The Fizz #94: Patrick Cappiello is supporting Lodi farmers, making affordable California wines that buck the trends.
Patrick Cappiello of Monte Rio Cellars speaks about keeping his wines affordable in a difficult wine economy, and supporting American farmers along the way.
For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke to Patrick Cappiello of Monte Rio Cellars. Patrick is an outspoken voice for American wine, making the case for us all to look into our local wine regions, support our farmers and winemakers, and explore the diversity of grapes from American regions. His winery, Monte Rio Cellars, is based in Sebastopol, CA, where Patrick focuses on sourcing grapes that speak to an older California milieu—Mission, Petite Sirah, old vine Zinfandel, and others. Before becoming a winemaker, Patrick worked as a sommelier in New York City across storied restaurants like Gilt and Tribeca Grill, receiving widespread recognition for his wine lists.
Today, we spoke about his rich career and the mentors he’s had along the way, the ins and outs of sommelier work on the floor, how he works with local growers, and what it means to make an affordable wine in today’s economy. I’m excited about the message Patrick is championing, and learning more about his upcoming projects, including The Siren’s Cellar, a tasting room opening soon.
Margot: You were a sommelier in New York City. Can you tell me about that? What was that like?
Patrick: It was great. I was lucky enough to get to the city when the sommelier culture wasn't what it became. When I got there, there were probably like six sommeliers, and luckily I worked at Tribeca Grill—it was my first server job, and I went there because this restaurant I worked at in Cleveland, the guy who's a chef owner knew David Gordon, who was the wine director at Tribeca Grill, and recommended me for the position. So I started as a server. I had an interest in wine, and David saw that in me and decided to open the door of opportunity for me. I'd go down to the cellar on my off time and be organizing and inventorying and learning everything I could, and he would constantly be giving me invitations to tasting appointments or portfolio tastings and lunches that he didn't have any interest in, and I'd go and taste.
I was thrown into it and absorbing everything I could. Reading every book that I could get my whole hands on about wine. I couldn't afford to go the MS route, so I learned on the job. After a year of being a server, I was promoted to be the first floor sommelier that they ever had, and a lot of great people came and went from that establishment. There was an opening at Veritas, which was arguably the most famous restaurant in New York for wine. In those four years that I worked at Veritas, I probably tasted more great wine than I will have for the rest of my career. After that, I got hired for my first wine director job at a restaurant called Gilt in the New York Palace Hotel. It was a two-star Michelin restaurant that was started by Paul Liebrandt. I worked with Richard Kuo, who opened up a little restaurant called Pearl & Ash. That was our first restaurant together.
Then I moved on to open Rebelle with my friend Daniel Eddy, who was a chef in Paris, and Brandon McKrill, who was my operations partner. We opened a place in Philadelphia called the Walnut Street Café, and the New York restaurants closed. At that point, I was 45. I'd been working on the floor since I was 15 and I just felt like I needed a change. Pax Mahle, one of my best friends, makes wine here in California, and he asked me to come work harvest. I came out here and worked harvest and fell in love with California and just was like, "shit, I wanna do this." So I went back to New York and sold a majority of things that I owned and started crashing halftime in a single wide trailer on Pax's property and just basically learning under him how to make wine. In 2018, I did my first very small release, and then have scaled up. Monte Rio Cellars was born from this moment.
Margot: You went from working on the floor to opening several of your own restaurants with big time wine lists. It’s clear you had some prominent mentors in your life.
Patrick: Definitely. David Gordon, the wine director at Tribeca Grill. Tim Kopec, who was the wine director at Veritas. Those two guys were so important to me. Yoshi Takamura. Yoshi was a manager at Tribeca Grill who was my immediate mentor. He had just finished his hospitality degree from Cornell and was super passionate about wine, and a whiz kid on spreadsheets and all of the stuff that goes into the administrative side. David, Yoshi, and Tim were the three people that really taught me the things that I know. Trips to France with Daniel Johnnes, who was also a very important person with La Paulee, who I worked with for a long time. These were all people that were really important to my growth.
