The Fizz #38: Colin Shirek of Alto Cirrus is an up and coming winemaker you should know about
Winemaker Colin Shirek talks about his winemaking process, working in a wine co-op, and why he's leaving Oregon for California.
For the 38th issue of the Fizz, I’m throwing it back to a relaxed July interview with Alto Cirrus winemaker Colin Shirek. We met at Brianne Day’s winery in Portland, Oregon, which Colin was working out of at the time, to taste and chat about his wines. It was the first time I had tried Colin’s wines, and they were fantastic, clearly made with love and intention. He has an infectious laugh and you can feel his warmth and kindness through the way he speaks.
In this interview, we spoke casually about his winemaking process, his payment structure for the co-op he worked out of, and why he’s leaving Oregon for California. Through tasting Alto Cirrus wines, it was obvious that Colin is a rising winemaker to watch—his curiosity, technique, and winemaking style set his wines apart. I can’t wait to follow Colin on his journey as a winemaker.
Margot: You’re currently working out of Brianne Day’s facility?
Colin: This year, yes, but 2020 will be our last time using it.
Margot: How long have you been making wine?
Colin: We made our first Alto Cirrus vintage in 2017, but I’ve been working in the industry since about 2000. I worked at Christom for the 2008, 2009 vintage and then Domaine Drouhin for awhile and then Hirsch Vineyards down in Sonoma for a while. I also bopped down to New Zealand and Australia as well at a place called Felton Road and Ten Minutes by Tractor.
Margot: That's fun. This wine is delicious, by the way.
Colin: Thank you! I love the acid on it and the floral characteristics. We're natural leaning, I'd say, there's definitely no dogma about sulfur levels or anything. There's an ideal way to do things, sure. If the wine is not going to get there that way, then I'll intervene if necessary. For this wine, it just got pressed into neutral oak. Full lees contact, naturally fermented, without anything added to it, except for some sulfur right at the end.
Margot: Where do you get your grapes?
Colin: This is from Meredith Mitchell Vineyard in McMinnville. This year, except for this wine, my wines are coming from completely organic and biodynamic growers.
Margot: How do you find your growers? Does Brianne help you with that?
Colin: No. I drive around a lot and explore. Word of mouth and Craigslist even. Just all kinds of random ways to find people. I prefer sites that are own rooted, older vines, and non-irrigated. I never ever get all three except for Meredith Mitchell, but that's ideal.
Margot: Why do you prefer own rooted vines?
Colin: I think they might hang on to their acid a little bit longer, and acid is a very important part of my wine. I used to say I never saw a wine with too much acid in it, but I’m changing my thinking around that just a little nowadays.
Colin: This Viognier saw a week of skin contact and was just de-stemmed into the fermentor and given a couple of punch downs maybe once a day, once every other day. And then once the fermentation started to kick, I pressed it and barrel fermented it in neutral oak.
Margot: There's some cool herbal qualities to this wine that I’m loving.
Colin: Yeah! I personally like Viognier on the greener side. I think Willamette Valley does really well in that realm.
Margot: Absolutely, and it’s great to see grapes like Viognier getting some more attention out here. Did you make wine last year with all of the wildfire issues?
Colin: Last year was hard. Ironically, all of my skin contact wines and my rosé got smoked, but most of the reds didn't and the whites didn't, weirdly enough. The vineyard that got the most smoke impact from is in the Colombia Gorge and it sits at a higher elevation. I think that the smoke of that year was pretty high up, so a lot of the lower elevation vineyards did okay, but the higher elevation vineyards, especially the Gorge one just got smoked. I have a Ramato that tastes like beef jerky.
Margot: Oh no! What did you do? Did you do anything with those wines?
Colin: I couldn’t do anything. I took the grapes. I made wine with them and the wine just kept getting worse and worse. It's in there now—it's a great little snapshot of what smoke does to wine if you'd be down to check it out.
Margot: Oh, absolutely, I’d love to try it.
[We did end up going into the winery to try some of the smoke-tainted wine.
Colin: Yeah, it’s cool. I mean, I really don't like it. I love like funky wines and stuff, but at that point it gets too distracting for me.
Margot: Oh, for sure. That's not what you're envisioning for the wine, right?
Colin: Exactly.
Margot: But then again, it's interesting to see what people do with it. Like, Brianne trying to go for her distiller license. We have to think about this sort of thing because it's not going away. It's only going to get worse, you know? So sustainability wise, like what can we do with that?
Colin: Right. It’s something we're going to have to navigate, because it's not going anywhere.
[Colin pours his Rosato. This wine was a real trip to try. It has a dried fruit vibe to it thanks to the bit of oxygen it was exposed to in the winemaking process. It’s textured and and has some grippiness to it. This wine woke me up in the tasting—delicious and exciting.]
