California’s Grand Cru Vineyards Emerge

An informal Grand Cru is emerging in California, and it is at once as dead-serious and casual as the ambition and culture that defines the Golden State’s mysterious and magnetic modus operandi.

The real Grand Cru, of course, was established in 1855 at the Exposition Universelle, after Emperor Napoleon III asked each wine region in France to establish a classification. The Grand Cru is the highest classification of wine, and can refer to either the plot of land in which the grapes are grown, or the château at which the wine is made. In Burgundy, Alsace, Champagne, Languedoc and the Loire, Grand Cru refers to the land; in Bordeaux, Grand Cru refers to the château.

The closest thing California – and the US more broadly – has to a formal classification system is the American Viticulture Area (AVA) designation. It was launched in 1980 with the goal of carving out and defining terroir. It is useful, to be sure, but when it comes to a precise evocation of flavor, aroma and spirit, naming the AVA in which a wine is made is like describing a flower as “red”; naming a Grand Cru is like describing it as “crimson” or “vermilion”.

The real Grand Cru is carved in stone. The informal Grand Cru is more like a cribbed cheat-sheet shared on wine bottles, to be noticed and truly understood by only members of the industry and the most rabid enophiles. The vineyards that seem to pop up on the most highly rated bottles with ever-increasing frequency, and wine aficionados will have an idea of what’s to come.

“It is not appreciated how extraordinarily rare and special these vineyards are,” says James Hall, founder and winemaker at Sonoma’s Patz & Hall, which specializes in single-vineyard Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. “When people talk about Grand Cru wines from Burgundy, they’re talking about less than 5 percent of the wines made there. They’ve been studying these places for hundreds of years. We’re just getting started. I believe that there are not nearly as many truly great vineyards in the New World as people think, but there are ones that have that mysterious, magical element. Ones that can produce wines with emotional impact. Those are the ones we look for, and return to.”

While California is unlikely to ever formally recognize these rock star vineyards, that doesn’t mean we can’t. We also wanted to understand just what makes these places so distinctly phenomenal, and if and how much the growers and winemakers work together to determine what happens in the vineyard. Read on for insight from farmers and producers.;

The relationship

Grabbing grapes from the best vineyards in the world isn’t as easy as placing an order on Amazon. The right to snag – and then brag about the snag on the bottle – has to be earned.

“We planted Bien Nacido Vineyard in 1973, and at that point, no one was growing grapes with intention in the way my family wanted to,” says Nicholas Miller, a fifth-generation farmer in the Santa Maria Valley, and VP of sales and marketing for the Miller Family Wine Company. “Back then, most people were just planting for quantity. My dad and uncle worked with UC Davis to source quality bud for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and they planted them and acted as a nursery.”

Currently, the Millers have about 700 acres under vine, one-third of which goes into their own vineyard designates. The vines are on their own roots, a rarity in California because of phylloxera, and that, combined with their rigorous approach to planting and farming, means their grapes are in demand.

“We are very strict about taking on new contracts, and want to taste the wines before our name goes on the bottle,” Miller says. “The demand is definitely higher than the supply for us at this point.”

When the fruit is good, word spreads fast, agrees Hall.

“When we got started in 1988, we had $5000 to invest,” Hall recalls. “There was no way we could buy a vineyard. But we could buy fruit; we knew what kind of wine we wanted to make, and we knew what kind of grapes we’d have to find to do that, in part by tasting through a lot of wines and noting the names of vineyards.”

In the 1980s, the market was less tight, and both growers and producers exchanged notes on grape quality. Hall’s first big “score” was in 1989, when Larry Hyde agreed to sell them Chardonnay.

“That became a model we replicated,” Hall says. “We would buy a small, precisely selected slice – maybe 6-7 tons – of vineyards we really liked. When growers tasted our wines, they began coming to us, and now we’ve all grown up together, and as their reputations rose, so did ours, and vice-versa.”

Currently, Hall works with about 35 growers on his Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays.

Like Miller, Napa’s Gamble Family Vineyards also operates a hybrid model, farming for wineries like Nickel & Nickel, Julian Fayard, Robert Vineyards and also for their own estate wines.

“The relationship between grower and producer is key,” says proprietor Tom Gamble. “I have to understand their intentions and they have to understand mine. My wife tells me I spend more time communicating with the people who buy my grapes than I do with her, and she may be right! Everything from when and how we prune to the moment we pick is discussed. And in the end, it’s absolutely fascinating to compare bottles from different winemakers made from grapes from the same vineyard. Every choice has an impact.”

© Arista Winery
| Mark McWilliams says that the relationship between grower and buyer is more than a simple business transaction.

Joe Harden, winemaker of Napa’s Nickel & Nickel, grows grapes for his vineyard-designate wines and also works with Gamble and 17 or so other growers for single-vineyard designate wines. And yes, he has all of them on speed dial.

“My assistant winemaker acts as scout when harvest time gets close, and he walks each vineyard every day, testing and tasting,” Harden explains. “I have really good relationships with all of the growers we work with, which is key, because sometimes the window to pick opens suddenly, and we know we have to move in immediately.”

