The Fizz #8: Cara Mockrish is a farmer at heart, focused on the terroir of North Yuba County
In this interview, Cara and I talk about the farming side of winemaking, experimentation in the winery, and her philosophy around vine-growing.
For The Fizz #8, I sat down over Zoom with Cara Mockrish at Frenchtown Farms, located in the North Yuba AVA of Northern California. Cara works with her husband Aaron to create wines that speak of the terroir in this small Sierra Nevada mountainous appellation. Cara is a farmer at heart and speaks of winemaking entirely through a farming lens. Her dedication to the region and to the practice of farming with a commitment to respecting the natural world is clear throughout this interview.
We briefly spoke about her philosophy around vine-growing, what it means to be a farmer in North Yuba, experimentation in the winery, and why co-fermentation is important to Frenchtown Farms.
When folks talk about the start of Frenchtown Farms, they often talk about the history of the Renaissance Winery and of the religious group, some people call it a cult, Fellowship of Friends. We’re not going to talk about that here. If you’re interested in that history, here’s an article to read before moving forward.
Margot: Frenchtown Farms has been around for five years now. What’s something you have learned in your journey so far?
Cara: We’re still here and we’re still doing this because it’s an opportunity to never stop learning. There’s just so much to learn about wine and farming and the history of not just California, but wine in and of itself. Especially with the farming—that’s the most important thing to us. It’s an opportunity to continue learning for the rest of our lives, and that’s why we’re so excited about it. There’s no such thing as an expert. You can have a lot of knowledge and insight but I feel like it’s this one place with an infinite amount fo things to learn. That’s the most exciting part.
M: You didn’t come from a winemaking background—what made you decide this was what you were supposed to be doing?
C: We wanted to farm. That’s what brought us together as a couple and what keeps us together. We just want to be outside all day, working with each other as much as possible. Before wine, we were farming. Aaron was growing cannabis, I was growing vegetables, I was selling at farmers markets, we were raising lamb. We met Gideon [Beinstock, winemaker at Clos Saron, and previously at Renaissance] from selling lamb—he bought meat for one of his dinners. We had restaurant connections, we were into wine, but when we met him, he opened our eyes to the fact that we can spend most of our time farming and have something that allowed us to pay our bills so that we can keep farming. We fell in love. It’s a very different endeavor working with perennial plants than working with annuals. I love growing vegetables, I still have a garden—I’m starting seeds right now and thinking about the summer. It’s a different type of commitment, though. With perennial plants, you’re taking care of the same plant year after year. We fell in love with it.
M: Can you give me a sense of what your vine-growing practices are like?
C: We’re not certified anything. We’re certified Aaron and Cara. If you ask a question about what we do, we’ll answer you honestly. We could be certified organic if I wanted to go through all the paperwork and pay all the fees associated with it. We definitely would fall under that umbrella. We don’t do any tilling, we don’t spray anything but elemental sulfur and we stop spraying at the first sign of verasion. The bulk of what we do is pruning and hand work and vine management. We don’t do a lot to the vineyard itself.
[A USDA organic certification can cost winemakers between $500 and $1500, depending on acreage and production amounts. Costs can add up greatly over time with renewal fees and inspection fees. Many winemakers choose to forgo the certification and instead be transparent with winemaking practices, but that can be costly on the consumer side—it’s hard for consumers to know if the producer is using organic practices without that certification sticker. Talk to the employees at your local wine shop when choosing your next bottle—they can guide you toward a bottle made in a way that’s important to you, even if they choose not to participate in the USDA organic certification. Learn more about the costs of organic certification here and here.]
Last year during the onset of COVID-19, we were hit right at the beginning of tying and shoot thinning season. We thought we’d have some interns, but that fell by the wayside—we didn’t know how to handle the situation as well as we do now. It was just me and Aaron and we have about 20 acres. It was a long year and a lot of work. We didn’t get to everything as well as we normally do, so by the time harvest came, I was apologizing to our interns for all the weeds under the vines. I just couldn’t do it all myself. That’s kind of our philosophy—we bring people together who want to farm, are willing to spend a year out here learning the entire season and cycle, go through pruning, go through tying, shoot thinning, under vine management. Here and there we might do a couple of tractor lessons. We use tractors to mulch our prunings. We’ve talked about burning them in the past, we haven’t tried that out yet but I’d love to. We mostly mulch and compost in place.
