CA'NA The Miracle Continues
	DECEMBER 2003

by Sara Tamayo
Photos by Brad Shifflett

It is more difficult to find a great name for a new winery than it ever is to get a great name for a child. The challenges of marketing wine products to a discriminating public require careful consideration for things like how the product will come across to people who see the name advertised in a magazine, or see it displayed on a bottle they have just picked up in a wine store.

Of course, the marketing challenges for any winery go far beyond issues concerned with picking out the winery’s name. Decisions must be made regarding other important tasks, such as selecting the color and shape of the bottle, and designing the label. Jeff and I spent hours in wine cellars pulling out bottles and discussing what we liked and didn’t like about each.

We had to give a lot of attention to the cork, and even to the little foil over the cork (called the capsule). We learned that it is important to put the winery’s name on the cork. Knowledgeable people won’t usually keep an empty bottle, but if they really like a wine, they will often take home the cork. We now ship every bottle of wine from our vineyards with our name and website printed on every cork.

We finally chose the name Ca’na, because it was the name of a place where a perfect cask of wine was created from a large vat of water. We are seeking to propagate a real, though admittedly lesser, miracle here in East County. We are working hard to make a great Brentwood wine that people will enjoy drinking. It will be a miracle if we can actually do this.

What’s in a Name?
The miracle is starting to happen, however. People are beginning to comment favorably on our wines. They always say things like, “This is from Brentwood! Wow! This is really good!” Now that’s a wonderful miracle, and one that never fails to give us a sense of joy and satisfaction! It touches something deep in a person’s soul to create anything that other people really love. It is like making a great meal. When the diners say, “Oh this is really good,” it makes all the difficult work in the kitchen worthwhile.

We conduct tastings for friends and family at our home and at the Brentwood Wine Shop for the public. We have placed our wine at a number of locations, such as local country clubs, Prima’s in Walnut Creek, and at Bacar’s Wine Bistro and Roy’s in The City.

We regularly participate in wine tasting at Blackhawk, and when we pour our wines, they often ask things like, “Where is this from?” “Brentwood?” Then they will say, “Honey! Come taste this! It’s from Brentwood!” They are amazed.

A Bureaucratic Burden
We face a tougher challenge than our competitors in Napa Valley in getting product to market. Misapplication of local zoning laws force us to pick our grapes and then load them on a truck, and drive them one-and-a-half hours to Napa. Only then can we can crush and bottle them. The process isn’t in any way detrimental to the wine, but it wastes a lot of time.

Being permitted to carry out the bottling on-site would be the difference between night and day and would provide us with more control over the final product. However, because we are in the ag core, we can grow the grapes, but local authorities consider crushing and bottling to be a manufacturing process so they won’t give us permission to do this.

The good news is that in October the Board of Supervisors unanimously approved permitting the building of wineries in the East County. They appointed a committee to work out the details. We are hopeful that by the end of 2004 we will be crushing, processing, and bottling our own product. We will also be able to have our own tasting room.

The Payoff for All the Work
The best thing about owning a vineyard, from my point of view, is being able to work together as a family. We have four boys, two daughters-in-law, and two grandchildren. Our two youngest sons, ages 16 and 17, do things like harvest, drive tractors, drive the forklift, and drive to Napa for us.

The kids, being teenagers, sometimes complain about having to work, but I’m sure that someday they will look back on this as a golden time. All the members of the family working together in the family business: that’s an old model for family relationships; and a healthy one, it seems to me.

I enjoy entertaining friends in our home and watching the sun set over the mountains. I sit by our fountain with our friends in the gathering twilight, looking over the vineyards towards Mt. Diablo, and realize how fresh and perfect some moments can be in this often tired, imperfect world.

“A pleasure shared is twice enjoyed” is more than a proverb. Sharing this rich treasure that we have been given with friends and family is the sweetest thing of all.

Little miracles really are happening all the time, it seems, as we share the wonderful blessings of the good earth with others. Their pleasure makes our own even more intense. That’s as good as life gets, in our opinion.

Gold in Those Grapes
My husband, Jeff, does a lot of the work out among the plants, themselves. He says that if you want to really get in touch with the earth, try planting a vineyard.

Before the Industrial Revolution changed everything forever, most of the inhabitants of the world survived by planting and harvesting. Sometimes we have a romantic view of this earlier, simpler life that, in most cases, was the opposite of the actual truth. Those ancient farmers usually died early from working themselves to death.

However, we now have a vineyard, in which the romantic view becomes a regular reality in our lives, as we work with our hands among our plants, playing out our role in the cycles belonging to the great ordinary miracles of planting, growing, and harvesting.

We own a roofing company, which creates the diametrically opposite experience to what happens to Jeff when he goes into our vineyards early in the morning and walks among the rows. He works side-by-side with the hired help, and says that he constantly discovers that laboring in the vineyards with those men is a wonderfully therapeutic exercise. For a few hours every day he is away from phones and nobody is hassling him.

