You're listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am Pat, the Director of Spirit Sales here at Binny's Beverage Depot. With me today is our wine educator, Alicia Barrett. Thanks for having me on. All right, cool. Thanks for joining today because we have a wine episode. But also we have some other Binny's peeps here. Roger is of course with us. Roger, Beer Man Adamson, also Fruit King. Hey, Roger. Hey, glad to be back. And welcoming back Chris Spear, one of our wine managers and also works in some wine marketing capacity. Thanks for having me. And we are joined today by Jesse Lange from the Lange Estate Winery and Vineyards in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest. Jesse, thanks for joining us today. I'm excited to try these wines. I lived in Washington state for a little while. It's kind of close to Oregon. And these are pretty approachable styles of wine for a total wine noob such as myself. Yeah, thank you. Great to be here. I appreciate you guys taking the time to invite me into your living rooms, bathrooms or recording studios all. So, Alicia, this was one of your loves here that you wanted to talk about this winery and get it on. So you want to take it from here? Yeah, I'd love to. Jesse, thanks for coming on. And both Lange Estate and the Willamette Valley in general are very near and dear to my heart. I love what the region's doing. The wines are just of the utmost quality. And it seems that our section in our store continues to expand. So lots of interesting wines to be had. So hopefully we can paint kind of a clear picture for you of the region and of the wines that we're going to taste today. Before we get into that, Jesse, you have some Midwestern roots. So I wanted to bring those out because Midwesterners love anyone that hails from our area of the country. So tell us about your parents a little bit and kind of their journey and how they ended up in the Willamette Valley. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all good stock comes from the Midwest, right? So I'm actually a hot guy by birth. So I was born on the university campus there in Iowa City. My folks both grew up there in the Midwest and moved to, my father had a fairly successful music career, played many, many bars and showcased events there in the Chicago area. But he wanted to be a little bit closer to LA, moved to Santa Barbara to further his music career, fell in love with wine as their want to do. Both my folks got involved in the wine industry in Santa Barbara County, which was then Santa Barbara Winery and Sanford and Benedict back in the day. And back when that region was really kind of at its beginning, and they fell in love with Pinot Noir. Fast forward into making Pinot Noir, and then they really felt like they needed to make a conscious decision about what was going to be the next chapter of their lives. Kind of having Pinot Noir being the guiding light, they fell in love with a number of Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs here in the Dundee Hills where I'm calling you from. And they looked themselves in the mirror and looked at each other and said, Let's throw all of our goods in a big U-Haul van. And they bought their first property, their first 30 acres in 1987. And we moved everything in here and they held their noses and jumped into a big pool of Pinot Noir. And when they moved up in the 80s, give us an idea. I mean, what was the Willamette Valley like then? How many producers were there? Yeah, it's great. I've had the good fortune of being able to watch the Willamette Valley evolve and grow throughout the years, you know, from 1987, obviously here to 2020. So it's been a really wonderful kind of paradigm shift in the way that the reputation of the valley has grown, the reputation of our wines, you know, vintage to vintage quality increases. And for me, back in 87, it was really kind of, of course, I was a kid, so this is what I remember. But I think it was sort of a region where you really had to kind of create a category. And I say my folks didn't just create a brand, they really started a category called Oregon and Willamette Valley wines. And they helped kind of pioneer that. So really up here, it was a matter of establishing a beachhead for our region. And you kind of need to do that in any region for wine. Pinot Noir was going to be the kind of lead varietal in that paradigm. And a number of others to follow behind that, Pinot Gris and Chardonnay, of course. But Pinot Noir is kind of what we hug our hat on. And it was great to see that sort of evolution where people were like, Oregon, Pinot, you can't grow Pinot Noir in Oregon because it just rains there all the time, which, you know, big secret, we don't want people moving here, but it does rain, but in the winter and in the spring months. So when the vines are