Folks, you're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Greg, I do communications at Binny's. Chris is here. I'm Chris, I do wine. And Alicia. Hey, good to be here. And Alicia, we have somebody special in the room with us today. We do. We have David Phillips, co-owner and president of Michael David Winery in Lodi, California. Yes, good morning. Hi. David is actually in town to run the Chicago Marathon, and we're all very impressed by him. Wait, seriously? Yes. You're running the Chicago Marathon? I ran part of it the other day. I did not. I had some issues, some health issues last week, and I couldn't quite finish the whole thing, but I support my friends in it. It was great fun. But you're a long-distance runner. You have another marathon booked for December, right? And I would be curious to know how much of a marathon Greg thinks he could run. Oh, we're going to have to bleep this. I got through all of a 10K once, but I'm never doing that again without tape. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's still pretty impressive though. It was like 40 pounds ago. Was there a bar at the end of the 10K? Yes. Yes, of course. David, you couldn't do the Boston Marathon immediately following the Chicago one? I did Boston a couple of years ago, so I'm good with Boston, but I'll be back to do Chicago one day. You do have some friends that literally ran Sunday, the Chicago Marathon and then flew to Boston and ran the Marathon yesterday there in Boston. I just know people that did it. That's pretty crazy back to back. Well, you're still the most fit one in the room at the moment. Yes. Most certainly. Well, we appreciate you making time for Binny's while you're here in Chicago, and we thought this would be a great time to chat all things Michael David, wines that are best sellers across the chain, but also we'll get into Lodi itself as an AVA. I think people know of it, but perhaps don't really understand what makes this AVA so special. So we'll get into all of that. But I do first, David, want to hear about your journey into wine and go back a few decades to your backpacking days. And how did you get in the industry? My brother Michael and I are both fifth-generation farmers in Lodi. So great-great grandparents homestead out there in the 1860s. They picked some really good dirt homestead on and we're lucky to have it. My brother and I both went to UC Davis where we did background in winemaking. Neither of us ended up majoring in it. Organic chemistry got me, but I ended up majoring in international ag development instead. I took lots of econ and marketing with that too, which was very helpful later as the business started growing. But I was supposed to go in the Peace Corps after international ag development degree and I got accepted to the Peace Corps. I was ready to go down to Central America and then I got offered a job in San Francisco at a cork company or imported corks from Portugal and sold them to wineries. After growing up in Lodi, I'm like, I'm out of Lodi, I'm going back, I'm going to go live in a big city. Lodi is a small town, very Midwestern values kind of place. Went to the big city, worked in this cork company and then while I was working there, I met my wife and she just happens to be from Homewood, South Side of Chicago here. At that point, I said, okay, after one year, we're all going to quit our jobs. My roommate, my wife and I, my roommate was one of her best friends that went to Homewood-Fosmore High School with her and then she went to UC Davis with me. That's how I met my wife. That's the Chicago connection. We did, we quit our jobs and we backpacked around the world and went to some great wine regions in Australia and Europe, but we spent most of the time in the Himalayas and Asia in general. That's my favorite place in the world is the Himalayas of Nepal, so great stuff. What about the wine cork industry drew you away from the Peace Corps? I mean, two very different experiences. I figured I can always do the Peace Corps someday, but they offered me $22,000 a year and a car. I'm like, whoa, I'm taking that. It was like, that was big money. You don't get that in the Peace Corps. This was 1988, it was big money. I'm like, oh yeah. Okay, so backpacking around the world and going to some wine regions as well, what do you think stuck out to you in terms of either any famous winemakers or regions or styles that you thought, oh, this is what I want to see in a future winery? At that time in the early 80s, I fell in love with the grapes of the Rhone in France because they were so much more affordable and we were living cheap. So the Rhone wines back then were pretty cheap compared to Burgundy and Bordeaux, of course. Still relatively. And I love them. So my brother also loves Rhone. Syrah is our favorite grape in general and he planted Syrah and Lodi in 1980. I was at UC Davis when my brother started planting more experimental grapes and started the winery in 1984. So we were one of the first people to plant Syrah in California. There wasn't a whole lot of it. Yeah, that's way ahead of the curve. Yeah. So we still have those vines a day. We make