The Fizz #85: Claire Hill is planning for the future of West Coast winemaking
Winemaker Claire Hill and I speak to her experience at Texier and Mount Eden, working with old vines, and why she left California to make wine in Oregon.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke with Claire Hill of Claire Hill Wines, a winemaker you need to have on your radar. Speaking with Claire makes clear her passion, knowledge, and forward thinking approach to the whole picture of winemaking, from the vineyard to the cellar. I’m certain this is a winemaker we’ll come to consider a leader and a classic American producer.
In our conversation, we touch on her experience working at places like Mount Eden, Texier, and Unti, then starting her own project, Claire Hill Wines, in 2017. We tackle wine as an agricultural product, her experiences with the distinction between vineyard and cellar work, the impact old vines have on her work, and what it means to choose a grape that is matched well with its growing location. We touch on her move from California to Oregon, and how climate change plays into the choices she’ll make as she settles into her own future vineyard sites.
Margot: You’re from California. Was wine a big part of your life when you were growing up?
Claire: We would have red wine on the table, but it was always from the corner store or Trader Joe's, high octane anonymous stuff. My dad still drinks Trader Joe's boxed wine, but he also enjoys fancy wine. In 2016, when Chanukah and Christmas season were at the same time, we did a big family thing and I opened a bottle of old Chave for him. He loved it. White wine was not a thing. We had cooking vermouth and sherry. But that was it.
Margot: Is your family multi-cultural? You mentioned Chanukah and Christmas.
Claire: Part of my family is Jewish, part is Irish Catholic. Manishevitz was my first wine. I think Irish Catholicism and Judaism are both very cultural. In my family, certainly, it's not about the religion. It's about the culture. What parts of our culture are we going to keep and what parts do we not want to hold on to?
Margot: So wine has a cultural place for you.
Claire: Yeah, I think wine is subservient to food in that way. Like family meals are something that both Irish Catholicism and Judaism have in common—it's about food, it's about family, it's about having big get togethers, and I mean that's most cultures, wine is a part of that. In California, it was certainly seen as an agricultural product, but in the way that applesauce is an agricultural product, like not an exciting way.
Margot: I always think that's really interesting because I'm from New York City and we're not surrounded by vineyards and the culture of wine. I always wonder for folks growing up in California, how you approach it. It's interesting that you said, well, it's an agricultural product. Here on the East Coast, we don’t really see it that way because we're not surrounded by it.
Claire: I spent a lot of time in Sebastopol as a kid, where going to wine country was normal. You’d get dragged to different wineries. In Sonoma, you have either apples or grapes and that's what you grow. I think wine has always been like “fancy farming”.
I was an art history major. With art and wine, there are a lot of these things where they're so caught up in class structure, like art appreciation, for example. I think wine is a similar thing—you can be a fancy farmer, but you can't be a not fancy farmer, you know? I think people put wine on a different level. Even within California, there is a distinction around what is a “gentlemen-farmer” appropriate crop to grow. You're not doing soybeans, but you can do grapes, especially the further you get away from agricultural areas in that it's not seen as an agricultural product anymore. It has too much mystique around it.
I just read a funny New York Times article about all these Americans moving to French chateaus and buying them up cheap and then being like, oh shit, I'm in a falling down house that I have to put back together. It sounds so romantic but at the end of the day, it's still like, okay, you're in a small town with a house that's falling down. At the end of the day, you're still a farmer.
Margot: What do you think is the difference between farming soybeans and farming grapes? Why are grapes considered a gentleman farmer crop?
Claire: I think apples are a good comparison. Apples have a lot of history surrounding them. There are a lot of really interesting varietals. There's a huge overlap between migratory patterns and crossings that have to do with why certain apples are here and not there. They have very different flavors, very different profiles, make very different products at the end of the day. Cider, I think is seen as craft, where wine is seen as art in the same way that being a really amazing woodworker and making really beautiful furniture is different than being a sculptor. Even though functionally, it's the same thing, but one of them is caught up in much more mystique. But ultimately it's the same, you're using the same tools, you're doing the same thing, you're working for aesthetics.