The land

Like people, certain places simply imbue inherent rock star quality. Trying to pin it down is like trying to explain why David Bowie is so cool. Is it the blue eye shadow? The quilted two-piece suit he wore for the Ziggy Stardust tour? The eyepatch?

“When my brother Ben and I took over Arista from our parents in 2012, we literally wrote down a list of vineyard sites that if and when the fruit became available, we’d want,” says Mark McWilliams of the Russian River Valley’s Arista Winery, with 36 acres of estate fruit under vine and contracts with several iconic growers. “Many of the vineyards we work with are very old. Ultimately, we feel the site and to an extent vine age always trumps clone.”

Decisions on organics and price are also pretty much a non-issue, McWilliams says.

“These people are farming at the very high end,” he says. “They are not using chemical sprays or practices that fall outside what we’d call traditional, sustainable, organic farming. The fruit is going to be very expensive, but you get what you pay for. We ask our growers to farm in a way that’s very tough and demanding, and have incredibly high expectations given the pedigree. These relationships are more than a business transaction; they’re a partnership.”

At Thompson Vineyard, with 43 acres of predominantly Rhône varieties on their own rootstock under vine in Alisos Canyon, California, the “white glove” farming treatment is the norm for the 25 wineries they grow for, owner Noah Rowles confirms.

“Everything is done by hand,” he says. “We harvest at night so fruit comes in cold and fresh right when winemakers are beginning their mornings. We entertain a lot of requests and approaches from very idiosyncratic winemakers who take a vested interest in what we far and deliver. No one touches the vineyard who doesn’t literally live on the ranch; I don’t use any outside farming labor.”

Terroir is key, but it can only do so much; every choice a grower makes imprints onto the wine’s final flavor, Rowles argues.

“I think most people underestimate just how true the ‘wine is made in the vineyard’ statement really is,” Rowles says. “I think most folks think that a winemaker can take fruit and ‘make it’ into whatever they want. But the best wines in the world require the least amount of actual winemaking.”

Theresa Heredia, winemaker at Gary Farrell Vineyards and Winery, which works with 30 vineyards on about 12-14 vineyard-designated Pinots and 6-8 vineyard-designates Chardonnays, in addition to Russian River Valley selections, agrees, explaining that she spends more time walking the vineyards she works with than many might imagine.

“We visit the vineyards constantly, collecting data and looking at the fruit,” she says. “We do that to figure out if we want to adjust leaf pulling or anything else, and then establish exactly when we want them to harvest.”

Shaping the future

For a few decades now, the wine cognoscenti have known where to go to score killer fruit. Now, it’s about shaping the narrative of California’s wine country writ large; it’s a matter of cementing its reputation as one of the best places in the world to find highly coveted, exclusive sips of precisely chiseled terroir.

“For many consumers, there isn’t a lot of thought about where the grapes actually come from or who’s behind them,” says McWilliams of Arista. “But it’s probably the most intimate of relationships for small wineries. It’s sacred. We depend on each other for our livelihood. We live together, work together, our kids are in school together. We have a vested interest in each other’s success. Our relationship involves a lot of trust.”

Often, to get to the next level, both growers and makers have to find a lane, and stay in it.

“I was farming 80 acres of estate fruit, and now I’m farming two,” says Bryan Babcock, owner of Babcock Winery & Vineyards in Sta. Rita Hills. “We lost it to first Pierce’s disease and then phylloxera, after we replanted. You’d think I’d be depressed, but I’ve never had more fun. Now I buy fruit from six or seven incredible vineyards, I trust what they do, I can work on my own experimental radical vineyard farming project and do what I love. I can make wine, instead of running around and putting out fires all day.”

Gamble, who both grows and makes his own estate wine, takes the opposite tack, saying that he prefers to keep the winemaking portion of his business relatively small.

“If I grew the wine brand more, something would have to give, either the quality of care in the fields, or the quality of the wine,” he says.

On the road to wine nirvana, there are almost unimaginable sacrifices being made, every day, especially by growers.

“For us, it’s about delivering the best fruit,” says winegrower Craig Becker, of Napa’s Somerston Estate, with 244-acres of grapes under vine and contracts with Cliff Lede, Pahlmeyer, Prisoner and several others. “Last year, we delivered 2.929 tons of the 500-plus tons we estimated we’d harvest, due to concerns over smoke taint from the wildfires. It’s not an annual game we’re playing. It’s a multi-generational relationship. They’re paying us top dollar, and we can’t deliver them anything less than perfect.”

In the end, wine growers, makers and drinkers want the closest thing to perfect they can get in the glass. California will never catch up with France’s timeline but, in lieu of history and systematic classifications, they have a constantly evolving grapevine of intel being passed between growers and producers, and that distinctly New World yen to prove itself. 

“It’s getting clearer every year which sites are truly great; there’s so much that goes into it, from the location, to the age of the vines,” says Nickel. “We’re separating those superior sites, showing them off, highlighting them. I see the movement toward showing one varietal grown in one vineyard in one bottle as a solo rock act versus a symphony. There’s nothing wrong with either approach, but the single-vineyard movement feels more high-stakes. And I like that.”