a beautiful Syrah out of our old vine Syrahs. And yeah, we were big in the Rhone Rangers when we were first starting out. So after we went around the world, my wife and I decided, well, we're going to get married. Let's move back to Lodi. Okay. Go back to the family farm. We'll raise a family there. Okay. So that's how we ended up back in Lodi in 1989. Joined my brother as a partner with my parents and started farming. And we always made a little bit of wine, but it was really the late 90s when we started to expand into distributing our wines nationwide. So that was a crazy story after that. Before Binny's, I worked at a grocery store famously and sold wine and spirits in like 2004, 2005. You were just hitting the scene in like Omaha, Nebraska then. Yeah, yeah. It was really big distribution. We really, it was late 90s, early 2000s. Our first distributor ever was actually in Chicago in 1999, I think that was Great Lakes Wines. And I came out to do my first work with, it was in Chicago, first ride along. I don't even know what a ride along is really. And the first account we went to was Charlie Trotter's. And I sold a case of our Symphony wine to Charlie Trotter. I'm like, oh, this is easy. Okay. I guess we can start right at the top. And so my first work with one ever sold was to Charlie Trotter's. That's amazing. That's pretty cool. Rest in peace, Charlie Trotter's. I think he loved the van. Did you pull up in the same van that A van? I have a new van. My wife and I travel around now. It's all through the Western US usually in our van. So it's great fun. So I do want to get into Lodi here. Yes. 90 miles east of San Francisco. It's within the Central Valley. Don't they grow cabbage there? Not a lot. I haven't been. Don't they grow produce, lots and lots of produce? Well, the Central Valley as a whole, right? Right. Lodi is more famous for cherries and walnuts and things like that than Roe Cosmo. You might be thinking of the Salinas Valley. I assure you I am not. But we did grow up growing. Come on. Haven't you ever read East of Eden? No. I'm falling behind on my Steinbeck. I'm sorry. No, I mean the Central Valley at large. You don't associate it with great wine region. You assume that a lot of wine, bulk wine being made there, and then just a lot of produce because it's a verdant area. It's super great soils to grow almost anything. It feeds the world, that valley. Okay. But Lodi is in a special part of the valley. It's due east of San Francisco Bay, so while we get the nice warm days and 95, even 100 degrees during the day, we get an ocean breeze every night in the summer. It cools us off and grapes love that. So Lodi Appalachian, we have 100,000 acres of grapes planted in the Lodi Appalachian. We are five times more grapes than Napa. Wow. And twice as many grapes as Oregon and Washington, actually, in Lodi. So that's how big Lodi is. It is a player and it still provides some of the bulk wine, but now it's really evolved into making premium wines, and now there's more than 80 wineries in Lodi that you can come visit. That's tremendous. Yeah, I mean, the Central Valley as a whole produces about three quarters of all of California's production, wine production, that is. And so Lodi, I think, is drawing increasing attention, and rightfully so. They've recently actually given it seven sub-AVAs as well. So just starting to recognize all of the difference in terroir that exist. So can you tell us a little more specifically about where your vineyards are situated, where you source fruit, and what kind of specifically about those vineyards are so special? Yeah, well, because we're basically at sea level. It was a vast inland sea before we had dams to stop the rivers. The soils are deep and sandy, and we are on the west side of Lodi, very close to sea level, super deep soils. And the beauty of that is we still have the old vines. Phylloxera does not do well in deep sandy soil. So we have old vines, Zinfandel, that we're sourcing from 80 to 115 years old. We have the oldest vineyard in Lodi, our Sinso Vineyard, which is 136 years old. The Bechtel Vineyard is probably the most famous vineyard in Lodi, just beautiful old vines. That had to survive a couple Sinso massive trim offs, right? When it was time for everybody to plant Zinfandel, that they pulled up the Sinso. No one even knew it was Sinso until fairly recently. Ignorance saved the Sinso. I was going to say, probably a blessing, yes. Given that you're in a river delta area, and the bay is right there, and you're so low, I imagine that you have a pretty good water situation compared to other regions. The water table must be pretty close, and you've got those deep vines from old vines. Yeah, we've done a pretty good job imagining our water. Our river that comes through Lodi is the McCollumney River. It's managed by East Bay Mud, which provides water to the eastern East Bay of California. They do a pretty good job of regulating the flows, and we have very solid water rights. In a canal system that comes off the river, we try to use surface water as much as possible to irrigate so that we recharge our groundwater. And then we