Our last stop in Sonoma was very special indeed and in
fact, Leslie and I got to do something that very few wine
enthusiasts ever get to do and that is to go to the home of
the winemaker and owner of a winery. In this case, the
winery was Deerfield Ranch, located in Kenwood,
California, and the owner whose house we visited is
Robert Rex. Robert was born in America, but he is of
Italian descent, which is something he takes a lot of pride
in. Robert has managed to accomplish a feat that as far
as I am concerned, no other vintner in the state has been
able to pull off consistently and that is to make excellent
hand crafted wines from the great grape of Tuscany,
Sangiovese. In fact he blends Sangiovese in a couple
different red wines that they make, one of those being a
red blend that is made up of 71% Sangiovese called
Super T Rex. This wine is ironclad proof of the man’s
talent for making special wines from a notoriously difficult
grape to fashion into wine outside of its native home of
Italy.
The winery itself is not quite open to the public just yet,
but Robert tells me that it will finally be ready for visitors
come harvest time this year. Wow, talk about a hectic
time for a grand opening! I asked Robert if he was ready
for the circus of people that will be visiting and he agreed
that the biggest challenge facing them would be handling
all of the extra people onsite. The entrance to the winery
will be off of Highway 12 and will feature 23,000 square
feet of caves, which took a whole three years to drill.
There will be a big grand room in the middle of the cave
where they’ll have a tasting room, just to complete the
whole winery visiting experience. The caves themselves
will hold the nearly 2000 barrels of wine that they have on
property. These barrels hold not only Deerfield Ranch
wines, but also much of the clients that Robert makes
wine for. Deerfield Ranch makes about 12,000 cases of
wine a year and an additional 15,000 cases are made for
various clients of Robert’s. These are mostly start-up
wineries; most are just vineyard owners that make about
2500 cases of wine a year. Sometimes they get too big
and Robert has to give them the proverbial boot as they
run out of cellar space to accommodate the extra cases.
This was precisely the case with Robert’s most famous
client, but I will tell you who that was a little later on in
the story.
The entrance to Robert’s driveway is off of a curvy road
and if you don’t see the mailbox with their name on it, you’
re quite likely to miss it. It is a steep drive up to the top
of the driveway to Rex’s home, which is a ranch style
house, complete with a pool and built in the 1940’s. Upon
getting out of our rental car, we were greeted by a very
large black poodle named Luke Skywalker. A famous
poodle I might add, he is featured in a book called
“Winery Dog’s” complete with a portrait of the pooch.
Walker, as he is known for short, escorted Leslie and I up
to the door, where Robert was waiting for us. They had a
large dinner party at the house the night before and in
fact, just two weeks earlier, celebrated he and his wife PJ’
s, twenty five anniversary. We stepped out back, pulled
up a chair and Robert began pouring us some of his
fantastic wines. He had tons for us to sample too! After
our initial greetings and once everyone was content with a
glass of wine in their hand, Robert began telling us his
story and it is one that is both fascinating and entertaining.
Robert got interested in wine while he was attending
college where he joined a wine tasting group that got
together once a month to taste wines. Back then, they
were mostly French wines and believe it or not, they were
all pretty inexpensive. Robert remembers paying just
$12.00 for a bottle of Chateau LaTour. I believe the 2005
vintage sells right now for around $900 a bottle. His
everyday wine was another Bordeaux classic, Chateau
Gloria and he could buy that for $26.00 a case. Yes, one
bottle of that alone now costs more than the entire case
did back then. To further rub salt in my envious wound,
he informed me that Heitz, “Martha’s Vineyard” sold for
a buck ninety-eight and the BV “Georges Latour” a
paltry two-fifty. Next to two-buck chuck, even that is a
hell of a bargain. By the late 70’s these wines increased
in price to seven or eight dollars. Well boo hoo! That
wouldn’t even put a down payment on either one of them
today. Robert liked to visit Napa in the early days and
tells me that you could tour most of the wineries in a
single day. Now that is certainly impossible in this day
and age.
With a passion and a palate for great wine already
established, Robert just needed a good reason to leap
into the winemaking business and that came from, of all
places, the women that was to become his wife, PJ.
Robert has always been good at fixing things and PJ had
a little Italian sports car called a Fiat. “Well, Robert
says, you’ve got to have an Italian work on an Italian car,
right?” Robert saved the day by getting PJ’s car back up
and running and as a thank you gift, she purchased him a
winemaking kit. Oh Lord, he never looked back! Maybe
that is all I need Leslie to do for me to get started! PJ
upgraded her car to a 1974 Alfa Rameo and I believe she
still has it to this day.
