The Fizz #16: Donkey & Goat winemaker Tracey Brandt has seen California go through major changes.

Tracey Brandt has been making wine in California for almost 20 years. In this issue, we talk global warming, sustainability, wildfire adjustments, and so much more.

For the 16th issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Donkey and Goat’s winemaker Tracey Brandt on a recent wine class. Donkey and Goat was started by Tracey and her husband Jared in 2004 in Berkeley, California, and they have been some of the first vocal and outspoken proponents of minimal intervention winemaking in the United States. We spoke about how Donkey and Goat got started, how global warming is affecting winemakers and grape growers, the effects of California wildfires, and the unique culture of American wine drinking.

Writing The Fizz means I’m lucky enough to meet with wine industry folks across our country and experience the humanity in each of us—it has been such a pleasure. Tracey is casual, focused, and with a great sense of humor. It’s clear that she’s a person who sticks to her values with a focus on her craft.

Before we dive into this interview, I want to drive attention to the recent events in the United States. On March 29, Chicago police killed a thirteen year old boy, Adam Toledo. This event is impossible to process. A child with his hands up, was killed in our country by an organization that we pay for with our dollars. Please stand up for this child, and consider if he were your own sibling, child, or friend. Adam was a 7th grader. He didn’t get a future. What does this have to do with wine? Wine has to do with humanity, with culture, with agriculture, with resources, with time. More than anything, wine has to do with people.

Margot: Can you tell me a bit about how Donkey and Goat was started?

Tracey: Yes, so the winery is in Berkeley, California. We started 19 years ago in France, as more of a sabbatical to learn about natural wine, than an initiative immediately to start a winery, but that evolved relatively quickly. We started the winery in 2004, but at that time we were still involved in other jobs. We weren’t planning on spending that much time in the vineyard at the start, but that evolved over the years, and we always had what was referred to as an urban winery. We decided to work in a contained area for the vineyards—we only go about 120 miles north of the winery. It’s just a function of how much we want to participate and the realities of not having a helicopter [laughs].

The vineyards are peppered throughout the North Coast and the foothills with a little of Sonoma and Napa—about 50% of production is out of El Dorado. We work with Steve Matthiasson in Napa and we have a vineyard in Sonoma now where we have a Pinot Meunier block. Everything else is Mendecino/Anderson Valley. What you’re drinking now [I was sipping on the Pinot Gris] is out of Filigreen Farm in Anderson Valley.

M: The Pinot Gris I’m drinking now is from a biodynamic grower, it looks like. How do you choose the growers you work with?

T: It’s kind of like how do you choose your friends or your partners, you know? Something peaks our interest—a wine from a particular area, and then we start looking for someone. I’d been interested in finding a Pinot Gris vineyard for years and hadn’t found anything until Jason Drew at Drew Family up in Anderson Valley knew of Filigreen. They have veggies, fruit, and Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris planted. We met in 2013, my first vintage was 2014—I go in thinking I want to find a partner who is already farming the way we want to farm. In the very early days we were more willing to maneuver a bit and grow them in our direction, but we haven’t done that in years. Everyone we work with is farming organically or biodynamically. Then it’s really a chemistry check—there’s a saying “I don’t want to work with assholes”, and that’s true. This is a long term proposition that’s meant to be joyful, so the personalities have to align.

M: You all have been around for almost 20 years. Can you tell me about how the landscape of wine in California has changed over that time?

T: It’s been pretty dramatic. One of the reasons that we wound up in France was that coming out of the 90s and early 2000s, the style that was dominating California was what people would say made to Robert Parker’s liking—high alcohol, big extraction, lavish oak. [Robert Parker is a wine critic who wrote The Wine Advocate newsletter. He had a huge influence around what Americans drank, and what winemakers around the world produced, thanks to his popular 100 point system for rating wine. The flavors he enjoyed pushed toward bigger and bolder wines, changing the landscape of wine production.] A wholly different style of what California is known for today. When we came back from France, we thought okay, we’re going to work with organic farms and not add any chemicals and do native inoculations. At that time, people would offer me unsolicited advice around how my wines would be ruined with stuck fermentations and things like that.