When I worked at Gilt, I unfortunately wasn't able to have any help. I had no sommeliers. I did everything myself. I grew it from a 1,000 bottle selection to 4,000 bottles and won the Grand Award from Wine Spectator. It was a very big moment. It was a huge experience for me to really have to do everything on my own. I had to learn how to create a wine list that was implementing the kinds of things that I wanted. There was another person who was really important in all this—Lee Campbell, and Lee worked for Joe Dressner at the time. I was super interested in natural wine in the Dressner portfolio, and all of these wines that weren't on these classic wine lists that I had worked with. Lee was a really important person helping me understand more about this world and these people.
Margot: When folks think about sommelier work, I hear a lot about the romantic aspects of the job. How did you approach the behind-the-scenes of the work—building and maintaining a list, inventory, selling the wines?
Patrick: I’m literally sitting in this tasting room talking to you right now with all of these bottles behind me. It’s a tasting room but it’s also going to be a wine bar. Because my partner owns it, I can actually do both. It's called The Siren’s Cellar. I've been here all day long putting these stickers on bottles of wine with numbers to create this bin system that was actually initially created by Yoshi, and it's this Dewey Decimal System basically. It makes it way easier to pack a lot of wine into a small space and be able to find things very quickly and efficiently, and it integrates very well into a normal POS. It's usually done in a spreadsheet. For a while, I used BinWise, but I prefer an old-school spreadsheet approach. It's a ton of admin work. I spend more time doing this in my regular career as a sommelier than I do actually on the floor opening wine for people.
I’m trying to seek out things with intention. It's it's super easy to [let that become deprioritized]. A lot of people that are sommeliers or run wine programs have so many other duties, and it's a bonus for them to be able to make a wine list, but they don't have the privilege of being able to make that their 100% focus. It was rare even in my time to be a sommelier and only have to be a sommelier. So many people get swayed by importers or distributors to make their list. I get it. It makes it a lot easier. You build a relationship with that person. They give you allocations of things. You want a wine that you see on Instagram, and you think that's one way to build a list. I'm as guilty as anybody about the fetishization of wines and wineries and producers. In retrospect, I wish I hadn't done as much of that because it's really hard to get all these wines that I loved for so long. That's the hard part is procuring the rare stuff and going out and making the effort to prioritize that. A lot of times it's easier to look at a book and order without tasting and build a wine list without a level of connection to the wine.
So outside of all the admin work, actually the time that it takes to understand producers and vintages from those producers, and knowing you're not putting some bullshit on the list, it’s important. Doing the work to make things extraordinary and to get people excited.
Margot: So you moved to California, you started your project. You're in Lodi now, is that right?
Patrick: I live in West Sonoma County in a little town called Occidental. The winery is in Sebastopol. Most of the wines that I make come from vineyards in Lodi. I have a lot of great farming partners in Lodi. I'm making more in Sonoma County now that I have a tasting room here. I'm making Pinot, I'm making Chard, I'm making Cabernet, I'm making Syrah, I'm making Chenin, but it'll just be small production stuff for the tasting room. The real drivers for the winery, like Sauvignon Blanc from Alta Mesa, Vermentino from the Clements Hills, old vines in from Lodi proper, Sangiovese from Mokelumne River. These are the kind of main SKUs for the winery, and I'll never stop making those wines. It's the relationships I have with the farmers, but it's also access to affordable grapes from Lodi.
There is a reason why when you go to Costco, all the wine is from Lodi. The only wine that can be $9.99 a bottle is from grapes that grow in Lodi because it's an agricultural area that's not like here, where in Sonoma County there are little vineyards that are four acres big that are in somebody's backyard. It's mainly cattle land.
Margot: What do people not understand about Lodi? What should we know about this region? It’s a pretty under the radar region, right?
Patrick: Totally. It's one of the few places where we see generational ag happening. So like Nico Teresi, who farms a vineyard that we just grafted over all nine different Italian varietals. He's an amazing regenerative farmer that I met through Brent Mayeaux from Stagiaire. He's a fourth-generation farmer in Lodi. His grandfather planted the 70-year-old Zinfandel vines that I make wine from. When you're here in Sonoma County or even in Napa, a tech bro like sold their company and moved here, bought a fucking vineyard for too much and hired some fancy winemaker to make the wine for them. That’s not the way it works in Lodi. They're farmers, and right now they're the ones that are hurting.
It's so bad. So many vines were ripped up in Lodi during the last two years. It's crazy. And now they're moving on to planting nuts.
Margot: Why have they ripped them up?