Colin: So this is just something that needed to happen. I had a lot of Chardonnay that was so low in pH that it didn't finish malolactic fermentation. I had another lot of Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir co-fermented on the skins made like a red wine. The Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris was lacking something and I couldn't bottle the Chardonnay on its own. It just tasted kind of too lean and too acid driven. I blended the three together, so it's a third Pinot Gris, a third Pinot Noir and a third Chardonnay.
Margot: Interesting! It has like a real like passito vibe.
Colin: I do most of the whites the same, like I really love lees and I think a little oxygen on the juices is nice, cause it kind of drops out a lot of the phenolics.
Margot: This is awesome. I love a little oxygen, it gives it this awesome rustic Italian vibe that I love. I’m really digging this. I’m really surprised at how much tannin is in here.
Colin: Pinot Gris has a lot of tannin when you skin ferment it! It’s very cool. This vineyard is incredible. It’s out in the Colombia Gorge on Underwood Mountain, and it's on the colder side of the mountain, so it gets the direct wind from the Gorge. It is own rooted and un-irrigated, organically farmed, and it is just so scraggly looking! We were just talking about “good wine comes from beautiful vineyards”, and this is totally the exception to that rule. It never loses its acid, no matter what level you pick it up.
Margot: It’s absolutely delicious.
Colin: I've got this one barrel inside—I’d love to see what you think about it. It's a little too much for me, but it's a three-quarter filled barrel of Ramato that I haven't topped, just to see how oxidating a wine affects the smoke.
Margot: Oh that’d be interesting to try!
This is a vineyard that I found through a viticulturalist up there named Joe Cushman. He does a lot of the Columbia Gorge farming. This vineyard is squared evenly, so they got the top part of the vineyard and I got the lower part. It’s a little bit less rocky. I love whole cluster in Pinot, but this one, I really hadn't worked with the vineyard before I saw any wines from it. I just wanted to see what it looked like without any whole cluster. This was totally de-stemmed and un-inoculated for primary and malolactic.
It was left on the skins until it was dry and the cap was showing signs of dropping, and then just pressed and put in the barrel, and left on its lees for 18 months, topping every two weeks or so. Then bottled after 18 months in barrel.
Margot: That’s a long time!
Colin: It is. It’s just what needed to happen for logistics, not necessarily for, wine profile. Awesome.
[Colin pours his Johan vineyard Pinot Noir]
Colin: Have you tasted many Johan wines? Brianne does one too. They're a vineyard that has a lot of different grape varieties planted, and they sell a lot of them off, so a lot of us all use Johan fruit. It's kind of our source for cool stuff. They’re biodynamic and this wine has about 30% whole cluster, with about 30% new oak.
Margot: Where do you get those new barrels? Are they expensive?
Colin: I work with a cooper from France named Cavin that I worked with a little bit at Domaine Drouhin and Hirsch. Not too many people use them around here, and I always want their barrels. Each barrel is about a thousand dollars.
Margot: Why did you get into winemaking?
Colin: Well, I dropped out of art school. I started working at a restaurant in the Bay Area. Every couple of days I had off, I would go out and taste in Santa Barbara, or go to Anderson Valley. I just started loving it. I really connected with the maker aspect of it—doing stuff with your hands and making something that you could share with people. I really loved that part of it, you know?
That year, in 2004, I tasted a wine by Calera. I kinda liked wine, but it was mostly oaky Chardonnay and Cab. Like the wine my parents drank never really resonated with me. And I tried Calera and I was just like, oh my God, this is it. When I was out in New Zealand for wine school, I worked at a vineyard Felton Road, and the assistant wine maker there had done a vintage at Christom.
Christom is out in Salem and the winemaker there was the first winemaker at Calera. I got to work with him in 2008 and 2009. I got to learn from the dude that started me down the wine route. So that's awesome. It was fun.
Margot: How'd you get here, to Oregon?
Colin: I hit a wall in 2014. I was doing harvest hopping. I wasn't really finding a place that I was really resonating with, so I decided to take a couple of years off, and I started working in wine at New Seasons, and at one point I wanted to get back into making wine. I decided I was going to start a wine label and go really small, really slow. Brianne then said well, I have some room here at the winery, and it clicked.
I met Brianne my first week here in the Willamette Valley. It was her first week too. We were both in our first Oregon ventures together. We went out and tasted all day. I think we went out and got crappy pizza later.
Margot: I love that, what an organic relationship. I'm trying to like understand the situation around the facility—how does that work, you sharing this space? Brianne owns the press, tanks, everything, and you lease studio space?