There was an infamous incident years ago with one of the big Pinot guys prior to Instagram and iPhones on the Robert Parker bulletin boards—that used to be how people would dialog virtually about wine. Someone had gone on who had Donkey and Goat’s Rousseau Vineyard Chardonnay, and we were with Rousseau from 2003-2010. It was a beautiful site with gorgeous fruit, but it never maintained the acidity we liked. We applied a trick Eric Texier had taught us where you pick at verasion, press that juice and freeze it, and that becomes a natural acidifier. That was how we could get the wine to the acidity we wanted without adding a bag of tartaric acid. It was an enormous amount of work. This high falutin Pinot Noir guy went on the boards and said it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard.

What’s interesting about that is there was such a backlash around thinking differently. Somewhere around 2009-2010, John Bonné writes this book about California wine, which intersects natural wine in this unique moment in time. I feel like both of those things thrust the conversation and interest leaps and bounds forward. It’s been a wholly different world since then. Today, most people are at least aware of the idea of natural wine and organic farming and sustainability.

M: You were some of the first winemakers in the United States to start speaking loudly about minimal intervention winemaking. Can you talk about your winemaking philosophy?

T: Yes, and we definitely were. There was certainly organic, biodynamic, permaculture farming at the time, but what is interesting is that a large share of the grapes that were farmed in that manner would come into someone’s cellar to be made into wine, and they would take more of a conventional approach in the cellar. Folks coming out of U.C. Davis would take an approach around control and risk mitigation. The idea that when you pick the grapes, you take the fermentation vat and make sure that you have only the yeast you want and you control your flavor profiles. That was the antithesis of what we imagined made sense.

Coming out of Europe, the idea was that we’re farming the microbes and supporting their evolution of making this wine—more of a stewardship as opposed to a mad scientist. That was what was interesting to us. We’ve never made wine in plastic vessels, for example. It never made sense. When we made that decision, no-one in the U.S. really knew about B.P.A. yet. Our daughter was born in 2005 and she had a glass baby bottle and most of my friends thought I was crazy. That philosophy really guides all of our decisions—even the weight of the bottles. Heavier glass has a higher impact on the planet, and our shipping materials—cardboard vs styrofoam, for example. Our winery facility is in a building built in the early 1900s, the walls are concrete, 40 foot ceilings, and we’re directly across from the Golden Gate Bridge so we’re fog-influenced. We don’t have temperature control—we don’t need it. We don’t have to run an A/C unit in there, it just stays naturally cool in the winery. When it doesn’t, we use a night air system and sprinklers to chill it out.

Foot crushing at Donkey and Goat

M: In California, I hear a lot about water conservation and management. Is that something you keep in mind?

T: Always. From an ecological and a wine profile perspective, dry farming has always been advantageous. In California, it’s difficult to dry farm from the first couple of years of planting. Once you have established roots, and you train them with lack of any meaningful irrigation to go deeper and deeper, that allows them to be more sufficient regardless of what you’re doing at the topsoil. It probably makes better wines. At the winery, we’ve never filled wood with water to maintain it. We either try and keep it full of wine or we use a steaming process, which still uses water but far less.

M: Can you tell me about the Stone Crusher Roussanne? What was the inspiration behind that wine?

T: It was our first skin contact wine, or orange wine. In 2007, we were struggling to get the fermentation to go dry. With natural wines, wines may take a year to go dry, and that may become problematic because you’re more susceptible to microbial problems. We like to bottle our wines early, and we do things like warming the room to try and get them to go dry sooner. Another way to do it would be to introduce the skins—there’s so much in the skins that provides fuel to the fermentation. We started playing with it in 2007 and by 2009 just realized that we preferred the wine that way and we made the first Stone Crusher in 2009 where we de-stemmed all of it, we saw that the Roussanne coming out of El Dorado already tends to be a higher pH wine. When you do any sort of skin soak, you’ll tend to see higher pH. We de-stemmed it, put it in a big wood tank, treated it like a red wine—we punched it down by hand a couple of times a day. We purposely minimized the oxidation—it was more about minimizing VA.