Patrick: Because of the reduction in consumption, and also in that price point where Lodi wines tend to hit are the area that's not having as much traction, and the big companies are dropping contracts left and right. Three of my farmers that I work with, I'm the only winery buying grapes from them, and I'm buying two to three tons of grapes, and they have ten acres of vines. All the big companies have dropped contracts with them. I think the focus on the farmers for me has really become the story I'm trying to tell with people because, I can say “drink American” all day long, and it's hard to say anything about being excited about America right now. When I started this Drink America campaign a couple years ago on my Instagram, a lot of people got pissed at me for it, for the fact that wine regions across the world are hurting. But I have to speak about this. I see it every day. These farmers are a part of my life. They're friends and they're hurting.
And everybody can say that. Anyone in wine right now can pinpoint someone that's being affected negatively by the reduction in consumption. It's really just small family-owned farms or big family-owned farms, but that are generational, and I think that there's something in that. We have tons of generational vineyards, it’s one thing we can hang our hat on here in California, especially in Lodi.
Margot: Out of the grapes that you work with I'm seeing some old Zin. I'm seeing some Petite Sirah, French Colombard. What ties these grapes together for you? I know some winemakers have a vision of the grapes they want to work with, and some are like this is affordable and I'm gonna grab it.
Patric: This will be my ninth vintage. When you're starting a winery that's a negociant style winery [meaning you are not the one growing the grapes, you’re purchasing grapes from farmers], you have a lot of opportunity, and you also have to live within the understanding of trends. I never wanted to follow trends, and I started making wine at a facility with Scott Schultz from Jolie-Laide, Martha Stoumen, Pax Mahle, Carlo Mondavi, Rosalind Reynolds from Emme, Michael Lucia from Root Down. At this point in 2017, 2018, they were all making Trousseau Gris and Pinot Grigio. There was this new wave of more unique varietals that were registering with people. Grenache and Syrah, the Rhone wines.
When I started out, I didn't see anybody around me making a lot of heritage varietals. For me, the winery wanted to be something of old California because if I look back at my history as a sommelier, when I was tasting wines in these restaurants, there would be a night where I would open several bottles of Bryant Family or Screaming Eagle at the same time that I'm opening like '60s era BV, George Latour, Stony Hill Chardonnay from the '70s. Inevitably, the wines that I was more turned on by were these old California wines. Making things like Mission, French Colombard, Flame Tokay—these are the heritage varietals that became the mainstay for me, and they continue to be. I still make Zin, I still make Petite Sirah, I still make Mission, I still make French Colombard.
One thing that started to resonate with me was my Italian background, and I started making Sangiovese. This area where I live was mainly Italian. The lumber market that exists here was built mainly by Italian immigrants coming here in the late 1800s, early 1900s that were redwood lumbering, which then built San Francisco and it went everywhere. That's how all these old Italian varietals ended up here. So when Nico Teresi, who's Italian as well, and I started talking about what we wanted to produce, we both agreed we wanted to start working with more Italian varietals. We planted Aglianico, Barbera, Nebbiolo, Sangiovese, Vermentino, Nerello, Arneis, and Greco. They'll become the future of the winery.
It's fun to experiment and figure out what works. I'm pleasantly surprised that the Sangiovese has become so much of the integral part of the winery, and it's become something that I think people really enjoy. At this point, though, Sauvignon Blanc, Vermentino, old vine Zin and Sangiovese are the varietals that I really want the winery to be known for.
Margot: It sounds like you're pretty involved with your growers. You mentioned “we planted these grapes”, is that a similar relationship that you have across your growers?
Patrick: Yeah, Nico is the one that I have the most connection with in that respect. I don't want to get in the habit of trying to convince farmers to plant things. I've now met a lot of farmers that have a lot of great varietals that they wish they didn't have because they meet a winemaker that does that. I consider that very heavily. I think you have to be careful. You have to be wise in your words and your intention because these are people that don't make wine, and they don't know the market, they just want to sell fruit and farm. You can very easily put them on a path that they probably shouldn't be on. Even this conversation with Nico—I gave him a bunch of the wine that I made from these varietals. I'm like, "let's start seeding these out to some of these other winemakers that you're talking to, [to see if they would also buy the grapes]." I don’t want to take on the responsibility of planting all of that stuff and having him, ten years from now, be like, "what were you thinking convincing me to put Nebbiolo? Dude this is crazy."
