New Wines Soon

I spent a very enjoyable last couple of days culling through our 2006 Ghielmetti Vineyard Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot lots. I take a glass and a plastic cup and a wine thief and my clip board to the barrel stacks and a taste a sample from each barrel, write notes and grade each wine. Depending upon how far along in their lives the wines are, I am looking for different things.

At this point with the 2006 vintage, I am tasting wines that are pretty close to being where we want them for release. And boy did I find some spectacular wines, too. In part because of the success of the La Rochelle project (with its multitude of small lot wines), but mostly because we now have the right vineyard bearing a wide variety of wonderful fruit, we will be releasing very small lots of wine for all of guests that particularly display varietal typicity, deliciousness, interest, and world-class quality.

I have had the growing sense lately that the decisions I have made regarding, especially, the amount of time some of our Bordeaux varieties spend in wood, need to be revised. Generally, we use a fairly high percentage of new barrels, and it has been our practice to keep Cabernet in barrel a full two years. For the first vintage or so of the other Bordeaux, the practice has been the same. After tasting through these lots, however, I have found some wonderful fruit characteristics showing through at 18 months in barrel that may not be there at 24.

Though we have wine making protocols, they are not recipes. Each vintage is different and requires modified thought processes to make successful wines from them. I think it may play out, however, that we see a more general move to reducing time in barrel (or a higher percentage of older barrels) for more of our wines. Later this year expect a single barrel each of Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot in the Barrel Room in both 750ml and magnum formats.

Lunch with my Daughter

Sometimes parents (ok, I'm talking about myself, here), make assumptions about what their children are going to like or what they might do when they get out of college. My father (5th generation) never talked to me about going into the family business, probably because I made no bones about my desire to do something else. Well, life took the turns it does, and I wound up back in the family business (can't imagine anything else now!). This is where my kids come into play.

It really isn't my nature to let things just happen, and, though I am trying to show enough of the business to them to get them really excited about the thing their dad does, I try to do it in as subtle a fashion as possible.

Good food is an important part of our lives, personally and professionally. And the opportunities I get to have a meal with one of my kids always end up being a wonderful time. My oldest child, April, who is studying Hospitality Management (concentration in Event Planning) is going to school at San Francisco State, and today we had lunch at one of our favorite City restaurants, Rose Pistola in North Beach (try the house cured sardines and summer truffle raviolos with sweet corn, pictures below).

April turned 21 a few months ago, and the wine education is now beginning in force. I can get excited when talking about wine and April and I talked about appellations in Europe vs. California, what grapes go into Chianti, Barbera in Piemonte vs. ours from Livermore...it was really fun (for me, anyway). The chance to express the wonder of wine to one of my kids is just an amazing experience.

Where this intersects with the larger wine world is in the personal-ness of the experience. It doesn't have to be one of my children, I feel a similar jolt every time I have the occasion to talk to someone who shares this passion that I have. I think what underlines everything we do at the Steven Kent Winery is the attempt to make a connection...the desire to make personal what so often is nameless and faceless. We have tried to make sure that all of our club members and guests feel, at least for a short time while they are at the Winery, that they are part of the family. We hope you feel this too.

Tasting the 2002 Smith Ranch Cabernet

Play the video for an update on the 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon, Smith Ranch

Are We Losing a Generation of Wine Lovers?

Steve Heimoff, a very thoughtful, and talented wine writer with Wine Enthusiast magazine posted a new entry on his blog questioning the interest "millenials" (those folks under 30) have in wine. The conclusions he cites don't make the winemaker's heart sing.

Those cited claim that colorful cocktails have taken the place and the dollar that wine had 5 years ago. Our recent experience at Steven Kent belies this, however.

I have absolutely no evidence for this except for my own, often bleary, anecdotal observations, but I think the number of young people who have visited us in the last year or so has increased dramatically.

And I think the chief reason for this is the same reason that gives me hope that we are building a true, wine-loving culture in California: wine isn't that big a deal any more.

By no big deal, I mean this new group of people ( I hate those generational labels!) is the first that has seen wine as a regular part of their every day experience. Mom and Dad weren't celebrating an anniversary, they were celebrating surviving the day. They knew that the wine they chose would not only ease the cares but also make the food they were eating taste better. A shared bottle of wine was the vehicle for re-connnection, for new-memory making.

In this case, familiarity breeds comfort. As the under-30's (sorry!) find the beginnings of their careers and the income that goes with it, the natural consequence, it seems to me, is that they begin to find their wine legs. The underpinnings have been erected; now they place their own favorites on this framework.

Welcome to wine and to Steven Kent!

Back to the Beginning

To find the killer of his father, Inigo Montoya follows the advice of fellow n'er do well, Vizini, and "goes back to the beginning."


To reclaim our Cabernet soul, we are going back to our original mission of focusing our attention on producing world-class, small-lot Cabernets that tell a story about a special place. While our production has never been large compared to more well-known brands, we will be concentrating a lot more energy in sucking the marrow from our Cabernet sites to provide the biggest small "wow" we can.

Beginning with the sold-out releases of our first two Premier Cabernet Collection wines (Ghielmetti Vineyard, Clone 4 and Smith Ranch, Clone 8) in November, our goal is to produce 4-5 Cabernets per year that our indelibly linked to a site and philosophy of winemaking. While the first two wines released this year number fewer than 30 cases in production, the PCC wines released next year will be in the 50-case range.

Smallness has its advantages. We strongly believe in a business model that favors the face-to-face transaction: we like to know who is drinking our wine and whether we succeeded in its production. We can't know this if we are producing thousands of cases of wine. We also like to be able to offer our club members and winery guests something unique and new each time they come to visit. Most importantly, though, is the ability to control more of the things that bear directly on quality.

Our goal has always been to produce Cabernet as great as any in the world. Going back to this original impulse, this first commandment, will give us the opportunity to succeed or fail.

Is California "First-Growth" Worthy?

The Wine Spectator's, Jim Laube, had an interesting take on the recent sale of venerable Napa winery, Chateau Montelena. After detailing some of the difficulties this particular brand has had (made even more glaring after all their early success), he concludes that many of the old superstar wines such as Mondavi Reserve Cabernet, Stag's Leap's Cask 23, Montelena's Cab, have seen their best days, and that, by implication, restoring their former glory is next to impossible.

In the past, there have been calls - mostly by wine writers - to create a classification system in California modeled after the 1855 classification in Bordeaux. The four wines that were originally rewarded with "first growth" status were the most expensive (equated, then, with quality) Bordeaux wines made. In the intervening sesquicentennial, only one change has been made to the the first growth rank: Ch. Mouton-Rothschild was moved from second to first in 1973.

Whether Ch. Montelena's (and Mondavi, and Stag's Leap) "fall" is a symptom of America's seemingly insatiable appetite for the next new thing, our still-young wine culture, or an indication of French inflexibility, it is hard to imagine a California brand achieving the consistent highest level of quality for as long as the French wines have.

One of the benefits of the American search for the new is the ability for a wine region like the Livermore Valley to be lifted, through the efforts of the truly dedicated growers and winemakers, to the highest levels of quality. America reinvents itself constantly. What was accepted wisdom for one generation is the peculiar footnote for the next.

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.