the Pavle Milić show
Pavle Milic has spent 40+ years in the hospitality business — co-founding FnB restaurant in Scottsdale, building Los Milics Vineyards across three Arizona tasting rooms, and writing about wine for Phoenix Magazine for the past decade. Now he's pulling up a chair with people from well outside his own world and seeing where the conversation goes.
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the Pavle Milić show
017: Andrew Wright of Jessup Cellars and Lindo Wines
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We’re thrilled to have Andrew Wright, the brilliant head winemaker at Jessup Cellars, share his fascinating journey from the vineyards of Arizona to the wine scene of Napa. His story is not just about making wine; it’s about embracing his roots and blending innovation with tradition, inspired by mentors like Michel Rolland and Bob Levy.
Our conversation also captures the essence of wine exploration through Andrew’s spontaneous road trip to the Finger Lakes and his transformative experiences in Tucson and Chicago. His narrative is enriched by friendships with influential figures like Kent Callaghan and Simone Fleury, culminating in memorable adventures and a deep appreciation for European wines. Together, we celebrate the joy of wine discovery and the community that thrives within it, highlighting the blend of academic knowledge and practical experience that fuels this passion.
In this episode, you will hear:
- Andrew Wright's journey from Arizona's wine scene to becoming head winemaker at Jessup Cellars in Napa.
- Andrew's blend of innovation and tradition.
- Spontaneous road trips and experiences that shaped Andrew's passion for wine, including the Finger Lakes and Chicago's wine community.
- The balance between personal ventures, like launching a bookstore wine label, and professional growth in Napa Valley.
- Emphasis on creating wines with personality, freshness, and a commitment to lifelong learning and exploration.
Resources from this Episode
https://jessupcellars.com/winemaker/
https://www.callaghanvineyards.com
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Episode Credits
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Emerald City Productions. They helped me grow and produce the podcast you are listening to right now. Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com Let them know we sent you.
Welcome to Wine World, the podcast that takes you from vineyard to glass. Each episode, your host Puffly Village, Winemaker, Restaurantur, and Column explores wine grape growing, winemaking, and wine and food pairings, focusing on Arizona and beyond. Join us as we visit vineyards, chat with restauranteurs, and meet the pioneers behind tough wineries. Whether you're a wine enthusiast or curious about starting your own winery, Wineworld offers the perfect blend of education and entertainment. Pour yourself a glass and tune in to discover the stories behind the bottle.
SPEAKER_02Hello everybody and welcome back. Today, we're diving into a story of passion, curiosity, and the pursuit of lifelong learning in the world of wine. Let's start in January 2025 when the Arizona Wine Growers Association hosted its old members' meeting. It was a packed agenda covering the latest updates on Arizona's wine industry. Among the guest speakers was Calvin Arnold, National Sales Director for Kaduce Cellars in Merckin Vineyards, who shed light on national distribution and building relationships with wholesalers. We also heard from viticulturist and Yavapai extension director, Matt Helderson, who explores soil health and erosion prevention through the use of cover crops. I was also keenly interested in the blending philosophy chat by Andrew Wright. Now, if you haven't heard of Andrew, let me paint a picture. He's the head winemaker at Jessup Cellars in Napa, Yonville, to be exact. When he's not crafting wines, he and his wife run Wild Plume Books, an independent bookstore in St. Helena, because why not? But here's where it gets really interesting. Before Andrew made the leap to Napa in 2012, before he worked the vineyards and cellars of Harlan and Bond Estates, blending alongside legendary figures like Michelle Roland and Bob Levy, before his time at Maryville Vineyards as winemaker working with Philippe Melka, his story started right here in Arizona. Andrew cut his teeth in the vineyards of Ken Calligan. In the cellar, he worked alongside Arizona winemaking pioneers like Michael Pierce and Tim White at Arizona Stronghold. His early years in the high desert terroir of Arizona still influenced his winemaking in Napa, where he brings an exploratory and experimental approach to a region steeped in tradition. It all started with a faithful trip to the Finger Lakes, which completely changed the trajectory of his life. So in this episode, you'll hear about how Andrew's Arizona roots continue to shape his philosophy in one of the most iconic wine regions in the world. It's a story about following your curiosity, taking chances, and never look inside of that hunger to learn. So grab a glass of something good, sit back and enjoy the conversation. I know I did. Andrew, I'm being asked to talk to you about Simon Fourry, a trunk full of wine, and a flat tire. About will that set the tone for this conversation, sir?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a pretty good starter, I think. Yeah, so Simone is a good friend of mine. We were interns at Harlan together back in 2012. He became the head winemaker of Maryvelle in 2013. When I was still in the Harlan organization, he's obviously a French guy, Simon Forey. He comes from the Flory family of the Rhone. So if you guys are familiar with Domain Flory, is that the Kermit Lynch? That's the Kermit Lynch. That's his uncle and his cousin.
SPEAKER_02But they're very affordable wines, by the way.
SPEAKER_01They're affordable, they're great. They make a killer co roti, Saint-Joseph. Like their wines are banging for sure. But no one is really sure why he left France and came to America. Though the rumor is he got kicked out, but Okay. We're not sure for what I give him a hard time. But anyway, he was one of those kind of guys where he had all the classic European winemaking education background. So he had gone to the University of Bordeaux, the University of Turin, places like that. He'd work in some pretty high-end places out there. Anyway, we became fast friends at at Harlan, mainly because I had the opposite experience growing up. My degree from U of A is in history, and I am completely self-taught or Kent Calaghan educated in terms of winemaking. So but also coming from Arizona, it's not too bad. But coming from Arizona, you know, I was a bit of an outsider in Napa when we met, and so we just became fast friends. And so I ended up inviting him out to uh Arizona for Thanksgiving one year. There was a Kent invited us down to his tasting room. And so, you know, we started off at Todd's place, at Dos Cabezas, and had a good time. And then we went down to Kent's and, you know, Kent was popping some really serious roans for us too, because you know, he had a roan guy in there. We had a good time, nothing too crazy, but we were coming back, you know, driving back to Tucson, and then I had borrowed my mom's car and the tire blew out, taking the curve down around into Senoida from Kent's place. Okay, so on upper on Elgin Road? Yeah, exactly. Okay. So that curve down there, I took it, it was just the tire blew out, the sidewall blew out of my uh of the car. So we ended up in the field there. So everything was fine or whatever. We're just in the field.