Well after a few successful home wine making vintages
under his belt, Robert decided to up the ante by
purchasing some grapes from an actual vineyard. He had
read about this world famous tasting in which a Napa
winery took top honors and decided to see if he could talk
the owner, who shall remain nameless, into selling him
some grapes. To his surprise, he agreed to sell some to
Robert under the condition that Robert and his buddy had
to pick them their selves. Viticulture wasn’t as good back
then as it is today and the grapes weren’t evenly ripened,
so Robert and his buddy went through the vineyard and
picked only the ripe grapes. About a ton and a half to be
exact. This infuriated the nameless winery owner, who
accused them of ‘cherry picking’ his vineyard. Robert
told him they weren’t ripe so they left them on the vines
for the winery owner to pick once they had ripened. The
winery owner scolded Robert; “We don’t do it that way
around here!” Always thinking ahead, Robert asked,
“Well does this mean we can’t get them next year?” To
which he replied, “Well you can probably have them, but
we’ll pick them for you!” Just as an FYI, Robert said the
wine they made from this nameless winery’s grapes
turned out really good. In fact, he liked it better than
theirs!
From here our conversation shifted from making wine to
tending to grapevines and sourcing fruit. Robert informs
me that perfect ripeness in grapes is the holy grail of
great wine grapes. In the vineyard, you pull leaves from
the canopy and trim vines to get all the berries to ripen at
the same time. Back in the old days, wineries didn’t use
vertical trellising and instead the vines grew out on their
own in a manner known as the ‘California Sprawl’. This
gave the grapes too much shade resulting in more herbal
wines. Back then; Robert says it was hard to get the
growers that they bought the fruit from on the same page
with winemakers, but these days they are all on the top of
their game. Now they actually welcome input from
winemakers. Robert tells me that he himself learns from
the really good growers and passes on their input to the
other growers as far as pruning techniques and how many
buds to leave on the vine. These growers take a lot of
pride in the resulting wines that are made from their
vineyards and they get to know their vineyards really well
and know precisely what they are doing.
Robert goes on to tell me that when the growers get the
vines in balance from year to year, they can get in a rut
and prune the same way every vintage. So Robert will
advise the growers based on what he thinks the vintage is
going to be like. If the vintage is going to be weaker for
instance, then he’ll tell them to leave fewer buds on the
vine. The things they spend the most time on is the
placement of the canes so that they can get the fruit
hanging at the same level and thinning the crop, which is
done two times a vintage. The first time they thin the
crops it’s done as the grapes are coming in and they will
cut off some fruit, especially from the weaker canes. The
second time happens towards the end of Verasion (the
period when grapes begin to change colors), where they’ll
take about 5% off the vine or as he calls them, “the
lagers” because they won’t ripen at the same time as the
rest of the grapes.
Robert makes all of the picking decisions in the
vineyards. He says the growers usually want to pick
earlier than he wants. They get nervous and want to get
the fruit off of the vine as soon as possible. They are
afraid of rain and call Robert all the time to ask him if
they can pick’em yet. He reassures them that it will be
okay to wait. Speaking of picking grapes, Robert
proclaims to me that he will never pick the fruit himself
again. A job I guess that he does not relish. Instead he
puts together a crew and then they show up at the
vineyard before dawn and pick all the grapes to take back
to the winery. At this point, the work is just beginning for
Robert and his winery crew as they begin sorting through
the grapes and putting them through the process of
destemming and crushing, etc… all the while the farmer is
throwing a harvest party back at the vineyard.
Not all of Robert’s wines are from sourced vineyards. He
has a total of seventeen acres planted close to the house
and another forty-seven acres down by the winery. They
are in the process of building a bigger winery and who
knows, maybe they will be expanding their own vineyard
holdings at that time. We did not get into what grapes
were planted on those vineyards, but I could guess that
there are Cabernet Sauvignon grapes planted as well as a
few others of the usual suspects. Another interesting fact
is that the logo on their wine bottles shows a mountain
view and it is precisely the view you see from their
backyard. Pretty cool, once you've seen it for yourself.