do have wells as backup. So we're in a pretty good situation for water. We do hope it rains and snows a lot this year. I hope we need it. We're going to start with the Michael David Petite Petite. This is on the shelf, ladies and gentlemen, for $13.99, and we'll send this one around, and I will let you explain these two enormous elephants. Yes, this is our elephant wine. So Petite Petite, two of the darkest grapes we grow, Petite Syrah and Petite Verdeau. Of course, Lodi has more old vine Petite Syrah than anyplace else in North America, so a true treasure. We put Petite Syrah into almost every red wine we make. We love Petite Syrah. So this is 85% Petite Syrah, so it is now the second best selling Petite Syrah, I think, in the world because there's not a whole lot of Petite Syrah outside of the US. Wow. Just curious, do you know the first one? Bogle. We've had Mr. Bogle on the podcast way back. Yeah. We do. They're good friends. Bogle Winery is just 20 minutes north of us. We love them. They're a great winery. But yeah, Petite Petite, colorful label is the first of our circus labels. We'll get into that theme later of all of our crazy circus labels. But Petite Petite came out, I believe, 2005, First Vintage. It's just a standalone product that just kicks butt out there. It's doing great. I would say this put you on the map, but it seems like this is the map. Well, the one that really put us on the map, you might remember, was Seven Deadly Zins. We sold that three years ago. I was just going to say that you're missing one of the elephant in the room, which is Seven Deadly Zins. We have to give credit to Seven Deadly Zins. That's the one that propelled us nationwide. From one distributor in Chicago in 1999, Seven Deadly Zins came out in 2002, and then finally it was easy to get distribution around the country when that came out. You sold that brand off a couple of years ago, right? Three years ago, we sold it to the wine group, and it's still the number one selling Zin in the world. So, any wine consultant at Binny's who's been there for three months will tell you, Petite Seurat has tiny berries, a lot of skin influence, very big, robust, a lot of tannins, a lot of flavor. But on the nose, this smells incredibly approachable. It is ripe and vibrant, and it smells like it's going to be really easy to drink. To me, it's almost like blackberry jam on buttered toast. I literally get a sense of butter out of the nose, and it is really luscious smelling. I would say that the tannins are incredibly well-managed here. For the reputation Petite Seurat has, this is so silky smooth. That's what Lodi gives us fruit first. We get fruit before tannin. Sometimes we need to try to add some tannin by using good barrels or even blending a little North Coast wine into some of our Lodi wines. But yeah, Lodi is all about fruit up front, drinkable, young. You don't need to age them. They're ready to drink the day you buy them. So American consumer likes that. Oh, for sure. You can take this wine to a party. Everyone's going to love it. Yeah, it is. It's just a bouquet of fruit, really luscious. Tannin's really in check. And to your point, just super friendly with food, without food, tons of, yes, blackberries. I love the blackberry jam on toast, Chris, but also a lot of purple and blue fruits as well. You said you have the most plantings of Petite Syrah in California? Lodi has more old-time Petite Syrah than any place. When did that take hold in Lodi? When did they realize the potential for the grape there? Back then, our great-grandparents had the, during Prohibition, were smart enough to take advantage of rail cars and home juice-making. They planted a lot of hardy red grapes in the 20s, like Carignan, like Zinfandel, and Petite Syrah, often field blends of those three. They shipped them all over the country. So a lot of these Petites, these are head pruned vines. They look like little trees. They're still standing on their own and they're out there still producing incredible fruit. Yeah. Thanks, bootleggers. Yes. Yeah. They make the finest medicine and sacramental wines. Oh, the church became so popular. A resurgence in Lodi there. Yes. All right, so you brought up the Circus label, and the next wine, also with the freak show name now, is your freak show Zimfandel. Can you tell us, firstly, where is the freak show name coming from, and who loves circuses at Michael David Winery? Well, everyone loves a good circus, but Petit Petit came first, and all of our labels were designed and drawn by local artists in Lodi. We try to keep everything local as much as possible. So a guy named Ben worked for a local design firm, and he drew the Petit Petit label, and then it was actually our marketing guy said, we need to expand the circus themes, and we think Freak Show will be a great name. They talked us into doing our first freak show, which was actually the Cabernet back in 2009, and Ben drew that label, which was really cool. It had hundreds of real circus freaks on it, and then we started expanding the line. It took off, did great. Unfortunately, Ben passed away a few years ago, so we continue