved the wines which we made there. I made contacts with great growers, and in a sense Zinfandel found us since most of our vineyards were discovered by growers calling us and asking us to make the wine from the vineyards. They thought we could do a good job with their grapes—most of our vineyard owners have great pride in their land and their grapes, and wanted a winery who could make wines which would show off the grapes.
TE: You also make Bordeaux varietals. Let’s take Merlot as an example: give us your impressions of how Merlot and Zinfandel behave in the winery.
MD: Zinfandel is lower tannin, and therefore we can do things like submerged cap fermentations to extract maximum flavors without getting a wine which is too harsh. Zin ferments easily and rapidly, but you have to keep an eye on it to make sure that it’s getting the flavors which you desire and is not fermenting too rapidly or at a too-elevated temperature.
Merlot on the other hand is easily fermented—just crush, pump over regularly, and it makes itself. Zin requires more skill, and is more easily made into inferior wine if you don’t look, taste, and make decisions on a timely basis.
TE: To what extent do your customers rely on you to deliver the qualities of the vineyard and vintage no matter what that means, and to what extent to they expect your wines to deliver similar qualities year after year?
MD: I think our customer base absolutely expects us to create wines that are characteristic of the vineyards. It’s our trademark. They know that there will be vintage differences, but they expect our Todd Brothers Zin to have chocolate, coffee, blackberry, and earthy flavors and our Louvau Zin to have spicy, black raspberry flavors, every year. We deliver it.
Most of all, though, I think our customers expect that if they buy a bottle of our wine, it will have the mouthfeel and texture that is our trademark. All of our wines have a velvety, sensuous mouthfeel and are very complex and layered wines. They’d be disappointed if suddenly we started making big, fruit-bomb wines.
TE: Is there any difference between the people who visit your tasting room in downtown Oakland and those who visit the tasting room which you share with other wineries in Healdsburg?
MD: We just opened the Oakland tasting room, so we really don’t know yet. However, the Healdsburg people are classic wine country tourists who want to find out about wine and enjoy a wine-tasting experience. I will say that more than half of the people who visit the Healdsburg tasting room come in because they say they’ve heard of Dashe and want to try the wines.
Taste for yourself
the winemaking mastery of
Mike Dashe.
Dashe Cellars’ array of distinctive Zinfandels from
Dry Creek Valley and
other appellations are available here.
TE: Anne, you considered a career in perfume blending in France, and you also worked for a brandy producer in California. In what ways is wine similar to or different from those other two luxury products?
Anne Dashe (AD): I would say that wine and brandy are similar to perfume in the blending aspect. To create a perfume, you blend small amounts of components together and the result is something that is much bigger than the component parts. It is the same result when you blend tiny amounts of different lots of one varietal or different varietals together. The final wine will have much more layers and complexity and will be more interesting. However brandy and perfume are different from wine in the sense that the aromatic components are more numerous and cover a much wider range.
TE: Mike, what is the most important lesson you learned while working with Paul Draper at Ridge Vineyards?
MD: Paul taught me an endless amount—where can I start? Mostly, he focused on vineyard styles, and tasting grapes in the vineyard to evaluate how a wine will be made and will evolve. When I taste a grape now, I have a very clear picture of how the resulting wine will evolve. He’s a wonderful evaluator of vineyards—I learned quite a bit about how to select vineyards, and how to work with growers to enhance the natural terroir characteristics in the vineyard.
Because Paul is a master blender, he also taught me much about small-lot fermentations, and keeping everything separate before blending. Much that I know about creating complexity and layering in wines come from him. I love blending wines, and you can’t work at Ridge without learning a tremendous amount about the art of the blend.
~ Thom Elkjer, Regional Correspondent
To comment on Thom’s writings and thoughts, contact him at t.elkjer@appellationamerica.com
