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Feature Article
If you want vineyard tending secrets from Bill Eggert you're going to have to dig deep--and even then you might not find them.
Digging for Vineyard Secrets at Fairview Cellars
“A lot of winemakers will keep their blending close to their vests. For me, it goes back to my philosophy. I am not a winemaker;, I am a grape grower. My wine is made in the vineyard and it is the vineyard secrets I keep to myself, not the winemaking secrets.”
~Bill Eggert, owner, Fairview Cellars
by
John Schreiner
January 4, 2007
John Schreiner (JS): Why did you choose to establish on the Golden Mile? There were opportunities throughout the entire valley at the time.
Bill Eggert (BE): The main reason was financial. This property had no water on it. As a result, I was able to pick it up at base land price, without water, which was significant for me. I looked at the other side, Black Sage Road, but I really didn’t want to farm sand. I had farmed pure sand at Coverts and it is much less forgiving than the heavier soils we have here. This property has the perfect exposure for sunlight. It is on a knoll, so there is no frost. That was important. I saw the water problem as being fixable. It took me four years to get the water supply to the point where I felt confident enough to plant grapes.
JS: How did you solve the water problem?
BE: I get my water from Reed Creek [which comes off a nearby mountain]. There was a line to the property but it was only running about two gallons a minute. I had to rebuild an intake, replace almost a kilometre of line, and then properly put it underground. That allowed me to get it up to 20 gallons a minutes. For most of the year, I get 20 gallons a minute. In some years, it will still dry out later in the year. It depends on the year. In drought years, it got down to five gallons a minute but it was enough.
JS: What are the advantages of this site?
BE: I actually have three different soil types on this property.
JS: On six acres?
BE: Yes. I have a sandy gravel strip through the middle, then sand at the south end, and more of the heavier soil, with a higher clay content, at the north end. So I can get the complexity of different soil types from this little six acres. Different yields on those different portions. They are each too small to keep separate lots of wine. It is not as though it were a five acre block of one type of soil. It’s actually three different soil types in one row.
JS: What are the advantages to the lay of this land?
BE: The way I explain it is: when does a person do his best work? In the morning, when the sun is shining but it is cool. It is the same with grapes. By the middle of the afternoon, it is so smoking hot that the grapes have all shut down. They won’t start up again for 12 or 15 hours. So after three o’clock, when it is over 35°C, the grapes aren’t working anyways. I am not that concerned about losing a little bit of sunshine at the end of the day. I would much prefer to have that sunshine early in the day, when the vines are morning-fresh and ready to go. That is one of the main reasons that I actually picked the west side of the valley.
JS: Were you taking a risk when you planted here?
BE: I only planted an acre and a half to begin with. I waited until I got my first crop before I planted any more. Christmas in 1995, which was when I had my first crop and I had enough for a barrel, is when I ordered Cabernet Franc. And then I planned to have more Cabernet Sauvignon later on.
Because of the water problems, I could not plant it all at once. It takes more water when you are planting.
JS: What did you plant to begin with?
A. I planted an acre of Cabernet Sauvignon and a half an acre of Merlot. I had a little bit of Cabernet Franc mixed in with the Cabernet Sauvignon. I got caught with the hot water treatment and I lost 25 percent of my vines in the first planting. [At the time, Canadian authorities, finding viruses on some vines coming from France, insisted on brutal treatment of them, including dipping them in hot water.] I replaced them in 1994 with Cabernet Franc because I couldn’t get any more Cabernet Sauvignon. But what it did was, it gave me Cabernet Franc right away.
JS: What is the current composition of the vineyard?
BE: It is about three acres of Cabernet Sauvignon and an acre and a half each of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. An acre and a third of Cabernet Franc, and about 1.6 acres of Merlot. And I planted one row of Petit Verdot this spring [2006]. It will be specifically for my Meritage.
JS: I believe you have Syrah as well?
BE: I have one row of Syrah … and my little plot in front of the tasting room. I took the Vidal out. I had planted the Vidal to do icewine with it, but after making several vintages of icewine with Lanny Swanky [owner of Willow Hill Vineyard], that was enough of that for me. So I pulled them out and planted Syrah.
JS: Is there room for more vines?
BE: I’ll probably plant a little more Petit Verdot and a little bit of Malbec, but a very small quantity. Altogether, I might be able to get one barrel of the two combined.
JS: Why did you decide this was a strong Cabernet Sauvignon site?
