Rollin Soles is a scientist. He started out as a scientist before he was a winemaker. A lot of winemakers go to school for winemaking, and they learn processes, and maybe somebody else is growing the grapes, they learn what they need. But he started with an approach of microbiology. And basically, all pretension and assumption is thrown out the window with this guy. Total scientist. Total scientist. But no time for the fact that you are an idiot. And he does not have patience for fools. No, not at all. We learned that. And rightfully so. You know, that's just his personality. That's who he is. But he's so funny and fun and well spoken that if anybody could be a crabby old man and get away with it, and you walk away going, God, I like that guy. Definitely earned it. Definitely earned it. It's him. So Rollin Soles got his start as a winemaker at Argyle? He began his own ventures in Argyle in 1987. He was the founding member, team of one, at Argyle Winery. He started making wine in California. Then he made wine in Switzerland. And then he really got his start in Australia, where he learned under iconic, iconic leaders. And he became one of the first flying winemakers. So these guys would fly out into a winery, and they would have several days to fix this whole entire thing. So it was like, you know, in, hold on, what's the movie? Saving Private Ryan. Nope, nope. It was with John Travolta. She's the wolf. Awesome. So then after that, as far as the timeline of his evolution, he began Argyle in 1987, which we all know and love the Fizz and the Bubbles, and of course the still wines. And then he started ROCO Winery in 2003, which is his own venture. Yeah. So make wine in the Willamette Valley for as long as you did. You started Argyle in 87, right? So I mean, would you dare to say you were there from pretty much the beginning? I understand the 70s was the first wave of Davis grads, et cetera, but would you say that you're right along in there with? I guess what I would say is I visited there for the first time in 79, and it was the energy and enthusiasm of the folks that were already there that attracted me very much. Emotionally to the Volamba Valley, and so I always characterized my appearance in the Volamba Valley as more of a second wave than the first wave. And it was the first wave that proved that you could grow grapes there, and also that they had so much authenticity, generosity, enthusiasm for growing grapes, and it was something I had never experienced in any other wine-growing region. Really? How is it different than the Napa Valley for you then at the time, in the 70s? Because I mean, you were there, right, late 70s in Napa? Correct. So you were there with, you know, Paul Hobbs and all these other guys that are really big wigs now. Did you rub shoulders with them? I got the grad school at Davis, and so we visited Napa and Sonoma all the time. And I worked at a killer place in Napa Valley, and it was awesome. It was phenomenal. A great experience, and it was completely convinced that California was the be-all end-all. We went to Australia and Switzerland, and the wines that I got exposed to in Switzerland were from the best places in all over Europe. The Swiss are huge wine collectors, and I got totally re-indoctrinated in what makes fine wine. By going to Switzerland, it was unreal. These guys had cellars where they had pre-World War I, pre-World War II Bordeauxs and Burgundies and Rieslings, and they were phenomenal. And I'd never tasted wines like that, if that ilk in my life, and it completely re-calibrated my palate. So that was the turning point for you, in terms of... Very much. And then it's almost like, add on, go to Australia, and get the opportunity to work with a wonderful, unbelievable winery called Petaluma, and their chairman of the company was called, his name is Len Evans, and that guy was one of the... I play the options game, and I always talk about him every time I do it. He's unreal. And so, he's like, and I was like his redheaded stepchild, and he fashioned my palate like no other human being on the earth could do, and so that's where I came from, for my palate, to the Willamette Valley. Your Rolodex of mentors is out of control. I mean, you were taught by the best of the best and the who's who, of Australasia, of Europe, you know, of North America. It's crazy. That's cool. You seek them out, and then a lot of times they seek you out. I feel very fortunate as a young person that I got that kind of exposure. Yeah. You learn from these iconic people. Do you ever take what they taught you and do something completely different? Because of what they taught, what they, you know, so the two guys that really influenced me in Australia were Brian Crozer, who is my boss, who has an analytical mind set that I've, that I could never hold a candle to. But it definitely caused me to be one of these people that doesn't leave my brain behind the door. I'm always thinking about, so what do they mean by this subject? And look at the little nitty-gritty details. And then figure out how I can fashion that yes or no to make a better wine. And then Len Evans is the guy that could put together blends and could characterize wine in such a fashion that little details, middle palate, finish, aromatics, details that you would never get from anybody else but Len Evans. So if somebody wanted to start a winery, what are some keys of advice you would give