If you’re following our Instagram at all, you may have seen that I (Teresa) have had an amazing opportunity to make wine under the direction of Ed Shaw. Anytime you can make wine with a mentor, you’re ahead of the learning curve.
It’s just Merlot.
But this is Ed.
Ed’s mistakes earned awards. In fact, one time he accidentally entered a wine he didn’t even like into a competition and won gold. Ed, to me, is kind of the Chuck Norris of wine. If Ed walks past the grape section in the Produce Department of a grocery store, the grapes start fermenting out of respect. Wine is known as an antioxidant that is meant to help fight cancer. Ed’s wine actually cures it.
If you haven’t met Ed, here’s my take on him…
I haven’t seen this but apparently he was the guy waterskiing on one ski with a pack of smokes rolled up in his sleeve and a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and NONE of the smokes ever got wet.
He also has a toy poodle.
He makes award-winning wine that our dear friend described as ‘chewy’ — not that it has a bite, but because it has some heft to it.
He also likes to cook with his fancy-pants sous vide.
He’s like old-school new-age and I can’t keep up with all of this.
Ed wears the coolest clothes, sourced from the best places, and has an outfit for everything. And he was a big-wig lawyer who flew via Concordes to his destinations. (I keep calling them Corsairs, which makes more sense to me…)
Yet Ed is no diva.
Ed’s famous quotes include, “If you want to make a million in the wine industry, start with 10 million.”
And, when I asked if I could grab enough Merlot to make a 5-gallon bucket of wine said, “If you’re going to mess with a little, might as well do a lot.”
The Dude Abides
And so began my apprenticeship into wine-making.
I will tell you that all of my life I’ve wondered what might have happened if I’d taken advantage of the education before me — as an employee of Kiona Vineyards in the early years (John Williams swears I was their first employee) — I had easy access to Scott Williams and every aspect of wine making from viticulture to eonology.
Let me be a lesson to you: I thought I wasn’t smart enough, refined enough, you-name-it-enough. Don’t do that. I haven’t asked Scott this, but I’m 99% sure that if I’d expressed my interest in wine-making, he’d have supported it. But I was in my late teens, early 20s, and had No. Friggin. Clue.
Here’s another tangent — Scott was my first tax-withholding boss. And, from that time forward I held all other bosses to Scott Williams’s standard. He was 26 and if I wasn’t his first employee I was sure as heck a very, very early one. And he was the best boss I’ve ever had. Which is remarkable for a 26 year old managing a 16 year old. And, Scott has employees who’ve been with him since the same time I started. You can draw your own conclusions about Kiona Wine, but the Williams family and Scott are Top Notch Human Beings.
So, anyway, 35 years later I’m finally dipping my toe into the wine, so to speak.
To say I’m excited about this is an understatement. It’s Merlot. If you haven’t heard me wax poetic about the wonders of Red Mountain Merlot then I am not sure that we’ve ever spoken. Have we met?
Red Mountain is well-known for its Cabernet Sauvignon. Great! Our C.S. is awesome. Woo!
But Merlot. Merlot is the red-headed step-child of bordeaux varietals and I think it’s due to 2 things:
- Can we get over the movie Sideways once and for all? The quote is taken completely out of context and seriously if you’re letting a B-grade movie determine your wine preferences… you need to taste for yourself. (that’s fancy-speak for grow a spine)
- you haven’t tried a Red Mountain Merlot. Seriously. You might say, “well, I’ve never seen Sideways but I tried a Merlot and it was blah.” Try Red Mountain Merlot.
Red Mountain is to Merlot as Technicolor was to the Wizard of Oz. Okay, or maybe it is to Merlot as Pink Floyd was to the Wizard of Oz. Either is a good metaphor.
Anyhooooooo
So here I sit with an amazing mentor and some world-class wine that is my DREAM varietal from my DREAM spot. Special bonus points for being from a vineyard on my parents’ original plot of land.
Me? Weepy?
Maybe a little.
Can I just say that I think Ed is even a little misty-eyed over the project? You know what Ed gets misty-eyed over? Not a damn thing. Ed’s a lawyer, a father of two boys, a German. Ed’s eyes don’t see mist unless he introduces it when applying contacts. One time he wasn’t well and I actually called a physician to convince him to go to the E.R. Which he did, and he bloody-well drove himself (with me in the back seat to take the car home in case he needed to stay the night). He wasn’t fuckin’ misty-eyed over that, let me tell you. Blind rage? yes. Mist? No. None. He may have had some deep-seated hatred directed at me at that point.
I didn’t want to badger Ed with my wine-making dreams because I know I’m analytical and if I start down a path there’s likely to be 8 billion questions to follow. Why not malolactic fermentation? Should the temp be wavering? How much yeast and what kind? What about a tiny barrel to age the wine? Are flies necessarily bad? How long should I stir the wine each day? Is twice a day enough or too much? What is the square root of 17? and so on.
Ed smiles, and he answers every question. I’m going out on a limb to say he even seems to enjoy it. I have to try really hard not to ask more questions because I’m pretty sure that his tolerance has a low threshold. “Just make the damn wine” I imagine him muttering.
This is the cool thing: wine makes itself. Seriously. I tend it but all of the magic happens when I’m sleeping or just anywhere but near the wine. I wake up, stir it, check the brix and boom… it’s gone and fermented most of the sugar away while I slept.
I seriously wonder if a wine-maker’s role isn’t to just get the hell out of nature’s way.
I guess that’s a question for Ed.
It’s a small lot and I can’t even begin to describe to you the hopes and dreams I’ve projected onto this experience.
I mean, heck. It’s just Merlot.