developing new freak show labels using his original ideas and keeps going on. Really fun stuff. Freak show Zen here has the fire breathing woman on the label. I'm pouring a little bit now, and this is just typical. Lodi, of course, is most famous, probably, for old vines in Fundel. About 40% of all the Zen in the world is in Lodi, and like I said earlier, these could be anywhere from 50-year-old to 115-year-old vines. We source from probably 30 different Zinfandel vineyards. Okay. Are you using predominantly American oak in this wine? On the Zinfandel, yeah. Zinfandel, we like American oak. The winemakers will sometimes give it a little French kiss, we call it, especially on some of our higher-end Zins, like the earthquake. After 15 months in American, they'll put it into French for three months just to make it a little more diverse around everything. But yeah, in general, American oak for Zins and French oak for basically everything else. I hear if you French kiss a fire eater, it's a rather exciting experience. Oh, yeah. That could be dangerous. On the nose, just quite different from the first one, you notice the fruit is much more brambly. There's that characteristic spice with Zinfandel. What adds that nice complexity with Zin is the fact that it tends to ripen unevenly on the vine. You get some fruit that's really nice and ripe and can be almost jammy in quality, and then you get some things that are just into the ripe category or even slightly under. So that combination just makes the wine very interesting. So for your Zin heads out there, we need help. The Lodi Old Vine Zins, we have more grapes than we have demand for right now. We're trying to keep pushing Zinfandel. Unfortunately, Zin sales have been flat for the last 15 years. Old Vines are being torn out, and it's a real shame. I hate seeing Old Vine vineyards getting torn out. I hear there's this new fangled thing called White Zinfandel. You might want to jump on that. Well, back in 1988, the White Zinfandel and the Trinchero family saved the Old Vines then. They literally saved the Old Vines because Zinfandel was worthless at the time. Then Red Zin had this resurgence coming in the early 90s and became really popular with Zap and the big Zinfandel tastings. Yeah. We owe a lot to White Zinfandel. What you're saying is a real pity. It's an American heritage Zinfandel, in my opinion, and we should preserve it. Yes. We have a new campaign in Lodi called Save the Old, trying to encourage people to seek out Old Vines Zinfandels and keep these vines in production. Your support helps. What are they replanting instead of the Zin? What are they ripping it out for? What's the flavor of the day? It's trying to guess what's going to be popular five years from now. All the Mabic is just coming into age now. Yes. A lot of the catheter grapes in Lodi are still bought by the top three or four biggest wine-raises out there. People plant Pinot Grigio, there's always more demand for Chardonnay and Cabernet. I'm planting more Chardonnay and Cabernet now. Really, Lodi, I like diversity. There's 130 different kinds of grapes being grown in Lodi because our land costs one-tenth the price of an acre of land in Napa, so we can afford to experiment. There's all kinds of really cool things happening in Lodi as far as trying different kinds of grapes besides the big three or four that people know. Right. Then in terms of production, if you were to guess how much of Lodi production is from wineries like yours, family-owned versus some of the bigger guys, is it quite a small number? Yeah. I'd say for family-owned, we're probably the biggest family winery still in Lodi. We're producing 700,000 cases a year total. But most of the wineries in Lodi are producing between 5,000 and 20,000. So yeah, it's a drop in the bucket. The big wineries are still buying 80% of the crop. Wow. Yep. Go buy more Zin, Greg. Yes, please. So you're talking about the over-under kind of quality of Zinfandel where it can be under-ripe and over-ripe at the same time. This seems mostly ripe. It has a couple of notes that I don't get many places other than Zin, and I just always think of them. It's like a sassafras root, like root beer kind of quality, and then like a chicory spice sometimes, and they're here. They're just whispers, but they're here. Why? Why is Zin? I mean, it has this brambly fruit, but it has this herbal complexity too. All kinds of different things it can be. Sure does. Yep. There's a lot going on in there. All right, sweet. What would you like to eat? What would you like to eat with this? Cheese. Cheese. Always cheese. Chris? This wine would be well suited for a steak off the grill for sure, some barbecue. It's got a lot of fruit. It's got very supple tannins. I think you need something pretty bold to eat with it. I'm thinking blue cheese crumbles on top of that steak. There you go. A little balsamic reduction. It definitely has those ripe brambly qualities that will spark off the pungent blue cheese really well, I think. Let's go kind of back to Lodi. Your family started farming in Lodi back in the 1860s. I'm sure some stories have been kind of passed