I mentioned earlier that Robert loves crafting Italian
varietal wines and is quite skilled at doing so. I found this
out the night before I visited him when my wife and I
shared a bottle of his Sangiovese at the Glen Ellen Inn
and it was fantastic. Indeed Deerfield Ranch has
suffered from so many California vintners doing such a
lousy job with the varietal, but theirs is first class. They
have been making it since 1995. Robert explains the
problem with growing Sangiovese in California. “It has a
very short window of uniform ripeness and then the PH
levels start going up while the acid starts dropping like a
ton of bricks, with the end result being a flabby wine. So
the tendency for in California is for vintners to pick early
to keep the acidity up, but then the wines are thin and don’
t have as much fruit in them.” In essence, you have the
opposite problem. Both Robert and I agree that the
weather in Tuscany, Sangiovese’s native homeland, is
similar to Napa and Sonoma, but perhaps the soils are
different. Robert notices from frequent trips to Italy that
the Sangiovese wines he likes best come from rocky soils
as opposed to the richer soils like they have in
California. The other thing he points out to me is that we
Americans have just not been growing it as long as the
Italians have. We just need a little more practice is all.
The regular bottle of Sangiovese that Deerfield Ranch
makes comes from Roland Garret’s vineyard up in Lake
County and they get more Sangiovese for their “Super T
Rex” blend from Dan Sancho, who owns a vineyard on
top of Hood Mountain with very thin soils. Dan has been
growing the grape varietal for them on eight acres with
very step steep slopes.
Speaking of finicky grape varietals, Robert and I got on
the subject of Pinot Noir wines. I’m sure I probably
brought this discussion up because it is my favorite
varietal. At any rate, Deerfield Ranch produces three
different Pinot Noir wines from various sourced
vineyards, but he likes the Russian River Valley Pinot
Noir the best. This is due in part to Robert’s philosophy
on how Pinot Noir should taste. He believes that Pinot
Noir wines should be feminine and prefers them to be
more Burgundian in style. Like the 2001 vintage in
California as opposed to the big bruisers of 2002. “They
shouldn’t look like Cabs!” he states. Robert says the
best wine he has ever had was a Domaine Romanee Conti
in a restaurant in Paris, France. He has also served a
DRC “LaTache” at home for dinner guests and when he
pulled the cork out, the aroma filled the room. Both are
legendary Pinot Noir wines from DRC in Burgundy,
France. Even though these two Pinots made quite an
impression on him, as a general preference, he prefers
Bordeaux wines. He started making Pinot Noir wines in
1978, but quickly gave up after 1980 because he was
convinced that you could not make a good one in
California. Obviously he took up the challenge again and
informs me that between he and his clients last year, they
made about 148 batches of Pinot Noir, due in no small
part to the famous customer that he had to boot out of the
cellar that I referenced earlier.
This famous winery I keep referring to came about
through Deerfield Ranch, quite literally. A young waiter
from Seattle, Washington wanted to get into the wine
business. He asked Robert if he could work for him as an
assistant winemaker. His name is Michael Browne. For
the first year he worked as an intern at Deerfield Ranch
and he had to work for free. But his dedication to the
craft was extremely focused and he learned as much as
he could from Robert. After the first year, Robert took
Michael on full time and for seven years he was the
assistant winemaker at Deerfield Ranch. Soon he started
making some Pinot Noir wines right there at Deerfield
Ranch along with a partner named Dan Kosta. Before
the Wine Spectator discovered their wines, they had
2,000 names on their mailing list and were making
roughly 3,500 cases of Pinot Noir. However, now that
James Laube of the Wine Spectator put them on the
proverbial “must have” list, they have increased their
production to around 11,000 cases of wine (too much for
Deerfield Ranch to accommodate space for) and have
over 10,000 people on the ‘waiting list’ just to get some
wine, all because they do not have enough to meet the
demand. I am one of those jokers on their list and finally
got some wine from them this year. Of course the winery
I am referring to is none other than Kosta Browne. Now
they make their wines in Sebastopol.
About this time, Robert’s wife PJ came outside and joined
us and walked us through some of their advertising
posters, which was a lot of fun. She told us a story about
the Deerfield Ranch late harvest dessert wine called
“Gold” in which it was put into a blind tasting up against a
bottle of the world famous Chateau D’Yquem. Nine out
of ten people preferred their wine over the French Icon.
Score another victory for California! We swapped stories
back and forth and before we left, Robert mentioned that
he would be coming to Dallas next year. You know me, I
asked if he would like to get in front of our group, so be
looking for an event with Robert Rex from Deerfield
Ranch in 2008. I promise it will be both fun and
entertaining and the wines will be spectacular! In the
meantime, if you are in Sonoma and looking for a fun and
unique experience, might I suggest paying Robert Rex a
visit and check out their brand new winery and caves.