I'm looking for a particular varietal French Colombard. There's not a lot of organically farmed French Colombard out there. Of it that's planted, there's not much that's farmed in a way that I want it to be because it's always an overcropped varietal. But now I've just found a vineyard here in Sonoma County that planted in the '70s. It's organically farmed. Right now I'm trying to find more farmers. We started this little Sonoma Coast project where I'm working with farmers that don't have customers, and I'm trying to make a by-the-glass price Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, maybe under a different label, maybe with Pax or with someone else. The focus for me right now is asking farmers, "How can I support you? How can I help you? How can I help keep your vines in the ground?”
Margot: I want to touch on the accessibility bit because you've brought it up a couple of times. Making wine is not cheap. Glass, tanks, materials, labor. How are you thinking about accessibility, especially at a time when winemakers are not exactly rolling in it?
Patrick: From working in restaurants, I’ve learned how to work on lean margins. It was a good training for me to understand that. There's a lot of things that we do to keep our overhead down. Our wines retail between $20 and $25. I've never raised my prices on the wines, even though a lot of stuff around me has risen. But you learn how to pivot and adapt, to bring things to the right place that you need them. We just started bottling under a screw cap, which is something I never thought I would do. But I'm happy that I did, and it's brought the cost down significantly in a time where everything else is going up. Fuel is a problem right now we're dealing with. We're looking at harvest, how we're trucking grapes.
Working in a communal space where we share a press and we share tanks has helped. I buy all my barrels used from other winemakers. It's just me and Jesus [Jesus Aleman, the assistant winemaker at Monte Rio Cellars] that are making the wines. I invested my entire retirement fund into starting this winery, and I've never been able to repay myself back any of that. I've never taken a salary. If I had to sell wine for $40 and $50 a bottle, I wouldn't do it. It's just not where I wanna be.
It’s not just me, Pax just started a new affordable line. Eric Asimov just did his under $20 article, and Pax got in it, which is super cool. Ian Brand has always done it. I think Ian does it better than anybody. Lynn and Kenny from Hobo. You just figure out ways to make it work, you don't put foils on your bottles. You buy the cheapest corks you can find. You buy the least expensive glass that's the most lightweight…
Margot: You buy your grapes from Lodi?
Patrick: Yeah. Exactly! It takes a little more work, but it's the most rewarding thing knowing that people who are excited about the wines say "These are so good for the price point." or "They over-deliver for the price point," that's all I ever want to hear.
Margot: What does sustainability look like to you as you grow in your winery?
Patrick: Waste is always a focus for me, low waste on everything. We’re kegging wine. My keg production has jumped significantly. This year I'll probably fill 800 kegs, which is huge. They're all fully recyclable one-way kegs. The weight of it is so much less. The carbon footprint—the amount of wine you can put on a pallet, it's all smaller. So for me, that's the number one way of making it sustainable. Also, the price that I charge for a keg, for a restaurant they can buy a keg from me and a five-ounce pour costs them like $2.25, and they can charge $12 bucks for that. That helps in a time where it's hard to find affordable wine.
I worked at a restaurant once where we would pour like a Sauvignon Blanc by the glass—we'd pour like two cases of it a night. What a waste. It didn't need to be in that bottle. I looked at doing wine in a bag, I know Bedrock and other people are doing that, but it's logistically complicated. You gotta get the recognition to get the buy-out for it, too. It's tricky. More of the wines are gonna go under screw cap now, because there's not been any pushback, which is great. Obviously continuing to work exclusively with farmers that are farming organically, working in a communal space, we try to minimize our impact that way.
Margot: I want to ask you about your dessert wine. I'm a huge fan of dessert wines. It's my special interest. Why do you make that? How are people responding to it?
Patrick: I only make two barrels a year of it. And I over-vintage it, and it gets barrel aged, bottled when I need to. It came out of this discussion with Tegan Passalacqua from Sandlands who's a homie and a mentor and somebody I've known for a very long time. I'd been making Mission for a long time, and I was at Tegan's house one night. He was asking why I wasn't making Angelica, and I'm like, "I don't know, man. I don't wanna make a dessert wine." He said "You need to do it. It's very important. It's such an important part of the heritage of California.” Yeah, I literally woke up the next day and decided to do it. I started making it that harvest. That was my first vintage of the Angelica was '22, but I’ve been making Mission since '19. People light up when they taste it. I make 70 cases every year and I sell out fast enough.