SPEAKER_02You mean the car went up the road?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it went off the road because it didn't have a tire anymore. And so we're ending up in the field there, and you know, Border Patrol comes and picks us up and gives us a ride into town. Thankfully, we had all the the bottles of wine were in the trunk. Which bottles specifically? The ones that were drunk or well, we weren't really drinking, it was just more of a tasting. So we had some telegraph back there, we had some other pretty hard-hitting stuff, we had some four-e back there, we had some McKenzie stuff as well. But yeah, it was pretty funny. The Border Patrol rolled up on us in the middle of a field trying to change this tire. They were kind enough to give us a ride into town. We had to go back the next morning and change it out. It was very much like one of those classic on the border of Arizona U-turn kind of stories like Oliver Stone. And so I think I scarred this Frenchman for life, but he is now like a French cowboy. He loves it.
SPEAKER_02We need to get him back out here. Andrew, let's start from the top, my kind, sir. Obviously, are you from Arizona your whole life?
SPEAKER_01I mean, since you've since born? I was born in Iowa, and I come from uh a family in Iowa where one side was, you know, a lot of agrarian stuff, so farmland, hunting, things like that. So I think I've always kind of had that connection. When I was growing up, I would always go back and spend my summers out there and you know helping my grandma on the garden and helping my other grandfather. He bought a farm once he retired and planting potatoes and things like that. So I think it's somehow, you know, the connection with the dirt in your hands and working for a living has always kind of been my DNA. We moved out to Arizona when I was five years old. My parents still live in our original house there, Gilbert. So Gilbert and Lindsay, so not too far from Garage East out there.
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I went to high school at Highland High School. Didn't know anything about wine. You know, I was a pretty good kid, you know, raised Catholics. Are your parents wine drinkers? Not really, no. My dad, you know, Irish Catholic family, he was a big beer guy. And my mom, you know, really adopted Arizona as a margarita drinker. Okay. So wine was never really a big thing in my life. I kind of got into wine in college. I went down to Tucson, I did my undergrad at U of A. And oh man, it's like I look back on that with such like remorse. I was that guy in college who discovered Yellowtail Shiraz and would drink it out of the bottle at house parties like I was like some sort of poet.
SPEAKER_02Well, it's really embarrassing. There's nothing wrong with yellowtail, man. I remember when my dad was alive, and you know, we really we didn't have much of a what you would call a wine budget. My favorite memories, you know, he used to make like, you know, inexpensive cuts of grilled steak with Serbian beans with paprika and roasted rebel peppers, but our go-to wine was floor-stacked, tapeway, pepper woodgrow, pinot noir. And back in that day, I think it was like $4.99 a bottle. Yeah. I haven't revisited, but I still have very fond memories of that cheap wine. So back to your poet days.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so that was my college experience. And then after college, I took a road trip around the United States. I was up in uh Ithaca, New York, because my college roommate lived in Ithaca, it was from Ithaca. So I went out to visit him. And I was going to go visit some of the gorges in the state park up the road from Ithaca, but it they all had like $5 parking. And I didn't have $5, or I didn't have $5 I wanted to spend on parking. You know, my idea was to just drive further up the road, park, and then hike back into the park. You know, got a quarter mile up the road, and it was like free wine tasting signs. And I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool too. I didn't realize that I was in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Well, and I had never heard of the Finger Lakes region. So that was kind of my Eureka moment, so to speak, and really loved it. I, you know, drinking these like amazing kind of Finger Lakes Rieslings and some Cabernet Franc and kind of fell in love with that vibe. And so I made a point driving back to Arizona. Every state that I drove through, I went and visited the local wine region in that state. So Virginia, North Carolina, stuff like that, all the way through, New Mexico. I don't think I hit Texas, but anyway. Got back to Tucson and uh picked up a copy of the Wine Bible by Karen McNeil and read it cover to cover. And then at the end of each chapter, she recommends kind of the benchmark wines of those regions. You know, and I couldn't afford all of them, but I would go up to AJ's back when uh Kevin Anderson was there. Shout out to Kevin Anderson, who's a Tucson legend. Okay, and he would special order me some bottles. And so I was self-taught about wine by reading the wine bible and then drinking all the wines that were in the Bible that I could afford. And then from there on, just kind of reading different regional books and drinking wines there. Got kind of immersed in the Tucson wine scene. Tell me the time with the end of the 2000s here. This is 2004 through 2006. Okay. Befriended Kent, I think, because we're both kind of passionately surly people. I guess we'd be awake for that.
SPEAKER_02I normally say if you don't know Kent, at at face value, he seems a bit deadpan and with like kind of a sardonic sense of humor. But then you ask Kent Calligan a question about wine, and he's like a lost person when found. He'd like he'll tell you the story with excruciating detail. He has an amazing encyclopedic knowledge of wine from all over the world. I always joke and say that you know he's pretty well drunk in that regard.
SPEAKER_01Means more than one thing. But yeah, him and I hit it off really well. Like we're very similar people, and we had a good connection. And so I would taste with him. I would, you know, had a tasting group going with the people from AJ's and some of the people from Rum Runner down there. I also befriended a lot of the guys at Plaza Liquors there in Tucson as well. And then every time I would come up to Phoenix and see, you know, hang out with my parents, I would go to Casmirus. Is that was that what it was called? Back then.
SPEAKER_02That was also another Peter Kaspersky restaurant, the Casimir's World Wine Bar. Same wine list. So yeah, and that was right down by Cowboy Chow, if I recall. Right on Stetson and Sixth Avenue.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_02In Old Town Scottsdale.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and that was like such a cool vibe, too, a different vibe than the Tucson wine scene vibe, right? Because that was all about like more like a jazz kind of club, more like an underground scene. Really kind of cool. And in 2006, I moved to Chicago. I got a job working for a subsidiary of Great Lakes Distribution out there. So working in their some of their web stuff and some of their wine education for some of their salespeople. And totally dumb luck. This is 2006 to 2009. I was in Chicago and I befriended and was invited into the tasting group of the Psalms from Alinea, Trotters, and Blackbird back when it was still around, and the pump room. And we just got along really well. I don't know, it was a random thing.
SPEAKER_02And they probably have some really nice freaking wine at their disposal.