on. Can you speak to the evolution of the region, how it's changed? I mean, I'm sure, you know, the grapes they were growing then quite different than those now. And when do you think it really kind of hit its stride? Well, our great grandparents started off growing wheat and watermelons, and Lodi was the watermelon capital of the world in the 1880s, you know, because the water table at that time was only about five feet below the surface. So all you had to do is put a seed in the ground. My grandmother would tell stories about hauling the watermelons to the train station. If they didn't weigh 50 pounds, they just left them in the field. They shipped, you know, 50 pound watermelons all over the country. What do you do with the enormous watermelons? Giant watermelons. They liked to grow them big back then. That's another label idea. Yeah. So, and then as the land got more settled and the water table started to drop, they began to diversify more and start planting more things like grapes and almonds and cherries and all kinds of different things. And then the grapes really started to take off. Lodi, there was a cooperatives. You know, after prohibition, they formed cooperatives. We made wine and sold it to Gallo and other big wineries. And Lodi flourished. We also grew a lot of table grapes at the time. The Flamed Toque table grape was the backbone of our grape industry in Lodi. And then, of course, when seedless grapes got invented in the 70s, early 80s, the Toques that had seeds in them just kind of died off a slow death. Did they plant Thompson seedless then or something like that? Or did they go more to wine grapes? They ended up planting all the seedless grapes down south of us in the Fresno, Bakersfield area. So Lodi didn't have, and they got ripe earlier, so Lodi didn't really have a market for table grapes anymore. Yeah, you're not in the raisin belt. Yeah, we continue to grow small amounts of table grapes to sell at our roadside fruit stands, because that's what we always had was fruit stands. Before we had wineries, we had fruit stands, so then the wine evolved into the fruit stand. So you can go buy fruit and wine at your stand? Yes, you can, and vegetables still. And pies, the best pie in the world. What kind of pie is the best pie in the world? Oh, I made my load at our bakery in Lodi. My grandma's recipes, everything from apple to blueberry to. There are a lot of grandmas out there who will throw down with you. Yeah, come on out. So, yeah, the evolution and after the cooperatives, and that's when we had the Caragnan, the Zins, the Petite Seurage then, and a lot of that went into like Hardy Burgundy for through all that growth. The Hardy Burgundy was always a consistent good wine and Lodi grapes were the backbone of that. And then, of course, as things changed, the co-ops went away. We had to take matters in our own hands and figure out how to market our grapes better. And we formed the Lodi Commission and we formed the sustainability program in Lodi. We really wrote the book on sustainable wine growing in California. And all the other regions kind of followed our lead. And by forcing all of our growers to become certified sustainable, it improved the quality across the board and really helped propel Lodi to a premium wine region. Sure. Did that kind of filter out some of the poor quality wineries or did really everyone step up at that point? I think, well, everyone's growing for the wineries, really stepped up to grow better grapes. And because they saw the prices increase then, so farmers figured that out that I remember the first time we cut crop off, probably 20 years ago, we started thinning the crop. Our parents and grandparents were like, what are you doing? You're throwing money on the ground. That's crazy. Because he used to farm for 10 tons. He used to farm for 10 tons the acre. Now we strive to go four to five tons the acre on our grapes to improve the quality. And it worked. And now look at us. This seems like a good place to ask about the Lodi rules. What can you tell us about those? The Lodi rules, like I said, was a book written on sustainable wine growing. It's very strict third party certified. I believe we have about 40% of all the vineyards in Lodi now under the Lodi rules program. So about 40,000 acres, one of the bigger sustainable wine growing programs in the world. So we're very proud of it. And like I said, all across the boards, improve the quality of the vineyards, the health of the vineyards. We say we're farming for future generations. We grew up in the vineyards. We want our children and grandchildren to grow up in the vineyards. Yeah, that seems like a very good rate of participation in an area that is so large. It is. We like to be 100%. What is the reticence on the part of the people who don't buy into it? I don't know. There's a lot of old conservative farmers in Lodi too. And if they're selling to one of the big wineries that is not using sustainable on the label, then there's no reason for them to spend all that extra money and paperwork to do it, I guess. Yeah, so we're trying to get all... We were the first one to offer a $50 ton bonus to become certified sustainable. And then money others have started following that too. Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. The incentive for it has to come from the purchaser of the fruit, that farmer, if not asked and not needed, he's not going to incur that additional expense. I get that. So yeah, it's the wineries that need to... Well, the one thing that would convince someone is better price for their grapes. Right, if the winery agrees to that. Money does talk. Obviously comes from who's buying it. Yeah. So what are some of the key components of Lodi rules? As minimal input as possible. I mean, I like to say it's almost beyond organic because organic farming is great and all, but sometimes you have to actually do more spraying and more passes with a tractor in an organic systems. Then whereas in the Lodi rule system of sustainable farming, it's really you only do something you absolutely have to, and you have to provide paperwork and reasons why you have to do something. So in general, it's least input as possible. Sure. It's what it is, and it's managing the soil. What's the pest population that tips the scale and becomes a negative, and what can you live with? Is that not part of this? You assess whether you need to spray or not based on population. Exactly. You always try to use natural methods first, unless you really have to use something you don't. But if you get everything in balance, nature usually takes its course. But really, it's building up the soils, number one, having healthy soils by using good compost, by growing the cover crops, and year after year after year making that soil even healthier. Then you have healthier vines and then less pressure from insects if the vines are healthier. So. As we send around Inkblot in a moment, yes, and now another very different label. I am curious the marketing genius behind all of this. Oftentimes, a winery says, we want all of our wines to share some common attributes, so you can identify the whole portfolio, but yours do not do that. No, and I get told all the time. I had no idea my favorite Zinfandel's were Freak Show and Earthquake. I had no idea that they are from the same winery. So what's the thought process? So ink blot here. If you want to sneak four wines on a wine list, do you have four different brands that no one really knows? It does say Michael David somewhere on all of them, but people don't always notice that. Why did you put a picture of murder on the label? You need some psychiatric help there, buddy. Or Rorschach, he doesn't know what to think. There's a Rorschach test on every bottle of ink blot. David's only known you for 45 minutes, and he's already keyed into your- That was a joke. I nailed it. I meant a sexy butterfly. That's what I meant. Yes. I see a circus scene personally. So we make three different ink blots. Today we're having the ink blot Petite Verdeau. Meet one of my favorite grapes. So the whole point of the ink blot brand was to showcase grapes that are usually not bottled by themselves, usually blenders. So Cabernet Franc, Petite Verdeau, two fantastic Bordeaux blending grapes that there's usually a reason they're not bottled by themselves. They can be vegetal, they can be Teutonic. That's why they're good blenders. But in Lodi, because of that upfront fruit and growing it right, we can get away with doing them as 100 percent single varieties and really show people what a Cabernet Franc or what a Petite Verdeau is supposed to taste like. That's really cool. I want to try the Cabernet Franc too. Yeah, Cabernet Franc is really fun. I mean, all these grapes that we're tasting today, the Petite Verdeau, the Cabernet Franc and the Zin, they all have that Jekyll and Hyde quality where they can be super ripe or they can also get really vegetal. Cabernet Franc is another great example where it gets so peppery. But when it's ripe, it's like blueberry pie, it's so good. But that's not what we're having right now with the Petite Verdeau. So thanks. Get off your Cabernet Franc first, you're not tasting the one that Greg can wax poetically about. All right, so Petite Verdeau, it isn't the most common bridle in Lodi, of course. I do want to go back to kind of the fruit tannin balance here. You mentioned Lodi has this ability to really bring out the purity of fruit without kind of the really high kind of astringent tannins. Can you dig a little bit deeper into that? Why is that the case? Well, partly because of our deep sandy soils and our westerly winds. We work really hard in the vineyards, our viticulture team to get these, typically on these, a big quadrilateral system for the Cabernet Franc or the Petite Verdeau. Up there, a lot of handwork, pulling leaves, dropping crop, making sure the sunlight and wind is getting to the grapes themselves during the growing season. And that really helps to get them ripe, avoid those unwanted qualities of red veginess and bell pepper that we don't want. So Petite Verdeau is famously a very late ripener. Yeah. But I imagine you have zero issues with that. How much later are you picking ripe Petite Verdeau as opposed to say