Welcome to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, Your Binny's Podcast. I'm Chris, and with me today, via whatever you call it, WebEx or Zoom, we've got Pat. Hey, it's Pat from the Spear's Department. And Roger. Hey Roger, from the world of beer. And we have a really special guest today. We're really happy to have him here. We've got Mr. Russell P. From, Herman Story, the winemaker, proprietor. And we're going to grill him today and find out what he's going to tell us and what he'll keep hidden from us. Welcome, Russell. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. I'm ready to get grilled. I am ready. There's nothing you can't. I'm an open book today. Full disclosure. Right on. We like it that way. So we'll dig deep here. I think we should just start with a little background here. I think you've got about 19 vintages under your belt with this label at this point. And so you're no longer the new kid on the block. That's for sure. You got a lot of experience. And you work on some other projects here and there, and you worked at a custom crush facility early on. So you've got more vintages under your belt than it even sounds like. So can you just give us a little background on how you started and where you are today? I started just mainly into food. I worked at restaurants in the back of the house, front of the house, and while I was going to college. And then I did a few internships at wineries at the last few years of my college. And I was fortunate enough to work for the family that owns B&O Cito, a pretty famous vineyard in Santa Maria. And then they opened a custom crush. And that's where I worked. And I was able to really cut my teeth there and see all the different things and all the different styles and all the different commitment. Some people were very committed in doing all the work, some people weren't. And so I got to really learn a lot there. And then in 2010, I had an opportunity to move into a winery that was another winery is vacating a winery salt that was all set up. And so I moved to Paso in 2010 and then opened my own place in 2012. And so I've been in downtown Paso, so I'm between a welding gas place and a tire shop and back up to the Highway 101. But I always have a joke that the barrels have no idea they're not in a cave in Napa. That's right. But I have one vineyard that I just obtained a few years ago. I was leasing it for a long time, but I buy my fruit from all different sources. And really of the last five years, I really honed in on the vineyards and dropping yield. And that's been the exciting part of what I've been doing lately. But it's been a fun ride. I'm 45 years old. I've started working at wineries when I was 19. I worked in Australia. So I have quite a few vintages under my belt and everyone's a different, different mother nature through, through crazy ones at us this year, of course. But yeah, even mother nature was crazy last year. She often is. It's neat that you now have a vineyard of your own too. That's in Shell Mountain Vineyard, right? In York Mountain area. You got it. Yep. It's amazing there. It's about, it's a thousand, maybe eight hundred to a thousand feet higher than the rest of Paso. And it's closer to the ocean and rocky soils. It's real cool AVA. Almost I equate it to Napa, like Mountain Napa, Spring Mountain, that kind of area. Sure. And it is definitely very cool because you've got the Templeton Gap right there. So you're drawing a lot of ocean breezes in and that high elevation and huge diurnal shifts, right? It's where the ocean air, where it's really high in humidity and it doesn't freeze as easy. And then you have this, all the valley air from Paso, and it's right at the edge of where the fog kind of creeps over, and then it retreats first too. So if you get any closer to the ocean, and you're counting yourself in with Gavirtz, Riesling, maybe some Pinot, or some kind of early ripening white, and we have a lot of cab at our place, and we don't pick until about the first week in November, even at a super low yield. So we really push the vines, but that's the only way to get stuff at the ripeness I like, which is optimal ripeness. I have to lower my yields to ridiculously low yield in order for the plant to have all the energies just pushing into a few clusters, and then I can get my sugar. Otherwise, if I hang too much crop, I never get to my sugar that I want. Right. I mean, that's a super cool climate for Cabernet, so you got to have low yields. And yeah, you got to push that hang time a long time, I would imagine. Right. My wife for Desperada, we have two acres of Sauv Blanc that used to be Grenache. And in Grenache, I get some Grenache from great sites and that really didn't fit up there. And so we have two acres of Sauv Blanc that is unbelievable. It's so, so good. Yeah, I bet that's perfect for Sauv Blanc. And honestly, yeah, not great for Grenache. You need a lot more heat for Grenache to ripen, don't you? Yeah. And the vigor was really crazy. And the vigor was so in control on the cab. The cab berries were super tiny. And the Grenache, no matter how I starved it of water, the grapes just made these big clusters for some reason. I think I just had a bad clone or something. And so I did all Bordeaux red. I had four acres. I put an acre of cab Franc, acre of Petite Bordeaux, and two acres of Sauvignon Blanc. And so it's done so well. It's just the little berries. Because the smaller the berry, the more intense the wine. And the people might laugh at tasting my wines being in a very California style. I really do think about Chateauneuf and think about the, you know, I like the Jeunesse and all the riper producers. But when I taste some of those, I want to figure it out. But I tell all my staff, you can learn a lot from a bad wine, but it's very hard to learn from a good one. I have so many questions, I don't even know where to start. Let's start by tasting the first wine. Let's drink some wine. Let's do that. So we're going with Late Bloomer. So the deal with this wine is, these are barrels you identified that needed some deep time in oak. So released