SPEAKER_01Oh my God, it was amazing, man. And everybody in that group was, you know, either an advanced Psalm or setting for their MS or, you know, even their master their MWs. And so it was pretty, it was such an education. And every week we would meet and it would be all blind and you'd have 30 bottles off on the table, but it was all region specific, right? So it was like this week we're doing Rieslings, you know, or I guess varietal specific. We're doing Rieslings, we're doing Pinot's. And so that was just like such an accelerant in my own palate, you know, tasting all of these wines from, you know, like pretty run-of-the-mill to like Grand Cru, Echizo level style stuff, which really informed my palate. And I think is it kind of sent me in the direction of being a more European-centric wine drinker. I really I think it's really hard to taste domestic wine with European wine a lot of times, especially stuff from California, is so can be so overpowering, and especially in the mid-2000s when the style was go big, get those hundred points. But I always found that I lost the subtlety. I, you know, you couldn't one, just consume as much. It uh was a little bit overwhelming to the palate and just was less interesting to me. I've always gravitated more towards wines that had freshness and tension in those wines. You know, you go over to Italy or Spain and you finish a bottle and then you want another bottle, you know, and it's not anything other reason than though those wines are so good, you just want to keep drinking them and they're light and you can drink more, and it's you wake up the next morning, there's no hangover, etc., etc., etc. So I really feel like that time in Chicago and those in that tasting group really kind of steered me in that direction. And then also just traveling. You know, I took a trip to Spain in 2012. I turned 30, went to Spain for the first time, and it blew my mind. It blew my mind. Just the connection of wine, culture, life, food, art. I had an appreciation for it before I went there, but in American culture, it's so a little bit divorced from everyday life to a certain extent, at least it was back then. I think now it's more of a part of everyday life. And that was really my first experience with wine as life. Wine as life, that that kind of idea. And so when I came back, I was like, why have to go to Napa? I have to go, what is the greatest wine region in the United States? It's it's Napa. And at that time, I should take a step back. When I came back to Arizona, I moved from Chicago back to Tucson because my sister had a health scare. She had a tumor, a spinal tumor, when she was in school at U of A. And she's fine now. But anyway, I went back there. She had to go through some radiation. So I moved back to kind of help take care of her while she was going through that. And I hit up Kent and I was like, hey man, you know, if you ever need a hand, you know, coming three years out of the distribution side in Chicago, I was like, all right, how do I actually make wine?
SPEAKER_02You know, I wanted to see and you have no knowledge at all of winemaking, besides what you learn, you know, like the vernacular of studying about wine, but not necessarily any hands-sun at all.
SPEAKER_01No, to this point. And Kent was kind enough to let me come out and kind of get in the way for a while. But I started with Kent in the vineyards. I remember in 2010, in the spring, we were planting grapevines by hand. And then, you know, going out there every day. I was bartending at night at a restaurant called Pasco down on West University there, which is kind of the first farm-to-table kind of local spot down there. No longer? Okay. That was another really kind of zeitgeisty place for Tucson at that time. We were the first people in Tucson doing wine out of kegs, bringing in kind of more like Oregon coastal stuff. So it was really kind of fun. But I would go, I would drive from my apartment. I was living down in Armory Park in downtown Tucson, and I would drive to Kent's place every morning, like super, super early, you know, work out there for eight hours and then drive back and then go work my bartending shift. And I did that for three years with Kent. Oh, and then I just fell in love with it, you know. And it's such a meditative thing being in the vineyard, just being out there, kind of communing with nature. I need all that cheesy stuff that people kind of roll their eyes about. I mean, as you know, it's all true. You have to kind of go beyond your own ego in a sense. Like, I remember being out there the first couple of weeks, and I'm like, I am like working. I mean, not to put too fine a point on it. I'm like the only white guy out there, certainly the only person out there with a college degree. You know, it's six in the morning, I'm freezing my ass off because it's cold out there, you know, and you know how cold it can get out there.
SPEAKER_03Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And I'm like, what am I doing? What am I doing right now? But you work through that, and it's just this is where it's at, man. This is the best. And so I really wanted to keep scratching that itch and was lucky enough to get hooked up with Tim White up at Arizona Stronghold, and he offered me a harvest position in 2011. And so 2011, I moved for harvest, I moved up to Sedona and lived there, drove over to Cottonwood every day and worked Arizona.
SPEAKER_02And with Kent, Andrew, were you mostly doing viticulture, but you know, farming work, or did you get a chance to also be there during harvest and sort of dip your toes into that process?
SPEAKER_01No, I mean it was exclusively vineyard work. And I remember because in 2010, I was gonna help him in the cellar, but there was this huge hail storm and it wiped out the entire crop. And so there was no harvest. So we drank a lot in the cellar, but that was about it. So uh my first cellar experience was up at Arizona Stronghold with Tim White and you know Michael as well, Michael Pierce. Michael Pierce, yep. Yeah, and that was an interesting time to be up there because that was when Eric and Maynard were kind of going through their professional divorce. So that was an awkward time to be in the wine cellar, just from that perspective. But at the same time, it was kind of glorious, man. Like I it was my first time ever doing any of that stuff, digging out a tank, using a steam machine, operating a forklift, you know.
SPEAKER_02Just to contextualize it for people that may not be from Arizona, Arizona stronghold is probably to this day, probably in the top three or top four in terms of volume in production. So I'm assuming that it was a weird confluence of being in a larger scale winery, but you still were able to not be like assigned to a single task. You got a chance to do a lot of things there that normally, as an intern, for example, in a big outfit in Napa, you're just in charge of, you know, cleaning barrels or whatever.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You got a chance to do everything there from cleaning to forklift to maybe working on some inoculations, all that stuff.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for the most part. I mean, it was a small crew, so we had four guys in there. And to your point, crushing for Arizona Stronghold. But at the time, most of the Pillsbury stuff was coming out of there as well. So we were doing all this stuff for him. And, you know, Michael, because he had the most extensive background aside from Tim, he was kind of in charge of bricks, temps, inoculations. I was certainly the low man on the totem pole, so it was hoses and scrubbing the floor and digging tanks. But, you know, we got into a pretty good groove. I loved it. I fell in love with it super hard. And I was already in love with the viticulture aspect of it. So I was like, I'm all in, you know. And so when the harvest ended in November, went back to Tucson and was just, what's my next step here? You know, my degree's in history. I thought I was gonna go to law school. And I remember talking with my advisor from the law school, I was looking at, and he was asking me if I was gonna come in the fall. And I was saying, like, you know, like I want to, I don't know though. Like, I really kind of fell in love with working in the cellar. I think I want to go to Napa and just see what that's like. And he was really cool. He was like, you know what? Like, you can always come back. We'll save a spot for you. But if you want to go, you should go.
SPEAKER_02Andrew, and where did this idea of becoming a lawyer, practicing law, where did that come from? Or what was your intention, I guess? What was the end result for you back then?