We mow once a year—we’re actually thinking this year of switching to a different tractor implement that just bends our cover crops rather than chops them up. That’d be really cool if that works out. Under vine management is all by hand—we use these really long sickles and go out as a team in June or July and clear it out, mostly so harvesting is more pleasant. We don’t have too many issues of sulfur getting into the vines—the weeds don’t grow into the vines, the trellis is pretty high. We have a lot of thistles and thorny things and poison oak, though. These vineyards are wild. They’re not your average manicured vineyards. It’s a different way of growing. We prefer to just go with the flow and work with what the season gives us. Every year there’s something—a gopher explosion, a bad mildew year, more wasps than usual. There’s always something.
M: That reminds me of something Cathy Corison said in our interview—for everything you use chemically, you’re going to have to use something else.
C: Absolutely. I definitely agree with that. We just don’t want to fight our vineyards. We don’t want to say what’s the next battle? We’re growing, we’re trying to grow. What’s the point of working against yourself?
M: You mentioned you don’t till your soil. Why is that?
C: We have so many rocks up here that we don’t have problems with aeration and drainage and reasons why you may till in other areas. Keeping the communication between all of the plants in our vineyards as connected as possible is important. We don’t want to interrupt whatever conversations they have going on underneath the first few inches of soil—it’s kind of their own personal internet! They connect to each other through those micro fungal organisms that tell the plants, hey there’s this nutrient over here, come get it. Tilling disrupts that. We’re also on the side of mountains—the more you disturb that, the more rain storms will wash the topsoil away. These vineyards haven’t been tilled in many years. We started farming Renaissance five years ago and the vineyards themselves are anywhere between 40 and 50 years old. I don’t think they’ve been tilled at all in the last 15 or 20 years. We’ve got a good baseline and we want to hold steady.
M: Do you all get erosion issues up there?
C: Yeah, there are certain vineyards that aren’t farmed at Renaissance anymore—there used to be 365 acres, somewhere around there. Now they’re down to about 30. You can see on some of the hills that some damage was done. The roads can get really washed out. The way the terracing was cut—they didn’t plant the rows up and down the mountain. They cut these terraces into the sides so you can easily drive a tractor across it. In some of those areas where you see the cut side of the terrace, you see some washing away. The vines on the subsoil cut side are not as vigorous as the vines that have all this topsoil pushed over. It’s pretty clear when you’re walking down these roads—on one side you’ve got really low vigor and on the other the vines are just exploding.
M: You work with own-rooted vines. What’s that like? Are you worried about phylloxera at all?
C: We’re not worried about phylloxera. Because we aren’t anywhere close to another winegrowing region—we are our own AVA. We have a North Yuba AVA, that’s solely due to Renaissance applying for that back in the 80s, they established the appellation. Other than us and a few other local vineyards, we’re the only ones out there. There’s no crisscross between vineyard crews—we don’t even have a vineyard crew [laugh]. We’re less vulnerable to phylloxera for a variety of factors, including how isolated from other vineyards we are. The soil structure, minerality, all the other microorganisms that are in the soil—there’s no vacuum for phylloxera to come in and take over. If you blur your eyes a bit, it doesn’t even look like there’s a vineyard here! It just looks like a wild abandoned mountainside. I just don’t think that it’s a very inviting environment for phylloxera to settle in. In the 40 or 50 years that these vineyards have been here, they’ve never had a problem. It goes back to our philosophy of growing, not fighting. I’m not going to worry about something that hasn’t happened in 50 years.
Working with these vines, when you have a vine that’s struggling and it has some trunk disease, for example, we have the benefit of just bringing anything up from the ground. We can rejuvenate that vine—we don’t have to worry about, oh where’s the graft line. There are places that are grafted. Our Syrah vineyard is grafted onto Riesling, for example. The whole thing was planted to Riesling and in the early 90s, Renaissance grafted it over to Syrah. We’re producing Syrah but every ten or twenty vines, there’s a Riesling vine. Any time the Syrah is struggling, we’ll just cut it down and bring up a Riesling vine. We have a second, third, or fourth chance to keep something productive in that space, which is really cool. We don’t have to worry about anything from the ground being a hybrid rootstock—it’s all vinifera.
