The Fizz #41: Ryan Stirm of Stirm Wine Co, is working with old vines & making wines with longevity.
In this issue, Ryan and I get technical around pruning techniques to avoid disease, why he works with old vines, and the resurgence of Cabernet Pfeffer.
For the 41st issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Ryan Stirm, winemaker at Stirm Wine Co. I met Ryan at Peripheral Wine Festival in Hudson, New York a few weeks ago and was immediately pulled in by his wines. Wine fairs can be go-go-go, a blur of different bottles and flavors, especially when it’s the first fair you’ve been to in two years. It was so good to see everyone together, excited about this beverage that brings us together. Ryan was obviously passionate about his work, and excited to share some of what makes his area special.
In this issue, we really get into it. Ryan and I talk about the technical aspect of pruning vines in order to mitigate disease, what makes old vines special (and difficult), and his work with varieties not often found in the United States like Riesling, Cabernet Pfeffer, and Rosa del Peru. We also touch on the future of California winemaking and where concerns like water and labor shortage come into play. I’m excited to support this talented and visionary winemaker on his journey—I hope you will too.
Margot: I'd love to hear about how you got into winemaking. How'd you get to where you are now?
Ryan: When I was 18 and applying to colleges, I chose Cal Poly, which had a winemaking program. I just picked that because it sounded kind of cool. It was about as simple as that. I found the botany and the viticultural side more interesting, but I also really liked winemaking and ended up concentrating on both of those things. A lot of people in the major choose one or the other and most head into the wine business through sales. Cal Poly kind of grooms you to work for a big wine company like J. Lohr or Gallo, so a lot of the program is really tailored for that instead of for the entrepreneurial side of starting your own wine business.
It was a good place to launch from because they really encourage getting out and working. That was the most valuable part of the program—being pushed into getting some real world experience. That tied everything together and helped me figure out what I didn't want to do and what I did want to do. I got internships with both Gallo and J. Lohr and also a smaller winery nearby. All three were drastically different experiences. Working for Gallo, I learned how to drive tractors—I had never hooked up implements to a tractor before in my life. I was a suburban kid, so not at all farm skilled.
It was cool. There were parts of the job I didn't really love doing, but it helped me decide that I don't really want to be on the gigantic side of the business. It can be fun, it can be a sweet cushy job in the wine business, but you're just being told what to do all day and I don’t really jive with that. Naturally, at some point, I was going to do my own thing. I used to rock climb in Northern Santa Barbara County and I met a guy who owned a winery and I ended up clicking with him and working for him for about four years. He's got a winery called Tyler, which is down in Lompoc, Santa Barbara proper. I started with him when his winery was pretty small and it grew substantially when I was there, and that's where I started Stirm. I was his assistant and I made four barrels my first year in 2013 of Riesling from Santa Barbara.
Margot: So you really got started in his facility.
Ryan: Yeah, I made wine in his space. I worked with him for two years. My wife and I wanted to move up north and as soon as I got a salary job with Tyler in 2013, we took all the saved up cash we had and bought a house in Santa Barbara. I had a four day/week schedule at the winery and on the weekends in the off season, I was able to fix it up and we ended up flipping it and selling it and moved up to Santa Cruz after that. All the cash we made, we injected into both of our businesses and were able to start on our own in a small way, at least for a few months.
Margot: That’s awesome. You made it happen.
Ryan: Yeah, we wanted to be up in Santa Cruz, and we’re still here.
Margot: Can you talk about how that area is unique? What’s special about that region?
Ryan: Santa Cruz and Big Sur is kind of the southernly boundary of where all the Redwood trees are on the coast. It just receives a little bit more winter rain than the Southern part of the central coast. It’s more lush. We felt there was more opportunity and simultaneously a lot more history up here. In Santa Barbara, as long as you are able to get enough money together, you can kind of make anything you want because there’s a lot of acreage, but in Santa Cruz, there are different layers that make it both more challenging and also more available to start leasing and farming vineyards. That was just not an option in Santa Barbara.