SPEAKER_01I don't know, change the world for the better. You know, the classic idealism of a liberal arts educated, I don't know, kid from the suburbs, I guess. I don't know. You know, I've always studied like the Civil War, the civil rights movement. I my degrees in history of America with a fo with a sub-focus on the history of slavery in Latin America and the Caribbean. And so I've always kind of been really into social justice, things like that. And as you know, living in Arizona, there's so many Latin people in Arizona, you know, working in the vineyards, you know, like I said, like I was the only white kid. And especially when I moved to Napa, you know, in the cellar for you know 12 years, definitely the only white guy in the cellar. But really, just like falling in love with other cultures and being open to them. And so I I had this idea, and I've always loved to argue. So I think that's also why can I get along? That helps. And I always felt like I was usually right, you know, which is important to be the overconfidence of the mediocre white man, as they say. So, but yeah, that was kind of my vibe. I I really wanted to get into maybe politics down the line, but definitely stuff coming from the left was more what I was gravitating towards. I wrote my thesis of U of A on uh Malcolm X, so I was just kind of into that stuff. But yeah, so my advisor told me, you know, go out there, check it out. And so I ended up scouring winejobs.com, very cool and old site, but I found an ad that was so vague, it was like, if you want to work hard and learn some stuff, come here. And it didn't say the name of the winery, and it didn't say any and didn't have any bands and whistles. No, and I was like, this is so vague that it's either Sutter Home or someplace amazing. It was the Napa Valley. It was really short and sweet, it was a very reductive kind of couple of sentences, and that's it. Two sentences, and so I I sent them my resume, just shot in the dark or whatever, and it ended up being the Napa Valley Reserve, which is the private members only wine cellar for in the Harlan portfolio. And their assistant at the time is a man who's now their current winemaker, he's been their current winemaker since 2013. Kind of my mentor out here, Marco Gressi, he's a Roman, and he was a Roman chef and came out to California and started making wine in the foothills. And so I think when he saw that I was coming from Arizona, he kind of he felt a kinship with that, you know. And I remember outsiders, yeah, and I remember being in my parents' backyard in Gilbert when I had my phone interview, and he was like, Yeah, I've got two resumes from Arizona, and I was like, he's like, Why should I hire you? And I was just like, Fuck that other guy. Is that what that was your answer for Batam? That was my answer, that's what I said, and like I was like, whatever, let's take a chance on love. You know what I mean? He got it, he started laughing, and he was like, All right, and so he gave me the job.
SPEAKER_03Do we know who the other guy was?
SPEAKER_01No, I have no idea. I have no idea if it was even a real thing or if he was just bluffing or if it was like a tactic or what you know, whatever. But so I got the job. Yeah, I wouldn't say that just you know, off the cuff. I mean, I might, but you know, yeah, that's a hell of a first gig.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. For some people that may not know. Harlan, do you want to give us a quick one-minute elevator pitch, Andrew?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, for sure. So Harlan Estate is kind of one of the original cult wines, maybe a little bit after Screaming Eagle came on the scene. But is in the Oakville bench there. It's got some elevation to it. It is an amazing piece of property, and it's one of the hardest wines in the world to get access to. I think right now it's about $1,200 a bottle or maybe more. But exquisite mountain Oakville fruit, done at the highest possible level with the highest standards. You know, consulting by Michelle Roland, you know, Bob Levy is kind of the OG there. But really hard wine to get. Fantastic stuff. I mean, it's awesome if you can get your hands on it. It's great now, it's great in 30 years. It's killer stuff at the at the very top of the food chain. Not even in Napa, but pretty much worldwide. It's pretty much a benchmark for what high-end Napa can be. Of course, I knew none of this at the time. I mean, I'd heard of Harlan Estate, of course. Didn't really realize what I was walking into because in 2011, I was working in Arizona Stronghold, you know, listening to like Bowie and, you know, beach houses and stuff, you know, in the cellar and like wearing my cargo shorts and, you know, just getting weird. And I remember I showed up at the Napa Reserve the first day of harvest in 2012, and I was wearing like keen sandals and like cargo shorts, and they were like, What are you doing? So I learned really quickly where I was at, but it was such an education because there's one, no expense spared in terms of research and production. The seller is immaculate. The reserve actually is really interesting too because the reserve is also in the Harlan portfolio of wineries, which includes Harlan Estate, Bond, and Promontory. The reserve is considered to be almost like the research winery in that organization. So, you know, the first place to experiment with concrete tanks and flora as well, uh, large formats, 500 to 600 liter barikes, as well as, you know, 10 to 40 hectoliter casks, you know, things like that. And so I had never worked with any of that kind of stuff before. Now, not you know, I had a little bit of an insecurity complex, you know, being from Arizona, not having been classically studied in winemaking, you know, just doing a few vintages with the in the vineyard with uh Kent and then one harvested stronghold, and all of a sudden it's like I'm out here and this is like, I don't even know. It's like all of a sudden you're playing for the Yankees, I guess, and you know, like learning on the fly to a certain degree. And so it was kind of one of those things. It was the opposite of when I told Marco on the phone, like, fuck that other guy, and I had the confidence of, you know, to say that. Pretty certain that was completely reverse. And I was just like, oh God, what am I doing? I knew that I had to just outwork everybody else. And you know, initially I wasn't intending on staying in Napa. My goal was to just work out there, figure out how to make wine, see if I liked it, and if I was something I wanted to do, I was gonna move back to Arizona and make wine out there. You know, as you know how this is, you you come out here and immediately you fall in love. The food, the wine, the culture, it's gorgeous out here. It's so beautiful, the people are cool, it's so chill. And so I was like, all right, I want to see what this is all about. And so I just made a like a promise to myself to just shut up and work hard. And so I don't think I really asked a whole lot of questions. I just did exactly what I was told, even if I thought it didn't make any sense. And then really quickly kind of got along with everybody and they liked me. I liked them, it became a good fit. And so I ended up working in that organization for eight vintages. Uh I did all barrel fermentations in 2014 for Harlan, Bond, and Promontory. And then in 15, I went back to the Napa Reserve as a cellar master. I mean, it was the cellar master there for five years and the assistant doing everything. I spent six months in the vineyard, and then I'd spent six months in the cellar, learning as much as I could.
SPEAKER_02Let's go back to this nagging voice that was saying, you know, what are you doing? Maybe you're not good enough. Two things. What were you doing at first? I'm assuming a lot of stuff at first that did not necessitate a great deal of sort of winemaking sourfare. And how did you ameliorate or step on that voice? Did you, I mean, just being in the milieu, being in the environment and hanging out with people that know stuff, or did you actually do some academic work, for example, at UC Davis to complement, I guess, your lack of, you know, winemaking backbone, if you will?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think I was initially a bit intimidated because of the resumes of all the other interns. I was also older than everybody else. I'm working alongside these people that just came from the University of Bordeaux and they're 22 and they come from a long winemaking family line. And I'm 30 years old. I grew up in Phoenix.
