The Making of Radius 3

Because of their adventurousness, our wine club members provide me the great opportunity to focus less on what the typical retailer/restaurateur might need from a wine and let my wine blending imagination go a little bit off the beaten track.

Many of our members have been with us for years so I keep one eye on reproduce-ability (if members liked a particular blend in the past, I want to be able to keep the option of doing it again as long as wine quality is maintained). I also keep one eye on putting together new blends so that we don't give our long-time members a reason for being bored.

So there are two eyes: one more eye on the small lot varieties that are available from our collection of wines at any given time, one eye on the required volume of any one variety to make just enough for the club's needs; four eyes on overall quality, and three more on my responsibility to make wines that exceed our members' expectations. And so we have Radius 3. The picture below shows my work table during one blending session, and the picture below that is of my notebook which hopefully captures a little of what goes through my mind as I am putting the wines together.




After 8 different blends, No. G was the wine that best expressed itself in terms of flavor, aroma, structure, and "aliveness." In August members of our Future Release Program will receive Radius 3, a blend of Cabernet (from 3 different sites/clones), Merlot (from 2 different sites), Cabernet Franc, and Syrah.

If you want to get in on the fun, please join the club.

Quality, Critics, and Wines for Those Who Know

A couple of fascinating articles and blog posts I read this morning have reverberated around in my head, knocking loose again these bedeviling personal questions.

What is Quality? How does the notion of a standard (with its implied underpinning of the "objective") of quality affect my business when the method of constructing that standard relies on mostly subjective inputs? How is the wine critic important to me and to those who love our wines?

My goal has always been to make wines from the Livermore Valley that are the equal in quality to wines made from any other appellation. The longer I make wine though, the more I come up against the ineffable, if not illusory, nature of the goal itself. In the larger world of wine, the standard for a variety's excellence is, at best, a confederation of opinions; the most important being that of the critic with the largest bullhorn at any given time. The bullhorn changes hands occasionally, and as it does, a new set of criteria for excellence seeps into the wine arena. Should our notion of quality then change too?

With experience and the coming to terms with what is really important in this adventure, the questions above become a bit more rhetorical. For the Steven Kent Winery, the only definition of quality, by necessity, has to be my own. Ultimately, every wine we release is the physical manifestation of a collection of decisions made by the Steven Kent Winery...everything from picking date to press date to yeast used to bottle chosen to artwork on label employed to how the wines are presented in our tasting rooms. The finished product is something we are proud of, that displays the maximum quality possible for that wine, that year. If we find enough people who feel that same way about it and the other wines we make, as we do, we might have a successful business.

Ultimately, I think this is the only kind of trade I want to be involved in...our efforts as a group
to make wine that hews as closely as possible to the personal vision we have of excellence in exchange for the passionate "yes" from those who respond the same way.

The real goal then becomes passionately making our wines as well as we possibly can for those wine lovers of like mind and heart. We'll leave it up to them to tell us if we've succeeded.

Child-like Awe

Every year it happens. Centuries have gone by, hundreds of vintages, thousands...you know it will happen, you even know about when it will happen, but still...there's a moment (when the first buds break and infuse your dormant vineyard with a living energy) of child-like awe.

Well, here it is.




On March 26th, bud break occurred on our HRV Sangiovese block, and was followed a couple of days later by Barbera and Cabernet. Though there really isn't any first step in this circle of life (cue the music!), bud break is generally acknowledged as the beginning of the growing season. From the buds come the shoots that serve as the nutrient bearing architecture for the fruit that will set in another month or so (depending upon the variety, of course).

In the next six to seven months fruit will set, shoots become canes; we will drop unripe fruit, thin leaves and canes, take numerous fruit samples testing for acid and sugar levels; we will move wires, harvest fruit, press and ferment. All these things, we've done before; they've been done for millenia...but it starts now, and it is inspiring.

Better Driveways Make Better Wines

Sometimes it is the little things that can have the largest and most important impact. And while the addition of a couple of thousand square feet of concrete doesn't make the world safe for democracy, it sure can improve the overall experience our guests can have.



Years of waxing and waning potholes led us to pave the entrance and part of the exit to our two tasting rooms. We hope that over the course of the next couple of years the entire roundabout will be similarly beautified.

Being a small company requires constant choices in how we spend our very limited resources. I think we finally have a handle on barrels and fruit sources (more important to the wine making process perhaps, but only a part of the entire equation), and it came time to make another quality statement.

From the very beginning, I have believed that ALL aspects of our winemaking and winetasting regimen need to be as perfect as possible to create the best possible experience. And though our wines have made a lot of friends, the entrance to our facility set the absolutely wrong tone for what was to come. Too often it takes too long to set the wrongs right. We've made a first step.