Margot: In Santa Cruz, you're working with some growers and you're farming some of your own vineyards. Is that right?
Ryan: I just farm six acres, so it's probably 10% of my production—some of it's not even in production yet. We just planted two acres this year, so it’s 10% from four acres, basically.
Margot: How do you find the people that you work with on the grower side?
Ryan: We try out relationships usually on the pretty small commitment side of things. We'll just start working with a vineyard and maybe get a couple of tons to start. We see how it is to work with them for a year or two before we are able to really commit long term. Long term, it's more about building a relationship where we can both improve upon what we're trying to get out of it. It's obviously important to grow better quality grapes, but I'm also focusing on better long term sustainable practices.
Margot: What kinds of practices are important to you?
Ryan: I would say dry farming or just a very dialed in irrigation plan is pretty important because not all irrigation is bad. I would say the best farmers in the state really dial in their irrigation to not maximize their yield, but just to help the grapes stay in, not perfect condition, but not deteriorating. Some dry farmers might let the grapes really struggle pretty hard and take some hits and it might have a big impact a couple of years after.
People who do a good job with irrigation can still have a pretty decent crop with not too much stress, even during a severe drought. When you do that, you're less prone to getting disease. For example, one of the vineyards I farm does have irrigation set up, but we don't use it. It was honestly to a detriment last year, just because we had so much disease pressure from things that have always been in the vineyard, but they get exacerbated in a drought because there’s less susceptibility to fight them off.
It's pretty common to have a wood canker fungus in a lot of older vineyards in Santa Cruz because everyone obviously prunes in the winter, but when you prune in the winter, you're just exposed to getting new pruning wounds infected with this wood canker, and it really limits production. They call it Eutypa. It creates a dead arm on the vine, because it restricts sap flow. The vines have always had it, but they've always been able to at least produce a little bit and not be just horribly mangled, and this year we just had a lot of loss and probably a lot of vines that will die because of it.
We don't own other growers vineyards, obviously, so they're open to make the decisions that they need to, but coming up with a plan that is good for their longterm viability, but also what we need to do in the short term to make sure that we get a crop. The goal at the end of the day is to get a healthy crop at the end of harvest every year, because it's a gigantic waste of time and resources if you don't harvest anything. It's working with them to do that, but also have less impactful long-term decisions.
Margot: That makes sense. You work with some old vines—Zinfandel and some Cabernet Sauvignon?
Ryan: I’d say the Zin, the Riesling, and the Rosa Del Peru and Cabernet Pfeffer is old vine.
Margot: What does old vine mean to you?
Ryan: Everyone has their own interpretation of it, but over 50 years old is pretty old. I mean, over 30 is pretty old, honestly. For a vine to get that old, it has to be in a premium spot that is not insanely susceptible to disease. A lot of really good old vine sites in California are not on the immediate coast. They're a little bit inland, not too far, but far enough where it it's relatively low humidity compared to the coast, and you just have a little bit less disease pressure, but close enough to the coast where you get enough rainfall, so they're able to sustained by dry farming. That’s how most of the old vineyards still exist.
Margot: What have you found to be the difference between working with these old vines and working with newer vineyards?
Ryan: The vines themselves are both more resilient and less resilient. It depends on what disease and how much disease is sustained in some of those old sites. In terms of short-term weather impacts, the old vines typically are able to withstand a giant heat wave better than a young vine. They’re not jumping up as much in sugar or fluctuating as much, so there's more consistency in that regard. Usually you have a little bit lower yield—young vines can really put out a lot of fruit, and it doesn't necessarily make the highest quality wine because things are a little bit watered down. Old vines are more consistent over time and have less fluctuations for weather events.