Cabernet or Zin? Cab and Petite Verdeau and Lodi come about the same. They're both coming in in the next week or two, right? You know, mid-October is general in those. Of course, everything's coming in earlier now than it's ever used to coming in, so we start picking grapes in July this year. But, yeah. What were you picking in July? Oh, Sal Blanc and Chardonnay came in pretty early. Yep. That's freaky. Yeah. And you're not even making sparkling wine. We do. We make a little. Oh, you do? We pick early to make a cuvee and we do make a little sparkling for the tasting room. I didn't know that. I feel like this whole podcast episode is just a plug for his tasting room. You want the good stuff. You got to eat it. You got to bring your pie. But we can always. Well, how are we going to compete in the world of sparkling method of champagne wine being from Lodi? Even though we make a delicious one, but for distribution, I'm not sure if it actually can. Are you doing traditional method? We are. Okay. Yeah. Let's get back to the Petite Verde because this is delicious. It's just mouth-filling. I love this wine. Beautiful. It is. This is $28.99 on the shelf. Another great value, but we're definitely stepping up in complexity, I think, in the richness of the mouth feel. This also saw time in oak, but as you referenced earlier, we're now kind of dominant in French oak. 17 months, French oak. A good chunk of this is new French oak, probably about 50% new. Yeah, very good French oak. Our barrel room has 30,000 barrels in it. It's a big process. Even though we're a fairly big winery, I guess, we're still doing everything by hand with real, like I said, 30,000 French oak barrels. That's a lot. Sure. Do you have someone on staff that's working through to maintain those and swap out stays? Oh, we have a full team of 12 people working in the barrel room daily. I'm trying to do the math here. This is a really well-polished wine, French oak, 100% varietal bottled. What does this cost? $28.99. Yeah, that makes sense. It's $35 at the winery, so you're doing really well. Also, don't go to the taster room. Shop at Binny's. Yeah, right. Well, it's good. I agree. This is a very polished wine. You can definitely sense the ratcheting up of new French oak here, although it's incredibly well-integrated. You get the vanilla and mocha and almost caramely tones in the nose. The feel of it, the mouthfeel of it. Yeah, it's a luscious wine. And this has, by far, speaking of the fruit tannin balance, the most prominent tannins, but they're still very ripe and supple. Okay. So that is your inkblot line. And I appreciate you showing off some varieties that are often in the background, and people don't know too much about. So if you are interested in Petite Verdot and you want to explore just how it shines on its own, we highly recommend this. Let's get on to your fourth wine that we have today, the Earthquake Cabernet Sauvignon. I did see you named this after San Francisco's Great Earthquake back in the early 1900s. What are your other thoughts here on the earthquake? To clarify that, the Zinfandel came first. The first earthquake wine was Zinfandel and it was found on Vineyard Planet in 1906. My brother said, we should name it after the earthquake. Like, yeah, it's a big rockin Zen. Sure, let's do it. Then we evolved and then we started to add more varietals to it. We used to do a sorrel. We used to do a petite sorrel on the earthquake. But the Cabernet has become king in the earthquake line. It's our number one on-premise wine. It's our steakhouse wine. It does. A lot of people will try it at some of your great steakhouses, like Master's has it, and then hopefully they'll come and buy it at Binny's. May I just suggest that your next line extension be called Richter and Rorschach? Whoa. Yeah, there we go. You can make some great label. It's R&R, baby. To Chris's point, what sets it apart from some of the other varietally labeled bottles in your whole lineup? We're working our way up the scale, right? Earthquake is up the scale, yes. Of course, we all have the freak show Cabernet is out there, always our number one selling wine. Earthquake is a level up, really good French oak, probably another about 40% new French oak, but almost all of it sees barrel time, about a year and a half in barrel. Vineyard selection or is it lot selection? Not specific vineyards, but generally, most of it is usually ends up being a state Cabernet vineyards that our family controls, because we can really control the quality in the vineyard. So we get Cabernet probably from 30 different vineyards too, but the best four or five vineyards usually end up in the earthquake line or in our super high end cab, the Rapture, which is our luxury Cabernet out there. So is your winemaking team fermenting and making wines individual to their source and then you're blending him and go in and assess? And that's part of our key to success is every vineyard is fermented separately. Yeah. We don't blend at the crusher. So we have 180 fermentation tanks. And the beauty of that, and then the great thing that we can go to our growers and show them exactly