Ventana Vineyards changes hands, course held steady.
Doug Meador founded Ventana Vineyards in the early 1970s. Over the last 3 decades he became a prominent figure of Monterey county viticulture: as an advocate, a pioneer and innovator and as an educator. He developed the Ventana and Meador labels. In September of 2006, the Meadors sold the Ventana brand, vineyards, winery and tasting room to a group of local winemakers and grape growers who make up Ventana Vintners, LLC.
Doug Meador, a former Navy pilot, was planning to make a career in his family's apple orchard business in Washington. He took an unexpected detour into wine grape growing and never turned back. His short-term job supervising the planting of 2,500 acres of grapes in the Arroyo Seco area of Monterey County started his fascination with cold climate viticulture. He purchased the current Ventana ("window" in Spanish) property (adjacent to the Ventana Wilderness). There, he indulged his academic curiosity - at times with the passion of a "mad scientist" - according to his wife, LuAnn. Dough has experimented with clonal selection (he picked individual clones specifically his vineyard, at first white varieties, then French red varieties and recently, Spanish varieties), vine spacing and canopy management and implemented many of the tested methodologies into the vineyard. As pioneer and teacher Doug is a pivotal figure in Monterey wine. In September 2006, the Meadors sold the Ventana brand, vineyards, winery and tasting room to a group of local winemakers and grape growers who make up Ventana Vintners, LLC. Doug is still involved with and present at Ventana (which continues his legacy) but is concentrating on his namesake label: Meador as well as other projects.
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The weather patterns and climate of Monterey County's Salinas Valley are driven by its geography and geology. The Salinas Valley, flanked by the Santa Lucia Mountains to the west and the Gabilan Mountains to the east, is often described as a funnel. Its wide mouth to the north receives cool marine air from Monterey Bay. This brings in morning fogs and mid-day strong winds which move north to south. These winds clear out the accumulated heat in the small canyons and ravines. As the air in the Central Valley warms up during the day, it rises and draws in more cool air from the bay. The majority of the water is supplied by the Salinas River. |
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A sign and mailbox identify the Ventana property on Los Coches Rd. in the Arroyo Seco AVA. |
Salinas soil is generally mineral and salty. The Arroyo Seco AVA in the west end of Salinas Valley (and west of the Salina River) is distinguished by much lower salinity. There is a gradient of salt and mineral content in the soils from east to west. This is attributable to the water of the Arroyo Seco River which drains the Santa Lucia Highlands, and flows into the Arroyo Seco AVA. The underlying water table dilutes the salinity of the high mineral soils of the Salinas Valley. The often dry riverbed curves northward, towards the bay where it marks the northeastern boundary of Ventana's vineyard.
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Some 300 acres make up the Ventana property in the north-central part of the the Arroyo Seco AVA. The vineyard was planted in the mid-70s and serves not only as a commercial source of fruit, but as an experimental laboratory. The rows and vines are planted very close together but managed with the intent of creating higher yields and densely concentrated fruit. Ventana grows: Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Orange Muscat, Grenache, Gewurztraminer, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Riesling, Sangiovese, Sauvignon Blanc, Syrah and Tempranillo. A grove of French Oaks is also on the property. |
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Ventana Syrah vines: leaves pulled and excess fruit dropped, make their grapes ready for harvest. |
Just above one of the blocks of Gewurztraminer, near the winery building, the French Oak Grove in the southwestern corner of the property was planted by Doug Meador in 1978 with the intention of being a source of wood for barrels, the 700 oak trees are reportedly one of the first in the United States. These trees are not yet being used to produce barrels. The winery and vineyard are not open to the public. Instead, a tasting room in the historic 1873 Old Stonehouse building (at 2999 Monterey-Salinas Highway, #10) in Monterey pours estate grown and bottled wines.
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Ventana’s lead winemaker is Reggie Hammond. His background is in Aeronatics. Such a career shift may seem quixotic in any other field, but in the context of Central Coast wines, this is pretty much par for the course. Reggie worked as an Aircraft Maintenance Supervisor and a manufacturing engineer at Boeing Aircraft. He and Dough came together in 1997 when Dough was looking for someone with experience in managing a large production operation and a passion for wine. He remains as director of wine making and continues established traditions after the recent transfer of ownership. |
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A view of the Pinnacles National Monument over the Gabilan Mountains from the Ventana vineyard. |
Reggie, along with David Rodriguez in the vineyard and Miguel Martinez in the winery, maintains Ventana's goal to craft wines of "European sensibility and an abundance of California fruit" while offering a good value. Put simply: this means affordable wines with distinct varietal characteristics. The frame of mind is to be "wine-growers", rather than being just grape growers.