They also need to be treated a little bit differently because they're a bit less resilient to bad pruning. The way the vines are pruned and sculpted and the style of pruning really impact the amount of disease that you can have. For instance, cane pruning versus cordon pruning. You can do the same thing in a head trained vine, but the less old wood that you have accumulated the less susceptibility you have to disease. Things that are cane pruned in general, it's just one year old wood that you’re choosing year in, year out to grow all your shoots off of, whereas cordon wood can be 20, 30, 50 years old, and that gets old gnarly twisted bark-y. That's a great way to trap in moisture and really develop different diseases.
We're not trying to spray, we're trying to minimize the amount of stuff that we have to do. Long-term and especially spray wise, we ideally for certain varieties try to do as much cane pruning as possible and limit the amount of old wood that we have on the vine.
Margot: Gotcha. You were saying earlier that for the wood fungus, you don’t prune in the winter?
Ryan: Well, we, we do prune in the winter. You kind of have to prune in the winter no matter what. We typically will prune a little bit later in the season, so we'll start in February, which is a pretty wet month. We don't prune in the rain though. We’ll do our pruning on the days that aren't raining—we have plenty of those too. We still get plenty of winter rain and you're still exposed to getting those canker fungus pressures.
Cane pruning helps prevent the transmission of that disease because you have new fresh wood every single year that you're choosing. Canes are just lignified shoots from the year before and it has all its buds and that's how you start forming a cordon anyway. The fewer cuts that you have, exposed wood on the vine itself also helps prevent that transmission because you just have less wood to penetrate from that disease.
Margot: The history of California Riesling is really exciting and interesting. It sounds like that was a staple grape for you when you got started. How has Riesling in California changed over time?
Ryan: Riesling was really popular around the turn of the 19th century. It was probably the most popular variety on the planet, even more popular than Bordeaux grapes. In the fifties and sixties, it just became wildly unpopular—I don't know if it's just because people wanted to start drinking drier wines, but I know Americans preferentially drink way more sweet wines than almost anyone, but Riesling just fell out of popularity. A lot of acreage was either ripped out or grafted over and replanted.
More popular varieties like Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc or Cabernet Sauvignon took over. Riesling was planted pretty much everywhere—every single region in California had it. It was a, a staple white grape, kind of a work horse. It has had a long history and been used for all styles of winemaking over the years.
Margot: Would you say that more people in California are growing Riesling today?
Ryan: The acreage is increasing. At least it was a few years ago, but only in select spots. Monterey County grows by far the most Riesling in the state. I want to say most of it goes to J. Lohr and they make a fair amount of Riesling, but a lot of it ends up getting blended in to Chardonnay at the higher volume wineries. It's cheaper typically, and there's plenty of availability on it, so there's a lot of use for the Riesling acreage that does exist.
Margot: On your website, it says that you are looking to bring in the new age of California Riesling. What does that mean?
Ryan: When I was getting started, it was about creating my own style that is tailored to the climate in California. I'm trying to make the best California white wine I can, and I don't think there's a lot of wineries that focus on that. I want to show that it's a solid grape, but at the right sites it can make an age worthy, iconic California white wine. I’m trying to show a different side of it.
Margot: I love that. Your website also says that you are creating wines intended for aging. What does that mean and why is that important to you? I feel like so many of the wines that we drink today or that are popular today are these pop them and kick ‘em back sort of wines. Why is aging important to you?
Ryan: When I got started in the business, I was just way more into the classic wines, Burgundy and things like that—they were a lot cheaper then too. I think it’s one of the coolest aspects of wine as a beverage that it can age when it's made for that purpose. It's pretty unique in that regard. That still fascinates me as much as making something that is tasty right off the bat. I think having the patience to be able to age something and see how it evolves is kind of lost in today's world, and not a lot of wineries still focus on it.
We purposefully keep about five to ten percent of everything we make in library, just to see how it goes over time. There's no secret formula to making an age-worthy wine except for good chemistry—I think that’s something that is universal universally agreed upon. There's not a lot of wines that have really high pH that age extraordinarily. Well, there are plenty of exceptions to that rule, but wines that have structure—acid and tannin, fruit that is not super watery. It's not that heavily irrigated watered down fruit can't age, but you're going to have to really adjust things to make sure that the chemistry is good enough. Maybe it won't even be that interesting when it does age, but yeah, high quality fruit that has good concentration, acid, and some structure.