We have a liquid CO2 tank that flows CO2, so we keep the cap during the fermentation without oxygen when it’s not yet fermenting strong enough. When a wine is fermenting, there’s enough CO2 coming off the fermentation to protect it. Where you get the risk for higher VA is in the beginning and the end when the fermentation isn’t strong enough to produce enough CO2, so we mitigate that with the CO2 tank. What results is that you have this crazy texture but perfumey profile that isn’t oxidative, and the VA is not offensive at all. It was always an extraordinarily exciting wine for us. It’s so fun to pair the Stone Crusher with food.

M: Your wines often have this refreshing and bright acidity—is that because you pick early?

T: We definitely pick for acid. Even to this day, growers will say well what Brix do you want? In their head, they’re trying to plan it out on a whiteboard and say well Donkey and Goat will probably pick first. For us, we can translate what we think acid and Brix relates to, but what we’re going to do is watch the acidity and flavors by tasting—that might be 19 Brix or 24 Brix. We’re 100% on flavor and acid. We’re also really big on blending. It’s unusual that one of our wine is 100% single variety. We have what we go to as our acidity in both colors.

For the whites, we planted Picpoul years ago—a beautiful high acid wine, a Rhone varietal. For Chardonnay, the one we turned into a pet-nat called Lily’s is extraordinarily acidic from a cool place in the Anderson Valley that can help any of the Chardonnays or Sauvignon Blanc with acidity. On the red side, we do a similar thing with Grenache. That’s the other way—we don’t always have exactly what we want in one little vineyard plot, and we’re not afraid, in fact we think it’s more interesting to blend. That’s the fun part.

Photo by Sari Blum

M: In the last 20 years, have you had to pick earlier and earlier? Have you seen any effects of global warming in the vineyard?

T: It’s marked. It’s quite frightening. I have a whiteboard in my office that shows nearly every vineyard block running down the rows and the columns are the years, and the value or the cell is the pick date. At a glance, you can see all of the pick dates over the years. It’s powerful. 2011 was the latest year ever, and I think it was 2015 we just jumped way forward on pick dates and we’ve never really gone all the way back. We have a Chardonnay vineyard that we’ve been with since 2010, and it’s an El Dorado vineyard, but the latest it was ever picked was August 17, and we picked it as early as July 31. These days, the latest has been about August 6. Climate change is real—and with the fires, it’s a huge concern for anyone in this industry.

M: Were you affected by the wildfires at all?

T: Oh yeah. We went through 2008 with problems and 2014. We were lucky with the ability to pick before anything happened in the subsequent years until last year. Last year was definitely a huge problem. We’re still not sure on a couple of lots if we’ll ever bottle them, but we’re somewhere between 25-40% down on our production. That’s a combination of vineyards that weren’t picked and some others where growers and I agreed that we’ll go for it and hopefully it’ll work out and if it doesn’t we’ll have to deal with the insurance thing. There are still a couple of lots I’m hopeful about—it might be a keg play where I sell that in Northern California, blended into a non-vintage but delicious wine.

M: Do you have methods for dealing with smoke taint? I know some winemakers wash their fruit right away to try and get some of that smoke out.

T: I’ve never done that, but honestly, I might this year. I would have to think about it a bit. You’d want to wash it in a way that it can drain through, otherwise you’ll wind up with the same problem. There are logistical issues there—I bring in about 100 tons of grapes and I don’t have a big colander. Our pick bins are not permeable for water. It would just be sitting in a bath of smoke water. I know some growers that washed with water in the vineyards and I’d be on board with that. You’d have to do that right ahead of picking or else you’d have a big mildew problem. If it were the morning of picking, that would be viable. There are a lot of winemaking decisions there too.

We had vineyards where we didn’t think we had a smoke problem—there was smoke in the area but it wasn’t low, or wasn’t there long. There was no indication in measuring in a lab that there was any problem, and then 8 months later there’s an issue. 8 months later it’s too late to change your course—if there is an issue, the best thing to do is direct press it and remove the skins from the equation, since that’s where the problem is. The white wines are a lot easier to deal with than red wines. But if you don’t want to make a house full of white and rosé and everything seemed fine when you were making those judgement calls and 8 months later it’s not fine. It varies—some wines taste like barbecue or smoke, and there’s other subdued fruit or some chalkiness. Every varietal is different and the amount of exposure has a huge impact. It’s very difficult.