Colin: Yeah. I pay sometimes per ton, sometimes per case. It changes with the situation. They call it like an alternating proprietorship—we're all under her.
Margot: Would you be willing to tell me how much you pay?
Colin: I think it's around 1200 per ton, and I usually bring in around 8 tons.
Margot: Gotcha—how does that feel? I know some folks are super happy with these kinds of relationships, some folks tell me that there’s space for doing it a little differently.
Colin: I think it's interesting. It's a double-edged sword where the, the proprietor is having your presence be a way to generate capital when they might not be having as much capital coming into the business. In exchange, you get the opportunity to make wine somewhere. It has never been a permanent solution. I'd love to have my own space and we're working towards that, but, for the majority, it's been a very positive experience and the camaraderie of sharing this building—that’s an incredibly meaningful thing to me.
We’re able to bounce ideas off each other and work with one another in really great ways, learn from each other.
Margot: That’s so good to hear. Did you mention that this is your last vintage here?
Colin: Yes. We’re in a bit of a crossroads. We're not gonna make any wine next year. We just signed a lease for somewhere down in Petaluma. I'm really excited about that. I'm going to work vintage down there and then I'm going to start making some more wines in 2022. I think I'll have to join another co-op, for now. There's a, there's a vineyard called Alder Springs in Mendocino. I am so pumped on that. It's all organic—it's kind of the Johann in Mendocino.
[Colin pours his Cabernet Sauvignon to taste. It’s light and joyful with some nice bell-pepper vibes that aren’t overwhelming. This is not a huge and heavy Cab—it’s incredibly approachable and easy to drink. It reminds you why Cabernet Sauvignon is so highly acclaimed. As someone who grew up in a wine culture that turns up their nose at Cabernet Sauvignon, this wine tapped me back into the joy of the grape.]
So, this is a Cab from Napa. I never thought I'd make a Cab. My dad has a friend who is currently going through brain cancer treatment, and he has a little backyard vineyard in Napa. The fruit usually gets sold to this one company, but he wanted to make something for himself. So we drove down. It was the day the fires happened, and it was insanely wild. I wanted to go for more of like a ‘70s vibe to the wine. We picked the fruit super early. It was supposed to be a ton and a half, we got a half ton out of it. We fermented it into little barrels and got this cute little basket press because the press wouldn't even fit it. That was just really fun.
Margot: Sometimes I smell Cabernet Sauvignon on I'm like, “oh yeah, Cabernet!”.
Caleb: Totally! For me it has been such a maligned grape for my whole wine life. What can I do with Cabernet that hasn’t been done?
Margot: It’s kind of Cabernet Franc-y!
Caleb: Yes! It was something that was kind of unexpected. I'm like, well, maybe I can do something with this in the future. The fruit was beautiful. The vineyard is literally like a really fantastic backyard. It was teeny tiny. They had all kinds of other stuff growing.
Margot: This is so nice. It really makes me want to dive back into some Cabernet. Why are you moving back to the Bay?
Caleb: I like extracurricular stuff outside of wine. I want to be outside more. I don't want to be stuck in the rain. I want to ride my bike and go surfing. But also, I want to work with more than just Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. I was so wrapped up in that kind of Burgundy mindset. Then I got so disillusioned.
Margot: It's interesting when people work with a bunch of different vineyards. You don't have your own vineyard because you don't have your own picking team or like farm workers. How do you approach that? Do you talk to these growers about their labor practices?
Colin: More so than ever. I think that should be the primary discussion point—so much more than how much sulfur you use or what you didn't add is how are the people treated. I think that's so important. I really want to foster more of a dialogue around that in the future.
Margot: How do you plan to do that?
Colin: I don't know yet. I don't think that it's my choice to figure that out either. I think to listen and to be present is a place to start. It's not for me to decide. I think it's for me to choose who to work with. It's hard to say, but I do want to have that be a bigger part of my winemaking.
I want to get back into the vineyard. I've worked a lot in the vineyard in New Zealand and it felt great. I feel kind of removed from vineyard life here. You lose a little bit when you're not up there with the vines every day.
Margot: It's interesting now that you're starting this chapter again over there, because you do get that choice. You can say, all right, here are all the growers out here that fit what I’m trying to do, and you can choose to look at all aspects of their production. What's the situation with growing, and harvesting and labor is a part of that conversation. How can we come to a place where I feel comfortable and you feel comfortable?
Colin: Exactly, and I think that’s super important.
Margot: Thanks for showing me around and tasting with me today. I can’t wait to get my hands on some of your wine out on the East Coast.
You can support Colin and Alto Cirrus by following them on Instagram. Learn more about Colin in this interview on Oregon Wine History Archive.
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