really butted out and you have your growing season, we actually have really dry, perfect conditions for growing the kind of varietals that we're focusing on. So the family roots in the Willamette Valley started with 30 acres. How many do you have now? We own 60 outright, but 45 is planted to vinifera, and that's 40 acres of pinot noir, approximately three acres of char, a couple acres of pinot gris. So that's what we have here that we oversee the farming on directly. In terms of land, if you mentioned you have 60 acres, do you intend on expanding in terms of your estate vineyards, or is much of the land now in the Willamette bought up? When we think about land prices, oftentimes we think about California, and in particular in places like Napa and Sonoma, where prices have just skyrocketed, it's only the very, very wealthy and or a corporation that can afford this land. What is it like in the Willamette and how saturated is it? Yeah. For us, in terms of Willamette Valley's growth and potential, there's still a lot of land here. The Willamette Valley ABA, the American Viticultural Area is a pretty vast region. We're situated really perfectly for agriculture, and it's really interesting, the question that you just asked, Alicia, is that a lot of the top-notch, most highly valued agricultural land used to be on the valley floor here. And as the wine industry continued to evolve, you saw that shift in land prices move up the hill to more hillside soils, which of course provide the more appropriate and probably the better land to grow vinifera and wine varietals on. So that's definitely shifted. But Oregon is still a fairly young wine growing region. We have a lot to explore and to learn here. It's a huge, diverse landmass and big state across the board. So trying to figure out those little pockets where you can tease out the best terroir and grow the best Pinot Noir we're still learning about. And I think that level of exploration continues today. In terms of the land prices and the overall real estate value, yeah, the Dundee Hills here, they're certainly not making any more east and south facing slopes in the Dundee Hills. So that's where our properties are located and have that kind of aspect, which is a key component of growing world class wines. But certainly, there's a lot of different ABAs that are popping up in little pockets and regions here in the Levant that continue to be explored and have a lot of potential. So I think it's an ongoing maturation. Just kind of depends on where you are specifically. Let's go ahead and dive into the wine. I know everyone's a little thirsty here. So we're going to start with your 2019 Pinot Gris Classic. Pinot Gris is a wonderful rattle. Everybody can raise their hands, but there'll be a quiz later. The first 10 producers of Pinot Gris were all here in the Willamette Valley, at least as it pertains to North America. So as a new world varietal, its birthplace was certainly here in the Willamette Valley. My family and folks, Don and Wendy Lang, were the fourth winemakers in the United States to make Pinot Gris, to actually release a commercial Pinot Gris. We've been doing it a long time. We have access to some of the oldest vines of Pinot Gris in the state. Stylistically, it's just such a great varietal. It's a sister varietal to Pinot Noir. But in the way that it provides texture on the palate, but still retains beautiful vibrancy is something that we look for with Pinot Gris. I think it's a very compelling varietal coming out of the Willamette Valley. It's something we're really known for. It goes really well with a wide variety of food. Wasn't your family one of the first to experiment with oak barrels in regards to Pinot Gris up there as well? Yeah, absolutely. Good point. We were the first winery in the United States to make a barrel-fermented, more Alsatian-style Pinot Gris, which we deem our reserve. But that's more of a break in terms of stylistic break as opposed to qualitative break between the two lines. That reserve tier Pinot Gris is something that used to be fermented 100 percent in neutral French oak barrels. They're big 500 liter French oak barrels. They're very neutral. Most of those barrels are somewhere in between 12 and 20 years old. Just recently, in the last few years, we started adding a concrete fermented portion to that reserve blend. That's been a really fun fermentation vessel, an aging vessel to complement and maybe adjunct to make a better Pinot Gris on the whole. My folks were definitely the first to make a barrel fermented Pinot Gris. I think it's one of those wines that helped establish the Willamette Valley as a lead producer of Pinot Gris, not just in the nation, but across the globe. I love that you said this wine was both easy drinking, which it is and very versatile, but there's plenty of