The Fizz #27: Santa Cruz Mountains winemaker Megan Bell is helping bridge the gap in organic farming
Margins winemaker Megan Bell talks frankly about finances, organic farming, mitigating climate change with early harvests, and the harsh realities of wine co-ops.
For The Fizz #27, I spoke to California Central Coast winemaker Megan Bell of Margins Wine. Megan graduated from the U.C. Davis enology program, and has worked in wineries in Napa, the Livermore Valley, the Willamette Valley, New Zealand, and France’s Loire Valley before settling in Central Coast and starting her own brand, which focuses on making wine that reflects the margins of wine production—grapes that aren’t often used, or from regions or vineyards with rare characteristics. This interview was incredibly refreshing, as Megan’s authenticity, honesty, and character really shines through.
We spoke about her journey into winemaking, how the culture around wine production almost turned her off from moving forward, the realities behind being part of a wine co-op, and an interesting possibility for mitigating climate change effects in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and more. I learned a lot from this interview, and I hope you will too.
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Margot: Can you tell me about how you got into wine?
Megan: When I started at U.C. Davis, I had just turned 18. Deciding to go there was really serendipitous because making decisions at that age is so haphazard. I went because my high school boyfriend and I brewed a lot of beer together. We wanted to start a joint winery/brewery—he’d do the beer, and I’d do the wine. The relationship didn’t last, so I had to make up other reasons to stay in that program—it was so hard for me because it was all chemistry. I went to college in 2008 and I was seeing my friends graduate that year during the economic crisis with liberal arts degrees and having no job prospects. I would have preferred to study English, but I didn’t think that would get me anywhere. I got an English minor just for fun. It didn’t help that I had zero interest in wine. The reason I ended up staying was because I wanted a degree that would lead me straight into a job.
Margot: Where did the passion for wine come along?
Megan: It didn’t come along until way later. I graduated and still wasn’t really interested in wine, and didn’t really know how to make wine. They don’t really teach you that at Davis. You take one winery class where you’re actually making wine, but if you don’t know what making wine means then you don’t really know what you’re doing in the class.
Margot: Wow, you always think you go to U.C. Davis to learn how to make wine.
Megan: No, you learn about the chemistry of wine. I’ve heard that some other wine programs in California are more hands on than Davis is. We took three vineyard labs, though, and those were my favorite classes. You’re really just vineyard crew. I finished the program, worked my first full-time internship a couple of months after graduating in Napa, and I hated that job. I loved the work, but the culture was so horrible. I was the only woman on the production team. There was one other woman who was the enologist, but she didn’t really work with us, and all of the guys were horrible to her behind her back. I was so uncomfortable the whole time.
I went into that job with no skills, asked tons of questions, learned so much. By the end I really liked my work, but the people around me didn’t see me as having improved. Because I was a woman, they saw me as incapable—I came in with no skill set and I left with no skill set, to them. Men are judged on their potential and women are judged on their performance. I came in with no skills so they thought I had no potential, they didn’t invest the time in training me versus my male co-workers.
It wasn’t until I went to work in Oregon the following spring that I really got into wine. That’s because my boss at Beaux Freres, Mike Etzel, had a great German Riesling collection. I didn’t know what kinds of wine I liked and turns out I liked acidic whites, and I loved the type of Pinot we made there—really light, low alcohol, earthy Pinots. I started to put that together with my background and see where I might fit into wine in a way that I didn’t before.
Margot: It’s amazing to hear how that different work experience influenced you. You could have been turned off by that Napa experience and gone to do something else.
Megan: I definitely almost did, and I think that’s why there aren’t as many women in wine production. The Davis program is more than half women, and it has been for like ten years, but you don’t see that reflected in wine production. I happened to get this great job in Oregon that I loved, but if I hadn’t gotten that job, I have no idea where I’d be today.
Margot: You’re the only employee at Margins right now, but you’re hiring an intern for harvest. What’s it like working through everything yourself?
Megan: For someone like me, it’s really nice. I need to be doing something all the time. Relaxing is when I’m doing an activity. It works really well for me. The workload hasn’t been super overwhelming, except when I was working six part time jobs and doing this. Now that I’m completely self-employed, it feels manageable. I work all night on my computer—I usually answer emails until 1AM. That’s how I relax.
I farm this vineyard with the owner, and we split all the work—it’s never terribly overwhelming because I know if I don’t do it, he will. Harvest was overwhelming last year—I doubled production and the neighborhood I live in was completely on fire. I was evacuated from my house for seven weeks and for three of those weeks I didn’t know if my house was still standing. I was pretty checked out last year because all I could think about was my home. That made it hard to get things done efficiently.