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Ventana white wines are usually forward, food-friendly with nice extraction and definitely old world-styled. As a rule, they tend to express better only lightly chilled. They share an amber hue and a light mineral character. The reds are well extracted with a distinct varietal character. They have an unmistakable mineral quality that makes them great pairings with hearty, richly seasoned meats. They stand up well and do not get drowned out when paired with strongly seasoned and BBQ meats. The Due Amici has a powerful Cabernet component and ages well. See full reviews. |
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Visitors enjoy the wines poured by tasting room staff. |
We sat down with Reggie to talk about Ventana wines and his wine making philosophy. Reggie is a thoughtful and articulate man, generous with his thoughts and insights. He has the appearance of a relaxed and casual everyman with an intelligent twinkle in his eyes.
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rwb: So… Aeronautics to winemaker. [Reggie chuckles] How did that come about? RH: Well, I guess we all start out in life thinking we have a plan, but the old saying goes: “Life happens”. So Aeronautics, a childhood love, I thought, was just going to be something I would do for the rest of my life. And it turned out to be a job, just like any other. One of my college professors gave me some great advice. He said: “You either find a job you can make a lot of money at so you can do whatever hobbies you want to do or do what you love for your vocation”. |
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In the Ventana tasting room with Reggie Hammond. |
RH: So I’ve always remembered that. I’ve always been intrigued by wine. It’s so much more than just a beverage. It’s an entire process and when you work in the business, it’s a complete lifestyle. It’s not just: go to work, make wine, go home, pop open a beer and watch football. It’s events, it's tastings, it’s coming in to talk to a wine writer on a Saturday afternoon. It just becomes integrated into your life. Once it gets there, I think it’s there to stay.
rwb: How did you learn to make wine?
RH: Actually, I had the great fortune of being hired at Ventana when they were looking for somebody to fill many roles at the same time. Probably, my greatest reason for being hired, my best attribute, was not having any wine making experience at all. I was enthusiastic, but naïve. So I was a clean slate for Doug Meador, who has been very famous in the viticultural word for many years. A lot of viticultural techniques were developed right at Ventana Vineyards. So I had the opportunity to learn under his tutelage and I was also given a certain amount of rope to hang myself with or experiment with and did a lot of that in the winery as Doug had done for many years. When Doug says he is an expert at making white wine, the meaning is: “not so hot at reds”. So it was his hope that I would, so to speak, “grow up” to fill that role. And so I’ve taken a great interest in doing everything and experimenting. As you make friends, you can learn as much from a 20 minute conversation with an old veteran as you can from reading 10 textbooks.
rwb: Did you do any formal training?
RH: Yes. I’ve been to some of the U.C. Davis classes, I’ve read their text books. You really need to have a foundation to build upon. There are some winemakers out there who are very numbers-oriented and they’ll do everything by the book and there are others who are more taste-and-feel, more intuitive. The main thing we want to do is make good wine. And good wine isn’t just about the right pH or acidity. Balance can’t be expressed on paper in numbers. It’s got to be tasted.
rwb: When I open one of your wines, I can tell it’s a Cab-dominant blend, a Chardonnay or a Syrah. The grape will express itself inherently, but what do you do to bring out the variety’s characteristic?
RH: Actually, it really is the fruit. I think if you are making 500,000 or 600,000 cases of a blend it’s very important that you don’t do anything wrong, not so much that you do everything right. Just don’t make a mistake. Our goal is to showcase the fruit we grow. All the Ventana wines are all estate grown and bottled. That is a legal distinction for the TTB, indicating that we have complete control over every process from grape to bottle. We can’t send the wine off premises to have anything done to it. So that really gives us the foundation material to make wine. To make great wine here is to just have the best fruit possible and just shepherd it through the wine making process. Ideally, I want to do as little as possible in that period.
rwb: Which is your favorite variety?
RH: Right now, I’m just loving Syrah and Grenache. I know that’s two separate varieties, but they can also make such a nice, drinkable blend, whether it’s by itself, with an appetizer or with dinner. Right now those are being consumed a lot in my household.
rwb: What makes an ideal Syrah or Grenache for you?
RH: Well, what I like is expressive fruit. As you said earlier, when you open it up, you want to know it’s a Syrah or that it’s a Grenache. For the wine that we make at Ventana, we have a certain minerality that kind of flows through whites and reds. A lot of people overlook it on the whites because they’re not really looking for that, but it’s there.
rwb: It expresses differently in the reds than the whites. I think it’s more extracted in the reds.
