Great wines take lots of patience, passion
Mike Chupp doesn’t use a cookbook when he’s in the kitchen. The Jewel Collection winemaker prefers to cook on the fly, tasting his sauces as they simmer on the stovetop and adding appropriate spices as he goes.
“I don’t bake; I cook,” Chupp said. “I can’t make the same dish twice, but I’m hoping to make a great dish every time.”
Chupp uses the same approach when making wine, which he has done for a living since graduating from the University of California, Davis in 1999. He’s one of the many local winemakers making Zins, Cabs, Syrahs and other wines that are drawing worldwide attention to the Lodi Appellation.
The process is thousands of years old, Chupp said. Harvest and crush the grapes, add yeast, then wait. It’s the little things that make the difference in the wine’s quality — the type of wood used for the barrel, precisely when to harvest the grapes, how long it should ferment — and it’s the winemaker’s job to make sure these and other factors are taken care of.
“Every winemaker has got their own personal taste, which gives a personality to each wine,” Chupp said. “Take grapes from the same vineyard and give it to five winemakers, and those wines aren’t all going to taste the same.”Winemaker David Lucas, owner of the Lucas Winery, has been growing grapes and making wines in Lodi for 27 years. While wines should have distinct flavors and personalities, he said, they should also carry the mark of the area in which they were grown.
Lodi wines, in short, should taste like Lodi wines.
“Should every wine taste like a Coke or a Pepsi?” Lucas asked. “Or do you enjoy a wine that tastes like the place and the vineyard it came from?”The challenge to making great wines is two-fold, Lucas said. Winemakers need to have the patience to allow wines to come together on their own. They also need to have the funding so their product can have extra time to age.
“You can hurry up the process, but almost every time you’re losing something in the wines,” Lucas said. “There’s a certain amount of evolution a wine has to go through.” Like the evolution of wines from the vineyard to the bottle, winemakers have to undergo a similar process when they first get into the business. Nobody makes a great wine the first time they try making wine; rookie winemakers often have to go through what Chupp refers to as a “trial by fire.” “It’s a long process, because you only have one shot,” Chupp said. “Once the grapes come off the vine, you can’t put them back.”
Lucas has more than 25 years of winemaking under his belt, and he’s spent much of that time learning from others and from his own mistakes. Though he had to go through the process to get where he is today, he wouldn’t exactly put his early labels on a pedestal.
“The Zins I used to make 25 years ago I would call terrifying today,” Lucas said.
Kreig Williams got his start in winemaking less than 10 years ago, bottling wines made with grapes from growers he met in his job doing pre-plant soil fumigation. His grower friends liked the wine so much they asked him to make more so they could market their grapes.
“I had done fumigation jobs for their vineyards; that’s how I got to know them,” Williams said. “We started playing around with the fruit, and soon they were asking if I could make more.”Today Kreig owns Kreig’s Kellar, a winery at Vino Piazza in Lockeford. His Syrah won a gold medal at the California State Fair last year as the best in the state, he said.
It’s the unpredictable nature of what will happen from year to year that Kreig loves about winemaking. That, and the fact that he lives in an area with an abundance of high quality grapes, he said.
“There’s so many great wines out there, and they’re all different,” Chupp said. “How exciting would it be if every Cabernet tasted the same?”