Dan Kravitz's Domaine du Pegau Origin Story

We are thrilled to represent Domaine du Pegau in California and Oregon. John connects with Dan Kravitz of Hand Picked Selections to dive into the history of this iconic family Domaine.

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Speaker 1 0:00

They were living hand to mouth almost literally.

Speaker 2 0:06

Hey, wine lovers, welcome back to grit and find unfiltered today's episode conversation with credits of home pick selections . You'll learn a little bit about how Dan discovered one of his favorite wineries, a few facts about the winery . He did not sleep . Alrighty . [inaudible] a little bit about that

Speaker 1 0:41

Road winery, which is a pretty inefficient . I see that I , by the way, both are correct, but I say cabaret , cabaret , cabaret . Yeah. Um, one of the , uh, one of, one of my kind of flagship producers is a domain to peg out in Sheraton . If Depop yeah . First time I ever visited there , uh, the co-owners Lawrence furrow and her father, Paul, I figured out soon after I met them, that their only purpose in breathing is to argue with each other. So how do you pronounce the winery? And Lauren says Pego and Paul says peg out because one of them speaking French and the other one's speaking province . Jeez . So a cabaret , if you're speaking French it's Caballero. And if you're speaking Catalan , which I prefer it's Khabarovsk cool. Well, let's , uh, let's zip over to the Roan . And we'll talk about a couple of people there that you are dealing with. You already mentioned a pig gal Pego yep . And how they're , uh, constantly , uh, you know, at each other's throats, you might as well start there. So, you know , give me the five minute spiel on those guys. Uh , this was , um, the way I found them was , uh , some real serendipity. I decided I wanted to shout Tim if Depop , and we're going back to 1988 here, you know , prehistory . And , uh, I wrote some people I'm not, I wasn't, I wasn't , uh, emailing them in those days. Um, and I made four appointments to see people. I don't remember the names and I wouldn't tell you who they were if I did, but I made four appointments in Chattanooga . If Depop and one guy's wine, which is bad, one guy's wine was mediocre, but he was a real nice guy. His prices were dirt cheap. He seemed very eager to do business. And I thought possible one guy's wine was good, but his prices were through the roof. And the fourth guy had even better wine, but he was also really expensive. And he was telling me, well, you know, if you represent the United States, then we have to be in this restaurant and I've heard of this, a famous wine store. And I want to make sure he was basically telling me how I was going to do my job. Well, I'm a cheapskate. So I figured, okay, this guy's wine is okay, not great, but it's very inexpensive. He's very eager to do business. It's going to be very easy to do business with. I've got a meeting in Bordeaux later, let me , uh , take a bottle of his wine. So I took a bottle of his wine and I went to Bordeaux and I was in a meeting with the broker who wound up steering me toward Lang doc , a vineyard owner. I know, and Robert Parker had an appointment, told taste together. And we did, after we finished tasting, I pulled out the shot to Nerf Brown bags and poured it for these three guys. And , um , didn't tell them , you know , to double-blind . And so the , uh , Chateau owner looks at me, sniffs sips , Spitz looks at me and says, Dan, no, the broker looks at me, snips sips and says, Dan, no, Robert Parker, sniffs sips looks at me and says, Dan, no , uh , there's this embarrassed silence? And Parker says, is this supposed to be burgundy? I said, no. Shut-in if Depop and I made an executive decision that I wasn't going to buy that wine . And there's this embarrassed silence. And then Parker says, you know, I was talking to Michelle, [inaudible] France, just yesterday. He told me about this, a new shot to Memphis state with old vines. That's just starting to bottle their own wine. And I said, Oh cool. What's the name? He said, I don't remember. I said, it sounded like pig out . Okay. So the next day was Thursday before my first appointment , I got up and I went to the French what post office, which at that time was called PTT post telephone and Telegraph. And they had a very early dead end computerized phone directory called mini tail . I remember that. And so I went to the village of shatterproof . Depop scold the letter P. And so Pego, Pego P G a U wines. So I call him up and say , um, do you sell in the United States? No. Are you interested? Yes, that was Thursday morning, Saturday. I was supposed to go sailing with the Chateau owner. I canceled the appointment, made the appointment to see them on Saturday, drove back 280 miles