to them to start a winery? I ask this question a lot. The answers I get are amazing. Yeah, there's all different ways to get into it. I would say that just like restaurants, if you're a really good cook in your house, and you think, oh, I could start a restaurant, what happens is if you just visit a winery or you just visit a restaurant, you can think, oh, I could do that. But I got to say that both entities are deceptively complex in their own fashion. And in the wine world, especially if you're making wine in a marginal region like the Willamette Valley, you're very much at the mercy of Mother Nature. And so if you don't learn to move with Mother Nature, if you have a personality that wants to come up with a recipe and stick to that recipe, you're going to fail. And so it teaches you to be a farmer first, and then it teaches you to really pay attention to the little details. Just like in a restaurant, consistency is huge. So what made you get on to the Fizz Train? When did you go, all right, I'm making bubbles. Well, when I was in Australia, Brian Crozer, in a cool climate near Adelaide, wanted to make Sparkling Wine, and he brought in investors from Champagne Bollinger. And so I got to participate in the making of the first two vintages there, and that was cool. Then when I moved to the Willamette Valley, our viticulture just wasn't consistent for still wine. They make a great, you know, a great Chardonnay every year because it was just viticulture wasn't right, and our climate was very challenging. But I figured I could make a Sparkling Wine that was high quality every year with the existing state of viticulture in the Willamette Valley. And I also recognized that we didn't grow Merlot and Cabernet and Syrah in the Willamette Valley because we don't have enough sunlight and heat. And if you go to Champagne, you'll notice that it's Pinot noir and Chardonnay and Pinot Mougnet. There's no Syrah and Cabernet. So I felt like in the new world we had finally an opportunity to make a Sparkling Wine that would have the same creamy texture and excitement and backbone that a well-made Champagne could have. So when you decided to start Argyle and you started to make Fizz, how did you mask a team to help you? Well, the first few years it was a team of one, basically. And you just learn by doing. How did you manage to stay married? That was wild. I mean, Sparkling Wine is the most difficult wine to make because there's no protection. There's no skins and seeds to mask bad decisions. And it's a very complicated wine to make. But it was fun. I knew I could make a wine that was going to be consistent and high quality every year. Cool. And it was important to me to lift the awareness of the Willamette Valley. It may not be in my lifetime, but for sure the next lifetime, there's going to be numerous other entities making very high quality Sparkling Wine because the Willamette Valley is the spot in America and in the New World to make super high quality delicious Sparkling Wines. Yeah. When it doesn't go well, what happens? Making Sparkling Wine? Well, you just make a... You know, this goes back to tasting with the best wine critics of the world. Sparkling Wine should be seamless from beginning to end. Sparkling Wine should never be tannic. Sparkling Wine should never be too acidic or too sweet. It should always have a beautiful balance to it. It takes a while to get that together. The good news is the Willamette Valley is the great place to make Sparkling Wines. So, your chances of succeeding are elevated in the Willamette Valley. How long does it take for you on average to do your assemblage before you go into tirage? Well, what happens to Sparkling Wine is, our Sparkling Wine is Pinot noir and Chardonnay. You can use Pinot Mougnet too, right? So, mainly two varietals, one, two black grapes, one green grape, and you make a white wine out of those grapes that only involves the heart juice of a berry. And that wine is very delicate, but very high in acid. Then you make a dry wine out of those Pinot noir and Chardonnay, Pinot Mougnet. Once it's dry, then you start blending them together to make them complement each other. If you think about it, Sparkling Wine Champagne is the only beverage in the world that combines green grapes with black grapes and makes a very complementary wine. It's pretty cool. They call the black grapes easy to define them as more masculine terms, and the Chardonnay to define them more feminine terms. And so it's a fun way to think about Sparkling Wines from Champagne. From the William Valley, it's combining masculine and feminine qualities. And it takes a while for them to get to know each other. And so you put them together whatever fashion is your fancy or your house style. And then you ferment it in a bottle. And when you ferment it in a bottle, you're increasing all the bubbles. Alcohol goes up just a teeny tiny little bit. And then you lay it down for two and a half, three years minimum. It takes two and a half, three years for those two masculine and feminine to get to know each other, right? Yep. It's just like a relationship. Sure. But if you get it right and they get to know each other really well, you disgorge it and pour it in your glass. Life is good. It's like, dang, this is all right. But you blend for many different plots, right? Individually? You can do that or you can have single vineyards. I just feel like the assemblage part