The Fizz #1: Rosalind Reynolds and the future of American winemaking
The Fizz #1: Rosalind Reynolds and the future of American winemaking
In this interview, Rosalind talks through what it's like to work in a wine co-op, and why the future of winemaking might actually be a grape from the past.
For The Fizz episode #1, I sat down (over Zoom, of course) with winemaker Rosalind Reynolds of Emme Wines. Rosalind is the Assistant Winemaker for Pax Mahle out in Sebastopol, CA. She also makes wines for her own project, Emme Wines, named after her grandmother, out of the same winery space. She shares this space with 7 winemakers who all work on their own projects there. We talked about what it’s like working in a co-op, how she and her co-winemakers share equipment and work through a tumultuous harvest season, as well as why she loves working with Colombard—a grape with deep history in California. We also touched on how winemakers today are approaching dealing with smoke taint—a difficulty that’s becoming more and more prominent for west coast makers, thanks to the ever-growing wildfires in the region.
Rosalind is right away kind, approachable, and incredibly knowledgeable. She’s patient, and explains every potentially technical detail in a way that’s easy to understand and doesn’t make you feel like a novice. Our conversation was easy and thorough. We jumped right in:
Margot: If I wanted to come out to California right now and make wine, I couldn’t do it in the “standard” way. I can’t afford to buy land in CA—it’d be impossible.
Rosalind: [laughs] Haha, no.
M: I’m curious to hear how you work with other people to make wine, how you work with Pax, and what the co-op that you’re part of looks like.
R: I’m Pax’s Assistant Winemaker, I make his wines with him. I also have my own project, Emme Wines. He leases this facility, but there are 8 of us total that make wine here for our own labels. I also manage the facility and help organize everyone, especially during harvest. During harvest I’m working constantly with not just Pax but with Martha Stoumen, Scott Schultz, Jaimee Motley, and the other winemakers and assistants. It’s stressful sometimes just because it’s a small space, but its also the best kind of place to work, especially if you don’t have connections and funds and a family that’s been making wine for generations—there’s all of these talented people here that can give me advice and context. Everyone in general bounces ideas off each other and checks in with each other. Ive never made wine in a place thats not like this, but I imagine it’d be a lot harder and a lot more lonely.
M: Do you all share the winery equipment?
R: Pax is in charge of the facility and owns most of the equipment, and we share all of it. Everyone else has bought pieces here and there that we also share. Everyone buys their own barrels, but the larger stuff—tanks, picking bins, the press—each of those are owned by one of the winemakers and shared between everyone.
M: How do you all make that happen financially? Are there contracts involved? Do you pay rent?
R: There’s no contract for the equipment, we all just share it. Pax runs the facility and everyone else here pays him rent. I pay for the 10 tons I make, others pay for how much they make, it’s based on the volume they’re doing. During harvest, Pax and I hire 5 interns for the whole facility. Those interns do everyone’s crushing work, cleaning, etc.
M: You have this community that’s ingrained into what you’re doing and you’re able to work with people who have different levels of experience. It’s a really cool set up, but do you see yourself branching out and doing something on your own?
R: I like it here right now because I do have my own project as well as working with Pax. It’s nice having that as well as connections to everyone else. At this point, I’m still asking advice from people like Martha and Pax and Scott all the time—especially in terms of sales and marketing. I don’t know what I’m doing there, so whenever I need help, they’re the first people I ask. I wouldn’t want to lose that connection. Maybe one day I’d want to have my own space, but it’s expensive and so much work to own land and own a building, or even rent a building. I don’t have much desire to do that at this point. It’s comfortable here and I love the people I work with—we’re co-workers but everyone is also friends. It’s a great place to be.
M: I hear more and more about co-ops in the states popping up. Do you feel like that’s the future of winemaking in America?
R: It seems to me that there are more and more people every year start a wine label that are younger and don’t have a lot of money and are interested in starting just a 10 ton passion project. If that continues, then this is a structure that you’ll see more and more of.