RH: Oh, yes, it is! But I just want something that’s pleasing. I don’t want it too acidic but I don’t want it too flabby.
rwb: How do you feel about spice, particularly in Syrah?
RH: Spice? I think spice, in particular pepper, whether you perceive it as black pepper or white pepper is really part of the cold climate viticulture that we have here. It’s only partially due to skin-to –pulp ratio. I think that is the beauty of Syrah: you can make a very nice wine out of it in cold and warm climates but they’re not very similar. We tend to get a lot more pepper here in the cooler climate.
rwb: What about savory herb characteristics like sage, bay?
RH: We’ll get some of those and a lot of those characteristics can also be barrel-related. Although we don’t really want to have such expressive oak that you can pick it out in the wine itself.
rwb: So how is your vinification methodology different or unique?
RH: It’s not different and it’s not unique. We don't do anything unusual or novel. We are very traditional. I guess being traditional may differentiate us from a lot of other wineries who are going with more modern techniques. Most of our red wines are made in 5-ton fiberglass fermenters. We hand-punch them down a minimum of 3 or 4 times a day. We ferment on the skins until they’re dry - somewhere between 7 and 10 days - and press it off. It’s really straight forward. We don’t cold soak.
rwb: Why not? A lot of people do it for extraction. Why do you choose not to do it?
RH: Well, we could do it, but then you’re stuck in a tank and then you have a closed top tank and you can only do pump-overs, you can’t do punch-downs. So it’s a trade-off. We do some tank fermentation, especially if we run out of 5-ton fermenters. We just feel the 5-ton fermenters give us the wine that expresses the fruit that we have. Although, you can do a lot of nice things with cold soaking, much more so than, say, an extended maceration with alcohol present. So we just stick with traditional, known proven methods. Every time you do something to the wine, you’re taking something good out of the wine. My main job objective is: “Don’t screw it up”. Grow great fruit and let the fruit express itself through to the bottle.
rwb: Your wines aren’t very oaky. Tell me about your cooperage preferences. You mentioned that you use American and French, but in what proportion of those and of new and old do you like to use?
RH: Well, there’s very little, less than 10%, new oak on these wines. We do use a mixture. We really use only one cooper for American oak and that’s Nadalie. It’s a French cooperage house but they also have a cooperage set up in Calistoga. For French, we use Berger, Bossuet, Tonnelier Bordelaise – a really small cooperage production house - and then François Frères which is kind of an old stand-by, but you know, there’s a reason for it and for Chardonnay it is the benchmark.
rwb: What’s you cycle on cooperage?
RH: We don’t really have a set cycle because we want a certain amount of barrel storage that doesn’t necessarily give off a lot of oak flavor. More so on the whites. We do some Sauvignon Blanc a percentage of which is barrel fermented and we want to barrel ferment it for the complexities of small vessel fermentation. We don’t want overpowering oak to invade the final blend. We recently had some visitors to the winery that asked: “Which barrels are you most proud of?” We had some new Tonnelier Bordelaise barrels and François Frères. I walked them over to some barrels and they said: “Those look really old!” They were stamped with “1988”. Anybody can go plunk down 800 bucks and buy a brand new barrel, but to keep an 18 year old barrel sweet and sound takes an awful lot of work and that’s what we’ve done.
rwb: Do you just take good care of them or do you strip and re-toast?
RH: We take good care of them. We don’t break them down. ReCoop, is one company that’ll shave them. We’ve never done any of those things. We don’t use staves. All the barrels that we have, have not been broken down at all.
rwb: Tell me a little bit about your terroir. Your literature says that your vineyards escape the Salinas salinity, but I think there is a tinge of that in some of your wines. It may be the savory herbal notes that are giving me that impression.
RH: Yes, I saw that in your notes. It’s a tough thing to compare individual perceptions. We’re really lacking it in soil: sandy loam, dirt. We’re really on rock, sand and gravel. So it gives our wines a unique character. Ventana is a very unique piece of property. We’re surrounded by other vineyards and the grapes there just don’t have the mineral character that we have at Ventana. Good, bad or indifferent, it is what it is and it’s a great expression of terroir. Ventana is bigger than a lot of appellations, especially in a place like Burgundy, where there’s a few monopoles that are a couple of acres. Having 300 acres, we kind of cross a large section in just the way the wind blows and the ground lies. The variations in the soil run north and south and our rows are oriented east and west. So we’ll have some sandy pockets and some rockier pockets within the same row. Ideally, you want to separate each different soil by variety and farming method. But, like I’ve said earlier, everything affects everything else, and given all the circumstances that we have down there, it just made a lot more sense to fight the wind which is a battle which we can somewhat win - just by creating each row as a wind block for the row south of it. Once the wind hits about 12 miles an hour, the leaves basically shut down. They’re history for the day. They’re closing up the sugar factory.
rwb: Let’s talk about the vines you have here. Some of them are about 34 years old?