of it would be very difficult. It just seems impossible. You know, somebody working at Krug, for example, with 120 different reserved wines, where do you start and how do you keep track? So my question is for you, how do you get a handle on? One, you're growing Pinot noir and Chardonnay in the right place. If you grow them in the wrong place, then you're going to struggle with making a good wine. Number two, then your decision of when to harvest those grapes is critical. The window of opportunity for capturing high natural acidity and beautiful fruit flavor is very, very narrow for sparkling wine. So you pick at the wrong time, it's either underripe green apple or overripe strawberry and peach, it's too much, and the acids drop down. And then when you bring the grapes into the cellar, you have to be very gentle and particular about how you press the juice off. Press too much, the base wine is going to be too tannic and really ordinary, and low in acid. So you got to be careful about that. Then guess what? When you ferment it, if you don't ferment with a healthy population of yeast, you're going to get off flavors that are really going to show up, and it's going to smell and taste not so exciting. And you're going to mask all that beautiful pear and apple and plum fruit flavor that you work so hard to pick at the right time. So once you got all that lined up, then actually making the assemblage makes it a little bit easier. But the caveat to that is those base wines are exceedingly high in acid. It just takes the enamel off your teeth, and to try to taste high beautiful fruit flavor behind high natural acidity is damn hard. So what I do is I pace them over time when they're fermenting, and then I'll get an idea when I'm tasting the grapes and the vineyard. I have an idea. I keep that in my mind the whole time. It has a great influence on blending. And when I put the blends together, what I do is, okay, write copious notes on what I'm going to put together. And then I walk away from it. And a week later, I try to not remember what I did. I get all the samples again, and I taste through, and I blew my blending, and see how it matches up with what I did the next time. Okay. One of my caveats in blending is, once you blend a wine, you can't unblend a wine. Right. Would you say kind of slow and steady is the way to go when it comes to the blending portion? I don't know. I think you just pay attention. Yeah. What else do you like to do at the house? I mean, Tuesday night, you get done at work. What do you, what's your other hobby? I guess where I would go is, Oregon is a very large state, but nobody lives there. So we have a very low population, and that's attractive to me. And we have a very diverse oceans. We got multiple mountain ranges. We have deserts. We have hard pan, dry lake beds. We have incredible rivers where we are, Columbia River, the Deschutes River. I mean, that goes on and on and on. And I encourage folks to come out and visit, and visit the Willamette Valley, and notice that it's diverse agriculture. The valley floor is full of all kinds of agriculture, but not grapes. You have to go up into the hillsides to find the grapes. And when you get up in the hillsides, look across that vista and notice those beautiful mountains in the distance. They have snow on them, you around. Our farmlands are protected. Our forest lands are protected. So, is the answer to the question camping? Oh, yeah. We camp like all heck. There's a National Forest Bureau of Land Management land. There's more federal land in Oregon than there is private land. And you can go out there and virtually camp wherever you want to. That's cool. We do a lot of camping. I wish I did more, you know, but we don't really have the beauty here in Illinois. It's just flat as a pancake. Yeah. Well, you don't have all the federal state land to go camping on. Do you think that you're going to hate retiring? I don't know that I'll hate it, but there's other things in life to do. And so to get the opportunity to do those other things would be kind of fun, too. You just seem like the kind of guy who dreads the thought of not doing work of some sort. Oh, no. Well, that's definitely true. I always want to keep busy doing things. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you have an artistic boat like your wife does? Not at all. She is incredible as an artist. She does Fuse Glass. Her poetry is killer. I mean, she's a natural in the artistic field. Boy, the right brain really works. And I'm kind of more of a knucklehead and figure out how things work and fix things. I guess my art form has to do with growing grapes and blending beautiful wines and understanding what's going to be really interesting. So with ROCO Winery, I've been able to invent some really cool new things. And wine making and blending, that's pretty exciting. Well, it's an art form in itself. It is. And it's fun. You can use your imagination if you allow yourself to. Right. On wine and winemaking. There seems to be a divide between the idea of wine as an art versus wine as a science. I find it increasingly difficult to try to explain to people that it is, for me, in my opinion, it is first an art, but you use science to help you create a beautiful product to make your art. Yeah, you can utterly fail if you don't recognize the role of science. Yeah. Great growing and winemaking. Utterly fail. Right. And I like to blend the