texture, plenty of body and plenty of fruit to add a great deal of complexity. Sometimes when we say something's very easy drinking, it's the polite way of commenting that the baby's bow on its head is nice because we can't say the baby's cute. Are you saying this isn't the ugly baby of Pinot Gris? You know when you're sipping that Pinot Grigio or something that's not too great? You're like, oh, it's nice, it's easy, and that's code for simple and bland? Yeah, pretty much. This is not that. This is not that. I have some sommelier friends that are pretty well educated online. They still call this wine a pool pounder, so I don't take offense whatsoever. For those interested, and Pat and Roger, jump in, I get a lot of under-ripe pineapple, and then lots of stone fruits, so the zesty orange as well, even in citrus and tangerine, alongside this really nice ripe yellow peach. But it's a clean style, it's all fermented in stainless steel, I believe. Right, Jesse? Yeah, almost all of it. It's about 90 percent stainless steel a lot, so we keep everything separate from vineyard site, block to bottle through its aging and fermentation in the cellar. So it's a compilation of a number of different parcels. So it's not a huge production wine, but we do treat all those little blocks of Pinot Gris separate. They're picked separately, fermented separately, they're aged separately, and then only at the end of the whole process, when we get up closer to bottling, will we actually start to put together those puzzle pieces to make the most complete wine. So this wine is about 90 percent stainless steel lots, different yeast, different clones of Pinot Gris, different soil types vineyards, and then about 10 percent comes from those neutral French oak barrels as well. So it's a nice overlay to give a little bit more body on the palate, and just round the edges of the wine. The fruit aromatics on this are really impressive. I totally agree with the peach, I definitely get pineapple as well. When you were saying that it pairs well with a lot of things, anything in particular that you'd suggest, I could see maybe like soft cheese, like a Chevro maybe? Yeah, I think a cheese is a cheese course, pre-meal, I mentioned the aperitif earlier, that's a great direction ahead for pairing with this wine. I think pasta dishes with a cream sauce are really good components, and then any seafood. One thing that always impresses me about Willamette Valley Pinot Gris is, we don't acidify these wines, so really their acid profile is clean, it's complete, and it's really well balanced, so it carries the finish on the wine, which I think one of wine's greatest attributes is a beverage that you pair with food, is its ability to, obviously, it tastes great, there's a lot of amazing flavors and aromatics, but the way it cleanses the palate, cleans your palate from any oils or fats, or the Let's move to the Chardonnay, if everyone is up for that. And we are drinking the 2019 Chardonnay Classique. I want to highlight that I think we have two different opinions here on the call about Chardonnay. Pat, I'm looking at you. I don't have opinions. What are you talking about? And Jesse, who I know this is one of, if not his most favorite, white varietal. And so, I want to ask first, Jesse, for your elevator pitch to someone like Pat or to someone listening that is of the, what we might call the ABC camp, the Anything But Chardonnay. What would you tell them quickly as to why they should give Chardonnay a try? My stump speech is just pour yourself a big glass, let the wine do the talking. That's it. That's it. But for Chardonnay, it is my kind of like, my favorite white variety at all, at least I think that's probably appropriate. I think its ability to showcase site and kind of flavor profiles, range of flavor profiles is extremely impressive. Our Chardonnay is one that I think has sort of a foot kind of in the old world in terms of its structure and its acid profile and its vibrancy. But it also has a lot of those fruit components that dabble in the tropical range and in the kind of stone fruit and lemon lime citrus range too. And also floral range. So I think it's a very compelling wine aromatically. It's a very complex wine. For me Chardonnay is one of those varietals that can be easily sort of masked or taken in a direction by a winemaker that sort of pushes it in a direction that kind of creates that really soft kind of buttery ML component that you can see. Oftentimes the wines are very heavily oaked. For our style it's a little bit different. We're trying to sort of capture the essence of the vineyard and the varietal here. So our inputs for French oak, for ML conversion, the malolactic conversion that can happen in barrel or tank. We try to limit those components so we have more of an expressive wine that really showcases