to shutdown of Depop from Bordeaux and went into a taste. How do you say the name of the winery? Pego Pega three hours later. They still have the 85 vintage and food, or they're getting ready to sell it off in bulk. And I taste through all the folders , which in theory are the same, but there are some differences. I pull a business card out of my wallet. I stick it into the crosspiece includer and say, I'll buy that one. The most shots of the pop I've ever bought in my life had been one bottle. I just committed to 500 cases. Nice. And their eyes got big. And when I talk about how loyal they've been to me , uh, their dance with who brung your types and they will not forget when I pulled that card out of my wallet, stuck it in the crossbar of the food are unsettled by that. Well, that's awesome. And so the visit finally ends and I say, okay, I've got it . I'm staying at this hotel in Iran . How do I get back there? Paul says, go out on the driveway and turn left. The Ron says, no God at the driveway and turn right. So that's how I got started with them. And a secret of why the wine is so good is that there is no sacred . They grow the grapes and make the wine exactly the way the grapes are grown in . The ones made 100 years ago, the , um , fermentation tanks, old concrete fermentation tanks. The youngest of them is, well, they have one that they , they needed a new, small one that they bought maybe 20 years ago. But the fermentation tanks range from 90 to about 110 , 115 years of age. Wow . You know, 20, 30, 50, 75 years. Um, it's just incredibly, incredibly traditional Paul for roll around . So his father had , um, uh , was one of five kids and he thought he didn't get enough attention. So decided he's only gonna have one kid and Lauren's furrow, man, did he get dealt the right hand that time? And she is one of the most brilliant human beings I've ever met. And , um , also happens to be incredibly nice, incredibly honorable person. She's just an absolute gem of human being. And , uh , she's just built it out of, you know, on hard work and drains . I mean, you shake her hands today. The callouses are there. She still works in the vineyard . You know , when I visited them, they had 12 acres. Then out of 53, they started bottling the wine. I mean, when I, when I committed to that 500 cases, I got home, I got a phone call. Can you please pray prepay for half of this? And I said, yeah, but why isn't that? We don't trust you it's that we don't have the money to buy the battling . That's the thing . People don't realize a lot of times, you know, when you're talking small producers anywhere, you know, it's not like the everyone's rolling in money and they have like, Oh, we need a new facility. Or we need this, this, this, you know, they have to figure out, you know , where are they going to come up with money to do their business? You know, bootstraps. I mean, they were, they called the , uh, the primary release wine has been called QB reservation since, before they bottled that 1985, because when , um, Paul was running the business before Lauren's came in, he was selling 90% of his wine in bulk giga, Davenport , yard [inaudible] . And the 10% that he bottled himself, he called QB resurveyed reserved for us. And he was sung it to the local restaurants and delivering it himself. Wow . Few private customers. It was nothing. There were, they were making, you know , they were living hand to mouth almost literally. And it took, I'm going to say from the time I started probably not 10 years, but definitely over five before they got to the point where they could bottle everything themselves, it probably was close to 10 years before they could afford to stop selling in bulk trap that business from 12 acres, 10, you know , battling , you know what , 1.2 acres, two tons per acre. They're probably bottling a hundred, 150 cases of wine a year. Wow. That's nothing. And today they're probably the basis of all Schatz and myth combined . They're probably in the 8,009,000 case range, still a lot, a lot of one , but of course you're making some money because it doesn't sell at the low end of shuts enough. Exactly. But also I see that they're doing quite a few COTA drones nowadays. Well, Lawrence Lawrence is larger than life. There's not an arrogant or snobbish molecule in that woman's body, but she just functions on a different level. So go back now to , um, let me see, how far back are we going? About seven years. So her father is officially retired. She's now totally in charge of domain to Pego her father officially retires means he's probably only working 40 hours a week, but she is still legally. It is her domain now. Um, she's a single mother with a teenage daughter and a teenage son. She has selection Lawrence fro and negoti on business. And in partnership with