late, how does that process work? We have basically the first cut, which is on the road. On the road is a wine or Grenache that comes from eight, nine different vineyards and Clones of Albans, the 362 and 136. I typically do the barrels that are the fermentations that I do a lot of whole cluster. I put into this, I use a little more Grenache Noir. I try to make this more of a Chateau Neuf kind of style. The Late Bloomer concept kind of came from the label. I was the 2010 version. I had an awkward picture of me when I was in the 7th, 8th grade. You can find it on the Internet, I'm sure. But I had a picture on my fridge and I was doing this. I always wanted to make a long-aged Grenache because it's one of the best varieties to leave and barrel. It just gets softer and better and finer. My buddy, Mike Rad, he says, hey, do Late Bloomer. I was like, damn, that's perfect. So now every year our wine club members, they send us their worst picture of that time and we put their face on the label. And so it's a fun project. And it's crazy how long these barrels, then we do sirleaves. We never take it out until the end. And so sometimes we have to, we set up a pressure washer through our filtered water. And we pressure wash the leaves because it is just so caked on to the bottom, the sediment. But we stir it. First couple of years, we'll stir these and try to get a little more volume. And fun wine to make. I really like this one. And the label is is a crack up. I still, when they're all stacked on a pad. I was going to say, I kind of as a chubby redhead who definitely wore braces, I kind of felt personally attacked by this label at first. But it's good to it's good to know that people are volunteering this. Pat, you got to submit your late bloomer picture for next week. I've got some. Hey, if you have some, I mean, you're in, you're in. Let's do this because we probably have about 10 years of this wine that we never even have to ask for submissions again. We have so many great pictures. But this one is Todd, Todd, but a female Todd, which I never heard of a female Todd until the thing. And I had even told her, hey, your husband sent this. She goes, no, I'm Todd, really Todd. So well, Todd is remarkable. I have to say, it's such a good one. It's such a good one. This long time in Barrel, you guard against oxidation, just keep things really topped up and leaving the lees in probably helps that too, right? Yeah, I think number one, I'm a topaholic. I top every two weeks. Nobody does that. Yeah, that's extreme. If you look in my barrels, not one of them, any yeast film or anything, anywhere on anything. When I opened my new place about nine years ago, that's when I said, hey, I'm going to the next level. I'm going next level on farming, going next level on the wine making. And so one of the biggest things about making, I think, fine quality wine is the maintenance. You have to stay on top of it. You have to keep everything top, everything clean. Clean job site. My winery is, you would never know where to make wine there. The concrete's perfect, everything's tidy, and all my employees are, I'll give them a shout out. They're awesome. We all are trying to make the best and have a great time doing it if you've seen all the social media and all the weird that we do at the winery. We like weird. I have to say between the label on this and the description, I was immediately captivated by your wine. I'm not the biggest wine guy, but I'm like, this is right up my alley. Yeah. Tell us about how these little story poems are written. I find them fascinating because it's completely abstract, but you can really get a sense of what the wine is about by reading it. So I find it fascinating too. Do you write those? I used to write them. I have help. We kind of all go in together now because it's way better when we're all together on them. And we kind of, the weirder, the wilder, the crazier. I have a buddy, Randy, who is kind of puts them all together at the end. We all talk about the craziness. We'll sometimes have pads of paper and write down what you taste. But I'm glad that you, you know, it's very important that we put very accurate descriptors in there. And then, we usually get those and then we boggle it all up. And it's fun, you know. And we, I have a crew, like I was talking earlier, my crew has been around for a long time. My seller guy, my main seller guy, 12 years. My assistant wine maker, 10 years. My guy that does all the labels and everything else, he's been with me eight years and Jillian's four or five. So we all kind of start to see the concept and everyone's kind of seeing the concept now. So it makes it a lot easier. We have a crazy idea email that we send, crazy ideas at hermestorywines.com, where we just, if I think of something, and the labels, the names, all that stuff, I say it's like finding love. The great names are found when you're not looking, but when you have this wine and you have a concept and you want to find a name for it and you're forced to, it's awful. It's awful. You get creative block, we call it. I love that the descriptions speak to the wine and at the same time, they kind of take the piss out of the snooty wine speak that you see on way too many wine labels. Really cool. That's where it started really. I can't see Forrest Floor in a tasting note anymore, all the other crap. It's like, gosh, why can't they break the mold? And the same thing with the labels, we try to break the mold on that and make it interesting and make something that you put on your table and it's part of the dining experience. Plain old boring white label or whatever. The beer guys have really got it and gals have really got the marketing way ahead of the wine. Yeah, especially for the next generation. Yeah, I agree. Right. Wine has this, why does it have to be boring? Why can't it be more fun, right? Yeah. I mean, the way your wines drink are, I mean, one of the main descriptors I would use would be fun. I mean, they're just so loaded with fruit and just like joyous in their approach to their venosity. I'm a taster. I don't use the lab. I just use the