SPEAKER_02You know what I mean? So you had a very interesting story going on in your head.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and but I was fortunate because the people that I was working with and surrounded by, it was a lot of absorption through that. And I think that I have a lot of faults, but I've always been pretty open about the things that I don't know. And I've always found that if you're really open about being honest about the things that you don't know, people want to help you. And if you have a good work ethic and you're open, I mean, I think that's the best possible combination. And so for myself, being having a little bit of maturity at 30, probably not enough. I probably still don't have enough. But I was always very like, hey, I don't know what this means, you know, and I found that people were much more eager to then help me. And so I really, the first couple of years there, 2012 and 2013, it was a lot of that. And then in 2014, I did go to Davis to do their two-year certificate program, which I started in 2014. And then I would also go uh drive over to Davis for any sort of day-long lectures that they would have that the guys at Harlan that I could use. And then when I became the seller master for the reserve, they would send me over to Davis a couple of times a year just to refresh stuff. It's a combination of both practical and theoretical. But I have to say, like for myself, I'm really glad that I came from the practical side because you can really, I mean, a lot of these people coming out of Davis and Cal Poly, they're very they understand the technical aspects of winemaking, but there's less of a connection to like the why. It's more of the science supporting the art than the art supported, you know, being supported by the science, which is kind of how I've I've always approached winemaking. And I also believe that like all the best winemakers that I know, I mean, this is pretty much universally true. All the people that make the wine that I find to be the most interesting are people that come from a different background.
SPEAKER_02So more kind of like autodidactic learning at first, and then following that curiosity, maybe down an academic route, ancillary to the learning.
SPEAKER_01Totally. Like you can't be all feel, you have to have some sort of you know foundation in science. And so I really approached my time at Davis as like, okay, what is gonna help me kind of make the wines that I want to make and being able to like kind of take certain things. And also at the time, it was really interesting, you know, being in class at Davis with people that were like in their early 20s, and I was running a cellar for the Harlands. And so it's kind of like you're in these lectures, and it's like this is a lot of it was like stuff that I was already doing at the time. So it kind of came easy to me at that point. And I've always been good with school, so the academic part came easy, thankfully. But yeah, so I soon found that you know, a lot of the people that were more educated than me in the more classical sense, they couldn't work as hard as I could. They also didn't maybe have the same level of passion for it as I did. And I think that once I realized that, you know, I had a little bit of talent, and once people started to respect what I had to say in those blending sessions, once I was invited into the blending sessions with Michelle Rollins and Bob Levy, and it's like, okay, like I've worked hard enough and I'm good enough to be in this room with these people and they want me here for a reason.
SPEAKER_02Can we maybe take a little slice of time? I want to briefly touch on when we talk about having and that couple with feeling like you belong in the room. Give us a little slice of what some of those blending sessions were like with Michelle Roland, where you felt you actually contributed or there was enough pushback that it created this ongoing conversation that was really awesome in terms of winemaking.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So Roland is a fascinating guy, obviously. And I remember, you know, when I was living in Chicago, Mondovino came out, the film that kind of follows Michelle Roland around. It's about the wine world and kind of Europe at the time. So I think it's like 2005 that film. So I had this kind of preconceived notion as to what he was like personally, which could not have been more the opposite. He's a very gregarious and pleasurable dude, super nice guy. But the standards of Harlan and Roland are extremely high. I remember we would, we would, I would have to line up maybe a hundred samples, and they have to be on a line, on a string, nothing's out of place, everything is completely level, completely squared, and just completely precise. And I didn't quite understand it at first, but you know, after doing several of the a couple of them, I was like, it sets the tone, right? Precision, just having it in your mind, the idea of being precise. And not that lining up the bottle completely correctly and having everything totally level, that doesn't really change the way the wine tastes, but it changes the way that you approach that session, I've found so where you're really kind of training your mind to just pay attention to detail more than anything else. And you know, so what happened was I would set the tasting up, kind of sit in the back of the room, Michelle Roland would taste through, and then Bob Levy, and then Marco, and then finally myself. I'm the last kind of guy to go through or whatever. And so the first few times was more like just shut up, dude, don't talk, like you don't know anything. But, you know, I'm taking my notes and then I'm listening to them have the conversation, and then they're giving me the blends that they want me to prepare. And then so I'm then, you know, I've got my beakers and I'm doing my thing, and then we're tasting the blends, and then I'm making my notes and I'm listening to the conversation. And you do that, you know, enough times and you really kind of get it. And I have to say, Michelle Rollan is a complete genius in terms of blending wines. We can have a separate argument about whether or not you like that style. To me, that's almost like a separate conversation. But if you give that guy 20 bottles of wine, he will give you the best blend. I mean, I'd like I've been around enough times to see that's the case for sure. Which is also really inspiring. And he was the first person I was ever seen be like, okay, I really like this one lot, but you don't need that entire volume. So let's split that lot up. I want you to go into the cellar, pull down all those barrels, and we're gonna taste barrel by barrel, and we're gonna make the best sub blend of those 10 barrels. And of that volume, that's what we're gonna use in the final blend. Now, in this in a wine cellar, that is so painful to do. That requires so much work. When you're trying to be precise down to the 750, it's almost impossible. But that's the level it has to be at, right? And so it totally changed the way that I thought about everything, right? To where the potential is only limited by your own personal attention to detail and your own desire to have it be as great as it can be.
