The Fizz #43: Bryn & Jeffrey, winemakers at Ellsworth Wines, get their grapes through land stewardship.
I spoke with Ellsworth Wines about how they source their grapes through relationship building and stewardship, how they're growing as winemakers, and what has helped them start their business.
Winemakers Bryn and Jeffrey from Ellsworth Wines in the Sierra Foothills are doing things a little differently. In California, in order to get grapes, you’ll likely either pay several thousand dollars per ton of grapes from a grower you have a relationship with, or less likely, you'll own your own vineyard. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, and Ellsworth Wine is that exception. They focus on developing relationships with folks in their area, stewarding land, and working with what’s available locally. I’m happy to say that I’ve had the chance to try many of their wines and they’re fantastic.
In this issue, Bryn and Jeffrey and I spoke about what it’s like not to center a pay to play structure, and how they have managed their relationships. We also spoke about how Ellsworth Wines got started, and where they found resources to help them throughout the process.
Margot: You’re not from California, you’re from Maryland. What made you want to pack up your lives and move to the other side of the country?
Jeffrey: I had been cooking for about a decade, up until 2018, and thought for a really long time that owning my own restaurant and being a chef was the path that I wanted to take. After years of doing that, and having friends that I thought were much better cooks that were struggling immensely to get restaurants open—all that just made me look at my life and how I'd spent the last 10 years. I found myself wanting to at least spend a harvest or some time working outside, working with vines and wine.
I had been super interested in wine since I was about 21, working for chefs that had an influence on the wine list, as well as chefs that were really generous with their wines. It was in the back of my mind, but I didn't really know how to get there. Then the obvious concerns of starting a winery—thinking it's impossible financially. One of my best friends had worked with Gideon Beinstock, and he knew Aaron and Cara from Frenchtown Farms and worked a harvest up at Big Table Farm in Oregon. He said working with Gideon would basically be the best opportunity one could have.
By chance, I ended up working with people that now have formed a lot of our thoughts and practices on how we go about making wine. Those same people pushed me to go work a very conventional harvest in Oregon following the California harvest. There's so much to learn—you learn things in both types of places and it's what forms you as a winemaker.
Bryn: I got involved because Jeffrey and I had worked at a restaurant together in DC and were seeing each other. I knew he was leaving and I was going to hike the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I did the Northern trail and there's a lot of vineyards and farms there. Jeffrey said hey I'm really enjoying it out in California, maybe you would be interested in this. I was really looking to get into farming and he said well, best of both worlds, you can farm and make wine. I was wary of the wine industry, just from working in restaurants and having seeing more of the pretentious side of the wine world.
Then I said well, I’ll just take a chance. We moved out officially together in January of 2019 and started working at Frenchtown Farms, interning for them. Aaron and Cara said if you guys want to stay, we'll provide an opportunity for you to make wine. So where we live now is actually the vineyard that they introduced us to. When we weren't working for them, we would come over here and prune or canopy manage and all of that fun stuff.
Through working the land, the owners were asked us if we wanted to live here and just keep doing this. We said yes!
Margot: Are you renting the place that you're in from them?
Bryn: We are!
Margot: Gotcha, that’s amazing. Are you leasing the vineyard, or did you buy it?
Bryn: We don't own any vineyard actually.
Margot: Oh, interesting. Is it like a handshake agreement? You farm it, you keep the grapes pretty much?
Jeffrey: Yeah! That's how we operate. There's a lot of small vineyards around that people either planted themselves or bought the property and vines were already there, but maybe thought for a year or two that they would give it a go and realized that it's really time-consuming. Even with a lot of effort, you can still have a lot of mildew and it can really go downhill fast, and you can feel like like it’s been a waste of time and financial investment.
Bryn: There are a lot of pot farmers who have properties that have vineyards and they have no interest in the vines, but they don't want the vineyard to die because it's a potential asset.