lab to confirm and to see if there's a problem. I say I'm a cook, not a chemist. I'm just taste the grapes and then we pick. Well, you really stay out in front of it by keeping your winery so spick and span. Much less possibility of things running wild in that environment. Do you guys use natural ferments or do you pitch yeast? I pitch. I'm already getting everything I want out of the full flavor and the grapes. I mean, there's no mystery when you taste these. I'm picking on the riper side. Sometimes I look around when I'm often at half the yield of the person next to me in the block or whatever. And then I look around and they've picked. Yeah, and you're three weeks behind them. And I'm like, I need two more weeks out here. I start second guessing myself. But if it doesn't taste good, I'll regret it, you know, in April and May when I'm trying to sell the wine. Yeah, you got to have a good tasting grape to make a good tasting wine. I mean, it all starts there. And this is a good tasting wine. Like this is an awesome wine. Yeah, what do you guys think of this? I really appreciate this. Initially, I think what caught my eye from the beginning were the ABVs on these obviously seem pretty high. I expected it to seem hotter than this. Like I- Doesn't drink that way. I don't perceive heat at all. It's really, really nice. Well, thank you. Thank you. I hate adding acid to wine. Adding acid to the wine is one of the ways that you pop alcohol. One of my big secrets is I find my acid naturally. I find it in Santa Rita Hills where it's cool climate, in Edna Valley where it's cool climate, and I can blend that acid in there and that really helps hide the alcohol. That is a big secret right there. If there's any winemakers listening here, you might have just sold the farm. I think that's a great point because with the hang time you're looking for, you really have to be sourcing from relatively cool climates to keep that acidity and particularly places with strong diurnal shifts. And that leads me to the fact that a lot of your wines carry a California appellation, which is very interesting. Wines at this price point and level of quality are often looking for the quote unquote prestige of a more focused AVA, but you are more about finding the right fruit and blending and getting a good overall product. I think it's a really interesting and counter to the most modern approaches here. It was hard doing that from the beginning. I had Central Coast as really my only other option. Yeah. Because of so many different AVA's. I did a San Luis Obispo County one once when I got some fruit from down in Edna Valley and a little bit from Paso and blended it all together. But Central Coast says, oh, it's $16.99 or $15.99 or whatever. So I just put California on there. I only get fruit from Santa Barbara County, or most of it comes from San Luis Obispo County and I get a little bit from Santa Barbara County, but just stuff I've had forever like Whitehawk and Larner. I've been in those blocks for 18 years at Larner, so. Sure. That's another like thumb in the eye of traditional approach to wine here. It was just like your labels. It's just counter to what everybody else wants to do, but it just shows that you're just striving for quality and you don't care about that. That's cool. Right. And I'm glad the wines sell because that's the only way I could really let my hair down. And you know, the more people that want to try them and want to buy them, then I can go really wild. It's crazy. So it allows us to be on the edge and do stupid stuff. Some of the ideas we have in that email, you should see. And through the COVID and all that, we've really had to step up our game on entertaining the customer and kind of keeping everybody interactive and keeping them a part of it all without having them at the winery, which I miss. I miss showing the people and seeing their eyes when they just, I even get a thrill out of it. And that's what I've been doing all my life. And I still think it's the best. Yeah, that's got to be cool because these just pop, you know, in your mouth. It's got to be quite a if you're uninitiated, it's it's quite an experience. I kind of love that you're located between the welding and discount tire place. What's it like when people visit? I mean, I think that fits right in with the, you know, that you are view askew to the pretentiousness of some of the wine game. Are people surprised when they pull up in your parking lot, as opposed to, you know, some bucolic, you know, vineyard in the middle of the mountains? Right. They they are, you know, they're surprised. But I think, you know, one winery in Paso once told me, he goes, hey, I said, oh, you know, we get a lot of tasters. And I told him, I never get any riffraff. I never get people that, I don't get bachelorette parties coming to my place and wanting to get tanked on my dime. I get people, if they find us, it's kind of worked for us because if they know where we are and they find us, then we have someone that's really interested. Yeah. You have an engaged audience. Yeah. And so the guy out on the west side, he goes, I just keep raising my prices. That gets rid of them. And I'm like, well, I wish I could do that. But it is a cool thing and we make it our own. You know, the first thing I did is we have music in every single room. Whoever's working in that room, I must have on a sonos, I have to scroll up to see all the different ones we're putting. And I thought music was very powerful to make it feel less weird, and to drown out the highway noise. We have a big kitchen there, so it's just a homey place when you come there and we've, that I think they feel the energy that everyone cares and that everyone's so excited. I have, I can't say it enough, I have the best staff in the world. And then we do have a little vineyard, right? Between the freeway and the parking lot, we call it Caltransia. And Caltrans is our DOT, California. And it's one row of Viognier, 72 vines of Viognier. And we were trying to figure out what to plant there, and I can use Viognier in a co-ferment with Saraw, and it can make an impact