The really hard stuff like the bookkeeping, I have a company that does all of that for me. I think of it like I’m efficient on the computer and in the winery so that I can be in the vineyard. If I’m in the vineyard, it feels like days off most of the time. I don’t work in the vineyard for more than four hours and every day I do something different, so my life feels very balanced. I started Margins to have my life and my work incorporated together, and I feel like I’ve achieved that, and it’s only going to get better when more people join the team.
Margot: How do you choose which grapes to work with? What does it mean for a grape to be on the margins?
Megan: I’ll consider either the grape, vineyard, or region to be marginal. The least marginal wine I make is the Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains. Santa Cruz Mountains is mostly Pinot, but this vineyard is the eighth registered organic farm in the United States. That stands out to me. The Counoise I make, very few people have had 100% Counoise. That varietal stands out. Region-wise, I make Sangiovese from Arroyo-Seco. There’s no Sangiovese there, and most people have no idea where that is. It’s a unique varietal for a unique area.
It used to be a lot harder to decide who to work with. Especially starting, no-one knows who you are—I was 25 and a woman, and no-one cared. I don’t blame them now. People are reluctant to get invested in new projects because so many things fail, but you never know who is going to do well, so you should treat everyone equally. I certainly wasn’t treated that way in the beginning. The first few vineyards I worked with were all word of mouth. I had to really fight to get my Chenin—I emailed like 50 or 60 people that first year, and three responded, and they were all in Clarksburg. It was decided for me that I’d make a Clarksburg Chenin. That was the first vineyard where I worked with the owner to convert to organics and now tons of people in that area work with them because it’s one of the few organic Chenin in Clarksburg.
Now people will come to me and say “I have this block” and do I have interest in taking over the farming, and I say no. One of the things I’m best at, and why my workload isn’t overwhelming, is that I say no a lot. I don’t want to place unrealistic expectations on my ability to work. Now I have the vineyard I co-farm with the owner, and ten other vineyards I work with, and all of those are with people I adore. I tried to pick up a new vineyard this year and I could just tell it’d be hard to work with that owner, and I passed on it. It’s not worth it anymore—it’s the relationships that make it so enjoyable. I enjoy having good friends who know me, and we’re invested in each other’s success—it’s not networking. We come to similar goals.
Margot: In the natural wine space, it’s often either you’re organic so we’re in, or you’re not organic so we’re out. I love hearing people talk about helping growers convert—how can we get them there, and supporting them as they’re converting. What’s that process like?
Megan: I don’t help them in the sense that I start working for them—I do not. I get no money from them. The part I help with feels like barely any work to me. It’s building a relationship with those people. They need to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and get excited about doing that with you. A lot of people I helped convert do not care about organic farming. They care that I care, and they’ve watched me grow and tried the wines, and they’re excited. It doesn’t hurt that I’m not an asshole to work with, because many people in wine production can be. They get excited about Margins and say okay we’ll try it, what do we need to do?
I connect them with vineyard managers who can help, or they can text me all their questions and do it themselves. There were times when I was getting tons of texts from growers as they were learning what they should do. To them, I was the only source of information, but it didn’t feel like work to me really.
Margot: Why is that important work for you to be doing?
Megan: It always bothered me when people would say “organic or nothing” because then nothing would ever change. The same people who are interested in organics would be interested, and the same people who weren’t wouldn’t be, and we’ll just keep diverging. I guess I just felt like I was a good intermediary, someone to preach that gospel, just because I don’t see things so dogmatically. I wasn’t going to judge people for loving Roundup. A different person might say “you’re a loser and you’re out of touch and ruining the planet”. I can see why they like it, and let’s see if we can recreate these results on organic farming—do you want to come with me on this thought journey?
It’s not major change in these tiny vineyards, but in Clarksburg for example, the family that I buy from farms more than one thousand acres. This twenty acre block of Chenin is their only organic block. It’s a pilot project for them. If it goes well, and it’s going very well, and they end up converting even half of their acreage—that’s a lot. It’s things like that that have the potential for major change.
Margot: That’s awesome, and definitely impactful. That skin contact Chenin is so delicious. What’s so special about Chenin for you that you reached out to all those 50 or 60 people?