the varietal Chardonnay but doesn't get overtaken by a lot of the techniques that you see for a lot of the mass-produced Chardonnays out there. I think that's an important point because I would venture to say, and Jesse, correct me if you feel differently, but Chardonnay is one of the wines that can be, or one of the grapes rather, that can be most manipulated by the wine maker. To just categorically reject to the grape is difficult because a wine maker can do so much with it. Can you share a little bit about the vessels that you use for this Chardonnay? I know there are more options beyond that, but perhaps how they influence this final wine? For the kind of craft wines we produce at Lange Estate, it's really a matter of understanding each particular block within each vineyard, farming that block appropriately and specifically to coax out the best of it, monitoring that site, picking that site at optimal ripeness and optimal balance, and then bringing that into the winery with a lot of care and to coax out the best possible components of each block. So for these wines here and kind of like the Pinot Gris, this wine is a compilation of different Dijon clone vineyard blocks. So these are a set of Dijon clones that our friend David Adelsheim brought into Oregon through Myrtle Water, Oregon State. So it's my plug for Go Beavs, national champions in baseball. So those Dijon clones are really suited well to the Willamette Valley here. And our different blocks, we treat them, like I said, a little bit separately. So they're all fermented differently. And that sort of builds your ability to have a very complex wine, is keeping things separate and creating sort of individual wines that can overlay on one another and create that kind of tapestry of complexity. So that sounds a little vague and a little crazy, but you have to bear with me. I spend a lot of time in our cellar, so I don't get a lot of human interaction. But this wine here is fermented in what I call responsible use of French oak. You alluded to earlier, Alicia, about this varietal and chardonnay being really dominated by winemakers and a winemaking hand. I think that's definitely true. For us, it's a matter of fermenting these different wines in 60-gallon barrels, 130-gallon barrels, and then stainless steel and concrete fermentation vessels. So we try to match those up based on profile coming out and experience of what we know coming out of a given vineyard site and a given block, and kind of the profile, match that up accordingly. And then we kind of listen to the wines a lot. I think for us, it's a matter of really monitoring each individual wine and then blending when we get through primary fermentation, everything to create the best, most complex and most appealing Chardonnay possible. Chris and I have talked before, for people that are not as into wine like myself, the minute I hear Chardonnay, I think oak. Would you say that in Oregon, there wasn't as much emphasis on oak or even within your own winery? Has that changed over time? Because it seems like lately, the oak forward stereotype is diminishing a tad, right? Yeah, I think that's spot on in terms of the overall American palate is it tends to evolve. I think you see it come in a direction that really suits Willamette Valley varietals and Willamette Valley wines really well. You know, where the emphasis is on the fruit character of the wines, the terroir, the land, and speaking to the place rather than just kind of making a cookie cutter bottling every single year, their wines have really great topicity of flavor, range, and place. So I use that joke, that term, I even put it on the back labels at one point in time about responsible use of French oak. You know, like you can have some of my favorite chardonnays in the world have a lot of French oak influences. And some of my favorite chardonnays on the planet don't have any. So there's really a matter of that balanced approach, you know, where you're not dominating a wine, but you're sort of uplifting that wine, sort of creating, you say, a framework to maybe fill in a hole in a wine a little bit, a little small hole, but just sort of keep a frame on the wine, but never to dominate. So for us, that's a really important part of our strategy for not only making chardonnay, but all of our bottlings here at Lange Estate. So I think that's a really good read on the marketplace. And that's something stylistically that the Willamette Valley has kind of always put its foot forward for chardonnay. How long have you been using the Dijon clothes for chardonnay? I know that there's been kind of a search in the Willamette Valley to plant the right clones for the area. And Dijon has come out on top. Yeah. So there was some 108 clones, some Draper clones of chardonnay that maybe weren't the best suited for the Willamette