so we can really see our impact from our little estate vineyard. And so this year, we took Saraw, I have two acres of Saraw at Shell, at York Mountain. We brought that in and then we had the Viognier ripen so fast, we had to lay it on cookie sheets and put it in the freezer, and then bag it up. And then we dumped it into the, so we had dual estate. Nice. Caltransia and Shell in a Saraw. That's interesting because Paso does have kind of a dual identity. The west side is very beautifully bucolic, and then on the east side, especially before the subdivision of the AVA's came in, it's flatter, warmer for the most part, and you get this real egalitarian feel over there. Like Tin City is really interesting, like homey, down to earth place, which is pretty weird and unique in the wine world. So there's a lot of things going on in that little area. East side, you can get a lot. It's higher yield. You have heavier soils, you have warmer temperature, you have lots of water, and you can just water, water, water and get higher yields. And on the west side, the soils just can't push that much crop, so it kind of forces everybody to make decent wine, I think. And then if you go to the next level on farming, you can really, really, it's a great spot for making fine wine, because we just have perfect climate. We're not getting the rain that we get up in north. In Monterey North gets a lot more rain than we do, so we don't have rain to deal with. And then we have the diurnal shift, exactly that change in temperature. Our grapes don't ripen after 6, 7 o'clock because it cools down so fast, so they rest and it draws it out like I always say, the best vintages are like braising meat, just low and slow to get there. And anytime you have these heat spikes, you have to deal with that. On the west side, you also have the really cool soil, the chalky limestone, old seabed soils, which are pretty special, I think. Best thing about them is they hold acidity. Right. You get the grapes, they're higher acid, and even if you do get them ripe, really ripe, as ripe as I like, you still have lots of acidity, and that's like I make a wine, a milk and honey and the tempranillo, where I only get it from Peachy Canyon because it's just chalk there, and I can get it the level of brightness I want. And it often, tempranillo is a battle to try to keep acidity in that one. I was going to ask real quick before we move on. You mentioned you had a kitchen. What would you pair with this first selection? I'm always big on food and wine pairing. You know, tonight I'm making a pork mille n'aise with little roasted potatoes and an arugula salad. It's weird that I love to cook so much and I love making wine and I love flavor and everything. And I'm absolutely ridiculously horrible at pairings. I just am not very good at it. I say, I'll have a filet mignon with a white berg and people would laugh. But if that's what I want to do. That could work. Come on. Right. If I'm into that that day, that's what I do. Sure. Why not? Yeah, I mean, your wines have some serious firepower. So I would imagine a lot of grilled beef. You know, do you do the classic of the region, the tri-tip and the Santa Maria beans, stuff like that? Yeah. Try, you know, tri-tip. You don't dig it? Tri-tip. I mean, I do. I have to. I mean, I have to. You're obligated to. I'm obligated to like tri-tip. But I'm a ribeye guy, New York guy. Sure. You know, that is a great steak. I mean, you can't can't go wrong with a ribeye. Lots of lots of marbling, lots of fat. It's the best steak. It's the best cut of steak. Right. Can we move on to the next one? Yeah. So, casual, you want to talk casual or counter? We'll have a casual. Yeah, let's do it. I love this label, too. Every year, always the honeybee and the flower, but different. It's always such a great close-up shot, though. I love it. Awesome, thank you, thank you. Yeah, we have a couple beekeepers that we know that submit us photos and stuff like that, and send us, like, one year we had bees were attacking a wasp that was trying to get in the hive. We always have these pictures, and it's somewhat of an innuendo of the old Tinder, Craigslist used to be casual encounter, you know, that's when you would go on. Right. Back, you know, that was all we had back in the day, you know, now when they got everything. But the correlation is that it's all co-fermented. Right. When I have more Vedra from Luna Mata and like Peachy Canyon, I'm blending it with Sirah and Gurnash from somewhere that was never intended, that never knew they were going to meet. And so the casual encounter happens. And the way we can do this is we often have these waves of grapes where we have a heat spike. And after the heat spike, we pick a bunch or before we try to pick stuff that won't make it through the heat spike. So we often have, and I get 20 different vineyards I'm getting fruit from, from all these places. And again, if I can integrate the acid or and get all everything integrated in my profile or my intended profile in my mind of what the wine should taste like, if I can get that integrated fast and the co-fermentation, then I think the wine tastes better quicker later on. And then I often use the analogy of braising meat. When you braise meat, you put the carrots and the onions in there, and the carrot comes out, tastes and still like a carrot, but it's a beef-flavored carrot, and the sweetness of the carrot went into the meat. And the cooking is the fermentation. And then the other thrilling part of the casual encounter, you can't go back. I can't go in and say, oh, I want to take the more Vedra component out of there and bottle it separate. No, too late, you blended it. And it's all done right as grapes. So I spend so much time getting the grapes to the picking day. And then I spend so little time sometimes figuring out what the destiny, and it just like boom on the cuff. You can't sit because we need to get the grapes processed, or we need to get them cold, we need to get them into the fermentation, into the tanks and start the process. So that's another part that starts with the maintenance and the quality is making sure that whole process goes very well. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you contrast your approach to like something that happens in Champagne where you've got a panel of people just like tasting a million different VanClairs and trying to figure out what the blend is. Sometimes that intuitive approach that just gut feeling really serves you well. And you do have a really high percentage of Mveedra in here, and I think it shows, but everything's really integrated together like you say. You get that really deep Mveedra approach, and then maybe a little top note from that little skosh of Carignan. Right. Yeah. The Carignan, we have one acre of Carignan, and we get about a bin, two bins. And one year we did ferment the Carignan by itself, and I wanted to name it Carignan, My Wayward Son. So there's one of those crazy label names. I just can't find, there's not enough planted Carignan out there to do something like that, and I hope no one steals that label. I really wish you would make that wine. I'm going to someday, but I'll find Carignan somewhere, like some old buying Carignan in Mendocino or something. Yeah. You had asked earlier about yeast. I use the Power Yeast, this Uvafirm 43. It was extracted from an alcohol of 18 plus. So I know it's got enough, and like I was saying, I get all the fruit and all that from the grapes. Yeah. You've got to have a yeast that's willing to ferment at high alcohol. So obviously a good choice. Yeah. And again, the pinot files out there, they'll say, oh, pinot is so hard to make. You're picking at 23 bricks. I'm picking at 27 bricks. It's very hard to get the level of sugar I have dry. And if you don't do it perfect and watch every step, it can fail pretty quick. So many pinot producers also use natural ferments. And I would imagine it would be easy to get a stuck fermentation with such, you know, relying on natural yeast instead of a strain that that's going to handle that high alcohol. What's the highest ABV that you've hit? Honestly, or just what we've bottled? No, I'm teasing. Yeah, let me know the mistakes, too. I don't even test the alcohol until I am finished with the blend because I don't want in my head knowing that something's right. I mean, I know what sugar I picked and I know what we did to the wines and some have higher alcohol, some have lower or whatever, but I don't even want to know because I don't really care, tell you the truth. Like I have to hide it. That's the key is hide that alcohol and get it integrated and get it. And so if it does, if I taste the wine hot, we go back to the drawing board. We got to fix that. So but the highest one to get to your question, 19.1. I did a Rosé 19.1. I think I said it was... What a Rosé. That's ridiculous. It's called After Hours. And I'm not f***ing you. I had a customer say that she tried a little bit, she forgot it in the freezer and it never froze. Nice. Your vodka and your after hours in the freezer. And the thing I would say about it is, again, with the casual encounters, the alcohol is so well integrated and so... How strong is this? Because it doesn't show it. 15.7, 15.6. Wow. I mean, big. The reason the Rosé is higher is because we will drain off Grenache, we'll put it into the barrel and then with all our other fermentations, I use cotton bedsheets. I know it sounds great. I use cotton bedsheets over all my fermentations. And sometimes you'll take them off and it will ring out of water and alcohol. And so I can collect a lot of it. And it was a thing I learned from Lane Tanner. She didn't want higher alcohol in her Pinot Noir, so I put cotton and it's a twin fitted sheet. And it's really the FBI calls when you order 50 twin fitted sheets for a little bed with no top or nothing. But yeah, right. What's the thread count on those? I hope it's like fine Egyptian cotton. The better absorption, the higher the thread count, the better absorption. And so we'll just take the sheet off and put a new one. And so on the barrels, it hits the roof of the barrel, drips back down, hits the roof of the barrel, drips back down. You've got a controlled high fermentation in there, and then nothing's gassing off. Even, I mean, we're at gassing off the CO2 and the alcohol. And I know this because I've used hard tops or hard plastic, and you could drain it out and get a cup of, just basically tastes like watered down Everclear. And so anything I can do to reduce the alcohol, I know they're high, but sometimes, but again, hiding it. And then I use dry air in my cellar. I don't humidify either. So, but I'm just doing that to concentrate more, not to, I don't, the alcohol is, is, is what it is. So, so you're, you're doing a Sanye on some of these red wines. Is it already massive red wines and concentrating them more? I am. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything. You're a mad man. As much as they'll give me sometimes, because after the processing, we're getting about 20 percent of the juice is coming out of the skin, out of the berries from breaking up from, from just going through the de-stemming. And then I usually, I'll take about 20 percent out of the juice out. You guys have any notes on casual encounters? It's pretty good, huh? Yeah. This is another real banger of a wine. I probably like Late Bloomer a bit more. I think that's more toward my taste where, you know, my, my wine taste is limited, but I do really like Rhone and Chateauneuf de Pop style stuff. And I think the first one we tried was a little closer to that for me. But this was a really nice wine though. I liked it. It felt a bit drier than the first one. I don't know. Maybe I'm just fooling myself into thinking that. Well, there's certainly some tannins there, but they are very fine, aren't they? Yeah, we get that from a little bit of the whole cluster. We do a little bit of whole cluster on this one. Then the Morvedra. Morvedra from Paso is like dynamite. I wish I can't find anymore. Like carrying on, nobody wants to plant these. Sometimes it's hard to get vineyards to plant obscure varieties, because if you're out of the game, they