gregbrunillano

It’s 10:00am on a Tuesday morning in September and I’m heading East
on FM 1585 directly south of the city of Lubbock, Texas. I was told by
the winery staff that Llano Estacado Winery is about 3.2 miles from US
Highway 87, on the right hand side, and that I would not be able to miss
it. I have been looking forward to this day for quite some time and I
began to look eagerly out my rental car window from side to side. All
along the road there are crops being grown as far as the eye can see, but
they are not grapes, they are cotton fields. Sure enough, there on the
right surrounded by fields of cotton and in more immediate proximity,
grape vines galore, was Llano Estacado. I pulled in, gathered my
notebook, recorder and digital camera, and marched inside looking very
much like a lost tourist!

Greg Bruni, the Head Winemaker, greeted me with much enthusiasm
and began showing me around the winery. Greg has a B.S. degree in
Enology from the University of U.C. Davis in California (Well known for
turning out great winemakers). When Greg arrived at Llano back in
1993, he brought with him over twenty years of winemaking experience
amongst the stiff competition in California. His knowledge of the
California Wine Industry was just what Llano was looking for.

Greg quickly introduced me to his right hand man, Assistant Winemaker,
Chris Hull. Chris is from Euless here in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He
went to college at Texas Tech and majored in Bio Chemistry. Hoping to
gain some valuable experience, he decided to do his internship at the
Llano Winery, but the wine bug caught him big time and the internship
turned into an exciting career there at the winery.

The two of them took turns taking me on a guided tour of the winery, but
more than that, they taught me a lesson in Texas Terroir. Terroir
loosely means, all the conditions like weather, soil, wind, magic, etc…
that a plot of land offers to grow grapes. Each place on Earth has it’s
own Terroir and one region, country or state may indeed have several
terroirs within mere feet from each other. Each grape variety has it’s
own set of conditions that it requires in order for it to grow and excel in.
Learning what grape varieties perform the best in the Terroir in your
own backyard, i.e. Texas, is absolutely vital to making premium wines.
The better the quality of grapes you have to start with, the higher the
quality of wine you have at the finish. Make sense?

Llano is the largest Premium wine (high quality) manufacturer in the
state of Texas. They achieved that title through years of research and
experimenting year in and year out with different grape varieties here in
Texas. After spending some time with them and tasting the fruits of
their labor, I’d say they are well on their way to paving the road for wine
styles that properly reflect true Texas Terroir.

Of course Llano will always make those styles of wines that are the most
popular, Blush, which can be made effectively just about anywhere,
Chardonnay and Cabernet. These are the wines that drive most of the
market all over the globe. But for Llano, who takes great pride in
making all three by the way, these represent the cash crop that will arm
them with the necessary means to fund their further research into wines
that distinctly belong in Texas. Wines with names like Syrah or Shiraz,
Viognier, Mourvedre and Sangiovese. What’s that you say? You’ve
never heard of these wine styles? Stick around in Texas a while and I’m
sure you will become quite familiar with them!

Harvest time for most Texas Wineries begins in late August and finishes
up during the first few days of September. Grapes are brought in to
Llano from three main growing areas in Texas; the High Plains, Texas
Hill Country, and the deserts of far West Texas. The state of Texas
doesn’t produce enough Riesling, Muscat and Gewurztraminer grapes to
meet the demand for these wines, so Llano brings in juice from
elsewhere, like California, to beef up production. Some Cabernet
Sauvignon grapes are even brought in from New Mexico.

Along with the usual suspect grapes, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay,
etc, Llano has encouraged local farmers to plant and grow grape
newcomers to Texas like; Viognier, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Pinot Grigio,
Mourvedre and Syrah/Shiraz. Viognier, a white grape, Mourvedre, and
Syrah, red grapes, all call the hot, sunny, southern slopes of the Rhone
Valley in France their home. Hmmm! I wonder what kind of weather
conditions we have here in Texas??? Nebbiolo, a red grape and Pinot
Grigio, a white grape, hail from the hills and mountains of Northern Italy,
while Sangiovese, a red grape that is primarily responsible for Hannibal
Lecter’s favorite Chianti, calls the warm sunny hills of Tuscany in Italy it’
s home.