M: Own rooted vines have such a cool story to tell. This is a pretty romantic notion, but how do we know that whatever grape, Syrah let’s say, planted on a different rootstock is actually what Syrah tastes like? Does grafting change the nature of that wine?
C: I have a similar hunch. Even the Syrah grafted on the Riesling is different from own-rooted Syrah. When you’re grafting, you’re creating a pretty big wound and hoping that it heals itself. You’ve always got that weak spot in the vine, and now you have two different types of genetics trying to talk to each other. It works—we have beautiful grapes out of those grafted Syrah vines, but I wonder if Riesling is the ultimate expression of that hillside because it’s the one channel of communication. It’s not something going on underneath and having to translate that to make it work for the grafted vine on top. I think the grafted vines are a bit more prone to disease because of that weak point as well.
M: What’s interesting about the terroir in your area?
C: We’re mountainous by nature. The soil here is at the end of one of those pushes from the glacier. The further south you go in the foothills, the sandier the soil becomes, the less severe the expression of the terroir. Up here, we’re still exploring, we’ve only dug into North Yuba. We have this special combination of elevation and exposure and these different rock formations. I’m sitting here on this one hillside and in front of me is the mountain where our Syrah is. Behind me is this other hillside and it’s completely different. In general we have a metamorphic mix of schist, volcanic ash, quartz, and rhyolite in the area, all of varying ages. So behind me is more clay, in front of me more rock. It’s interesting because it depends on the hill. We’ve got all these little hills nestled up against one another. If you wake up early on a super cold foggy morning, where I am at about 1800 feet, I can see the fog collecting below me. We have these peaks on top of Oregon House that shed that fog into these little valleys. There’s an interesting mix of rock here. That’s what makes this place special—there’s not one soil type, we actually have many. It’s fascinating.
M: I love that you all play around with co-fermentation. That’s fairly unique for the United States. Why do you do that?
C: Our main goal is to express terroir, regardless of variety or what might be planted on whatever hill we’re working with. We find that through co-fermentation, you’re better able to zero in on that particular site rather than that particular grape variety. It’s not always possible. The Pearl Thief is a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Roussane. They ripen so far apart that we can’t actually co-ferment them. We tend to build our wines in batches because we pick everything ourselves. We go out and pick half a ton, and then another half ton and another half ton—that’s how the cuvée gets built. We find that we end up with a more harmonious wine. One that doesn’t feel disjointed or forced. It’s a bit more abstract in terms of where is this wine, not what is in this wine. That’s our goal.
M: For the Cecelia, that’s Syrah and Sauvignon Blanc?
C: Yes, I’ve put some Grenache in it in the past. This year it might have some Semillon. This is the one exception [laughs]. All of our white grapes are grown on this one hillside—for the Cecelia, they face each other. The white grapes are on an eastern facing hill and the red grapes are on a western facing hillside, which can be pretty brutal out here. That’s why we make a rosé—it would otherwise be this intense punch of a red wine. With the Cecelia, it’s zoomed out a bit more than just the hillside. It’s a North Yuba expression and it’s always co-fermented. We pick the Sauvignon Blanc first and whole cluster foot stomp that, then we pick Grenache and Syrah and direct press that juice into the same bin with the skins and stems of the Sauvignon Blanc. That way we can get the harmony of North Yuba, of Renaissance. It might not be the same hillside, but it’s closer than fermenting them separately and blending.
M: What a delightful wine, I love the Cecelia so much. Where do you find your joy in winemaking?
C: It’s the farming. The winemaking is sort of this thing we do at the end of the year to celebrate the fact that we spent all year farming. I get excited at the beginning of every single season. Right now we’re about halfway done with pruning, we’re deep into it, and I’m still stoked to be out there pruning. Then I’ll be excited for tying, and I’ll be excited to get out there after all the shoots are out and start shoot thinning. I get to be outside most days for many hours, working with my hands, building the cuvée from day one in January. I don’t think ahead to how we’re going to pick the grapes, how long it’s going to ferment because I don’t have those answers at this point in the year.
The only things I can think about now is what’s the weather like today? What’s it like in the next few weeks? How are we going to manage an early bud break, which it looks like we’re going to have this year? How are we going to manage the deer who will inevitably get around our fences and take however many grapes? Is it going to be a high mildew year? We can’t make these decisions ahead of time. We make them as the season progresses, step by step, season by season. By the time harvest comes, we see the results of our hard work all year long, it’s a big celebration of picking the grapes and making the wine, doing as little to it as possible. The hard work we already put in, hopefully that comes through in the wines.