don't have a new buyer. So you got to convince them on that stuff. Was there more oak in casual encounters? There was way more oak in casual encounters. That's what I was going to say. That's about 85 percent new French oak for two years. Wow. Where the late bloomer, if we add too much oak, the oak turns too candied. So I try to lay off the oak on the late bloomer, and I use some larger formats or thicker oak barrels for the late bloomer to keep freshness. But on the rest of the wines, there is a lot more oak on them. Can we talk a little bit about the Cooperage you use? Using mostly French oak, any American? Yeah. I only use French, and I always say that all the barrels I'm getting are not in a catalog. You have to know the salesperson or wine and dine. Wine and dine somebody that you're buying from. It's a weird thing. Most of the time, it's the reverse. Yeah, that is weird. I have great relationships with my barrel reps. I have a Herman Story toast atelier that's basically super charred. I like dark heavy toast. That's my thing. They always try to push one light toast or medium toast. Medium plus, I get a few of those. But at the end of the day, I do heavy toast because I'm already getting so much fruit from the grapes and the big fruit and everything else I want. Why not match it up with some big heavy toast barrel? The darker, the better. But a lot of barrel companies don't want to go too heavy because you start to blister and you expose new wood. It takes forever to get that heavy toast. I mean, it could take hours on the fire. It's a very slow toast. You're not approaching the kind of charring that you'd get in a bourbon barrel, are you? You're just a really heavy toast. Yeah, not that dark, not where there's so much of the sugar is coming out of the oak. Right. Where the heavy toast, I'm getting a little bit of sweetness from that barrel. Again, none of my wines are filtered, so I can't leave sugar in them or I'll have a problem later on, so we get them dry come hell or high water. And again, the maintenance is the key to that. If we keep everything topped, that environment in that barrel is sound and just keeps doing what we want it to do. And sometimes we don't have stuff finished till like 2020 wines, we still have some ticking along. And as long as they're active and throwing gas, we don't really worry about it. Sometimes we'll take them out on a warm day, kind of get them going. But that's a good slow ferment. You must that must be where some of that complexity is coming in, some of these wines. Yeah, and those are the ones that give me heartburn, too, because if I can't get them dry, I'm screwed. They always do. It just takes time. Patience in the wine business. You got to have patience. You're just sitting, watching the stuff sit in a barrel. And two years later, you're going to bottle. It's kind of, can't do it too fast. I was going to say, I think I'm usually, Chris can attest that I'm not huge on wines that express without a big tannic character. But I love that casual encounter. I guess maybe it's that it's so well matched. So well matched with the fruitiness and big flavor. That the balance to me was fantastic. Thank you. You guys are going to make me blush. And you can't see it on the radio, I guess. Mouthfeel is a very big focus on the wines, too. And that is how they just glide on the mouth. They're soft. The tannins aren't too aggressive. And they just kind of linger on without being aggressive. And we do that by just tasting. I skipped ahead, and what's the FTC stand for there, Chris? First time caller. First time caller, sorry, I got little samples here. This wine is awesome. I did not, this is a... I didn't expect you to like it, to tell you the truth, because it's so far away from what you told us you like. I'm glad that you like this. I don't know, this is, it's such a rich berry aroma, it just keeps drawing me back in. I really, I can't stop smelling this one. I don't even want to taste it, I just want to smell it for another hour or two. Want to taste that one? Is that what we're up? Yeah. This is a 100 percent Petite Syrah, which is notorious for its massive berry fruit and tannic structure. This is the only wine we're tasting today that has a smaller AVA. This is Paso Robles Highlands District? Yes. There's two vineyards in this district, and one is Shell Creek and one is French Camp, and it's from both of those vineyards. And so this is my East side wine. And so it's way East side, kind of past all that loamy soil. We start to get out into the mountain areas where it gets rocky. But the problem is, it's super hot. Well, it's not a problem for Petite Syrah. You need lots of heat to get Petite Syrah ripe. And so the Millers, who own Biennacito, actually own French Camp Vineyards as well out there. And about five years ago, they had this little block at Petite Syrah where they wanted to use the same practices they use at Biennacito on steroids, really. Back then, they were they split the wires, they do shade cloth on each side, and they tie all the shoots about six, twelve inches apart. And each cluster just hangs and is shaded because the sun gets so hot. We put shade on each side, and then we just start. We just give it just enough water to keep it going. And that's the French camp part. And then at Shell Creek, I have these old vines. They just can't give that much. So we naturally get low yields in old vines. The vines have character. And, you know, young vines have youth to them. There's no doubt about it. And old vines have this character that is just really awesome. And then the big secret here, because we have full disclosure, and I'm telling you all my secrets. So we ferment one of these lots with Viognier skins that we get from Tomboy. So I make a Viognier called Tomboy. It's 100% Viognier and it's all done in New Oak. And then we take the skins and we run them through the destemmer after we press and we layer one of the fermentations with the skins. And then we get free tannin from the skins and we there's still the floral Viognier. So if you dig down deep in there, you can kind of smell that white