SPEAKER_02In doing this blending sessions, Michel Roland was always like splitting hairs down to the minute detail because he begs the question like, how far down do you go the rabbit hole? And it's a really discernible, and you've had enough experience that you're saying yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it is. It's so much to the point now where I'll pre-blend on first racking if I can. You know, if I know I need a thousand cases of X wine, but I know that I've got 500 cases worth of these lots that are clearly my best lots. On first racking, I'll blend that because you know, the longer that wine is in the cellar as one wine, the more it marries, the better and the deeper and the more subtle. It's just a better wine. So I already know that I've got half of that blend done just based on. I will say this I've never tasted anything in like say January or February after harvest that was the best lot that got worse. I've tasted things that were okay that got better, but I've never tasted stuff that was amazing, that then got worse. And so I'm always like, all right, let's blend the stuff that I know right away is great. And because that kind of clears up some space in your mind then, so you can go drill further down on the remaining volume that you need. Right. So rather than leave it all to the end and keep everything separate, I like to, whatever's the best, let's get that out of the way. Because I really want to go further and further down into the detail on what's left over. Because now you're talking about like what's your tannin structure? Like, what is the fineness of grain on that sandpaper? You know what I mean? Like, and then you can always then refer back to your base wine that you've already blended. Like, how is that wine evolving and how can I best complement that? And then you go from there. The thing with Roland that I always found fascinating was he didn't really pay attention to aromatics at all. He was more looking for mid-pallate structure and length of finish. And to me, I always look for that retronasal component after the fact. To me, I feel like that's the hallmark of all gray wines. But he was a genius because he would take a lot that I didn't think was very good at all. I might grade out a lot as solid B. I mean, there's no C lots that in the Harlan family. It's just easily A plus to like B. But so some of the lower quality lots, I'm like, I don't know, it's fine on the mid, but it doesn't really, it's not interesting to me. But you know, sometimes what you want is I like to call them grout wines. It's a grout. You know, you're just like using it to kind of fill in some cracks. And he was the first guy that I ever saw take a lot that I thought was subpar and put some of that in the final blend and have it just completely transform the wine and fill everything out. Uh, and so I always thought that that was really kind of inspirational. You know, it's like so you never give up on a lot for sure, because you never know how that's gonna be.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I'm not really sure I was going with that, other than to say No, no, talking about like really how granular, Andrew, do we really get about blending? Now, there's also another slight topic to talk about when we look through the lens of Harlan. We are ostensibly talking about mainly Bordelais varietals. Yes. If not, Cavern is Savignon, mostly with a few others. So, really, you have to nail down after that, not only like from picking decisions, but also the kind of barrels and what elements that brings to the blend and the different spices that you have in the cellar, if you will. So after Maryvale, you said eight years there?
SPEAKER_01Eight years in the Harlan organization. Eight, not eight years, but eight vintages. You know, you know how the harvest works. It's not calendar, calendar. So I got eight vintages in seven years in the Harlan organization. And then in 2019, I kind of halfway through Harvest, we were done with Harvest at the Reserve, but Maryvale was kind of like mostly done. I moved over to Maryvale as their head winemaker in St. Elena. Maryvelle was started by Bill Harlan in the 80s. So it was kind of like full circle. Their first winemaker was Bob Levy, and he was my boss when I was at Harlan. And so that was kind of nice. I had worked with some of their fruit before. And that was the transition, Andrew, why did you move on to Maryvale? Well, I mean, Harlan was great, but I was, you know, the head winemaker there is Corey Empting and he's a friend, but he's also maybe only a couple of years older than I am. So I had maxed out my position there. They were happy to keep me there or whatever. I didn't have to leave. But at the same time, if I wanted a head winemaker job, I had to, you know, keep an open mind to that. And so Mary Vale, their winemaker was Simone at the time, and he decided he wanted to move to Santa Barbara. He's currently the winemaker at Crown Point down there. And then Mary Vale offered me the job, which I accepted. And yeah, started that in October of 2019. Yeah. This was my first head winemaker gig, which was such a great experience, and I learned so many things. And it was really, really fun to be able to kind of take everything that I had learned, you know, one from Arizona, and just that kind of ethos of experimentation, I feel like, that exists down there, and then fuse that with what I learned in the Harlan family and just kind of go off and kind of make my own thing, which was really, really gratifying. And I'm really proud of those wines.
SPEAKER_02And yeah, been great. I so much appreciate the fact that you're giving the tip of the hat, obviously, to our state. But furthermore, your experience here, obviously rubbing the elbows with Kent, Mike Pierce, and Tim White. Can you talk about that a little more? How that was so formative that once you went through the more sort of, I don't know, the conventional route under the Harlan tent, in the tent, I'd rather, can you square that for us? Because I think that's pretty cool that you saw so much value in what was going on here in Arizona.
SPEAKER_01The thing that I've always gravitated towards in Arizona is what I like to call like frontier winemaking, right? There's no real borders to it, there's no boxes. It's everything is an experiment. Everybody's open-minded. It's very much a whatever works is what we're gonna do. Whereas in Napa, what I found was it's much more classically kind of boxed stayed. These are the varietals that we work with. This is how we make these varietals, this is how we blend things. And it always seemed like maybe you could make a better wine if you were a little bit less rigid. Like, what happens if we ferment this in concrete? What happens if we we do this in like amphora? What happens if we do this in large form? Like what just what if we just take our mental and only just shifting it slightly, right? Like you want to maintain that same level of dedication to quality. You the standards have to still be that high, but at the same time, maybe we approach it a little bit differently. Maybe we don't leave things on skins for 60 days. Maybe we try to pull it off a little bit earlier so it's a little fresher. You know, maybe we try to have a little bit more vibrancy and tension in these wines. You know, I think about a lot of the Napa wines that I've tasted and the California wines in general from the mid-2000s up to I want to say the mid-20 teens. And those wines don't really age out very well to me. They're just big and kind of jammy. It was so fascinating to me moving to Napa because everybody who's a winemaker was waxing poetic about these wines from the 60s and the 70s that they loved, and they're they're using these as like their benchmark standards. And then they're making a wine that's the exact opposite of that. And I was like, Well, this makes no sense to me whatsoever. And so I was like, Well, hey, no, if these are the wines that we love, this is what we should let's chase this dragon, you know, because all of those wines, even the earlier stuff from Harlan that he never released that was in a cellar that he from when he originally purchased the property in the 80s that I've been fortunate enough to taste, those wines were lower alcohol, less extraction, higher acid, and they're exquisitely gorgeous wines. You could make mistake them for, you know, first growth Bordeaux easily. And so for me, it was more like coming from Arizona and not feeling like I also didn't care about points, I guess you can say, because nobody in Arizona was scoring a lot of points. And so, like the idea that we're all gonna make this hundred-point wine is like hilarious to me in a sense. Like the level of quality of the wine that you want to drink is predicated on what score somebody gave it on one random day. And I have to say, since then, I've I have been to some house parties, and I'm not gonna name names, but I have seen some pretty influential wine critics doing reviews after you know, smoking cigarettes and drinking a bunch of other stuff, and you know, you know, it's like the classic stories, right? So you're like, but we're basing everything off of this. This makes no sense to me.
SPEAKER_02Um one gatekeeper that, whatever. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, completely. So it's like, why are we chasing this when we should be doing this other thing? And I think my experience in Arizona really gave me the confidence to be like, no, this can be different and it can be better at the same time.