We focus on that in the Riesling with some skin contact to draw out some tannins and other phenolic compounds in the skins. To me, that seems to be a no-brainer way to really enhance things. We press really hard to extract as much of those bitter compounds as we can, because there are antioxidants in there. We also try to oxidize all those compounds ahead of time as we press, so we start with pretty dark brown juice before all the whites ferment.
Margot: Interesting. How do you oxidize the juice?
Ryan: We just splash it over the top of a tank. So from the press pan and then up and over and it oxidizes as it's doing skin contact too in the bins. It usually takes five to seven days for those fermentations to start.
Margot: Cool. That's interesting. I've heard from a few different folks that they are doing more oxidation in order to avoid using sulfites as well, because they feel that it might be protective. Do you feel that as well?
Ryan: Yeah. Well, we don't use sulfur on the Riesling for other reasons. I like the cohesiveness of the finished wine when we have a mixed malolactic and primary ferment. We don't develop a lot of the diacetyl character that's common in a barrel fermented and aged Chardonnay where you have that lag phase between primary and secondary fermentation. That's where you can develop a ton of the classic buttery diacetyl character.
Margot: Cool. You work with a really unique grape called Cabernet Pfeffer. I actually hadn’t heard of it before I met you at the Peripheral Wine Fair. How did you get into that grape? How’d you find out about it?
Ryan: A co-worker was making fun of it when we were still in Santa Barbara. I don't even know what the joke was, something stupid. We were making Pinot and Chardonnay and we thought we were the coolest winery of all time, but I think that was the first time I heard of it. When I moved up to Santa Cruz, I ended up helping broker some fruit at an old vineyard that had Cab Pfeffer, Mataro [also known as Mourvèdre], some old Zin and it was a really cool site. I think we couldn't sell some of the Pfeffer and we ended up just making it and it turned out way cooler than I expected.
We didn't know exactly what the grape was. In those old blocks, they're all mixed. It's not one variety. The Cabernet Pfeffer blocks at this old site were a half acre a piece, but they had five varieties in them. There was Cab Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Trousseau. Cab Pfeffer could supposedly be a grape called Mancin, which is from the Bordeaux region in France, and it's just not grown there at all commercially anymore, but there are still cuttings of it at a germ plasm repository nursery where they keep all the varieties going. People thought it was another variety called Gros Verdot, but I think that's been debunked. There's another variety of similar to it called Moristel, a Spanish grape.
It supposedly came to California in the 1870s. There was a huge incentive to import cuttings, especially in the Southern part of the state. The Santa Clara Valley had a ton of Italian and French immigrants and in Saratoga, there was a guy who owned a nursery. His name was William Pfeffer and he either bought the cuttings from someone else or brought them in directly. I'm assuming he just named it Cabernet because it's from Bordeaux, and then named it after his last name, Pfeffer, and that was his advertisement on how he sold the grapes. Saratoga is in the Santa Cruz mountains where Mount Eden currently is and Peter Martin Ray, but his nursery was just down the hill from there. There were a lot of old plantings back in the Cienega valley, dating back all the way to the 1850s, 1849, even, the year California became a state.
[In doing research on Cabernet Pfeffer, the jury is out on how it came to California, what grape it is related to, and even its name—some people think “Pfeffer” comes from the German word for “pepper”. It seems there are only 12 acres total planted in California today. Do you have any more information about this grape and its origins? Are you growing the grape? Please reach out to me by replying to this email, or sending me a message on Instagram.]
Margot: So did a bunch of people plant that grape? Was it pretty popular here?
Ryan: I don't know what the historic acreage was, but it was definitely bigger than what it is now. A lot of it was ripped out over time. There's five acres of it left at an old site that I started working with this year. There is just under an acre at the other old vineyard down the road. There's an acre of it at Pat Wirz’ vineyard, and then for the new plantings, there's another four acres tops, I would say, and that's all of it that I know of in the whole world.