Megan: I hadn’t had Chenin until I worked in the Loire. I didn’t study grapes like that. I don’t know the names of regions or producers, and I don’t care—that’s not why I’m in this industry. I went and worked in the Loire in 2013 and said “whoa this is like Riesling but different”. Here’s a new-to-me type of acidic white wine that I’m really into. We were making 14 different cuvées of Chenin from different regions. Every single one tasted totally different, even though we made the wines the same. I learned about which ones I liked the best, and replicated some of those production methods to make the Clarksburg Chenin.
It was in France where I was like oh, I want to replicate this life in the states. I had worked at three harvests by that point and a bunch of other wineries not during harvest. Everywhere I worked was just obsessed with work—not taking breaks, working seven to seven. I’m efficient but I also take breaks during the day. It has never made sense to me to show up to work and rush all day. I really liked working in France because we took breaks, worked all morning, took naps, took long lunches. Sometimes we went back to work in the vineyard in the afternoon, sometimes it just went to dinner and we started to press after dinner. There was always something happening but it never felt rushed.
That’s not totally how I do things here because I live far from the winery—we don’t live at our wineries here unless you’re super wealthy. I do sometimes rush a little bit, but that said, the feeling of being able to just sit down, it’s meaningful. I want that to be okay here and it hasn’t been okay anywhere else I’ve worked. I’m excited about passing that on when I have people working with me. You will get paid for all the time you’re here, no matter what you’re doing. You don’t need to be finding things to keep you busy all the time. If there’s a couple of hours between what you finish and what I need you do later, you can just sit on your phone or take a nap. You’re getting paid. Your work doesn’t need to be this endless chase.
Margot: I love that, you get to build your own culture right now. How did you find the growers that you emailed about your Chenin?
Megan: There’s a grape crush report that’s public info that talks about all the acreage of the different varieties in the US and where they are. I’d look at that and see where Chenin was, and I’d Google Chenin in that region and try to find the names of the wineries or growers that worked with it. I’d Google Chenin in California and see what wines popped up and if they had vineyard designations on the label, and try to find those vineyards. A lot of people have mentors who connect them, but I never had that. I’m not managed very well.
I guess I was feeling not worthy of asking someone to help me. I knew people along the way who were well known, but I never felt comfortable asking for help. A lot of my guy friends, though, had no problem reaching out—they asked for what they wanted. That was a lesson I really had to learn as I got older. That’s how you get things. At a certain point when you’re successful, though, you need to stop asking for what you want and leaving room for other people to fill that space. That’s kind of where I am now—I hope someone asks me some day. A lot of people have told me that I appear intimidating, but I’m really very shy, and I just don’t feel like I’m in the “moment” of what’s going on. I would love to help someone if I can. I don’t know if I can really help people yet, but I can certainly get out of the way and help people have access to each other.
Margot: I appreciate that vulnerability from you, thanks for that. I want to talk about affordability—you mentioned that folks here don’t really live on their winery property, that’s too expensive. I don’t see it getting easier for up and coming winemakers in California to own their own vineyards. Do you see the future of winemaking be more co-op focused?
Megan: Yeah, I think we’ll see more and more co-op wineries. I was part of one a couple of years ago. There are at least three or four more that I know of, and I’m sure there’s lots that I don’t know of. That’s where people are really getting their start unless they work full time in a winery and part of their compensation is that they’re able to start their own brand out of it—that’s what I did in the beginning.
Whoever is in charge of the co-op winery is making bank off of everyone else. They’re charging you per ton that you process, so you are way more than paying the rent on that space. Someone has the lease in the winery, and that person is sub-leasing to all the other people in the winery who can’t afford their own lease. It’s really exploitative actually. I would feel horrible charging someone what I was charged.
Margot: I feel like when we talk about co-op wineries, it’s this romantic way of thinking of all of these friends getting together and making wine, we don’t really think about the money part.
Megan: Everyone that I have talked to in various co-ops I know of is paying around $1,000 per ton—that’s a really good price. Most people are paying $1,500-2,000 per ton, minimum. Someone like me, last year I crushed 30 tons, so I would have paid them $30,000. The rent is cheap in most of these places, mostly because it’s being split by so many people.
Margot: Wow, that’s a bananas amount of money. That person is buying all the tanks and the press, though, right?
Megan: Yes, but there’s this idea that “it’s mine and if you want to use it, you have to pay me”. When really, they have to buy the equipment anyway. These machines have more of a year lifespan, not a how many times they can operate lifespan—it’s more around how old is the gear? If you’re going to purchase the equipment anyway, why are you charging people to use it? Because it’s an amazing way to make money. I’ve had a bunch of people ask me if they can make wine in James and my building and I’ve just said no. The money isn’t worth it because the logistics can get messed up. The logistics going smoothly is more valuable to me than their money. If you’re in a building with expensive rent, it can be a good way to subsidize it, but mostly it just feels unfair to me. The last custom crush I paid, I did 18 tons, and I paid $18,000.