RH: They’re all different ages, but the vineyard was first planted in ’72. So we have some old Merlot and Cabernet vines and some old Chardonnay vines. A lot of the old stuff was torn out [in favor of cooler climate varieties]. Keep in mind that planting in ’72, this was considered cold climate viticulture, but so was Napa.
rwb: Isn’t his area Region I, though?
RH: Yes and what’s Napa, high III? You know that in August in St. Helena there’s a good chance it’s going to be 100 degrees that day, and for us, our high temperatures are very rarely over 85 during the summer and we reach that very early in the day – between 11, 12 o’clock or somewhere around there.
rwb: So that represents a revision of the understanding of cool climates. How long are the peak temperatures sustained during the course of a day here? That’s also important.
RH: Well, we’re typically at the hottest point of the day between 11 and noon and it starts cooling off after 12 or 1, once the wind kicks up. The wind blows 20, 25 miles an hour, most days, right through the valley. The Central Valley heats up and creates a vacuum and the cool air off Monterey Bay runs unabated down the Salinas Valley.
rwb: The topic of cool climate leads me to the next question: Tell me about your Tempranillo vines. How old are they?
RH: We planted Tempranillo in 1999. This is the Madrid AG200 clone. Some of our friends in Spain told us: “Tempranillo is a fantastic grape but don’t plant it because you don’t have the clones in your country”. Incidentally, when I say: ‘our friends in Spain’, Javier Ochoa was our main contact in Spain and he worked at the Olite Research Station. Although he worked on the enology side, he’s a great wine maker and he also knew just about as much about the vineyard as anyone else there. So just by studying what they told us and the amount of time that this Madrid AG200 clone had been in the country [introduced to the U.S. around the mid 1990s], it seemed like either that our friends weren’t aware of that or they just weren’t aware of other problems that they may have had with that particular clone. They’re very mechanized in Spain and they machine spur prune everything. They’ll go back and clean it up by hand but we kept canes on this Madrid AG200 and the canes proved to be very fruitful. I’m very hopeful that this will be a really nice performer for us in the future.
rwb: What makes the Madrid AG200 the preferred clone for Ventanta?
RH: The big problem was that a lot of Tempranillo here was very variable in yield. Prior to the Madrid AG200 clone, we had clones 1 and 2 and both those clones were not well regarded in the Spanish community. With large berries, it was more of a Rosé grape. That’s really all you could get out of it without Saignée’ing 50% of the juice and then you get a wine so unbalanced that you don’t care how dark the juice is.
rwb: Let’s go back to climate a little bit. How much rain do you get here and do you implement any supplemental irrigation?
RH: We’re very fortunate in California in that it doesn’t rain here very much. Maybe 2 or 3 vintages in 10 will get a little bit of rain during harvest. At the same time, it’s arid, and between March and September [2006], we got no significant rainfall. Without a clay component to our soil (being on sand rock and gravel) [water] moves very quickly through the soil. So, we’re definitely on an irrigation program: all the vines get irrigated between every 12 and 14 days.
rwb: So, to whom, would you say, will your wines appeal to the most?
RH: Well, you know, that’s a very good question. I would say that our wines are probably more in tune with the ‘foodie’. This is the person wants to pair food and wine. There are a lot of wines that I like that I don’t typically want to have with dinner just due to heavy extraction, heavy oak and high alcohol.
rwb: When we started this conversation, you told me how you came to be in wine making and that your previous career felt like a job. Does this feel like a job?
RH: Not, yet. 10 years going and I don’t think it ever will. It’s not possible for this to become stagnant and stationary. You’re always meeting new people, every vintage is a new challenge and each vintage is never good enough. But I’m not supposed to say that, either. [Reggie chuckles].
rwb: But that’s by your own judgment, though.
RH: I think a lot of us at winery feel the same way. We feel we’re on the right track and every year has got to be better than the last.
Doug Meador chose the name "Ventana" for his property because, for him, it was symbolic of a “window to the future” in viticulture. All things in this world are in flux and ever-changing. Ventana Vineyards is now in different hands - just as a baton passed between runners. Although the first runner falls behind after the hand off, both fix their gazes forward. With distinctive, cool climate terroir, Ventana is expected to keep delivering quality, value wines with varietal character and interesting character.
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