Valley. And I think any growing region goes through those evolutions and I want to say learning curves, but you're definitely looking to match specific mutations of chardonnay to your climate and to your soil types. So like I mentioned, David Adelson brought those in in kind of the early 80s, excuse me, early 90s. We have 5 to 8, we have 76, we have 96 and 95. So sounds like a bunch of like cubby pitchers. That sounds like a bunch of gibberish to me. You want to break those? What is actually getting talked about right now? Yeah. So grapevines, genetically speaking, are fairly variable. So you'll have all these mutations that can happen in your vineyard. You're planting 1200,000, 1200 plants an acre, and you have a couple of hundred acres. You start to see if you're lucky enough to point out a difference in a clone. If you're lucky enough to see it, you can actually take a cutting of that, propagate it. You will actually have a different clone of or different mutation of said varietal. And that's where varietals like Chardonnay and Pinot Gris come from. They're actually mutations or part of that lineage of Pinot Noir. Jesse, if you have to replant some Pinot or Chardonnay, are you taking cuttings from your own vineyards or are you getting them from a nursery or what are you doing? Yeah, we have cane layered in the past where we'll actually put a neighboring plant down into the ground and then that plant will come up and propagate its own vine. So there is that opportunity for sure. We do utilize that technique here and there. For planting new vineyards though, now typically we'll have all those, the scion wood and the selected clone sort of put onto the root stock. So that'll be on a root stock that we would select for a given vineyard site and soil types. So there's sort of a bevy of options to play with and we definitely are very specific about what we choose to plant where. So I'm curious, Pat, what are your thoughts on the Chardonnay? This is a pretty pleasant Chardonnay, actually. So Jesse, I had a bad experience with way too much Chardonnay on a week long tour of a bunch of properties in Sonoma and Napa once from a certain one of the world's largest wine companies and everywhere we went we got off the bus and we're handed a glass of Chardonnay and it was all like the you know flabby oak forward Chardonnay and I was and I was done with it. I like couldn't drink anymore and this is nice this is like fresh and and I love the fruit in it and it's and it's not flabby it It's kind of an aesthetic effort across the board as how we approach farming and wine making both. So another thing, too, is all those flies are all hand-tied. So we commissioned some of the top fly tires in the world to tie them, and they're very ornate, very detailed, and very gorgeous, too. So we try to have a different fly that we select for every single bottle of wine that we make, because each bottle of wine is different. They're all different vineyard sites. They're different vintages. That's cool. Very cool. Speaking of which, you guys are practicing salmon safe agriculture, and that seems to be where you are. I mean, sustainability and Oregon, the Willamette Valley, leads the nation in terms of our percentage of sustainable vineyard sites for whether you're in the silo of biodynamics, organic, or sustainably certified. It's all under the umbrella of responsible farming. For me, I shop for wines that have those components. That's how we choose to farm our site. The salmon safe is actually a subset of our low-input viticulture nanology, which is a certification that we're certified by for all of our vineyards. For us, it's a natural extension of what we've always done. I think as consumers gravitate towards products, whether they eat, drink, or otherwise, that are sustainable, I think that's something that Oregon really leads with and we champion for sure. Got to keep those salmon around to pair with these wines because now that would work. No doubt. My wife just picked up some fresh king salmon from this local purveyor here just at the bottom of the Dundee Hills. I'm not going to drink all these wines right now. I'm going to save some for later. So let's transition to the Pinot Noir. Jesse, probably your flagship varietal here, as it is for most Willamette producers. I, as we taste, many people come in and ask or share perhaps that they don't enjoy Pinot Noir. But a lot of the Pinot Noirs they've had, maybe on the lower end of the price spectrum. It's always a little bit difficult to communicate why Pinot Noir is hard for a winemaker to do inexpensively. Can you speak to that a little bit? And the sensitivity of the grape variety and all that goes into it, why Pinot Noir? Typically, you have to spend a little bit to get a really nice quality wine. Yeah, that's a deep question too. I think