That said, I do think that’s the future because ultimately, in the short term, it’s definitely cheaper than establishing your own winery and buying all of that equipment. Most brands don’t last for more than a couple of years, and in California so many people just want to make a few cases for a few years and have their own short-term wine brand. In the long term, though, it doesn’t make sense. I’m so grateful that James and I found this empty warehouse in Santa Cruz County that was an old apple cold storage. We each spent almost $100,000 though—this is all coming out of loans and lines of credit. That money’s not just sitting around for me. But it made it so much more doable to keep it at that price. We found deals on equipment and were able to slowly accumulate it. We’re not a co-op, but we really couldn’t be—the equipment isn’t nice enough for that.
Margot: You were impacted by the wildfires quite a bit, I’m sorry to hear that. I’m noticing a pattern of winemakers saying that they’re experimenting more with other fruit like apples, quince, etc because of climate change concerns. Have you seen that pattern, and how are you personally thinking about moving forward through climate change?
Megan: Absolutely, I’ve seen more fruit wines coming out of climate change concerns. It’s also trendy right now. To me, fruit wine and grape/fruit wine needs its own category. We have some trees on the property I live on and we make fruit wines here, nor professionally, in tiny carboys, and it’s just a totally different process. A lot of it has to do with the ratio of sugar to acid—it’s totally different in grapes than other fruit. I don’t see myself doing that personally.
I’m thinking we’ll have a lot more rosé going forward. It might need to be that harvest is in July like it is in Texas. There are things we can do to try and push that forward. We did it this year with super early pruning—we started pruning in December because the earlier the prune, the earlier you get growth. If we can find a way to push harvest earlier in the summer so it’s not intersecting with the largest fire season in mid to late August through September, that seems like a really logical solution to me.
It works because of the type of wines we make—it’s not going to work for high alcohol Napa Cab. The Muscat I make is only 9% ABV. We pick that at 16 Brix. I think that people don’t think of the possibility of being able to pick that early because they haven’t tried it. They think 16 isn’t ripe, but that wine is totally together. I’m not saying it’ll work in every circumstance, but it seems like a good thing to try in addition to making super light reds and rosé.
Margot: You don’t have early frost concerns where you are?
Megan: We don’t have frost here. It might randomly frost once every couple of years. I’m speaking of Santa Cruz, there are other areas that do get frost, but for us it’s not a problem.
Margot: Where is the joy in the work that you do?
Megan: In the vineyard. I’m not a morning person—I go to the vineyard around two and I work from two to seven. I prefer to go at the hottest time of the day and be there when it gets cooler. I do all of the morning things and clear my schedule to arrive at the vineyard. There’s this one spot where you come around this crazy road in the mountains and you crest a hill and you can see the whole Monterey Bay. Every day the ocean looks different—sometimes there’s clouds, there’s fog, there’s sun. It just relaxes me. It’s the beauty of owning your own business. It’s a very privileged position, and that’s not lost on me. I work until I get hungry or until I’m not having fun anymore and then I leave. That’s so different from what most people in agriculture have to do—they’re there until they’re done or they lose their job. For me, it’s a very joyful place because I’m mostly by myself.
I don’t spend enough time reflecting on this question. Every once in a while I’ll be driving or doing something mundane and I’ll think “wow, my life is filled with so much joy because I love what I do”. I’m so lucky, especially coming out of year six, where the financial part is finally coming together for me. It took so long to get established. I lived on a paycheck of $1000/month for the last three years until May. I still enjoyed my life, but it was hard. The last two months, the finance part has been there and it has allowed my life to go in the direction that I’ve been dreaming of for years. I just moved into a one bedroom apartment—I dreamed of this, and it’s only possible because I have this company. I don’t have to feel “ugh I have to go to work tomorrow”, the way I see some of my wealthy friends who make a lot of money but they only have fun on the weekend. That’s the only time when they’re not stressed, and they pay that price. I take it a day at a time. A simple life was the goal, and I’m finally on the way to getting there.
Margot: I love to hear that, and it’s such a refreshing thing to hear when you’re surrounded by all of this rhetoric around having to grow fast and expand. Thanks for taking this time with me, I can’t wait to pop open another bottle of Chenin soon!
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Owning any business is emotionally and financially taxing. But it sure feels good to pursue those passions and NEVER give up! Great read and phenomenal interview!