Jeffrey: We like the situation we're in, in terms of being forced to work with what's there, and to keep it as local as possible. We spend a lot of time rehabilitating these vineyards and making changes that should have been done years and years ago and trying to improve the quality of the soil and all of those things. We don't have the freedom of being able to drive to other parts of the foothills or drive to Napa and buy really high quality fruit, or even just varietals that we don't have here. At the end of the day, though, it's a more true expression of what is here. It's really interesting.
Margot: Do you get most of your grapes for free, then, in exchange for labor?
Jeffrey: We have a few different arrangements. The home vineyard is totally an exchange for the labor and another sizeable vineyard is the same. We have a vineyard that we made the bulk of our 2021s from where I told them market price for your fruit is about $2,000 a ton. We put in enough effort and trained their vineyard team and consulted on how to keep the fruit clean. The following year, they brought us in and said, look we really want to have a successful harvest. So, we ended up working at a bit of a discount, but there was some money exchanged, and everybody at the end of the day felt really good about it.
Margot: That's really awesome. You're creating these relationships with these vineyards that folks either don't know what to do with them, or don't even want them or care about them. That's really awesome because in California, you can pay a million dollars for a ton, and that's how anyone thinks to get grapes, but you're creating a more relationship based model, which is really cool.
Bryn: Yeah. It's not easy. Jeffrey’s initial thought of how would I start a wine business? We wouldn't have been able to without the opportunities that are out here. We're just really lucky. It's the type of community out here where a handshake is a solid enough of agreement. Some people ask—aren't you insecure about somebody changing the lock on you or something? We don't really worry about that as much as we worry about the vines.
Margot: That's awesome. So this is your third vintage? How long have you been working in wine?
Jeffrey: If you consider my first harvest, that would have been 2018. This will technically be our fourth year.
Margot: It's wild because you're pretty new to the game, but you're doing a lot of this work rehabilitating vineyards and offering consulting. Where did that crash course in knowledge come from and how do you continue your education?
Jeffrey: The base understanding of fundamentals definitely would be credited to Aaron and Cara at Frenchtown Farms. There was this really great book that Jess Miller of Little Crow translated. It was a French book by Francois Dal and provided a new perspective on how to prune vines and how to avoid disease and extend the life of your vineyard far further than UC Davis or most people would expect.
That's something that we got ahold of at the end of 2020. Aaron and Cara, when they first started working the vines that they work, there was a lot of rehabilitation that needed to be done. Focusing towards the center of the vine and respecting sap flow—those things were all at top of our minds, but when we got this book, it was this community effort to think about what the book is saying and how to actually understand it and put those learnings in motion.
A lot of the focus throughout the season is on the actual vine. We don't have to worry so much about weeding or tilling and planting cover crops and all this stuff, because the only way to achieve that would be to really water your whole vineyard to get it to take, which we aren’t doing. We get to focus on pruning and maintaining throughout the season.
Bryn: We've also met Mimi Casteel, who is a farmer and winemaker in Oregon, and she has been an immense resource. She's just an endless book of knowledge for plants in general, but specifically vines. She rehabilitated what was a Christmas tree farm, and that's where she ended up planting her vineyard. She had a bunch of firsthand knowledge, and then podcasts and other books.
We've also been really fortunate to meet other makers in France and talk to them about their practices and why they do the things they do—stuff you can't just find by Googling.
Jeffrey: Yeah, we did a big trip in 2019. It was really awesome and we got to see a lot of producers who I would consider to be some of the best in natural wine. It's really a never ending source of inspiration and knowledge. We can all learn from each other.
We're a lot more prepared with the way that we grow grapes here to what's happening there now. There were a lot of conversations around the evolving climate and how to farm and adapt and prepare crops for what is to come.
Margot: How are you all thinking about that with your own vines?
Bryn: A lot of thoughts about dry farming. We're really lucky. A lot of the vineyards we work with don't have irrigation set up or it's broken and doesn't work. That forces the roots to dig deeper, to tap into the groundwater. That’s definitely key.