BE: The heat units are almost identical to Bordeaux, within a plus or minus five percent.
JS: What are the heat units here?
BE: The number 2,450 sticks in my head.
JS: Yet, you are not as hot here as on Black Sage Road.
BE: I suppose not in the afternoon, but I am warmer in the morning. You get to a certain point where, unless you are growing Shiraz or Sangiovese, the vines shut down anyway in that heat. Especially Cabernet Franc. It shuts right down.
JS: Many growers in the Okanagan planted Cabernet Franc because it is supposed to ripen earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon. Because the variety shuts down during heat spikes, it actually ripens later than Cabernet Sauvignon. How do you get your Cabernet Franc tasting ripe?
BE: One of the reasons that our Francs are so unique and tasty is that we let them ripen. It is agonizing, getting your kids dressed up for Halloween and thinking about harvesting the next day. That starts to get agonizing.
JS: You let them hang that long?
BE: Yes. I have picked them on All Saint’s Day [November 1]. That would have been in 2001. I remember it distinctly. I had to run around and knock on all the motel doors to get the pickers out because they had partied on Halloween evening.
JS: What Brix do you try to get?
BE: About 25. There are other years when you can pick them in the middle of October as well. But it is within that period from the third week of October to the end of October.
JS: How much earlier can you pick the other reds?
BE: We’ll probably pick the Merlot this year in September. And the Cabernet Sauvignon is probably at almost the same ripeness as the Merlot.
JS: If you were planting all over, what would you do differently?
BE: Less Merlot, more Cabernet Sauvignon. Although the 2005 Merlot is pretty yum-yum. It will be the first time that I release a straight bottling of Merlot.
I do a bottling of Cabernet Franc on its own every year, just because people ask me for it. I have quite a following for it. If that’s what they want, that’s what they get.
JS: Is that Fairview’s signature wine?
BE: Yes - along with the Cabernet Sauvignon.
JS: What do you taste in your Cabernet Franc that sets it apart from others?
BE: More ripeness. More intensity, I think. But I don’t like to blow my own horn. I prefer to have other people do that.
JS: How many clones do you have?
BE: I have two different clones of Merlot, two different clones of Cabernet Franc and four different clones of Cabernet Sauvignon. I have never kept the lots separate. I can tell you the ones whose growth patterns I like better. But it is tough. They also have different rootstocks and they are on different soil types. How much of it is root stock or soil or vine age? Iit is all way too early to know.
JS: Do you recall the numbers of the clones?
BE: I do but I am not going to disclose them.
JS: Why not?
BE: A lot of winemakers will keep their blending close to their vests. For me, it goes back to my philosophy. I am not a winemaker, I am a grape grower. My wine is made in the vineyard and it is the vineyard secrets I keep to myself, not the winemaking secrets.
I do pretty standard stuff in the winery but in the vineyard, I do a lot things that are different. People who work for me, I have told them that what I do in the vineyard, they keep to themselves. I do some things differently that I don’t like people to know about. It is just cultural practices and the clones.
JS: Did you chose those clones with a knowledge of how they might perform?
BE: No. To be quite honest, I had no idea. When I started planting in 1993, we didn’t know the first thing about rootstocks and we had no experience whatsoever with clones here. So I was just being careful by having more than one clone, to make sure I would have something to make wine with, in case one did not succeed.
None of them were disappointing. Some are lower yielding that others; some ripen earlier. But I know there is a virus in one of the clones, so it may be the virus that is at fault. There are so many variables.
I am not a winemaker. I call myself a winemaker in broad terms because I have wine in the cellar that I made. But I have no formal education in winemaking. You sit around and talk with winemakers. We talk about filtering problems; we talk about where the acids are. I do a lot more listening than I do talking at those conversations, that’s for sure.
JS: What yields per acre are you aiming for?
BE: Four to five tons, even four and a half to five and a half for Merlot. Four to five for Franc and three and a half to four and a half for Cabernet Sauvignon. Those are the numbers that I am happy with. This nonsense about a ton and a half or two and a half! If I had a ton and half or two and a half, it would be the worst wine ever off this place. I would never get those vines under control. They would be going vegetative all year. I would be fighting them right to the bitter end. It’s all balance. You want the vine to be putting a lot of its energy into bunches of grapes, not into shoot growth.
JS: There are those who crop at one and a half tons in the quest for really intense wines.