flour, kind of Hawaiian kind of smell in there from that Viognier, adding this really cool line. And the Petite Syrah is already jammy and brambly, so it really matches well and kind of makes the wine real pretty. And this one is probably my most user-friendly wine that I make. It's easy drinking and just pleasurable. Like that's it. So that's funny because historically, you wouldn't always expect Petite Syrah to have the user-friendly moniker because tannin management is so important with it. But yeah, I think you're right. And I think it's pretty interesting that this is an East side wine. Like you said, you're going past the flatlands and you're gaining elevation again. Getting back to huge diurnal shifts here too, but the soil type is completely different from the West side, right? I see alluvial push out there where the shells are almost intact and you're 40 miles inland. And it could get down to the single digits out there, which is crazy. It just has this little valley out there. And then the reason they planted out there is because they have a huge water supply actually under the ground. The water is only, is not very deep. That's what they do mostly of the grapes out there produced for high, for big volume. And so this little tiny mountain top, it's, this is the craziest place. And when I go out, but it's thrillingly majestic. There's nothing around, but in the summertime or when we're about to pick the only little green patch on all this ground that you can see for miles is this vineyard. And so it has a special place in my heart in this place. So, and then Shell Creeks planted in the 70s. And so I get this really high, high part that's just, you would think the vines weren't alive anymore, but they produce really good grapes. So if you say diurnal shift one more time, Chris, I'm going to have Jim Eddett and Peewee Herman yelling because it'll be the word of the podcast. All right. I promise never to say it again. But it's such an important factor in a lot of these wines, because this wine is massive, but you got to have that for that acidity to balance things. And again, this is nothing if not balanced. It's a huge wine. It's lush and full, just packed with fruit. It carries everything so well. I agree. I think the Bramble character you were mentioning is just off the charts. Yes, totally. Yeah, it's like a mixed berry pie. This is definitely a ribeye wine, I would say. I mean, this has the structure and the power that just slice right through the richness of a ribeye for sure. Right, or by itself. Why not? Yeah, it's delicious on its own. That's for sure. I think that's one thing that these wines stand out for is that they are balanced and delicious in the absence of food. I'd like to point out that the last vintage of this wine has a public payphone and a newspaper machine, which several 21-year-olds would probably have no idea what the hell they're looking at. What are these things? Yeah. When we look at some of these ones, the next one is a good one too. There is a website, I'm not joking, that you can go nearest phone booth and it'll tell you where they are. Oh, man. Few and far between. Yeah, I think there's one year where the cord is missing on one of the vintages and the phone has no cord. I don't know what's the next one or when we did pass, but to get to the name, first time caller, I've always made a little bit of Petite Seurat and I kind of blended away here and there. And so I've been a long time listener at Petite Seurat and when I did a single bottling, I made it first time caller. Long time listener is in our idea part portfolio. I don't really know what I would use that for, but I'll find something that will be fun. First time caller, long time drinker. Yeah, right. Bullcutter's the last one, right, Chris? Yep. This one, I wanted to make a big steak wine. I mean, all the wines are pretty big steak wines, but I enjoy Napa wines. Sometimes they're just a little too manipulated, if you will, like stuff, you get rightness, and you don't have alcohol, something's happened. They're technology, technology, let's just break right to it. Technology gets a hold of some wineries, and I just don't like that. I can taste it a mile away when stuff's been manipulated. These wines, I'll tell you, are pure. I'm not stripping. Like I said, I don't care. The alcohol is a byproduct of flavor. And it's the one thing that I can't control unless I bring technology into the room. And I just don't do that. I'd rather have the high alcohol and not strip the wine of any kind, or put it through some process or anything. And so the purity is very important to the wine making in all our wines. So, but I digress. The wines that I really like in Napa, some of these older older producers that aren't doing any of that, and they're getting it ripe like this, there's only a few of them, and you're paying big money for them. I wanted to kind of make my own rendition of the Paso style one. And, you know, I like Laventure wines. Those are those are good wines and, you know, certain wines of Paso. And why not? Why not jump on the cab bandwagon? And so I started 2010 making this wine, and it's really taken took me three or four years to get the right fruit sources. I just can't stop on a dime and say, Oh, I want to make this or that if I can't find the fruit source and the vineyard management and the them wanting to do it the way I want to do it and have control and all that. It's tough. You can't just start making stuff. So it takes a while to build the blends up. And now I've kind of got my vineyard sources dialed and occasionally I'll add one. But I always tell myself if I add one, one's got to go. And so I'm pretty happy with all of them I have now. So the offers, it's really tough. It's like, you know, somebody's saying this three acres of Grenache clinging at the side of the mountain overlooking Big Sur. And it's the sugar you want it. And I have to say, no, it's tough. Well, one thing I think that makes this wine really interesting is the incredibly high proportion of Petite Verdot, which is usually a bit player in a lot of wines. So it's a