Grapes ready for the sorting table

M: I know a few winemakers have forgone those red wines to make rosés, like Brianne Day made “Lemonade”. It’s interesting to see how winemakers have had to pivot in these circumstances.

T: Yeah, we make a red wine called “The Bear” and the vineyard was too exposed for it. I had been wanting to try to make a red wine that’s more white than red. I had a concrete tank and 2/3 was direct press of Mourvedre, Syrah, Grenache, Cinsault, and 1/3 was de-stemmed and all put together. The ratio of juice to skin was different than a traditional red wine. We also blended some Chardonnay in there. We were in the tank for maybe four days, and that became our New Glou. It was delicious, and people loved it.

M: How have you had to adjust or adapt this last year, especially around the pandemic?

T: We were lucky that in 2013, we made a conscious effort to change our business. We wanted to focus on DTC—direct to consumer growth. We wanted to grow our wine club and evolve our tasting room. When COVID hit, we were protected a little bit in that we’ve been in Berkeley since 2004, so we had a large local audience who wanted to drink wine. Even though our tasting room closed, we were still able to sell wine off-premise. Our distributors, while they were down, there were a lot of people buying wine to drink at home.

We actually had a great year sales-wise and in growth, and on the internet channels. Our private events, our tasting room revenue, our restaurant partners—that was all extraordinarily suppressed. We made it, and we’re hopeful that we’ll see some movement around opening back up by mid-June. Our tasting room has been open since early February, and although we definitely do the same number of people in the tasting room, things are still moving in the right direction. It’s exciting to feel like the world is opening back up a little.

M: What’s the best way for individuals to support you right now?

T: The wine club is definitely the best way to support us, and the best deal. We grew the overall number of wines we make, but we shrank the number we distribute. For any given release, I may have 6-8 wines, but only 4 go into distribution. The rest stays with my wine club and tasting room. There are a lot of wines you just can’t find except through these channels. It affords us an enormous amount of creative freedom, which translates into more excitement. This year, for example, I’m going to have a Vermentino bottling that’s going to be gorgeous, and we’re only making 95 cases. The pet-nat is another one—we get to dabble with a different pet-nat this year, and I only made 140 cases, so it’s not going to go very far.

M: That’s awesome, you get to have this more personal relationship with the wine club folks, since you get to have fun and get creative with those wines and know these folks support your vision. Having spent some time in France, what’s unique about American wine culture for you?

T: Europeans have such a different relationship with the communal aspect of food and beverage, and how primal that is both to human connection as well as drinking things that are from your immediate area, and celebrating that. The idea of the “table wine” or local bistro that has one item per day and two wines—one white and one red, sources from 20 minutes away. That is so foundational and fundamental to the culture that it makes it a whole different thing. They can drink it out of a juice glass and be eating some charcuterie and its a magical experience. It doesn’t have to be a fine dining experience to be a great food and wine thing.

M: I feel like the more I explore New England and the East Coast in general, I’m finding more of that. We have so many wineries here and local shops that sell local wines, and I feel like it’s something that we also have, it’s just not something that’s touted widely yet. People often think that you don’t have great wine coming out of your backyard, but that’s not true at all. There’s amazing local wine culture around Maine, New York, Virginia, Ohio, Texas.

T: Absolutely, and I think that’s something that has changed during our tenure. When you think about what happened in the beer industry, for example. When I started making wine, Anheuser-Busch reigned supreme, and that has been turned around. It has been so beneficial to consumers—the choice, the locality.

M: I feel like that’s where we’re going with wine as well. There are so many new wineries popping up in the United States. It’s becoming a bit more democratized and easier to get the information you need to start your own project. I hope that in the next few years, wine will seem just as commonplace and everyday and for everyone as beer is today. I think we’re getting there.

T: I do too.

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