BE: I would never even contemplate it. If I had a soil that had been farmed for 500 years and had no nutrients left in it, and I wasn’t allowed to water, then I would go to a ton and a half. But when you have vines that are giving you six, seven, eight feet of growth; to go to a ton and a half is madness. You are just not doing the vine justice.
There are limits, too. You know if you have too much crop. The ideal vineyard is where you don’t have to hedge. The shoots stop a foot above the last wire. You have all the leaves to produce the phenolic ripeness you need and you have the right amount of fruit for that to happen. If you don’t get the growth to the wire, then you have too much fruit on it. You get six feet beyond the wire, you don’t have enough fruit. It’s balance.
JS: You are tight with what you do in the vineyard, not in the winery?
BE: I don’t really have any secrets in the winery. It is pretty basic. Add the yeast, do the malolactic, get it fermented, add the sulphur, let it sit for a year, then bottle it. Filter and bottle. I do filter. I would think that you would have to go to an ultra-filtration before you started taking character out. Every wine I have is sterile filtered, and I get no complaints on my wines.
JS: You cannot expand on this property. Are you considering buying land elsewhere?
BE: At $150,000 an acre, it ain’t going to happen. But I do have a neighbour who has planted a little more than an acre of Cabernet Sauvignon and some Malbec. It’s a handshake agreement. He just wants to have enough wine not to go out and buy more wine, and I need more grapes.
JS: When you taste wines from the two sides of the valley, do you detect differences?
BE: Differences, yes. Whether they are good or bad is up to other people to decide. I have had many wines from the other side of the valley that I like a lot.
JS: Is there something that stands out from this terroir? Can you find your own wines in a blind tasting?
BE: I have a hard time. I can pick my wines out from the Black Sage area, but I have to be honest, I have a hard time picking out my wines in a blind tasting.
Out of my terroir, I get what I want in my wines. I am getting good complexity, good maturity – phenolic maturity. I am getting good colour. The flavours are all there and I am happy with the flavours. I am not getting a lot of the green bell pepper/asparagus/grassy notes on my Cabernet Sauvignon. I think it is an ideal spot for Cabernet Sauvignon here.
JS: What do you find are the differences between Golden Mile and Black Sage wines?
BE: How would I put it? I think there is more finesse in the wines from the West side. The wines on the East side are bigger. I would think they are higher in alcohol and heavier that ours. You can get those big, bold wines on the other side. Here ... I have always said our wines have more finesse. But the Black Sage wines are good wines. I drink their wines; I drink my wines. They are both good. ~ John Schreiner, Regional Correspondent
To comment on John’s writings and thoughts, contact him at J.Schreiner@appellationamerica.com
Bill Eggert (BE): The main reason was financial. This property had no water on it. As a result, I was able to pick it up at base land price, without water, which was significant for me. I looked at the other side, Black Sage Road, but I really didn’t want to farm sand. I had farmed pure sand at Coverts and it is much less forgiving than the heavier soils we have here. This property has the perfect exposure for sunlight. It is on a knoll, so there is no frost. That was important. I saw the water problem as being fixable. It took me four years to get the water supply to the point where I felt confident enough to plant grapes.
JS: How did you solve the water problem?
BE: I get my water from Reed Creek [which comes off a nearby mountain]. There was a line to the property but it was only running about two gallons a minute. I had to rebuild an intake, replace almost a kilometre of line, and then properly put it underground. That allowed me to get it up to 20 gallons a minutes. For most of the year, I get 20 gallons a minute. In some years, it will still dry out later in the year. It depends on the year. In drought years, it got down to five gallons a minute but it was enough.
JS: What are the advantages of this site?
BE: I actually have three different soil types on this property.
JS: On six acres?
BE: Yes. I have a sandy gravel strip through the middle, then sand at the south end, and more of the heavier soil, with a higher clay content, at the north end. So I can get the complexity of different soil types from this little six acres. Different yields on those different portions. They are each too small to keep separate lots of wine. It is not as though it were a five acre block of one type of soil. It’s actually three different soil types in one row.
JS: What are the advantages to the lay of this land?
BE: The way I explain it is: when does a person do his best work? In the morning, when the sun is shining but it is cool. It is the same with grapes. By the middle of the afternoon, it is so smoking hot that the grapes have all shut down. They won’t start up again for 12 or 15 hours. So after three o’clock, when it is over 35°C, the grapes aren’t working anyways. I am not that concerned about losing a little bit of sunshine at the end of the day. I would much prefer to have that sunshine early in the day, when the vines are morning-fresh and ready to go. That is one of the main reasons that I actually picked the west side of the valley.