Margot: How did you get from having random table wine every once in a while at dinner and getting dragged to wine tastings to wait, this is something I want to pursue?
Claire: When I was nineteen, I studied abroad and enrolled at a university in Paris. Through dumb luck, my first week there, I met a guy in a bar who I ended up dating while I was there. His family owns Bollinger, and they have a lot of holdings in Burgundy as well.
Margot: Wow. It's giving Emily in Paris right away.
Claire: Right, [laughs]. I was nineteen, I could go into a store and I could buy wine, and wine is so cheap there that my entry wine that I could purchase at the grocery store was Bordeaux. I was like, wow, this is great. He would open bottles from his dad's cellar. I remember the first wine, you know, people ask that question, which wine was it that pulled you in? For me, it was a bottle of white Burgundy. Growing up, we didn't have white wine. White wine was used for cooking. I just was like, oh my God, I didn't know wine could do that, that it could be beautiful. That was such an eye opener for me. That was it for me.
It still wasn't a thing that I saw as a real job. There were certainly many examples of winemakers that I saw around me—but those people had vineyards in Sonoma. It wasn't the way that it is today where you have all of these people like me who don't own land, who have labels. That was not even an option in my mind.
I got my degree in art history and was at the Smithsonian for a second, very much based on my ability to live with my aunt for free in D.C. Art history was definitely one of those things where I realized you have to be independently wealthy to work in that field. I love the education that I got and I think so much of it is parallel to wine. I had such a vision of what I wanted to do, which was working in museums and then just sort of this moment of realization, of nevermind.
I moved back home to San Francisco and started working in tech, doing marketing, hated it desperately, and finally left my job. I went on Craigslist and got a job as a hostess at a restaurant. I'd never worked in a restaurant before, and it turned out to be a Michelin starred restaurant with an extraordinary wine program called Commonwealth. They included me in their wine tasting, and it was a really small team. Being part of the wine training, was completely eye opening. I knew that wine could be really cool, but I also wasn't in a financial position to go spend $75 on a bottle of wine or buy a bunch of different wines to see what I liked.
There was still impenetrability to it that I think a lot of people feel about wine and being part of that training. Once again, I remember the wine that did it for me. It was Eric Texier's St Julien en St Alban by the glass. I realized that I wanted to make wine. I wanted to make something beautiful like this. I want to be the reason that beautiful things exist in the world. I want to make this. I went and worked my first harvest right after that.
Margot: Was your first harvest in California?
Claire: It was at Unti which has Ciliegiolo planted. That was one of the first grapes I ever worked with, which is why I loved your Instagram handle so much. That’s not a grape many people know about!
Margot: Hah! It's my favorite grape and it's a very random favorite grape, but just like everyone, their favorite grape, it's because I had a wonderful experience with it once in Umbria where I was working harvest with Vini Conestabile della Staffa. It imprinted on me.
Claire: Yeah, they do that.
Margot: You had this harvest experience. Then did you go straight to Texier?
Claire: No, I hounded him for like three years. Every time I would see him coming in for like Louis/Dressner tastings, things like that, I’d say I want to work with you. I'd always kind of get the yeah, yeah. I think he gets that a lot from people. It took three years before he finally said OK you can come work with me. I worked at Unti and then went back to San Francisco and was working at Bi-Rite Market, which was the most wonderful amazing experience. Then I worked down in the Santa Cruz mountains, I worked at Rhys and Mount Eden.
Margot: You did vineyard work for Mount Eden, one of my favorite wineries for cellaring bottles. What was that experience like? You must have worked with some older vines.
Claire: Yeah, I was there unpaid. I got paid in old wine. But I was working at NOPA at the same time. I was doing these things that like only a 25 year old could do—NOPA's open really late. So I'd work from five to midnight or later, and then be at the vineyard from seven to three. Absolutely insane hours.