There have been conversations around vine height. In France, the vines are a lot lower to the ground because they deal with so much more cold weather, that they need the heat from the earth to survive. Whereas in California, it’s so hot, the vines have to be trained higher so that they can breathe a little. It's also just easier to farm, not having to completely bend over for so long.
Jeffrey: It's definitely scary. I think that the year after year distress is going to lead to vines dying. We saw a lot of that with other producers down in the central valley and places like Lodi with heat stress. Vines, you know, they're extremely vigorous and yeah, and they're adaptable to a point, but I think we're all on the edge of maybe having to think about planting at higher elevations or really having irrigation be an important part of agriculture.
I think when considering the future and thinking about purchasing our own property or planting vines—there's a lot of insecurities around those types of thoughts. It all circles back to us being super lucky and very grateful to be here where we have plenty of vines to work right now.
Margot: You’re thinking, let's say we would want to purchase our own property, but at this point we don't know, climate change wise if that’s a sustainable idea? Is that what you mean?
Bryn: Yeah. It's basically impossible to get fire insurance, for example. You have to be like within a mile of a fire station. Your property has to be inspected by Cal Fire. With the fire situation, a lot of people are losing out and there's no insurance to back up their purchases. It’s so nerve-wracking to consider planting a vineyard—it's at least five years until it starts to produce fruit. Then what is that going to look like?
We're really lucky in that the vineyards we do work are older vineyards. The vines are more established so they don't need as much water, but if you're planting a new vineyard—they need a lot of water. We're farming one vineyard that's 15 years old and those vines got water before every heat stroke this year, just because they're not as old as other vines.
Margot: That makes sense. So you're working in an area that is pretty well known for weed. Do you find that it's a pretty sustainable relationship? Is there conflict there?
Bryn: It's funny because one of the properties we farm is a seven acre vineyard and it's owned by a pot farmer and we're not very in the know, but we do know that the weed market is changing drastically in California and people are having a lot of trouble moving their product. I think a lot of weed farmers are starting to reanalyze what their long-term plans are. I don't feel any hostility at all between weed growers and vinegrowers. The community here is so strong. The growers that we know don't use really scary chemicals, mostly just fertilizers. There's surely some runoff, not so much here, but maybe 40 minutes from where we are.
Margot: It sounds like you all have been both lucky and have made the right choices in your journey from Maryland to California now to set up your business. What have been some of the challenges that you've come across and grow?
Bryn: First and foremost, there's no page on the internet where you can Google how to start a wine business. It's not like here’s 20 forms that you have to fill out. A lot of it was fumbling through the process, reaching out to like folks like Frenchtown Farm for questions. We'd sign up for one thing and another organization would reach out and say, hey we just saw you registered as a business in California. You have to do X, Y, and Z now. That was definitely a challenge getting through everything. While we were getting licensed, it was COVID and there has to be an ABC agent to come out and inspect the winery and a lot of that was delayed. Everything took a little bit longer than expected.
Jeffrey: Also the fact that we've had to have day jobs while trying to go full speed. By the time the wines are made and in bottle and are being sold, that eventually will catch up to a point where that the value of all that is sustainable for us to only make wine.
Bryn: Yeah, not coming from a family of winemakers, not having a shit ton of money to start a business. Jeffrey was able to save some from cooking and stuff, but everything in wine costs a lot of money.
Jeffrey: All of our equipment's used, so that's been really great. We got to decide to get into relationships where we’re telling the owner of a property that we’re going to steward their land and then make wine from those grapes. We have a lot more freedom that way than the situation where once the grapes are ready, knowing that come August 1st, we need to have $15-20,000 to pay for grapes. We've continued to make more and more wine, and I think we're finally at a point now where we're considering bringing on some help specifically for harvest.
I had two of my close friends really show up for us in 2020, and then 2021 was more difficult with COVID, but we're getting to the point where it starts to feel real.