SPEAKER_02Well, I really appreciate you unpacking that. So at Merrivale, it's so interesting because you don't think of a place like Napa, which obviously they're at the forefront, if you will, in at least in the United States of winemaking. And you figure there would be more of a movement to be on the edges to see what works. But it's really interesting that you go to a lesser-known wine region where you find more of those sort of misfits trying to make something really cool in a place that doesn't have um historical typicity per se. So as a winemaker now at Maryvale, you were able to sort of amalgamate these two philosophies, and now you're driving the bus.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, which was a definitely a change and a step up, a little bit more stressed. But, you know, honestly, I it flowed really naturally for me, just applying everything and kind of maybe changing the direction that Maryvale was headed in a way. We divested out of Carneros for our Chardonnay and Pinot programs and look into Sonoma Coast, you know, being really inspired by the wines being made by Carlo Mandalvi out there for Rain, also Jasmine Hirsch, those people out there. And you know, when I taste those wines, that took me right back to those tastings in Chicago, for example, or those tastings in Europe, where like these are fresh wines, these are vibrant wines that have personality that speak of terroir, they're doing something unusual. Like it was more like that was like this the spirit that I was kind of going after. And so, yeah, started making uh Chard and Pinot in the classic Burgundian style. So 100% barrel fermented for Chardonnay, all native yeast using 500, 600 liter bariks, Austrian oak, uh non-toasted, water bent, things that in Napa are like no one's doing that. I mean, people are doing that now, but no one was doing that then. And the great thing about coming out of the reserve with Marco being an Italian guy is he was super into all that. So we were trialing that stuff there. And so by the time I got to Maryvale, I was full of confidence that I could make it work. And it ended up working, which was great. But also with the cabaret and the Bordelais varietals, I started picking a little bit earlier. If you're phenolically ripe at 24 and a half bricks, there is no need to pick it at 27 bricks. There is no need. I mean, you can pick it too early, certainly, and you can get those, you know, those compounds you don't want. But if you pick it too late, it's the opposite. To me, it never made sense to pick it over ripe as much as it never made sense to pick it under ripe. And I also believe that if you pick it too far over ripe, you're losing those vineyard characteristics, right? Because you're just accumulating sugars. The wine ends up being heavier, you're losing those subtleties and vibrancies that I really enjoy about wine. And so in Meryvale, we went from picking cab at like 26 and a half, 27 bricks down to I started picking at 24. In some blocks that had western facing sun exposure on hillside slopes, I might pick at 23.5, you know, even because the malloc's dropped out. You know, you got one gram of malik in there, it's ready to go. There's no reason to let that desiccate on the vine. There's no reason to make a port out of this Cabernet. I'll never forget it was the earliest that block had ever been picked, G block at the Profile Vineyard. Picked it at 23 and a half bricks, did a single bottling of that wine that scored 97 points. It was like the highest single bottling that Maryville ever had.
SPEAKER_02Andrew, did you ever sort of progressively nibble away so you would have kind of an arch? Or the way that it works in Napa, when you're ready, you're ready, you pick. Like the whole thing.
SPEAKER_01I don't like to chemically manipulate my must in the cellar too much. There's a school of thought that if every lot is homogenous in terms of its chemistry, that's the best. Way to do it. I don't subscribe to that at all. To me, I like to start picking it like maybe 23.5 for Bordelais. If it's ready. I mean, if it's not ready, don't pick it. But if it's there, take it. And then you can start picking then. And then by the time you're finished picking, your last lots will probably come in and to Napa, and you always get that heat spike. So maybe 25-5. So you do have some riper lots, but you have some stuff that has more tension. And so you just blend those together. I mean, it's the simplest thing that there is, right? So it's like, I want this to have more acid. Well, what lot has more acid? And if a lot has more acid, you know, it's got those, it's got more of that tension through the wine, right? It probably has less ripe characteristics, but it has more subtle characteristics in a different direction. When you blend that in with something that's a little bit riper, it maybe restrains that, pulls it back a little bit, rounds it out in a different way, gives it more tension, but at the same time supports it and complements it rather than just like layering the same thing on top of the same thing and then adding a bag of tartaric acid in it. You know, it's a totally different approach. But I've always found that those wines have the most longevity and the most interest to me. Another thing that we were doing was less extraction. I remember my first vintage at Harlan. I was at the Christmas party, and then after the Christmas party, I went downstairs and did pump overs. These berries were in the tank for 60 days, a lot of these. Wow. And you have really high VA. I mean, those wines are super impressive in the mouth for sure. But they're not much more than that. It's kind of they're kind of like, I don't know, monolithic. They're just totally no shots fired whatsoever, you know, but not really something that I gravitate towards. And so for me, it was really important to also working with mountain fruit. You know, you have shallow topsoil, 24-inch topsoil, volcanic soils out here, or at least where Maryville's vineyards are. These are really small berries, 0.8, 0.9 grams per berry. So you have not a lot of juice for the amount of skins you've got. And so I don't want to extract seed tannin. The longer you leave your stuff on skins, the more seed tannin you're gonna get. So I prefer a really long cold soak up front. I've even gone out five to seven day cold soak sometimes, if I thought the fruit could hang with that. And then, you know, two pump overs a day, just one volume each through the first, you know, kind of third of fermentation, then maybe backing off one pump over a day through the second third of fermentation. And then after that, just really tasting and kind of letting it coast into its finish line, but then taking it off the skins before it's 28 days. I think I kind of equate this more to like almost like cold brewing coffee in a way. So you're getting all of these interesting aromatics and subtleties. You're also achieving a lot of body as well, but with maybe less of a cooked component to it, you know, less of a more monolithic kind of heavy component to it. Yeah. So I got really into kind of figuring out tannin management extraction times, also fermenting at a lower temperature. A lot of the vineyards in Arizona, I feel like, you know, some of the stuff that Kent's doing out there works really well with a high temperature ferment. But for me, I was finding anything that like kind of crossed the 90 degree threshold was becoming a little bit too tannic, a little bit too extracted. So I like to use, you know, I'd say 90% of the wines that I made at Maryville were native ferments. So native yeast, we are, you know, farming organically, also picking on the biodynamic calendar whenever I could, but doing five to seven day cold soaks, just turning off the cooling after the fifth day and letting it come up to temperature naturally and kicking off naturally. And what I found is like you've got the classic Belker fermentation. You have these really gorgeous, classically made wines that have balance, that have acidity, that have tension. You still have ripeness, right? I mean, it's Napa, so they're still finishing at 14, 2, 14, 5 alcohol. It's not like they're thin, but they have more things going on. They're not a bomb, it's not monolithic, as you said, excuse me, as you said. So really kind of leaning into more, I mean, it sounds so simple, but these classic Bordelaise and Burgundian techniques that people have been using for 500 years, it's like you don't need to reinvent that because you're in a different country. You know, you just need to have, you know, take those wines that inspire you and kind of, I'm a deconstructionist, right? So, what are the wines that I like to drink? How do those guys make that wine? You know, I know that I'm not in Burgundy, so I know that it's not going to taste like a burgundy, but I can get enough of those components that I like, those elements that I like and be inspired by what they're doing in Burgundy, and you just like kind of transmute that onto the fruit that you're working with. And I find that once you do that, but those are always the best representations of new world wines to me.