M: If that early bud break comes, how do you deal with it?
C: You start moving faster. It depends on the vineyard. At Renaissance, because the vine density is so low, there isn’t much we can do in terms of protection in case there was a spring frost. That would be pretty rare at Renaissance because of the orientation of our vineyard sites, they’re actually quite protected from frost. They’re higher up, they’re mostly eastern facing. The cabernet is more vulnerable, but that variety tends to break later anyway, but if we had a vineyard that we planted and had the rows the way we want them, we’d protect the vines from frost with Agribon—it’s kind of like tissue paper. That would be our preferred method. You basically put a blanket on the vines.
M: Do you do any experimentation in the winery?
C: We do, we experiment every year. There’s always a keg of this or a barrel of that, always something weird going on in the winery. We’ve experimented with carbonic, mostly to see for ourselves what happens. It’s definitely not something that is in our philosophical column—carbonic flavors are carbonic flavors. We’ve experimented with extended maceration. That’s tough for us because of the Renaissance fruit. The tannin levels are through the roof. A lot of these older Renaissance wines that we’ve had the good fortune to try, it blows your mind when you have these wines that are 20 or 30 years old and they’re fresh and acidic. You can tell they’re aged and mature, but the acid levels are through the roof. We’ve played around with direct pressing—we switched our press last year from a basket press to a bladder press. When we started out we had the basket press which was what was available and what we could afford. With this bladder press, the wines are different, but in a good way.
We’ve experimented with de-stemming the last few years—the 2019 Cotillion that’s about to be released is our first de-stemmed Renaissance wine. We do it all by hand, it’s this contraption that we learned to make. You put it on the bin and it’s a board with all these holes in it, and you throw the grapes on it and rub your hands on it and the grapes fall through—it’s really cool. That wine was an experiment and the goal was to make a wine from Renaissance that we could release in 18 months, not in five years. It’s different, I can’t say that I prefer one or the other, it’s just that they’re different goals and aspects of what we’re trying to achieve. It’s different from the Cabs and Syrahs that are whole cluster foot stomped. It’s been fun.
M: what do those goals look like as you look to the future?
C: We’re hoping to plant about 8-10 acres of our own in the next two to three years. We love Renaissance, we’re going to farm it for as long as possible, which is hopefully for the rest of our career, but we want to plant our vines. We want to start from scratch. We have our own ideas around how to set up a vineyard. The beautiful thing about Renaissance is that it’s there, the vines are old, they have that special character, but infrastructure-wise there are so many things we’d do differently. It’d be cool to set up our own vineyard from scratch. I hope that’s what the future of Frenchtown looks like—setting up our own vineyard here in Oregon House.
M: Wow that’s awesome! So, you’ll have to go and scout land and see what’s available. What is that process like? When I think about making wine in California, I’m like ooh I don’t have any money for this.
C: [laughs] Yes, that’s definitely one benefit of being out in the middle of nowhere is that land is a little bit cheaper out here. It’s a lot of walking around, kicking rocks, a lot of conversations with people about what might be possible. It’s a lot of brainstorming, creativity—we don’t have some secret funder that’s giving us money. It’s just us, we’re just subsisting off of the wine and we’re very grateful that we’ve gotten to a point where the project is working. We’re hoping that it continues to grow. If you want to be in Napa or Sonoma or even El Dorado that has closer access to Sacramento, you’ve got to come in with the funding to support that, but up here you can find things that are more affordable. You get creative with grants—finding sources of funding that are supportive of agriculture. There are resources out there, but you definitely have to find them. That’s been a big part of my learning curve.
M: I can’t wait to see what you’re able to create once you get your own land and set up your own vineyards. Thanks so much for taking the time to chat!
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Non-profit pairing: Cara supports St. Hope, a family of non-profits whose mission is “to revitalize Oak Park through Public Education and Economic Development”. Support this important organization by donating here.
Learn more about Frenchtown Farms on their website. Ask for their wines at your local wine shop, or put in your orders online. Stay tuned into what they’re up to by following them on Instagram.
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Such a great interview, Margot. Makes the FF wines that much more delicious. Thank you!