Magic in Every Bottle

Mike Steinberger has an interesting post on Slate.com about his experience with the 1947 Cheval Blanc, seen by many as one of the greatest wines ever made.

I asked my father, an industry vet with 40 years of Bordeaux-drinking experience, if he had ever had this wine, and he recounts this story:

In 1969, my first trip to France with Dick Buck, Tom Keating and Sid Canal, Sid and I ended out trip in Bordeaux where he had set up some tours. We spent most of the day with Michael Broadbent at Mouton tasting 27 vintages of Mouton from the '29 on up. We left about 3PM starving, and drove to St Emilion. We were sitting outside at this little restaurant on the top of this knoll and tried to get something to eat. The restaurant was not yet open for dinner but the proprietor agreed to get us some cheese and meats. We asked for the wine list and there was a '47 Cheval. It was, however, $20 a bottle and we were on a very strict budget. After agonizing we decided , what the hell, at that setting we had to order it. In hind sight I doubt that there could have been a better time or place to have the first '47. The day, for a wine drinker, could not have been better and the '47 was very interesting. A big giant wine much like today's Cabs. but not seen back then. It was very controversial back then for it's difference.

It was never my favorite as I grew up with standards like the '45 Mouton but it was fascinating. We had the wine maybe a dozen times since that day. it was always extremely interesting, delicious and unique but never my favorite, except for that one day in St Emilion.

My dad's story of that first bottle confirms one wine-related truth (perhaps the only one!) It's rarely ever really about the wine. It's about the experience...the people you are with, the setting, the moment in time seen through a prism of green, bottle-shaped glass.

Wine has the power to evoke; like Proust's madeleine, to bring back the past. There is potential magic in every bottle of wine, then. Not just a Cheval Blanc, but the most ordinary of village wines, too.

Mushrooms and Feet...

I had the good fortune recently to be invited by Kathleen Ventura and Dennis Lapuyade of Bar Cesar restaurant in Oakland to taste a selection of Burgundies for potential inclusion on their wine list. I brought along a couple of Pinots from our sister brand - La Rochelle - for kicks.

The tasting was fascinating for a couple of reasons; the most obvious of which is that I don't really anything about Old World wines. I commented to one of my partners, Phil Tagami, that the Burgundies (representing a number of Domaines and the 1991 - 2003 vintages) required a whole different vocabulary than CA and OR wines do.

My notes included comments such as mushroom custard, crab bisque, mint jelly, feet.... Even more to the point, these French Pinots have a shape to them that is very different from our own wines...much more austerity when young, a wonderful bracing acid that runs completely through the wine, and an emphasis on non-fruit aromas and flavors.

I enjoyed the wines, didn't love them, not like I love Pinot from the Santa Lucia Highlands or the Umpqua Valley of Oregon. Our wines (I mean New World here) have a vibrancy and exuberance to them that is missing from Burgundy. The French wines may have been more interesting in an intellectual sense (it's more fun than you think to separate the feet from the crabs) but they were not nearly as viscerally satisfying as the younger, more opulent Cali wines.

Thanks Dennis and Kathleen for letting me learn a lot more about the other wine world and for sharing the fantastic food at Cesar (which includes, at their Berkeley location, the greatest french fry I have ever had). BTW, my favorite Burgundy of the night was the 2001 Nuits St. Georges, Clos des Corvees Pagets, Robert Arnoux.

Purity vs. Accessibility

I was at the Winery last week putting the final touches on the blend for a Grenache release for our club members later in the year (the wine will be called Symmetry, the label for which is at right and was created by Emma Alexander). I had gone into it thinking that I would probably add a bit of Syrah to the blend to round the wine out some, give it a touch more softness and a bit more fruit.

As I tasted through the 10 barrels of Grenache and picked the 7 or 8 I liked the best (I carry a little tape recorder with me and voice my notes on each barrel then transfer the info to an Excel spreadsheet...each barrel gets an A-F grade as well), the issue of varietal purity vs. a wine's accessibility made for lively conversation between me, Claude Bobba, and Brad Buehler (two winemakers at Wente Vineyards).

The 8-barrel composite blend of 100% Grenache (this is the first one we have produced) made a wonderful wine...delicious upfront notes of vanilla-tinged berry and citrus, a long, well-balanced finish. What made the wine unusual, apart from its unique fruit palette, were the quite obvious and sturdy tannins that came on like gangbusters on entry and persisted throughout the wine.

The addition of 12.5% Syrah softened the early tannins and rounded the mid-palate as I thought it would. This wine was also wonderful.

So here we are...two very different wines, both delicious; one more singular than the other, and requiring more open-mindedness perhaps...the other, still varietal, more likeable, but less interesting, maybe.

We have made our decision regarding the final blend, but I don't know if it's the right one.

What's more important to you...exposure to NEW wines that are interesting and delicious but may be a little too different or a wine that prizes comfort over differentness?