I’ve worked in France a few times, and a lot of the winemakers I’ve worked with, even young ones near my age that are just starting out, often have land that they farm and a space they own. The access to land is a lot easier there. Then again, there are winemakers down in Santa Cruz that farm a lot more of their own grapes because it’s easier to find land to lease for less money down there—it’s not as coveted an AVA as up here [in Sonoma County]. Anything that’s of a decent size, like a couple of acres, is so prohibitively expensive in this area.
M: How do you find your growers?
R: Connections. My main grower—Martha connected me with her and her husband. Martha has been buying fruit from her for a while. They’re really talented farmers. My other grower that I just started working with in Santa Rosa—Scott connected me. I don’t ever go hunting for new growers or new vineyards. I’m not interested in making a specific grape or a specific region. I’m interested in working with people who grow good fruit that are nice people. It’s easier to find those people through recommendations or connections. I don’t care what they grow or where they grow it. I care that they’re good people that do the right thing.
M: It sounds like you’re really community oriented in your approach.
R: It’s easy to be that way here. It’s such a close community. It is just so much easier to grow in an organic way when you work somewhere like this, where everyone is very interested in each others’ success. Scott, Martha, and Pax are always passing connections along. There’s a constant flow of information and ideas.
M: It looks like you work a little bit with Colombard. Can you talk about why that’s exciting for you?
R: I really like the idea of working with grapes that have history in California. Colombard, Carignan, and Zinfandel, three grapes I work with, those are all grapes that have been here for a long time. Some of them are the first grapes planted here. On top of that, these grapes are suited to the climate here. They’re mediterranean grapes from the south of France. Pinot and Chardonnay are cool, a lot of people like them, but it’s a lot hotter here than it is in Burgundy. Those grapes are very hard to grow, whereas Colombard ripens well in the heat and holds its acid well in the heat. It grows well here and doesn’t need much attention.
Also, these vines were planted in the 1940s so they’re super stable. It’s a nice mix of them being well suited to the land, so minimal work and minimal additives—you can produce really nice fruit—and you’re working with fruit that has an interesting history. Colombard was used in jug wines (high quantity, low quality wines) here for a long time. If you look at old grape crush reports from decades ago, Colombard was far and away the most crushed grape in CA, and the most planted. It was everywhere, but you never hear about it because it was blended into jug stuff for Gallo and other large companies. It’s cool to take a grape that has a lot of history and is not very well known right now and bring it back in a way that focuses on the variety and showcases it as a grape worth looking at by itself, instead of just part of a blend.
Colombard is a really good grape! It’s related to Chenin Blanc and it acts kinda like Chenin. It ripens slow, holds its acid. Its not the most aromatic grape, but it works really well for skin contact wines, which I like to make. It doesn’t become overpowering—it takes on a lot of texture and salt and weight on the skins. I like that about it. It’s a really cool grape.
[An aside: Colombard is a cross between Gouais Blanc x Chenin Blanc. It was planted in California for the first time in 1856, brought over from France by Pierre Pellier. It was planted widely in California and made in large quantities as jug wine, mostly in blends. In the 1960s, it was the state’s most widely planted grape. In 2018, it accounted for 6.8% of California’s grape crush, compared to 15.8% for Chardonnay.]
M: I think it’s so cool that you’re working with Colombard, trying to pull out some American history and bringing it to the light. I don’t see a lot of Colombard out there today.
R: Not yet, but more and more! People are getting more and more interested in it. There’s some sparkling Colombard out there and single variety Colombard. Not a ton yet—we’re trying to make Colombard popular here, that’s my goal. (laughs) The fruit is also super inexpensive because it’s not as popular yet, and grows really easily here. You don’t have to put as much money into growing it as Pinot Noir, say.
M: Is that something that guides your plans into what wine you make? The price per ton?
R: Absolutely. Yes. Especially at first when I was looking for a grower to work with. I chose Pamela as my grower for a lot of reasons, but her fruit is at a really accessible price point per ton. A lot of fruit in Mendocino is pretty inexpensive, as opposed to Sonoma where it can be 4k or 5k per ton which is an amount of money that I could never afford.