for growing great Pinot Noir, there's only a handful of places you can do it at a world class level on the planet. So it's margin for error for both in the vineyard and in the winery both. It does not allow for a lot of mistakes. You know, it's a very sort of, I don't want to say translucent, but very responsive varietal to any sort of problems that you might have, or it definitely mirrors those really easily. So I think your opportunity, your margin for error like you mentioned with Pinot Noir is just really thin. So growing the right grape in the right place is part and parcel. So I think trying to make a wine that has that sense of density and richness, but also has that sense of restraint is where Pinot Noir really fits in well into the pantheon of red varietals. And I think it's just a challenge. You know, they call it the heartbreak grape. And I think that that's that's a true kind of description of the wine, because you're always chasing making great wines. And Pinot Noir, when it's at its best, I'm not sure it can be touched. But it's a challenge always. And I've had the good fortune of chasing this varietal since I was a kid. And hopefully, that's allowed me to learn from some mistakes, but then also to know what great Pinot Noir is supposed to be like. You know, chasing great wines is a totally different animal. And when you're doing that, you're trying to chase wines that have the best expression of sight. And when you delve down deep into the, you know, the microcosm of every single little vineyard, you know, you talk about the soil type, the clone, and elevation, and aspect, and you're planting, and vine spacing, and farming techniques, and et cetera, et cetera. Drainage for airflow, drainage for water, all those things play into that expression in pretty significant ways. So for us, you know, we craft 12 to 15 different bottlings of Pinot Noir every year. And arguably, that's way too many. But that's part of the fun of being a Pinot Noir producer is being able to have that versatility and sort of that range of flavor profiles to work with. It frankly is what gets us up in the morning as winemakers and keeps us coming back for more heartbreak grapes. Chris, you're tasting this Pinot Noir with us, right? Yeah, I have the 17. Is that what you guys are drinking? I have the 18, actually. Yeah, we're drinking the 18. Chris, tell us about the 17 and Jesse can tell us any vintage differences. It's beautiful, I have to say. Yeah, it's really nice. The color is gorgeous. It's kind of a deep ruby with magenta highlights. It has that kind of magenta at the rim and very aromatic. I would say lots of red fruit, totally elegant style with very, very silky tannins. I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Definitely has some richness to it too though. Yeah, I actually commented in my little notes here. There is a really nice intensity of fruit for Pinot Noir that does tend to have more delicate flavors. I think this one really shows up well in its red fruit, even a little blue fruit, but gorgeous acid profile. You're starting to, and you probably have it more on the 17 Cris perhaps, but a little more of that earthy, the turned earth, forest forest that is starting to come out a little bit. Yeah, indeed. I think I'm really getting a little earth and mineral on the finish. Yeah, maybe even a little blueberry in the fruit notes, but largely red currant, raspberry, cherry. Yeah, I was just going to say, I get like a black currant kind of both that earthiness and the fruit forward makes me think of currants. Yeah, it's a really gorgeous wine. This is really nice. Sangria maybe? Yeah, turn in the sangria, you know. Just slice up strawberries and mangoes, put them right in there. Both those vintages are pretty top notch across the board, 17 and 18 there. You know, that classique bodily that we do should have a lot of similarities, vintage to vintage. I mean, we have a kind of, you know, it's not a rubber stamp or a mold that we we sink the wine into because every vintage is different, every growing season is different. So we like to celebrate that component, but stylistically and kind of conceptually, that wine has a lot of the same vineyard sourcing components. We look to sort of drive a classic style that is a really nice expression of 100% Pinot Noir, 100% North Willamette Valley. So it's a great snapshot of the given growing season for Lange Estates. I actually have two questions for you, I guess on the winemaking side, kind of decision side. One of them is a little more tangible than the other. So first off, all three bottles we tried today have screw cap closures. Is that the case throughout the portfolio? And is this a, obviously we know screw cap closed wines are fine for wines, and they're good, and they're more sustainable and all that. Is this still a