SPEAKER_02So let's change years a little bit. Let's go to the bottom of the ninth here with Maryvale. What's coming up next for you, Andrew?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, left Maryvale after five years in the spring last year. My wife and I opened an independent bookstore in downtown St. Helena, right off of Highway 29. It was formerly Main Street Books, it'd been an institution here for 20 years over that, but they wanted to get out of the game and they approached us and my wife specifically and said, Yeah, let's do that. We took it as an opportunity to start our own label as well. So we have a bookstore, and we're gonna sell our bookstore labeled Chardonnay and Pinot Noir from the Sonoma Coast. When I was working at Meryvale, our farming company were the same guys who did Scribe Carnerous Vineyard Management, so that arm of the family, and have a great relationship with those guys. And so I went to them and I was like, hey, I need you to find me some really cool Sonoma Coast Shard and Pinot. And yeah, so they did. And so we've got 500 cases of that that's getting bottled in May.
SPEAKER_02Andrew, where is that wine living?
SPEAKER_01That wine I crushed at William Harrison, so on the Silverado Trail in Zinfendel Lane there, that old spot there. And had a great time working with those guys this last harvest, kind of making my own wine and helping them out in the cellar, too. So really excited about it. It's definitely like my style. Well, it's actually I should say it's my wife's style. I feel like she's the wine director here. I'm just the winemaker. But she's very similar.
SPEAKER_02Sorry, the fruit is from where, Andrew?
SPEAKER_01It's Sonoma Coast Carneros. So there's this little section of Carneros that overlaps with Sonoma Coast just south of the town of Sonoma. So it's coastally influenced, but not by the Pacific, more by the San Pablo Bay. So I reached out to the Sonoma County Venters and asked them if I could label it Sonoma Coast Carneros because I'd never seen that, and they were really into that idea. So we're gonna label it Sonoma Coast Carneros. Okay. And this is completely different than your other label, Andrew? Yeah, so I started this company called Lindo as just kind of an umbrella company, not knowing what I wanted it to do. I have this dream of making my own wine called Lindo Mitaro. I just really like that because I love Morvedra. A gun to my head, the wine that changed my life the most was the 2003 Caligan Morvedra. The 04 El Norte, not far behind, but the 03 Morvedra completely changed, like I don't know, I don't know, my entire life, honestly. And so I've always had a kinship for that grape. So the idea was, you know, eventually down the road, we'll do that. So I started the company Lindo, just as like an umbrella company. And then And the name Lindo? My wife came up with it. Apparently she thinks I'm I mean, maybe she thinks I'm good looking, I don't know.
SPEAKER_02It's it's not Hey, you gotta take what you can get, man. I've always been a huge fan of Ken's Morvedra, and we poured it at FB or carried it rather. Another one, when we look at that grape, obviously we can name drop and talk about domain tempier, but through the less of the United States, have you got a chance to taste Ian Brand's Morvedra from the Ann's Vineyard? I have not. If you can get your hands on that, I think take one for the team for the sake of research and development. Absolutely. It's an elegant, amazing Morvedra. So now you are a wild plum and you have Linda wines now making this. And this is all gonna be distributed in Valley.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I'm gonna Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna sell it out of the bookstore and then DTC to anybody who wants to buy it. We will get the website up and running.
SPEAKER_03Amazing.
SPEAKER_01Like I said, we bottled in May, so it's we got a little bit of time, but uh really happy with the wines. They're definitely a lighter style. It's much more kind of fresh and vibrant style, but again, like barrel fermented Chardonnays, you know, Pinot done, hand punch down, 30% stem inclusion, native. Like so, really excited about the wines.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_01And I think there's one more announcement before we land this plane. Yeah, so bit of news this week. I accepted the winemaker position at uh Handwritten and Jessup Cellars in Youngville. They're a family-owned uh wine organization there. With Handwritten is their kind of high-end, almost like Bond style, where it's single vineyard, single appellated wines throughout Napa. Jessup is kind of the more, I don't want to say everyday tier, but you know, kind of the $50 to $75 range. So two tasting rooms, one next to the French laundry, down there in Youngville, one kind of across from the French laundry gardens down there. But yeah, really great people. We share a similar philosophy and vision. And so I'm really excited to get on board with those guys.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. For Napa, I see they, you know, they have some Sanjo, they have Petit Churrah, which is, you know, when we talk outside the box, not something you see often.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, that was one of the things that really appealed to me because I've been talking to a few other places. The most important thing over the last kind of six months was starting our own label and getting the bookstore going. But I had this idea in my mind where if I kind of went back to more of a I guess quote unquote regular winemaking job, it would have to be with like a like-minded, kind of family-run kind of organization. And these guys aren't from Napa, they're from the Midwest. The people that own it, they're all doctors. And they kind of also approach it with a little bit of that outsider kind of vibe. And so they're not necessarily as bound to the convention as people that are kind of from Napa are. So, yeah, some Sanjio, some Syrah, they do with some Mountain Zinfandel, which I'm excited to get into as well. But yeah, just kind of that more old school vibe of experimentation, but also I think the same dedication to the high level of quality, right? So I'm really excited to make a high-end Napa Zinfandel. Like I've never done that before. But yeah, looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_02Who doesn't like Zin? Zin's amazing. Andrew, I thank you so much for your time. I thank you so much for giving us a few lovely tips of the hat. All of us in Arizona appreciate a little bit of street cred that you give us out there for what we do here, us Pracies. I wish you nothing but the best, and I look forward to carrying your wines, Andrew.
SPEAKER_01Oh man, thank you, Pablo, so much. I look forward to being out there. I look forward to more of that Butterscotch pudding. We'll make it happen. Yes, sir. All right, Andrew. Thank you so much. But thanks, man. Take care.
SPEAKER_02And that brings us to the end of the show. But before we say ciao ciao, I wanted to let you know that if there are any questions about winemaking you'd like me to tackle on the pod, don't hesitate to email me at ps at povlamilic.com. That's ps at povlamilic.com. Also, if you like the content and you know someone who would get value from it, please share it. And lastly, if you have been enjoying the show, head on over to wherever you listen, leave us a review, and subscribe. Until next time, this is your host, Pavlomilik.