The vineyards were incredible. It was unpaid, but that was the way to learn. The crew working there, they’d been there for 20, 25 years. They are extraordinary, so skilled, so talented, so knowledgeable. Like, this is their metier. The vineyards at Mount Eden are a hundred year overview of all the viticultural trends of California. You have vines planted in the ‘70s with this big California sprawl sort of thing, or that one is this weird spur basket thing that's just a Peter Martin Ray thing. We're going to prune the vines the way they've been pruned. That perspective was really cool.
Margot: What did you take away from that experience?
Claire: Prior to that, I'd only ever worked for wineries that had estate vineyards. The most that the cellar people are in the vineyards is to sample. They're not doing anything else in the vineyards. Despite the fact that the winery itself recognizes the importance of having that level of control over the growing to have a premium product, yet there's such separation. I think this goes back to class again. You have all of your college educated white people in the cellar and if you are brown, you are in the vineyard. It's this very bizarre separation that California has.
Any winemaker will tell you that the vineyard is where the important stuff is happening. That was part of why I wanted to move to France and work with Eric is to actually get to be part of that whole process from vine to bottle. At Mount Eden, I didn't do harvest there. I was just in the vineyard. But for me, it was starting to learn how complex viticulture is. When wineries are talking about the viticulture, it's like, we just let the vines do their thing. We support the vines. They'll talk about fermentation and winemaking the same way, like we just help the vine express itself. We don't do anything. That's sort of a shorthand for so much work and so many involved decisions. What was eye opening for me was that this is fully its own craft. It is highly specific farming that relies on generational transmission of knowledge.
Margot: When you work with your growers today for Claire Hill Wines, do you have an opportunity to spend time in the vineyards and work in the vineyards at all?
Claire: No, I don't. I thought that I would my first year I worked with a vineyard in Contra Costa, Del Barba. I remember going out there in the summer and being like, whoa, you guys are leaving a lot of canopy. You need to be leafing more. I have a particular vision of what I think things should look like. They were just like, no. Then later on in the year when it's 105 degrees outside and everything is baking, they're like now you see, we have shade cover for all of our clusters so that you don't have sunburned fruit. That was such an eye opener of oh right, your family has been doing this for 120 years, and I was just like, let me tell you about the things that I know. I'm only working with vineyards that have been in the family for, well, the shortest is fifty years. The others are over 100 years that the land has been in the family.
It's extraordinarily presumptuous to come in and be like, well, this is what you need to be doing. I have conversations with them about soil health or cover crop. There's definitely an exchange of ideas, but ultimately, I'm working with a lot of different climates. I don't live on the vineyard. I'm not from that place.
Margot: How do you choose your growers? Is that family lineage important to you? Are you mostly going off of the grape and the price?
Claire: The family lineage thing has been completely accidental. I've gone into it wanting old vines that are farmed organically or organic adjacent. Really old vines are not a commercial endeavor. You have to have a love of the land. If you haven't inherited that land, it's financially impossible.
With my Chardonnay vineyard last year, I have a three acre block and I got a single barrel and some topping wine, and what they charged me doesn't even cover the farming. It's organically farmed, parts of it are no till, it's beautiful. Anyone else would have ripped those vines out. In fact, I think that they're now probably the oldest Chardonnay vines left. They were planted in the mid 40s and you get almost nothing from them, but it's such an important part of the family history.
Margot: And American history.
Claire: Definitely. For them, those are their family's original vines. That is what I look for, is for people who really care about the land, who have old vines that are varietals that are planted in the right place for that variety.
For a while in California, so much of the conversation was dominated by finding these cool sites and, yes, I think that there are a lot of grapes planted in places that are way too hot for what they like. There's a lot of Chardonnay that probably shouldn't be in Napa. There's certainly a lot of Pinot that should not be in certain places. But like Mourvedre, for that to be planted in Contra Costa, where it is extraordinarily hot, that makes perfect sense. That's what it wants. That's what it needs. Finding things that are planted in the right place for them—I love that.
Margot: I want to talk about your experience at Texier. What kind of work were you doing there?