JS: Were you taking a risk when you planted here?
BE: I only planted an acre and a half to begin with. I waited until I got my first crop before I planted any more. Christmas in 1995, which was when I had my first crop and I had enough for a barrel, is when I ordered Cabernet Franc. And then I planned to have more Cabernet Sauvignon later on.
Because of the water problems, I could not plant it all at once. It takes more water when you are planting.
JS: What did you plant to begin with?
A. I planted an acre of Cabernet Sauvignon and a half an acre of Merlot. I had a little bit of Cabernet Franc mixed in with the Cabernet Sauvignon. I got caught with the hot water treatment and I lost 25 percent of my vines in the first planting. [At the time, Canadian authorities, finding viruses on some vines coming from France, insisted on brutal treatment of them, including dipping them in hot water.] I replaced them in 1994 with Cabernet Franc because I couldn’t get any more Cabernet Sauvignon. But what it did was, it gave me Cabernet Franc right away.
JS: What is the current composition of the vineyard?
BE: It is about three acres of Cabernet Sauvignon and an acre and a half each of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. An acre and a third of Cabernet Franc, and about 1.6 acres of Merlot. And I planted one row of Petit Verdot this spring [2006]. It will be specifically for my Meritage.
JS: I believe you have Syrah as well?
BE: I have one row of Syrah … and my little plot in front of the tasting room. I took the Vidal out. I had planted the Vidal to do icewine with it, but after making several vintages of icewine with Lanny Swanky [owner of Willow Hill Vineyard], that was enough of that for me. So I pulled them out and planted Syrah.
JS: Is there room for more vines?
BE: I’ll probably plant a little more Petit Verdot and a little bit of Malbec, but a very small quantity. Altogether, I might be able to get one barrel of the two combined.
JS: Why did you decide this was a strong Cabernet Sauvignon site?
BE: The heat units are almost identical to Bordeaux, within a plus or minus five percent.
JS: What are the heat units here?
BE: The number 2,450 sticks in my head.
JS: Yet, you are not as hot here as on Black Sage Road.
BE: I suppose not in the afternoon, but I am warmer in the morning. You get to a certain point where, unless you are growing Shiraz or Sangiovese, the vines shut down anyway in that heat. Especially Cabernet Franc. It shuts right down.
JS: Many growers in the Okanagan planted Cabernet Franc because it is supposed to ripen earlier than Cabernet Sauvignon. Because the variety shuts down during heat spikes, it actually ripens later than Cabernet Sauvignon. How do you get your Cabernet Franc tasting ripe?
BE: One of the reasons that our Francs are so unique and tasty is that we let them ripen. It is agonizing, getting your kids dressed up for Halloween and thinking about harvesting the next day. That starts to get agonizing.
JS: You let them hang that long?
BE: Yes. I have picked them on All Saint’s Day [November 1]. That would have been in 2001. I remember it distinctly. I had to run around and knock on all the motel doors to get the pickers out because they had partied on Halloween evening.
JS: What Brix do you try to get?
BE: About 25. There are other years when you can pick them in the middle of October as well. But it is within that period from the third week of October to the end of October.
JS: How much earlier can you pick the other reds?
BE: We’ll probably pick the Merlot this year in September. And the Cabernet Sauvignon is probably at almost the same ripeness as the Merlot.
JS: If you were planting all over, what would you do differently?
BE: Less Merlot, more Cabernet Sauvignon. Although the 2005 Merlot is pretty yum-yum. It will be the first time that I release a straight bottling of Merlot.
I do a bottling of Cabernet Franc on its own every year, just because people ask me for it. I have quite a following for it. If that’s what they want, that’s what they get.
JS: Is that Fairview’s signature wine?
BE: Yes - along with the Cabernet Sauvignon.
JS: What do you taste in your Cabernet Franc that sets it apart from others?
BE: More ripeness. More intensity, I think. But I don’t like to blow my own horn. I prefer to have other people do that.
JS: How many clones do you have?
BE: I have two different clones of Merlot, two different clones of Cabernet Franc and four different clones of Cabernet Sauvignon. I have never kept the lots separate. I can tell you the ones whose growth patterns I like better. But it is tough. They also have different rootstocks and they are on different soil types. How much of it is root stock or soil or vine age? Iit is all way too early to know.
JS: Do you recall the numbers of the clones?
BE: I do but I am not going to disclose them.
JS: Why not?