very late ripener, but where are you sourcing that from? I don't imagine you have a problem getting Petite Verdot ripe in your general area. Yeah, it's all the Petite Verdot from here is in Paso. I get some from Pichicant, from, whereas I get a Rolf. I get White Cliffs. This is a vineyard that's in the real limestone soil, and I can get it the sugar I want and the acid is really good. And you can almost taste the chalkiness in it. And I think Petite Verdot and Morevedra and Syrah might be the three best varieties to grow in Paso. I would add Grenache, but Grenache grows great a lot of places. And to go to the next level, I think Petite Verdot of the Cab's great. Sometimes Cab can get a little too earthy or too tannic. But Petite Verdot is the saving grace. In the next vintage of Bolt Cutter, I have even more Petite Verdot because I did a planting deal. I grafted over some old vine, Syrah or something to Petite Verdot at Rolf. And that's finally come on. And I've gotten a few more Petite Verdot sources, but I love the variety. It's right in the wheelhouse of my consumer. It's big, round, rich, dark. So why not give them what they want? Yeah, I think it's really cool. I mean, you definitely get a kind of a chalky minerality from this wine. And for being so deep and Petite Verdot lends a lot of color to wine, I think you still get that high toned violet-like note in the nose, which is really neat with such a big wine to have a floral element there, too. Do you find that to be true? I would say that definitely is true. And when you're saying that, that violet-y thing is coming from the Petite Verdot. Yeah, exactly. The Caban Passo, it can get raisiny. I can't deal with raisiny, and that's really hard to say because I'm making ripe wines. When we get grapes and they're all raisined up, it's just, I don't know what to do with it. And so what we do with it is we hide it with some Petite Verdot. And blend it in and try to hide it and not make it stand out. And so that's why I'm moving more to Petite Verdot, hedge my bets. I have to say from a casual observer here, lending just the non-deep wine appreciation notes, I really enjoy looking at this wine. It's beautiful. The violet highlights. Once Chris said violet on the nose as well, I'm a huge creme de vealette fan. I make tons of aviation, so I'm pretty familiar with that violet aromatic. I mean, that definitely is on here, but it also has such a beautiful violet around the edges there. Beautiful wine to look at and to taste, but it's a big wine. When you said this is a steak wine, like boy, is it ever. I want a steak right now. We have a lot of New Oak on this too. This is 80, 90 percent. When we go through all the barrels, we line out 50 barrels. We often start with the New Oak barrels because we know they have a higher chance of going in. We can't waste the oak and we put all our best stuff in New Oak. People go, well, why don't you use all New Oak? I said, well, that's a good question. I started, well, other than the find, the cost of it, that's pretty much been the handcuff on that for the first 15 years, and now the bank will let me lease barrels. It's a new thing that they do. Instead of a flavor additive, it's actually a holding vessel, so you can do a four-year lease, which makes you want to get more, you know, get a Cadillac at $199 a month. Yeah, you can only drive it around the block three times. Yeah. Well, certainly the vast majority of wines cannot handle this much New Oak, but I mean, you get such concentration. I mean, it kind of begs for that treatment, you know? Yeah, we taste good. That's all I know. All these wines are tasting. And I'm actually, I'm up in the mountains, up outside of Fresno, up in the mountains with my wife and a friend of mine, my banker. It's his birthday. And so the wines I had in the garage and they were at perfect temp while I'm tasting them. And that's another thing that I suggest. All these wines, you've got to drink them a little cool and they'll be a lot more enjoyable and decant them. All my wines, decant them because they're best three to five years, but if you decant, you can advance that and it'll taste a lot better. And not a baby decant, like a rough decant, beat it up. Sure. I mean, these wines taste amazing now, but they've got all the power to age for a few years for sure. And a little oxygen introduced, and it sounds like you work pretty reductively, but there is by no means any reductive notes in your wine. But yeah, a little air is not a bad thing. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you one of my other secrets. I do a lot of pumping over at the beginning, dissolving a lot of oxygen and different things into the juice, and let that be the food, instead of adding all the things that the lab sells you to try to get fermentation to complete. I'm a big air guy. Air, oxygen is a food for the yeast, and if you can just really get it in there. And I think all that time of air and oxidizing at the beginning adds a little bit to the mouth feel. And so there you go. And I should zip my lips now. Obviously, we could ask you nerdy questions about these awesome wines all night long, but as it stands, producer Jim is going to be mad that he has to edit such a long podcast. Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Jim. He can handle it. Sorry, Jim. It was a good time. We had a great questions. Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, we really appreciate you coming on. It was great. Very insightful. And we love selling your wines at Binny's, so thanks a lot. I appreciate it. Yeah, listeners, if you haven't tried these yet, these are worth the price of admission. This is an easy $50 bottle of wine. Very impressive. Bring it to your next dinner with your family. It's awesome. Oh, thank you. Thank you. All right. Well, thanks for listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We do appreciate you listening. If you like this kind of beverage alcohol esoterica, please do us a favor, leave us a review on the podcast app of your choice. Until next week, I'm Pat. I'm Roger. I'm Chris. I'm Russell. Keep tasting.