Claire: I was there from March to late October. I got there just at the end of pruning. I was in the vineyards every day. I didn't even go to the cellar for the first few months. Replacing rotten trellis posts, redoing the wires for trellising, weeding, mowing with a tractor. I mean, it was just everything. I was mostly working alongside Martin, Eric's son. That was his first full year back to take over the family winery. It was the two of us. I was there for this sort of generational handing down.
We’d drive around trying to find a supplier for chestnut wood posts for the vineyard, certainly not glamorous. Eric started collecting wine when he was in his early twenties. On the weekends, he’d open up some wines, we’d talk through them and talk about mycorrhizal fungi for three hours. It was on the one hand extraordinarily practical, like hooking up a tractor, doing your spray mixes, but always connecting it back to the why.
Margot: That's such a special and meaningful experience having those types of conversations and being able to drink those wines. Do you have a special place in your heart now for Rhône varieties? I feel like I see more and more Rhône varieties out of California.
Claire: Yeah, Northern Rhône Syrah, it's my spirit grape. It's my Ciliegiolo. It's the thing that touches my heart in this way that is indescribable. I don't love Grenache. I know, very controversial. I love co-fermenting with Viognier, but there are very few Viogniers I've had that have appealed to me. I don’t love all Rhône wines, but I love the place very much.
Margot: What is the story that you're trying to tell with the wines that you make?
Claire: The Chardonnay and the Syrah, I’m just trying to make beautiful wines. I want to make things that are beautiful, that touch people's hearts, that make them feel the feelings. And those are two grapes that I've had those experiences with, and so that's what I am trying to do with those. The Mourvedre that I make is more of my family red table wine. My family emigrated from Ireland. We're in Contra Costa. I have my great grandmother's yearbook from the local high school in the thirties. In that whole area, it's Italian, Portuguese and Irish immigrants. The best hairstyles! Even today, the vineyard owners are either Portuguese or Italian. The Irish were not doing much with the vineyards.
There's a family connection to making a California red table wine. It’s my dad’s wine, basically. It has really broad appeal because it's juicy, but it's herbal. It's not low alcohol, but it has acid. It’s awesome.
Margot: You started your winery in 2017. It's been a few years. Are you feeling like you’re growing as a winemaker year over year? How are you looking into your future and your learning?
Claire: After harvest last year, I moved up to Oregon. So I am in Oregon now. That was a discussion that I had been having with my husband and also with other winemakers my age in California. Which is where do we go from here? What does this look like? I am 34. What is this going to look like in twenty years or in thirty years? I plan to keep making wine for my life’s work. What is that going to look like in California? I want to be able to have my own vineyard or at least farm my own vineyard.
What does it mean in this age of climate change and shifting growing latitudes to put that level of work into, but also your heart and soul into something that in maybe twenty years is not going to be in the same place? I worked for Martha Stoumen for a bit about this, and Eric Texier as well—his whole thing is planting hybrids in France. Mildew is such a problem, and it is not getting better, and there is no treatment that is going to fix it. We're seeing these losses. That's what it is. Water has always been California's issue, access to water, water rights, but there is less and less of it. Over the past ten years with the droughts, people are pulling from groundwater more. Aquifers are collapsing that will never refill again. Once that water is gone, it's gone. That was part of the shift for me.
Oregon has for so long been Pinot country. There are certainly still parts of the Willamette Valley that are absolutely perfect for Pinot, like Van Duzer Corridor, stunning, beautiful wines. That is a grape that is planted in the right place for it. But I think that Oregon has staked its reputation on Oregon Pinot Noir, but grapes like Syrah are going to start to become more prominent with the shift in growing latitudes. I think it's going to be more Northern Rhône, we're moving from Burgundy down to the Northern Rhône. You've already seen the shift. Gamay is really popular. I think we're going to just keep moving down.
Margot: Are you hoping to buy land and grow your own?
Claire: Yeah, that's the plan.
Margot: I’m excited to see you fulfill your dreams. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me.
You can support Claire’s work by following her at Claire Hill Wines and buying her wines from her website.