the owner of domain Lake, how you, she has parole Grinnell another on business. So she's trying to figure out what to do with her spare time. So she buys a a hundred acre Koch , their own estate. You see what I mean by larger than life, most people in that position, wouldn't be worrying about what to do in their spare time. They'd be worrying about how to get one, three hours of sleep at night. Exactly. So a hundred days , yeah. Um, ruin Chateau called Chateau the Jews . She changed the name to Chateau Pego and she's something of a contrarian , most French wine properties chateaus the name of the top wine. And if they use the name for something else, domain is the second one pay . Gouts the opposite. The top wine is the main de Pego . The second one, which has all Appalachian Coke . Jerome is Chateau pingo . There are five bottlings from there. Um, through your cult Rome , there's 80% of her coat thrown acreage is the title to coat their own galosh Appalachian, but she only bottles 20% of it as called their own blogs and came up with the proprietary named CTA. Um, she does a white called QB loan and most of the state production of Coke , their own red is Cobain McLaurin , which is , uh , the name of a tree that grows on the property called dosa and Osage orange in English. And then of the a hundred. And I guess it was a hundred about 110 acres, and there's 25 or a little more than 25 acres that are not entitled to Appalachian. They're on a different kind of soil and it's checkerboard doesn't qualify. So she makes pink Pego from that primarily sends so vine, Rosie , and then she makes a wine called [inaudible] , which they expanded production of something that existed before, even when they only had the four, 12 acres of shut-in of Depop , uh, her father owned five acres just outside of Schatz enough, that was planted to all kinds of oddball grapes. I mean, there was some Aramone , there was some Merlo in these five acres. Uh, there was a grape called Knotel and Angelman is legally not allowed to be made into wine France . It could be made into table wine. And , uh, I walked that vineyard once at harvest time. And basically you think about a supermarket and the grapes they have called flame Tokay, where each grape is like that big, got two rows of that. Wow. So he didn't want to do anything with it. And then , uh, they, they were up to about a dozen acres for those grapes, which they use to make a blended semi Solera style red, which I think is one of the unsung gems in my portfolio , uh, called plan Pego plan being the French word for plane is in a flat piece of ground PLA I N . Um, and then when they bought the , um , cope , their own vineyard that had almost 25 acres of non Appalachian binds in it, they're able to increase the production of plan per go. Our current release is lot 14, 15, 16, so they'll bottle some, they use small, old barrels holding in those small barrels , semi Solera system. Every year, they bottle some , every year, they refill the small old barrels and some weeds and they release it as a wine. That's basically pretty regular to drink because you're now the average age of what's in the 14, 15, 16 releases now five years. And it had three years to breathe in small, old, neutral Oak. Another creation of Lawrence's who does her mind is working all the time. And it works really well. I've seen that out there in the market and I've always wondered what it was exactly. And now I know. Yeah. And , uh , again, it's something that it's a little esoteric, you know , it , I , I'm guessing that you probably sells two thirds or three quarters of her production of that to French restaurants is by the glass wine, but it would have to be a pretty geeky restaurant to sell something. That's a blend of three vintages by the glass in the United States. Sure. There are restaurants that'll do it, but you know, not, not the more mainstream , uh, you know, it's a , it's not something an American steakhouse is going to say, Oh, that's cool. Now you never know. But yeah. Average steak house . Probably not. Yeah. Wow. Well, that's cool. I'd love to meet Lauren someday. Maybe I will. Um, she, yeah. Oh yeah. She'll come. She'll come to the us early and often once , uh , the world reopens, she, I mean, she's just one of the nicest, smartest, highest energy human beings you'll ever meet. Shall I say there's nothing arrogant or snobbish about her when she walks into a room, you know, it just radiates off of her. That was cool. Big personality. Yeah . Big personality. Cool. That kinda gets me up to speed on, I mean the PayGo or pig out, I was going to be a nonstop thing now.

Speaker 2 17:18

Big old pig . Wow. What a great success story. 35 years on their model on work . Well, that's it for today. Thanks for listening until next time. [inaudible] .