BE: A lot of winemakers will keep their blending close to their vests. For me, it goes back to my philosophy. I am not a winemaker, I am a grape grower. My wine is made in the vineyard and it is the vineyard secrets I keep to myself, not the winemaking secrets.
I do pretty standard stuff in the winery but in the vineyard, I do a lot things that are different. People who work for me, I have told them that what I do in the vineyard, they keep to themselves. I do some things differently that I don’t like people to know about. It is just cultural practices and the clones.
JS: Did you chose those clones with a knowledge of how they might perform?
BE: No. To be quite honest, I had no idea. When I started planting in 1993, we didn’t know the first thing about rootstocks and we had no experience whatsoever with clones here. So I was just being careful by having more than one clone, to make sure I would have something to make wine with, in case one did not succeed.
None of them were disappointing. Some are lower yielding that others; some ripen earlier. But I know there is a virus in one of the clones, so it may be the virus that is at fault. There are so many variables.
I am not a winemaker. I call myself a winemaker in broad terms because I have wine in the cellar that I made. But I have no formal education in winemaking. You sit around and talk with winemakers. We talk about filtering problems; we talk about where the acids are. I do a lot more listening than I do talking at those conversations, that’s for sure.
JS: What yields per acre are you aiming for?
BE: Four to five tons, even four and a half to five and a half for Merlot. Four to five for Franc and three and a half to four and a half for Cabernet Sauvignon. Those are the numbers that I am happy with. This nonsense about a ton and a half or two and a half! If I had a ton and half or two and a half, it would be the worst wine ever off this place. I would never get those vines under control. They would be going vegetative all year. I would be fighting them right to the bitter end. It’s all balance. You want the vine to be putting a lot of its energy into bunches of grapes, not into shoot growth.
JS: There are those who crop at one and a half tons in the quest for really intense wines.
BE: I would never even contemplate it. If I had a soil that had been farmed for 500 years and had no nutrients left in it, and I wasn’t allowed to water, then I would go to a ton and a half. But when you have vines that are giving you six, seven, eight feet of growth; to go to a ton and a half is madness. You are just not doing the vine justice.
There are limits, too. You know if you have too much crop. The ideal vineyard is where you don’t have to hedge. The shoots stop a foot above the last wire. You have all the leaves to produce the phenolic ripeness you need and you have the right amount of fruit for that to happen. If you don’t get the growth to the wire, then you have too much fruit on it. You get six feet beyond the wire, you don’t have enough fruit. It’s balance.
JS: You are tight with what you do in the vineyard, not in the winery?
BE: I don’t really have any secrets in the winery. It is pretty basic. Add the yeast, do the malolactic, get it fermented, add the sulphur, let it sit for a year, then bottle it. Filter and bottle. I do filter. I would think that you would have to go to an ultra-filtration before you started taking character out. Every wine I have is sterile filtered, and I get no complaints on my wines.
JS: You cannot expand on this property. Are you considering buying land elsewhere?
BE: At $150,000 an acre, it ain’t going to happen. But I do have a neighbour who has planted a little more than an acre of Cabernet Sauvignon and some Malbec. It’s a handshake agreement. He just wants to have enough wine not to go out and buy more wine, and I need more grapes.
JS: When you taste wines from the two sides of the valley, do you detect differences?
BE: Differences, yes. Whether they are good or bad is up to other people to decide. I have had many wines from the other side of the valley that I like a lot.
JS: Is there something that stands out from this terroir? Can you find your own wines in a blind tasting?
BE: I have a hard time. I can pick my wines out from the Black Sage area, but I have to be honest, I have a hard time picking out my wines in a blind tasting.
Out of my terroir, I get what I want in my wines. I am getting good complexity, good maturity – phenolic maturity. I am getting good colour. The flavours are all there and I am happy with the flavours. I am not getting a lot of the green bell pepper/asparagus/grassy notes on my Cabernet Sauvignon. I think it is an ideal spot for Cabernet Sauvignon here.
JS: What do you find are the differences between Golden Mile and Black Sage wines?
BE: How would I put it? I think there is more finesse in the wines from the West side. The wines on the East side are bigger. I would think they are higher in alcohol and heavier that ours. You can get those big, bold wines on the other side. Here ... I have always said our wines have more finesse. But the Black Sage wines are good wines. I drink their wines; I drink my wines. They are both good. ~ John Schreiner, Regional Correspondent
To comment on John’s writings and thoughts, contact him at J.Schreiner@appellationamerica.com