conversation you find yourself having to educate people on? Yeah, I mean, the proper title for that conversation is called closures. We could certainly spend a week delving into the minutiae of that, and the bonuses, positive negatives, all those things about those different closures. Yeah, I spent a year in New Zealand at lincoln University studying enology and viticulture on a scholarship from Oregon State. And spending time in the Southern Hemisphere, the Aussies and the Kiwis have kind of been on the vanguard for alternative closures, which back in 99 when I was there and earlier, they've been experimenting for non-corp closures for a long time. And that experience there really informed my enthusiasm for looking at closures outside of natural corp. There's a lot of issues with natural cork. There had been lots of issues with natural cork up until, I think, the last 10 years. And the reason that the natural cork industry has kind of got their act together a fair bit is because a lot of the pressure from competition with alternative closures. For us to give you an answer about the three closures we have on these wines, this is all Stelvin Plus. So these are kind of the Kleenex brand of screw caps. So without getting too specific about it, these are the best screw caps you can buy. And frankly, I think they're one of the best closures, if not the best closure in the marketplace. Every bottle of wine, and I try to, when I do like winemakers dinners at country clubs to crowds that have big cellars with older wines, and they're sometimes a little bit apprehensive about screw caps, but I ask them if they care about wine quality. And to a person, both the wives and husbands, everybody in the room, they tend to think, yeah, I care about quality first and foremost. And I say, well, look, from my standpoint as a wine grower and a winemaker, I spend a year in the vineyard, overseeing in the farming, right? An entire year prepping to even get grapes. That's a year there. We spent another year in the cellar crafting the wines, everything from harvest to fermentation, to barrel aging, to blending. We get to bottling. Bottling is basically the culmination of two years of work for every single wine that you'll ever have, right? So for me, the last thing a winemaker does to that, the last decision that you make is the closure that you put on it. And I've been sold on the screw cap closures for a long time. The consistency from the first bottle to the last bottle is bulletproof. That's super sound. Its oxygen transfer is consistent bottle to bottle. And you can store them in any orientation that you want. I just think that there's so much to be had there from this closure for wine quality that it's really hard to argue with. It's impossible to argue with, frankly. And I really like pulling corks on wines, but I hate having cork wine that I've saved for 10 years for my family for Thanksgiving, and then had to pour it down the drain because it was compromised by the closure. You're much nicer to your family at Thanksgiving than I am. Jesse, how involved is your dad and your mom in the winemaking and just the winery now? Yeah. I mean, all that stuff's, not to say in flux, but Wendy runs all of our day-to-day hospitality operations. She's our CFO, so a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that nobody really sees or anybody wants credit for, but probably deserves credit for, payroll and HR stuff. So all those details she takes care of and does a magnificent job. My pops is kind of my consultant winemaker. I think his title is executive winemaker because he didn't want to be called senior winemaker. So for me, I think it's great because really there's not a lot of winemakers out there that has somebody that has seen the Oregon wine industry and frankly, the wine industry in the United States progress and evolve the way that he has. And also his palate, he's got 40 years of tasting wine. So he comes with wines with a really, I think a sharp and critical eye, which we all do is on our winemaking side. But for me, that's really how you cut through all the BS and you get down to how you make the very best wine, to bottle the very best wines, is having a more critical eye than anybody else would. So sometimes you're your worst critic. So sometimes my dad's our worst critic, but I really like the way that our seller operations works together. And what's nice is the winemaker, Dan, the three of us just do a tremendous job collaborating towards the end goal, which is making world-class products. Well, thank you so much for your time. Any other questions, guys? A baseball and Oregon State-related question. So Roger and I are big White Sox fans, and our top draft pick last year was Nick Madrigal, a second baseman from Oregon State. I'm pretty sure. Are you familiar with that? I am, yeah. You