what their vineyard tastes like. And every year we'll have a contest with our growers where they blind taste each other's wines straight out. So we barrel down a barrel out of every vineyard we make and then have a contest to see who grew the best Zin or who grew the best Cabernet that year. Yeah. And of course, then they get a nice bonus and they're voting on, they don't know if it's their own wine or not, they're voting on the growers. So it's great fun. It creates competition. It encourages our growers to even be better farmers. Yeah, that's great incentive. It boggles the mind. Sometimes I see my outlook calendar and I see, I'm a little overwhelmed because I got all these different meetings. But I don't have to keep track of all a bunch of different vineyard sites and a bunch of different barrel programs and a bunch of different end products. That would be, I don't know, you'd have to hire somebody for that. How big is your winemaking team now, David? Altogether, I think we have five winemakers and assistant winemaker, oenologists, and we have over 200 employees total now, so thanks to you and all of the customers out there that kept wine sales going great during COVID, we didn't ever have to lay anybody off, so we were real happy to be able to keep the team in place. Thanks for drinking more during COVID, everybody. We really appreciate that. We didn't actually talk about the Earthquake Cabernet. I think this is just so juicy. It's alive, it's fresh, really vibrant. Good Cabernet nose, same thing, you don't need to lay it down, it's ready to drink the day you buy it, even though it tastes like it could be a much more expensive Cabernet. Yeah, and underneath all that juicy fruit component, you find that herbal streak that Cabernet is known for, and it's just so faint, but it is there and keeps it variety correct, no doubt. But this is juicy, ripe, acid is really fresh. Yeah, this is on the shelf, Greg, for $22.99. $22.99. I thought you were going to go up and not down. Yeah. Well, varietally correct yet quintessentially American, in my opinion. I mean, this is California wine. Yeah. You're not going to think it's French. Straight up. Just reference a little bit about sales and surviving COVID. You now are distributing to 32 countries, I believe. At least, yeah. Something like that. It might be more like 38 now since we added some more Caribbean islands. And just had a visit from our Venezuelan. Of all places, Venezuela is drinking California wine. Like, are you kidding me? Really? They reordered three times in the last year. So what wines are people taking to in your line? Is it everything? What's standing out in the market? In Asia, the elephant wines do great. In Korea, Japan, Taiwan, China, the Petite Petite's on fire there. Yep. In Europe, the Zinfandel's do really well in Scandinavia, Denmark, Sweden, and in Moscow now too. They're really liking Zinfandel. So yeah, I've been doing some Zoom tastings that direction. And yeah, it's fun to be all say you're someone in Moscow. I hope I can go soon. I went to Moscow one time in February just for the weekend. I was living in DC at the time. But it is a spectacular city and we stayed right on the Red Square. And so yeah, once they... They changed their visa situation from when I went. So I don't know what the deal is now, but when you can. I'm more of a drive across the country in a van kind of guy. Yeah. Hey, what do they drink in the Himalayas? And do you have distribution? I've not been able to break in there yet. We're in Vietnam, we're in Indonesia, and we got Utah rocking. I was just in Park City. We got a lot of people drinking wine in Utah now. And my wife and I, a couple of years ago, before COVID, we went and did a tour of Oman, Dubai, Bahrain. And it was really cool to do a bunch of winemaker dinners in those countries and to have people from Saudi Arabia come in and drink wine with us. That was really cool. I've pieced through wine. So birding cultures everywhere you go. I figure people just drink wine, there won't be war. You're probably right. Yep. Let's hope. Well, David, thanks so much. I enjoyed getting a closer look at Lodi and understanding the great potential of this region and the potential that's been realized for many years now. But I'm a little heartbroken about Simphandel. So we will continue to fight on your behalf. Save the old vines. Let's save the vines. Can't you just make that illegal or something? Yeah. Can it be a UNESCO World Heritage Site? Yeah, make them all heritage sites. Yeah. Well, thanks for the Lodi Lowdown. You are welcome. Please come and visit anytime. We really appreciate it. I had a great time. Thanks for being our number one partner in Illinois, Binny's. You're awesome. Yeah, these vines all over the chain, ladies and gentlemen. So please go and check them out. David, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Cheers, everybody. It was fun. Cheers. And thank you for listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We'll be back in your feed next week with something else that's pretty fun. Until then, I'm Greg. I'm Chris. I'm Alicia. And Dave, keep tasting.