M: That’s interesting—it feels like price determines trends in wine. People make it because it’s affordable to buy those grapes, and people drink it and make it trendy. It all started with that price point.
R: I think that happened with Carignan in the past 5 or 10 years. It has become a lot more popular in part because a lot of it is grown in areas of Mendocino that offer under 2k/ton for grapes. Starting winemakers like myself can afford it much more easily as opposed to say Pinot Noir, where grape prices can be outrageous.
M: It sounds like you’re really interested in the winemaking science—I saw you taught a lecture at one point on the biochemistry of winemaking. Can you talk about that?
R: Yeah, I didn’t go to school for winemaking actually, I went for genetics. I was supposed to go to med school and then went to work at Gallo for a gap year and just stuck with wine.
M: Can you give me a sense of any wine experiments you’re working on? Do you like to test stuff out?
R: I like to do some experiments in the winery—last year I picked Colombard and made a wine with skin contact and one without. Same vineyard, same block in the vineyard, same everything. The idea is to compare them side by side and see, if all the other variables are constant, what skin contact does to a wine. They were obviously super different. That’s not very technical, but it’s interesting.
I run a standard panel for most of my wines. We have a lab nearby and you can send samples to it to test for all sorts of things—pH, total acidity, volatile acidity, alcohol, and compare those points of data across wines. I didn’t do it that much this year because lab tests run about $150 per panel—it’s heinously expensive. I can’t really afford that anymore.
I did do a cool experiment this year—we had a lot of smoke damage from the fires this year. There’s a cool Cabernet Franc vineyard up on Pine Mountain with high elevation for CA, and a fellow winemaker and I were going to pick it together. He was going to ferment it as a red, and I was going to do something else with it. We paid for the fruit in advance and then the fires made everything in the area really smoky. We picked the fruit anyway and figured wed try and see what happened. What else can you do at that point?
The fires were a huge issue for everyone this year. I took my half and pressed it and split the juice into free run (the stuff that runs quickly out of the press) and pressings (the stuff that you actually press out). I fermented them separately in stainless steel containers and bottled them both separately as pet-nat—two different wines from the same grape. The idea is to see whether the free run or the pressings is more smokey.
That’s another problem we have right now—there’s so little scientific information about smoke taint and how it affects grapes, how you get rid of it, and how bad it is. This was the worst fire year I’ve seen since Iv’e been here. People are scrambling to figure out what to do and what will work with smokey grapes. We figured we might as well experiment with it. I actually opened a bottle of each wine yesterday for the first time and the wine made from the pressings was tasting fruity and pretty good, and the free run wine was super reductive and metallic. It’s crazy because it’s the opposite of what we thought was going to happen—the general idea is that smoke taint lives in the skins so the pressings should, in theory, be more tainted. The exact opposite happened.
M: Wow, yeah I would expect the free-run would be tastier.
R: Yeah me too! Not sure what’s up with that.
M: Do you find that winemakers in the area are trying to do more pét-nats with their smokey grapes?
R: I have the luxury of running little fun experiments because my yield is quite small and I have time and small quantities to play with. For the most part, the people I work with, because they’re making such larger quantities than I am, they don’t have the time or the luxury to do small experiments. The way they adapted to smoke taint was mostly standard procedure for dealing with smoky fruit. One of the winemakers likes to wash his fruit to wash off all the ash on the skins and wash off all the free run juice that might be tainted. Some would only leave fruit on the skins for a day or two and press it off really quickly. I also did that.
My Colombard and Carignan fruit—it was apocalyptic when I went up there. I did everything direct press. No red Carignans this year—only rosé. We also did a lot of carbonic—since the juice and the skins don’t touch and the juice ferments inside the berry, its less risky. We all kind of dealt with things in the standard procedure way of getting off skins or washing fruit. No-one else made a pét-nat as far as I’m aware. The facility here isn’t really set up for sparkling wines. We don’t have a small hand bottler, for example. I only did ten cases of each of the cab francs.