Chris is happy to report that the Sangiovese grapes brought in from the
High Plains are showing a lot of promise here in Texas and they are
starting to produce some excellent results with the varietal. Pinot
Grigio, which is being produced at Llano for the first time this year, is
coming along, but the Nebbiolo so far, has been disappointing. I tasted
the three Rhone style varietals, viognier, syrah and mourvedre (which is
really only used for blending with other wines) there at the winery and
yee-ow, were they ever delicious! In fact Llano has produced three
Texas vintages of Viognier, which is an exciting white wine style, but
relatively unknown to the wine drinking public, and each vintage they
have produced has been substantially better than the previous one.
Giving evidence that Greg and Chris are taking the lessons learned in
previous vintages and applying them to the most current ones.

Just to give you an idea of how far in advance you have to plan these
experiments, it takes three years for a vine to be able to produce grapes
for wine. The vine needs to grow and the wood finally matures in the
third year. Even when they are young, you should never over crop the
vines (pick the grapes) or it will place too much energy in growing new
grapes and will stress the vine, making it unhealthy.

Chris also claims that this has been a tremendous year for Cabernet
Sauvignon. In fact they have produced up to 16,000 gallons of Cabernet
wine off of the fruit from just one vineyard. So keep that in mind next
year when they are released to the market.

After Harvest time, the work shifts to more behind the scene duties and
is more complex, detailed and deliberate. This is the time when Greg
and Chris began their winemaking wizardry by racking, finishing,
filtering and blending the grape juice that will become the wines that you
buy off the shelf in 2004 and the years to follow.

The first step is to extract the juice from the grapes and ferment it into
wine. The fermentation process is kicked off by special yeast cells that
are brought in and introduced to the grape juice, which in turn convert
the sugar into alcohol. You know, that added benefit that makes wine so
much fun to consume! At Llano, most of the fermentation process is
done in stainless steel tanks at controlled temperatures that allow them
to manage the length of the process as well as keeping out unwanted
strands of yeast and bacteria. These temperatures are kept relatively
cool because the juice ferments much quicker at higher temperatures
and changes the taste and structure of the wine. For example, white
wine looses it’s crisp, refreshing acidity if it is fermented at too high a
temperature.

Inside these tanks, the seeds and sediment sink to the bottom while the
grape skins themselves float back to the top. These grape skins that
float at the top of the tank are referred to as the cap. Greg and Chris
will pump the juice out from the lower cavity of the tank and spray the
juice back over the top of the cap, two or three times daily. The reason
that this is done is so that important characteristics like color, flavor and
tannins are extracted from the grape skins when they come in contact
with the juice. However, the juice is never pumped out from the bottom
of the tank where the sediment lies because this would add very bitter
tannins that influence the wines in a negative way. I might add here that
for the wines Llano intends for early release, it is important not to over-
extract the juice because they don’t want these wines to become too
tannic in structure. These wines are typically aged only ten months in
the barrel and six months in the bottle before they are released. By
contrast, the big and beefy wines that are intended to age a long time
before being consumed are usually barrel aged for up to eighteen months
before being bottled and released.

When wine is under going the fermentation process, the juice gives off
carbon dioxide at extremely high levels. As you can imagine in a winery
as large as Llano, those levels of CO2 can become quite deadly just
after harvest time. Llano has installed a ventilation system that pumps
the carbon dioxide out of the winery and replaces it with oxygen, but in
the old days, they had to raise all of the doors first thing in the morning
and stand clear of the winery for twenty minutes until all of that deadly
gas had escaped outside the winery. Chris invited me to stick my head
in through the top of one of these giant steel tanks while the Cabernet
was giving off CO2 fumes from the fermentation process. I eagerly
agreed and dove in headfirst and took a big whiff. It was a good thing I
had my hand on the rail because it liked to have knocked me down! I’d
compare it to sniffing a large pile of smelling salt or ammonia. Chris
laughed and smiled rather proudly as he congratulated me on my first
Tank Hit! I can certainly assure you that I won’t soon fall for that one
again!