He finds it enormously relaxing to be in direct contact with the earth, and to be working with living plants that will one day produce a wonderful crop under his supervision.

Breathing New Life into an Old Idea
Jeff was a wine consumer and a longtime lover of everything to do with wine. A friend of ours, owner of Del Dotto Winery in Napa Valley, initially got us interested in the business side of the wine industry.

We realized that some wine grapes were already being grown in our area. In fact, we discovered that the first person of European descent to live in our area, John Marsh, also planted the area’s first vineyard.

During the early part of the last century our part of East County was home to a number of vineyards. Portuguese and Italian immigrants planted thousands of acres of orchards and vineyards in East County. The area’s thriving wine industry collapsed when Prohibition drove them out of business.

We began talking to local farmers about their success. They all claimed that the climate is well-suited to growing wine grapes. Jeff’s close friend in Napa, Dick Steltzner, offered the further refinement that, since we can grow apricots in Brentwood, we can grow great red variety wines, such as Cabernet, Merlot, Syrah.

Dick was familiar with what a great growing area this is. He came out and walked the ranch with Jeff. They tested the soil, digging exploratory holes with a backhoe. On the basis of this
research, we made the decision to grow red grape varietals, which was against the norm in this part of the country. What vineyards there were at that time were growing Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, and Viognier.

Taking the Plunge
The first step in starting our vineyard was to buy 54 acres of rich East County farmland just east down Highway 4 out of Brentwood, which included part of a ranch where Jeff’s aunt used to live.

We initially planted twenty acres in red vines and ten in Chardonnay. After the first year we made a business decision to graft over the Chardonnay vines to Syrah. The first harvest came at the end of the second year and we were extremely happy with the results. Our friends in Napa were very complimentary about the quality of wine that we were able to produce that very first year.

Jeff has always been particular about aesthetics. Some might say that he’s fanatical about the appearance of our vineyards. He works hard to ensure that his vineyards present a manicured appearance. Everyone in the food industry knows that presentation is a large part of the value. For us, presentation begins right out in the fields before the first budbreak.

Our Children, Our Plants
While that first crop was growing, Jeff touched every plant on those 30 acres. We consider each plant to be like a child. When they are young, just like a child, the plants are susceptible to attack. One day a plant might be beautiful and hearty, the next day, perhaps, it will be dead because of gophers. It took us a while to become okay with that.

It takes a couple years for a vine to get past that early, vulnerable state. After that, however, these plants become like a weed that you can’t kill. In fact, Kent Rosenblum, an industry specialist in Alameda, reported finding a half-acre of vines that he claims were producing grapes before the beginning of the Civil War.

The Unpredictable Nature of the Business
Even though the growing plants reach a very hardy state, each crop is vulnerable. Budbreak is an awful moment in the cycle of growing in any vineyard. This is the time when the leaf is just beginning to unfold. You are truly at the mercy of the weather at that time. A hard freeze during budbreak, for example, will absolutely ruin the harvest.

We’re now in our fourth harvest and every year our vineyard changes. When a vineyard is new you have to learn how the plants respond to the environment. This year, for example, we cut our watering in half. We were impressed with our first vintage, but as a result of our changes, our product is getting even better. Our fruit is riper and more intense than ever.

When we went into the business our friends warned us about the big learning curve. They said it would be ten years before we learned how to really bond with the plants. However, we’ve cut that way down. For one thing, we’ve been able to learn from their experience. We’re already close to breaking even on the vineyards.

Getting Down to Business
We sell 80 percent of our product in Napa Valley and keep only a small part for ourselves. Our biggest obstacle is that people always keep asking, “Where’s Brentwood?” We’re planning to put Brentwood on the map. It takes a few years to develop a reputation in this business as a really good wine producer, but in five years Brentwood will begin to be noted as a wine-growing region. People will come to Brentwood to buy peaches, buy apricots, and taste wine. Twenty years from now we might have 50 wineries out here and be on our way to becoming a world-famous wine growing region.

Our part of East County has a lot of small farms. Everyone knows you can no longer have a profitable farm on 100 acres of land, but not many people realize that you can make a good profit with a single-acre vineyard.

For example, one acre can easily produce enough grapes for 300 cases of good-quality wine that might wholesale for $117,000. An exceptional product might produce twice that much. My neighbor in St. Helena has a two-and-a-half acre vineyard, but he produces very high-quality wine that sells for more than $200 per bottle. He has no plan to plant more acres for obvious reasons.

A ton of grapes will produce 65 cases of wine, each with 12 bottles. There is often an inverse relationship between quantity and quality of wine. Some inferior vineyards will produce many more grapes, but a single acre producing good-quality product will vary between three and five tons per acre.

The math can get pretty exciting for anyone who thinks he or she could learn to grow grapes!

We feel like we’re at the beginning of another gold rush with our East County vineyard business. Except this time the gold is in our grapes.

It seems strange that vineyards have been around here for over 150 years and yet it still feels like we’re on the ground floor of an East County economic revolution. We can’t wait to see what happens next!