M: It’s wild to hear that there is a standard procedure for dealing with smoke taint. The way the climate has changed is so rapid that now you have to create some sort of template for working with it.
R: It kind of developed at the beginning of this harvest. In the beginning, everyone was panicked and didn’t know what to do, and by the end, we had it down. Some washed their fruit, some got it off skins quickly. We developed an SOP for how to deal with it. People got to do things differently and we all could see what results were. Really, it was a huge bummer.
M: That’s definitely a bummer. I hope next year is easier for everyone. What’s one thing that you absolutely love about your work, and one thing that’s difficult?
R: I’ll start with the difficult. It is kind of hard working here—it’s one space with 8 winemakers, and as much as everyone loves each other, harvest is a period of time when you’re working 12 hours a day 7 days a week and you’re always around one another. There’s not much space. It’s one of the most frustrating aspects—trying to both physically manage our space and emotionally manage each other. Harvest is a turbulent time—lack of sleep, a lot of moving parts.
I really enjoy teaching people and getting things done quickly. Teaching is one of the most fun things for me. Every year we hire 5 interns and we try to pick a spread of people—different personalities, different winemaking experience. I want one or two people who can manage a forklift, and some people who don’t have any experience and just want to learn. It’s really enjoyable to have people with no knowledge about winemaking and watch them progress throughout the 3 months of harvest—how to operate equipment, how to read numbers for analysis, all the moving parts. You watch people go from excited and disorganized to a very very efficient team by the end of harvest. It’s a joy to watch. It’s a good atmosphere. There are days where it feels crazy—I cry at least once every harvest. But besides those moments, it’s incredible. We all eat lunch together, folks cook, there’s a fridge full of beer all the time. We’re here to get work done, but we’re also here to enjoy ourselves. It’s a family dynamic.
M: That’s such a special environment. How do you share your equipment during harvest? I’m assuming you harvest at similar times?
R: That’s partly managed by the fact that Pax purposefully tried to choose people to work with that picked fruit at different times. He picks a lot of Syrah, which comes in late season. Carlo makes Pinot and Chardonnay, and Pinot comes in earlier than Syrah. Scott tends to have things that come in early because he makes fresher brighter wine, Martha’s comes in later because she makes Italian reds. We are balanced that way, but that’s not always the case—sometimes a huge day happens and we have 40 tons of fruit coming in from lots of different places.
We are in constant communication, and we stay organized. We have two big whiteboards up on the wall. One for the month, one for the week. Everyone has to write down what they know about their fruit as they know it—tonnage, where it’s coming from, when they want to press, what tanks they’re pressing. Each day I sit down and look at the calendar for the next day and check in with everyone about what they want to do, and I write up a plan for the following day—where the fruit is going to go, what tank it’s going in, so we can get the tanks ready. First thing in the morning, we prep the press and the tanks. Everyones goal is to get out of here at the end of the day as quickly as possible. Everyone tries to start working as quickly and efficiently as possible—if we’re unorganized we can be working through the night. We’re always planning for the day ahead—we all need to know what we’re doing before we start doing it.
M: Well, once we’re all able to travel again, I hope to come visit you!
R: Yes! We love having people visit, especially during harvest. This past harvest was a huge bummer because of the fires, but it’s also that time of the year that people come out because we have so much work to do. I hope by next fall we can have people visit again—it’s one of the best parts of working here.
M: Fingers crossed! Thank you so much for taking the time.
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Non-profit pairing: One of the non-profits Rosalind supports is Black Outside. Black Outside, Inc has one simple mission: Reconnect Black/African-American youth to the outdoors through culturally relevant outdoor experiences. Donate today!
You can find Rosalind’s wines on her website, Emme Wines. To support this inspiring winemaker, buy her wines directly from her website, or ask for them in your local wine shop. A great way to support small winemakers is to sign up for their newsletters, where they offer updates and news about their projects.
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