Around one ton of Sangiovese grapes that were grown by the local cotton
farmers are being fermented in small open lots. These open lots are not
temperature controlled, but have no fear, Sangiovese is a red wine grape
and it does not need the cooler temperatures during the fermentation
process that the white wines do. They have to hand-cap the grape must
(juice and grape skins together) two to three times daily. This is done by
using a hand tool that pushes the grapes back down into the juice and is
quite tedious. Some of this Sangiovese may be made into it’s own wine
while much of it will end up in Llano’s “Viviano” wine. The Viviano is
made from a propriety blend of grapes that changes from year to year
and usually consists of Cabernet Sauvignon, Sangiovese and sometimes
Cabernet Franc.

After the fermentation process, these Sangiovese grapes will be
encouraged to go through Malolactic Fermentation, which is a
fermentation process that softens the acids in the wine and gives it a
creamier texture. This instills the buttery taste and texture we have all
come to know and love in Chardonnay and other white wines. In red
wines, this process gives the wine spice characteristics, like leather, by
transferring a wine with a total focus on fruit flavors into a wine with a
balance of fruit and spice. After the malolactic fermentation process, the
Sangiovese grapes will spend ten to sixteen months in the barrel for
aging. It is important for the wines to finish fermenting before they go
into the barrel, otherwise the gases can build up and blow a hole right out
of the side. Chris spoke of this rather unfortunate side effect with a
convincing degree of certainty!

The next important stage in a wine’s life is barrel aging and if you
thought there are not a lot of differences in oak barrels, boy are you
ever wrong! There are French Oak barrels, which impart a flavor all of
their own, and American Oak barrels with their own distinct flavors.
Then there is this fuss over the degree of toasting that is done to the
barrels. Toasting is a process done to barrels whereby a flame is used to
char the inside of a barrel. This can be lightly charred or toasted as they
call it, medium toasted or heavily toasted. The more toasting done to the
barrel, the more dramatic the influence is on the wine. Have you ever
heard the phrase, “Too much of a good thing, can be a bad thing”? Well
in this case Llano tends to agree and mostly uses oak barrels with a
medium toasting. They also prefer French Oak barrels for their wines,
but use some American Oak as well. Lately they have been trying out
some thin stave barrels that impart oak flavors more quickly and help
oxidize the wine to accelerate the aging process. Along with a variety of
barrel styles, Llano has been experimenting with alternative aging
means like adding oak chips, sawdust and even sausages. Yes, I said
sausages! I’m not sure I want to know about what kind of sausages are
in those wines, but that’s the kind of guys Greg and Chris are, they don’t
want to leave any stone unturned when it comes to making great wine.

The next step in the oak aging process is called racking and it takes a
degree of scientific know how and ingenuity. Just because they start off
aging a wine in a French Oak barrel does not mean it will spend it’s
entire time aging in that same barrel. As we discussed previously, each
barrel can have a different range of flavors and sometimes you want to
impart a little or all of those flavors into a wine. Racking is the process
of moving wine from one barrel to another. The life span of a barrel or
at least the length of time that it can be used to impart these wonderful
flavors is three years. The younger the barrel, the more dramatic the
results are from aging the wine in it. This also plays a part when
determining what wine will go into which barrel and for how long. For
instance, a lot of wineries will designate the newest and most dramatic
wine barrels for Chardonnay wines, since Americans seemed to crave
that big oak and vanilla taste in their Chardonnay, and save their slightly
older barrels for big red wines to impart these flavors more gradually.
Llano takes a different approach with their Chardonnays in that they
prefer the Burgundian way of making Chardonnay by not leaving it in the
barrel too long, thereby imparting only a limited amount of those oak
flavors. This is the style that I personally prefer!