The story is so important because that's the reason why vitis vinifera ended up in California, was because of Angelica that was a sacramental wine brought by the missionaries. Whatever, good or bad, religion, colonization, bad things are tied to that. But in the end, it's one thing we as California have as a reference point for wine, and I think that's important. At this point, there are only a few old heads left doing it. So now it's Morgan from Bedrock, me, Broc, Teagan, there's a few of us that are doing it to carry on the tradition, and hopefully we teach the kids under us how to do it, and then they continue to make it.
It's a bitch to make. It's very expensive to make. There's not a lot of money to be made. It's sweet wine. I make it because I think it's important to carry on the tradition.
Margot: Why is it especially difficult and expensive to make?
Patrick: Because the laws around how you have to fortify a wine in California are really tricky. You have to move the wine over to the place where they distill wine and then distill the spirit, and then you add it to it, and then you gotta bring it back, and you go do all these bond transfers. There's all these taxes. It is what it is. Just logistically, it's very difficult. Making it is very easy. You're just adding a high-proof spirit to barely fermenting grape juice. I think there's some intent and style that goes into that about knowing when to do it, that makes my Angelica different than Tegan's. It makes it different than Morgan's.
Margot: Where are you getting your spirit for it?
Patrick: I make it. It's distilled Petite Sirah. When I first started doing it, I had the idea of buying grape spirits, and Tegan was like, "You can't do that. You have to make it." I was like jeez. I have a friend that has a distiller in Lodi, so he distills it into high proof for me, and then I bring my Mission to his distillery, we add it to the barrels, and then we bring the barrels back to my winery where I age it. There's another license you can apply for, but then you have to have it double locked, and it's not worth it. It's way easier just to go to Lodi, but it's my grapes that are distilled by a real distiller who knows what they're doing.
Margot: I remember when California had the big fires a few years back, there were a bunch of winemakers who partnered with distillers for their smoke-tainted fruit.
Patrick: Yeah, it's nice to see those partnerships. I wish we could do more of it, but the state of California doesn't make it super easy. Even with beer, I know Evan Lewandowski does that collab with Burial Beer, which is super cool. So I think a bunch of us have tried to do stuff like that. It’s awesome, but we have to be careful around trends. I'm still swimming in piquette, which I am soon going to have to destroy because it was a cool trend, but consumers never caught it and never understood it. When it comes to any of these sort of things, like infused wines or low alcohol or grab and go, in the end, you kinda have to stick to the standards. They've made it through every war and every pandemic and everything. A 750 milliliter bottle of wine unfortunately has been the standard for long enough for me not to abandon it yet.
Margot: For the people reading this issue, how can they support you?
Patrick: Buying the wine is great. I prefer that people make it clear to their merchant or their restaurant about the kind of wines they want to drink. A lot of times my wine might be available in distribution, but a restaurant doesn't have it. My dad will do this when he goes to the retail shop, he's like "You don't have any Monte Rio Cellars?" It's a cute thing that he does. He's 83 years old, and that's just his way of helping his son out. But I think people don't understand the power of that. You don't ever want to make somebody feel bad for their wine shop or their restaurant, but if there's a wine that you would like to see there, if a wine buyer knows that you'll buy the wine off the wine list or from the wine shop, that's a great way to help me.
Open a bottle of my wine for other people. I know that a lot of wines are expensive and maybe special occasion wines, but I try to make wines for your every day ideally. So if you can open a bottle of wine at a party and tell the story about what we're doing and talk a bit about farmers that are hurting and winemakers that are trying to help with that, I think that's the best way to help us. I'm not saying you should only drink US wines, but if it's not at least 50% of your consumption, challenge yourself to figure that out.
Margot: Big agree. Congratulations on the upcoming tasting room, excited for you!
You can support Monte Rio Cellars by following the winery on Instagram and seeing what Patrick is up to, buying the wine from your local wine shops and bars, and sharing it with friends.
Just this weekend I was waffling at an upstate NY wine shop that had a few bottles of Monte Rio Angelica in stock. Hadn’t heard of it before and ultimately passed on it, and now I’m kicking myself! Guess I gotta go back…!