got thoughts on him? He seems like a slightly more capable Gordon Beckham, which doesn't exactly inspire a lot of confidence in me as a White Sox fan. Well, I don't remember what the draft pick was, but now all those Oregon State kids, man, they are ballplayers. I'll tell you that. Pat Casey's program that he built there added nothing. And I think two or three time national championships. You guys want to give away $20? Yeah, yeah, we want to give away $20. That brings us to the Q&A portion of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Our question this week comes from Brian Velbar. Se-vel-bar? Maybe I mispronounced that. It is, why is white Zinfandel called white Zinfandel when it's neither white nor Zinfandel? This was from Facebook. So, Jesse, can you help us out? Yeah, I think I made some white Zinfandel back in my formative years at Santa Barbara Winery. I don't know if I know the exact answer to this, but almost assuredly, it's based in marketing. Like all great things and all great products came out of a marketing meeting. So, yeah, it just, people wanted, they didn't know what to do with red Zinfandel, so they made it blush. Too many red Zinfandel grapes. So, what do you do? You don't change the product, you just change the name. So, I think that's basically where that came from. So, when you're making white Zinfandel, so what grape are you actually using? Yeah, so at Lange's, no, no, we don't make any more up here. Not you, but... We did make some white Zinfandel. So, you just press it early. So, I mean, almost all red varietals are the color and the tan and the structural components, but invariably the color comes from the fermentation, primary fermentation on the skin. So, if you're able to press a wine early enough, you might get a kiss of that depending on a lot of components, but generally speaking, the pulp and the juice of any given wine varietal is going to be white. White, yeah. It is Zinfandel, but it's not white. Spear, you got any interesting tidbits on the history of white Zinfandel? It was a marketing thing. Sutter Home was the first. Yeah, we've talked about it before, I think. I think, wasn't it discovered by accident? Like fermentation stopped, it was a little bit sweet, it was this nice pink color, and then it kind of caught on like wildfire and they embraced it. Ladies needed something to drink when they played Bunko? Pretty much, yeah. The only thing you can say positive about it, well, other than a lot of people like it, is that it may have done some favors for Zinfandel itself as far as not having all the old vines ripped out and replanted to something else since they found an That's a good point. And if it brought a few more people into wine who only drank commodity beer or something like that before, it's a net positive. Everybody's got to start with wine somewhere. And starting with white Zinfandel is still starting with wine. Sure. Yeah, I mean, frankly, drink what you want to drink, what makes you happy. My mom, Wendy, has a phrase, she's like, it's your palate, it's your party. And I love that quote because it's true. It's like, don't drink a wine because, yeah, like somebody gave this wine at 96 points and then, oh, I'm supposed to be tasting blackberry and graham cracker. It's like, what the? It's like, hey, look, if you get those things, cool. If it helps you think about it, cool. If it gives you some terminology, cool. But if you don't like it, don't drink it. It's really that simple. And wine's highest purpose is to bring people together and not divide people because you know something more about wine than they do. Yeah. You guys should have t-shirts that say, your pal at your party. I'm picturing as a tie-dye. We would all buy those, Jesse. We need to trademark that. Well, Brian, I hope that answers your white Zinfandel question. If it doesn't, we can't answer it. But 20 bucks come in your way either way. So thanks for writing in. Anybody else, if you have questions, anything alcohol related or Roger's favorite kind of fruits, just hit us up at Binny's Bev on social media of your choice or comments at binnys.com. And hopefully, we get to your question and you win 20 bucks. So this has been really great. I've really enjoyed these wines. So Jesse, appreciate you coming on with us today and the enlightening conversation. Thank you so much. It's great to be a part of this. I love your stores. You guys do an incredible job of having first and foremost, just a vast selection of spirits, beer, and wine. So thank you and Alicia, thanks for helping coordinate and just everybody be safe out there. Drink great wine, open a bottle, keep your spirits up. I say chins up and spirits up. So thank you very much. I appreciate it. All right. Until next week. I'm Pat. I'm Roger. I'm Alicia. I'm Chris. I'm Jesse. Keep Tasting Wine.