Typically Llano Chardonnay wines will only see about twenty to forty
percent oak aging and undergo forty percent malolactic fermentation
before being put in the barrel. They want to keep a lot of that acidity in
wine early on because it will soften with age. Sometimes if the wine
becomes too yeasty in flavor as a result of malolactic fermentation, they
will mix the lees (a mixture of grape skins and sediment) back in to
counter it. Some of Llano’s wines receive very limited malolactic
fermentation, like Syrah for example, because they want to maintain that
grapes fruity character. The Pinot Grigio wines which are being made
for the first time this year will not undergo any malolactic fermentation
because that is a wine style that definitely relies on that acidic bite to
come through.

All through the barrel aging process and especially after, Greg and Chris
are busy blending the wines into what will hopefully be the final blend
that you and I buy in the next year or two at the wine store. This is a
highly involved process that can leave not a single sober man standing.
But seriously, it is a painstaking process that does involve several
combinations of different wines. They may take some Chardonnay wine
that has spent no time in a barrel and blend it with some Chardonnay
that has spent ten months in a barrel, or have some Chardonnay that was
aged in French Oak that is blended with Chardonnay aged in new
American Oak. You can see how quickly this could get out of hand!
What’s even worse is when you have a wine style that crosses more than
one grape variety such as their “Passionelle” wine, which is a Rhone-
Style red wine that contains Carignane and Syrah that is mixed with the
grape skins from Viognier grapes. Their Port wine, which is made from
Cabernet Grapes and fortified after fermentation with half proof wine
spirits, is a non-vintage blend (wines blended together from more than
one vintage) that contains wines that can reach up to ten years in age.
Fortunately for us, the consumers, Greg and Chris know what they are
doing and all of their hard work usually pays off in a delicious treat that
comes in a bottle.

To illustrate their point on blending wines, Greg and Chris took me into
the barrel room to sample some Chardonnay wine that was being aged in
different types of oak barrels. Some wine was in new American Oak,
some in older French Oak. Some went through heavy Malolactic
Fermentation and others very little if any at all. When you taste the
wines as they go through their separate journeys, you do begin to notice
the different nuances in taste from one style of Chardonnay to the next.
All variations have their strengths and weaknesses. That is precisely
what makes blending these different styles of Chardonnay together so
vital. The winemaker is hoping to accentuate the strengths of the wines
and eliminate their weaknesses through blending in the ideal amounts of
each style. We repeated this process with Llano’s new batch of Viognier
wines with identical results. It was actually through these barrel samples
of these new Viognier wines that led me to believe that this wine style
shows great promise for the State of Texas, producing very rich and
aromatic wines in structure and in taste.

Upon entering the lab room where they concoct all of these wonderful
blends, I couldn’t help but notice great wines from other parts of the
world like Opus One from California. Greg and Chris explained that
these were used to compare the wines they are blending at Llano to
other popular wines from around the world. Llano does not want to get
stuck in just having a regional palate. They want to go head to head with
the best wine makers from other winemaking regions. I admire that and
I believe that this thought process is a very important element in their
success. Why strive only to be the best wine maker in Texas? What’s
wrong with taking on the rest of the world?

I guess all that experimentation is what helps Llano find those rare gems
like Syrah, Viognier and Sangiovese that were made for the Texas sun.
These are the Holy Grail wines that hold the brightest future for Texas.
That is why Llano makes and sells those twenty three thousand cases of
Blush, so they can afford to make the one thousand cases of specially
handcrafted wines born out of experimentation. The winemakers at
Llano are never satisfied with their wines. No matter how many awards
they may win, Greg and Chris are always looking for ways to improve
them by taking the knowledge they’ve learned this year and applying it
to next year’s wines. I’ve tasted the results and I’d have to say they
know what they are doing. Greg and Chris seem to have the right
formula for success, because at Llano Estacado Winery, hard work,
dedication and passion equal great wines!