Margot: That’s great. What resources do you wish were available to you when you first started? Folks don’t become winemakers because they really want to learn how to do small business taxes. They do it because they like wine, and then they’re taken aback by all of the difficulties with starting an alcohol-based business. What do you wish was available for you when you started?
Jeffrey: Financial advice is always great! Being able to balance the winery labor as well as the labor that actually pays the bills was tough. We don't focus on branding and marketing much—we really just try to show up and have the wines speak for themselves and have us be the point of contact.
Bryn: When we started, we made mistakes. We made a lot of cuts. We converted our home vineyard from cordon to cane pruning. We made a lot of mistakes that did not respect sap flow. We had no real knowledge of the internal workings of the vine. A lot of that came second and this is only one book—wine has been made for so long. I wish that there had been more resources on farming no-till practices, dealing with droughts—farming in California is unlike farming in a lot of other places. There's not a lot of guidance for that. A lot of it has been trial and error, and also this book came out, which helped us understand the inner workings of the vine. I would say more help with farming and more help with the business side of things, too. I would've loved to have had a little checklist of things to look out for like COLA, the CDC, TFA, ABC.
You have to renew all those things yearly, or quarterly depending on your production. It's just so much, and it's definitely the least fun part of this.
Margot: Yeah, that would definitely be helpful. I have a hard time remembering to renew my car registration, I can imagine keeping track of all that is really difficult. I’d love to talk about your winemaking practices—how are you working with the grapes you harvest?
Bryn: We do all of our sorting at the vine. A lot of winemakers that purchase grapes have truckloads of grapes show up and then they have a sorting table. We sort at the vine, so that's where the wine making starts. We'll choose which clusters are good for winemaking and which ones are problematic—different diseases, different pests, mildew, etc. We generally stylistically go for lower alcohol wines with no additives except for a minimal sulfur addition before assemblage, but a lot of the winemaking direction came from Jeffrey. He has a great palate and he was really able to cross the bridge between the wines he enjoyed drinking and how stylistically to have that outcome.
Jeffrey: I think from the moment I arrived or started being aware of wines from this area, as well as the rest of the foothills, I realized that if you don't make a real effort to be restrained and you don't make an effort to make a lighter wine, the grapes give you a very, very intense wine.
If you foot stomp at all and are punching it down once or twice a day, that's seven days maximum before you're at a point of tannin and extraction, where if you go any further, the wine will be really abrasive and take a long time to come around. There's plenty of wines that we buy from all around the world and there's plenty of wines from here that we love at the five or ten year mark. The challenge of making something that's still expressing terroir really well with the same fruit was really intriguing to me. Not like a full carbonic Beaujolais, but making wines that are a little bit lighter and have a finesse and balance is what we're striving for.
We've come to put a good amount of direct press juice into our reds, basically making rosés, with sometimes 20% of the grapes, other times 50% of the grapes and making something that we think is really great, but would certainly be considered a little brother to a lot of the other wines. With older vine, dry farming, the granites and clays that we have, we are able to maintain the pH really far into ripeness, so it's not really that we're harvesting earlier than a lot of other people, it's just that we have a different product to work with and we make different decisions in the cellar.
Bryn: During fermentation, how often you punch down and how vigorously you punch down determines extraction. There are some people who punch down three times a day and they're pushing it all the way to the bottom and really extracting versus us—we do it by hand or feet, depending on the container, just very lightly once a day, just so that the cap stays moist.
Jeffrey: Generally, for the reds, the grapes go into a fermentor with a couple of gallons of fermenting wine on the bottom. Some people call that a pied de cuve, but it's not really like a green harvest. Grapes from a different vineyard that were ripe a little bit earlier, we get them going fully spontaneously and then work off of that. There's basically a blanket of CO2 from the second the grapes go in, and we feel that it's really protected. We’re in control and putting such an emphasis on quality and cleanliness of the grapes—we typically keep all of our grapes in the little boxes that hold 25, 30 pounds, instead of throwing them into a huge bin. The goal is to get back to the winery without any juice coming out of the grapes.