Margot: That’s wild. Why did people choose to keep those blocks?
Ryan: Probably cause they were still producing and they had a viable market for it. I think a lot of the Cab Pfeffer was blended with other grapes for a time, but also there was popularity for it as a versatile wine. There was a big winery here called Charles LeFranc and they made and sold a Pfeffer for a long time.
Margot: It’s not part of the Cabernet family—what would you liken it to?
Ryan: No, I don't think it is, you know, most of the vineyards used to sell it as Trousseau, but it's not really Trousseau. It's kind of like Nebbiolo in a lot of ways—the grapes ripen really late, they can withstand a lot of heat and sun, but they don't take a mega heat wave very well because they'll just get bleached out. The wine itself makes a kind of pale bricky red tannic beast of a wine that's kind of perfumed and light. It has acid, but it's not that acidic.
Margot: Have you found that the market is more interested in it? Are you making more of it?
Ryan: Yeah, total volume wise, we'll probably make about 600 cases of Pfeffer this year. I think it's still a niche thing for sure, but there's a huge demand for the grapes. I think there probably will be acreage increases of it, especially in San Benito County. I don't know if it will make the jump to other regions, but I know there's quite a few people in Sonoma interested in it. I think it it's having a moment.
Margot: What do you wish for the California wine industry in the future? How do you hope to see it change and evolve?
Ryan: Well, I mean, I just want it to exist in the future. I think there's a lot of challenges going forward and I'd say the biggest thing, besides water is labor. There's going to be a reckoning of sorts. White people don't work in the fields—it’s as simple as that. We are completely relying on immigrant labor and I don't really see that narrative changing a whole lot, not just in California, but worldwide, and to be able to make stuff by hand is a gigantic luxury. I still take it for granted, for sure. We just expect that we're always going to have help, but you know, you talk to a lot of the growers and that they feel the pinch all the time, and they're always worried about not being able to get a crew just to pick.
I don't know if that's always going to be around necessarily unless more white Americans really start doing the labor too. At some point in our lifetime it'll be a big point of contention. Everyone in the natural wine world is pretty opposed to mechanized anything, but it's also naive to think that we can completely rely on immigrant labor. It's just not a great system.
We have to make it easier for people to immigrate and work here. We have to be able to pay people better and make the whole system more equitable from every standpoint. Financially, it’s tough. I don't know if we'd have to sell for a ton more money, but we'd definitely have to sell a lot more direct to consumer and a lot less wholesale to really make the whole system work. What Hiyu does, they do a substantial amount of business direct and it's a higher priced model. I think that they have a pretty high payroll from when I talked to Nate about it. I think he has the most realistic and also unrealistic winery in some ways, because I just don't have the capacity to even think about doing all of that. I have me and one assistant, you know, no tasting room and no other staff to speak of, no vineyards that I own and it would just take a vast sum of money.
I think the businesses that will survive and still do it will be not gigantic, but big enough to employ a small team full-time and the bigger wineries will probably be fully mechanized. You just have to be efficient at the scale you're at, especially when you are dependent on a lot of labor. I think it is possible, but it'll require a lot of adapting for each business to be able to continue to do what they currently do at the level of quality that want.
Labor and water are my two biggest concerns for the future. Not necessarily the global warming or fires— that's just here to stay and it’s going to get worse. We have to figure out some kind of a hybrid grape that is smoke taint proof or can withstand a lot more heat and maybe that'll be a part of California's future. It's pretty cool and inspiring to see all the other states in the US using hybrids and making California shake a little bit. If we're not going to produce it, somebody else will.
Margot: Thanks for that insight and for taking the time with me. Can’t wait to get my hands on some of your wine out here.
You can support Ryan Stirm by buying his wines directly on his website. Get the Cabernet Pfeffer and taste a piece of California history (and possibly future). Follow Stirm Wine on Instagram here. Ask for his wines at your local wine shop.
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