two together. With ROCO, it's wild. I have some really cool ideas that I put together and made wines out of that are pretty damn extraordinary. Well, I appreciate you participating in our little podcast. You betcha. It's awesome. You betcha. Please come out to the Lamb Valley and visit ROCO Winery. Thank you so much. So that was it, that was my sit down with iconic sparkling wine and still wine maker from Oregon, Rollin Soles. Rollin Soles, really interesting guy. For sure, and we're happy, we're thankful for all the support he gives us here at Binny's, all the seminars, and for the opportunity to sit down and talk to him one on one. Yeah, really cool guy. So Greg, I want to give away some money, dude. Well, that means it's time to turn to customer Q&A. So ladies and gentlemen, if you want to win a $20 gift card. At your favorite Binny's location. Write in your question, at Binny's Bev on Twitter. So our question today comes from Donna. I'm trying to. Penmanship counts people. So this is Donna Cody. Donna Cody. Donna Cody, we don't know where you're from, but we do know that you joined us at our Wine Expo and gave us this question. And you wrote, I'm newly discovering Sauvignon Blanc, and I'm looking for recommendation. Let me read it. Sorry, buddy. That's Donna. That is some poor writing right there, friend. So Donna writes, she's newly discovered Sauvignon Blanc and looking for recommendations. She loves citrusy wines. I love citrusy wines too. Absolutely. I mean, oftentimes I look for citrus in a broader complexity of primary fruit aroma. So it can be kind of common, depending on what you're looking for. So let's just bust out citrus in terms of lemony-scented wines. A great place to go. We're just talking about wines from Piedmont is a little grape called Arnais, A-R-N-E-I-S. It's called the Little Rascal. And that makes a very refreshing, high acid, aromatic, lemony wine. It's not going to smell like Sauvignon Blanc at all. There is really no herbaceous quality to it, but it's more candy lemon, candied citrus, a little bit of chamomile. I think if you're looking for a citrusy, light bodied wine, in terms of structural components, very similar to Sauvignon Blanc, but doesn't smell anything like it. Light and crisp, good acidity, excellent for pairing with food. Especially seafood. Seafood. Or pastas with cream sauces. Some cheese. Yeah, yeah, soft cheese for sure. Sticking with the Italian wines, you can head on down to Campania. That is the region where Naples is. And check out some Greco di Tufo. The grape Greco is obviously, you know, little Greek, so imported in ancient times from the Greek Isles. Super citrusy, aromatic, but grown on these volcanic soils. So it has a little bit of a nervy minerality to it. It's just, it's absolutely gorgeous. Once again, lovely for those lighter dishes, good summer sipper. And I think really moderately priced and what a great value. What about jumping to Iberia, Albariño, Rueleta? Well, in terms of Albariño, Albariño can be really sort of difficult for some people to describe because it's super high acidity, it's full bodied, it's pretty high octane, and really complex in terms of aromas. But to get that citrusy, fresh aroma, you want to find a producer that keeps it, you know, super clean, stainless steel, reductive style wine making. Senurons would be one that's gonna give you more of that citrusy aspect to it, but super, super duper refreshing. Oh, lime and, in terms of citrus lime, Riesling's from the Mosel. Germany. I mean, those are, it's like honey slaked lime, refreshing, high acid. You can look for drier styles. If you like Sauvignon Blanc, we're guessing then here that you don't like sweet wines. And so you want to make sure to find one that's gonna be a high enough ABV, anywhere around 11 and a half to 12 and a half or 13, or says Trocken on the label. And you know, you've got yourself a dry Riesling. And not to get caught up in just one region of Sauvignon Blanc, it's great around the world, whether it's from New Zealand or California or France. It's a very good point, Greg. There's so many different styles around the world, yeah? Right. So whether it's gonna be a little bit lighter, high toned or a little bit fuller, riper, a little bit less acidity, you can find some oaked examples that are quite good. An oaked example would either come from a higher end producer in Bordeaux, or could be called Fumé Blanc from California. So yes, quite a few different options just within Sauvignon Blanc itself. But moving on from there, once again, Arnay, Scribka de Tufo, Reeslink, I mean, there's quite a bit. Cool Climate Chardonnay gives you lovely citrus aromas. So I mean, the opportunities are endless. The thing that you can do is just start popping corks and twisting caps. And talking to your favorite wine consultant at your favorite Binny's location. Exactly. Yeah. So that's $20 worth of answer right there. Donna, stop by your favorite Binny's location. We have a $20 gift card waiting for you. Thanks, Donna. We're happy that you're getting out there and wanting to explore new grapes. It's something we talk about all the time and we hope that we get more questions from people like you. Super smart. So good work. That's what makes it fun. Write in your question for your chance at a $20 Binny's gift card, at Binny's Bev on Twitter. Thanks for listening, folks. Catch you next time. Bye. Keep tasting. See you.