It's about preserving the year’s work, the quality, and the true expression of the grape. We learn a lot from people in Burgundy and the blog Wine Terroirs of Bert Celce. He goes deeper than any other blogger or journalist into how these French winemakers are actually making their wine. You read about specific people and it really makes you think. For example, de-stemming grapes in the Jura and how it's all done on a wooden board that has holes in it, which is very different than putting your grapes through a crusher de-stemmer, preserving the integrity of the grapes.
When we're foot stomping, we're not stomping the shit out of one hundred percent of the grapes. There's not an exact percentage, but it's like half or less of whole berry clusters, that will essentially be semi-carbonic. That’s a controversial call, but to get more fruit expression out of the wine, that works for us.
Margot: I love that. Do you all share a facility? Where do you make wine?
Bryn: We’re so freaking lucky.
Jeffrey: There was what I think was originally constructed to just be a garage, but with 14 foot ceilings. The vineyard was planted in the nineties before the current owners were here by this German guy who had another two acres of Barbera and more Syrah that got pulled out when the new owners came. When he was doing it, he had a facility up closer to the house where he would actually ferment everything, and the building we use now was just for barrel storage. He had this air exchange system that would take out the warm air and then bring in cooler air at night. Super thick walls. They built another building around that.
We just have a relatively heavy duty window AC unit that's been cut into the side of the building. As simple of a winery as you've ever seen—it's very small and we're already feeling the limits and considering other places to store finished wine. We’re considering how long we're aging our wines and not really trying to make a winemaking decision based on space, but you know, we've bottled wines that we thought in hindsight, we could have done this two months earlier and it would have been just as good if not better.
Margot: So these folks are like, hey we have this vineyard. We're not really doing anything with it. Will you take care of it? You can have the grapes, do your thing. Also, we have a house that you can rent, and we have this garage that you can turn into a winery.
Bryn: Yeah, basically! They’re very generous people who recognize the heart and struggle that goes into starting a business and wanted to provide opportunity for us to get our feet off the ground.
Margot: That’s so wonderful. You're so early in your come up and you're learning all the time. What advice do you have for folks who are in the same situation that you were three or four years ago, who want to make wine but don't know where to start?
Bryn: You’ve got to intern somewhere.
Jeffrey: Yeah, finding the right people to learn from is the most important thing in almost any industry, and I would really push people to find a way to work with vines. Even if it's half an acre, even if it's just 10 vines, that's what really completes the whole circle for us. That’s also what makes it really interesting and really exciting.
Bryn: It's important to read and expose yourself to information, but learning firsthand and being in a vineyard is everything. Our philosophy is that a great vineyard makes great wine. You can't just be in a cellar and learn how to make wine without being in a vineyard and understanding the full cycle of the year. We really think wine is an agricultural product and we owe everything to the vineyards—they do all the work.
Margot: That's awesome. Where do you find that joy in what you do every day?
Bryn: It's so great being outside. We were living in DC and it was like such an East Coast capitalist environment. This just allows you to slow down. It's so much less anxiety inducing working with your hands. It's so rewarding. When you’re going through a season and you see the life of a vine—you can really appreciate it as a living thing.
The ecosystem that we get to participate in—we watch life happen before our eyes. We watched the eggs in the nest and then we watch them hatch and take their first flight. We see the grasshoppers and the ladybugs. It’s so nice when you realize that you're a part of that ecosystem. You're not just working to work for work’s sake.
Margot: Thanks so much for taking the time with me. I love how connected you are to your work and how you’re focusing on relationship building as a way to get you there. So excited to support you both, and continue drinking your wines!
You can support Ellsworth Wines by buying their wine. Ask for their bottles in your local shop, and follow them on Instagram here.
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