• Clos Pepe Estate uses 100% Clos Pepe, Santa Rita Hills grapes in all of our 'Clos Pepe Estate' wines.  Our Axis Mundi brand focuses on wines made from other vineyard sources. Clos Pepe produces some of the most expensive and vaunted pinot noir and chardonnay grapes in the New World. Both Steve Heimoff (Wine Enthusiast) and Greg Walter (Pinot Report) have called Clos Pepe Vineyards 'California's Grand Cru'.
  
  
• We believe that sustainably-farmed Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes grown at extraordinarily low yields (around 2 tons/acre, or around 3 lb/vine) make wines with extraordinary purity of fruit, complexity, and elegance.
  
  
• The real work of winemaking occurs in the vineyard.  We have found that growing the grapes and harvesting them at perfect ripeness levels makes winemaking quite simple.  Most technical aspects of winemaking occur when a winemaker has to 'fix' a problem with the fruit: not enough acid, not enough sugar, etc.  We believe that micro-managing the vineyard and picking the fruit at optimal ripeness makes our work in the cellar easy.
  
  
• Freshly picked, cool bins of fruit are delivered to the winery at night or early in the morning.  Pinot Noir is crushed cold into small open-top fermenters and allowed to 'cold soak' for 2-3 days.  Once the native yeasts begin to warm the grape/juice combination (called 'must'), we inoculate with RC-212, AMH and BRL-97 yeasts.  We use between 25% to 35% new French oak, mostly from Allier, Bertranges, and Troncais forests.  We change the percentage of 'new' oak depending on the intensity and yield of any vintage's crop.
  
  
• Chardonnay is pressed cold and fresh, whole-clusters dumped into the press, directly into neutral French oak or 55 gallon stainless-steel 'barrels' for our 'Homage to Chablis' wine and older French oak barrels (neutral flavor) for our 'Barrel Fermented' Chardonnay.  We add CY-3079 or EC1118 yeasts to the juice and allow the fermentation to occur in barrel.  We never use any new French oak for our Chardonnay, preferring the austere, flinty style of Chardonnay characterized by the fine wines of Chablis, France.
  
  
• Wines are allowed to mature in barrels for 11 months, and then bottled with minimal fining. 
  
  
• To us, wine is an expression of the vintage and the place where it was grown.  We do everything we can to allow the 'somewhereness' of the wines to be purely expressed.  We do not use chemical means to influence the wines.  We want each vintage to be a special expression of the wind, the fog, the sunshine and the soil that define Clos Pepe Estate.

The Winemaking Story

by Wes Hagen, Vineyard Manager/Winemaker, Clos Pepe Vineyards

Jennifer and Nicole Hagen Press the 1999 PN

Back in 1996 when we planted the Chardonnay vineyard I made a promise to myself.  I was itching to make wine professionally, I was receiving top-notch tutelage as an intern at Babcock Vineyards and Winery, and I was ready to take on the wine world.  The best piece of advice I received that year was from Jeff Newton of Coastal Vineyard Care, who helped us plan and plant our Chardonnay vineyard.

'Most winemakers are lost in the vineyard,' Jeff had told me.  'They couldn't farm their way out of a wet sack.'

I remember him telling me this as we walked through the infant Dijon 76 vineyard, young vines struggling to climb the trellis wires for the first time.

'You're very lucky here Wes,' Jeff confided.  'You should learn to farm for five years before making commercial wine.'

Those words echoed in my head.  Five years.  Five seasons.  A long time to wait.

Jeff wasn't the first or last local wine personality to offer advice.  During one of my first trips to the Hitching Post in Buellton I met Chris Whitcraft who makes some excellent small-production Pinot Noir.  This was pre-Babcock and pre-Jeff's advice.  Steve Pepe introduced me to him.

'Chris, this is Wes Hagen.  He's wants to be a winemaker.'

Chris shook my hand and smiled.  'You know there's drugs that can prevent that.'

The next episode also took place at the Hitching Post, the hub of the Santa Ynez Wine Drinking firmament.  Bryan Babcock was eating with Walt and Mona, his folks, and noticed we were sitting at the next table.  The Vigneron, L'agent and I were discussing whether I might benefit from taking a few years to attend Davis or Fresno State, and we decided to get Bryan's take on the two campuses.

'Fresno?  Davis?' Bryan asked.  'You'll get out and still need to know how to work in a winery.  Might as well just come over and work for me.'  So I did.

Those are the memories that come racing back when I try to remember the process of becoming a winemaker.  It started in the early 1990's with Steve Pepe and Frank Guadagnini, both of Long Beach home winemaker fame, and ended with me managing Clos Pepe for five years and (finally)starting our own label with wines from the 2000 vintage.

Fifteen years at Clos Pepe has taught me the obvious lesson:  that great wine is farmed, not made.  The true winemakers are the viticulturists.  The potential quality of any wine is dictated by the condition of the fruit as it arrives at the crush platform.  It is the enologist's job to preserve the quality of the fruit in wine form, and to fix any problems that might arise during fermentation and barrel aging.  Knowing that I would be making my own legal, bonded wines in the 2000 vintage helped me really focus in the vineyard and grow some special wine.  This was the first year for harvesting a commercial crop of Pinot Noir as well, and my great passion for the varietal made my hard work and long hours worth while.

So enough about me, how about the wines?

Pinot Noir:  My philosophy in Pinot Noir production hasn't changed much in 15 years (grower) and 12 vintages (winemaker). I am still very proud of the first wines we made in 2000, and both the pinot noir and the chardonnay are holding up brilliantly after 11 years in the bottle. A bit of a miracle! Pinot noir requires a delicate hand in the production, much like a chocolate souffle' in the oven. You don't want to slam the oven door too many times, or the whole thing falls to shit. As a result, once the wines are in the barrel, we don't move them at all. We keep the barrels topped, the free SO2 around 20-25 parts free after malolactic has finished, and we run them through the lightest of filtrations before bottling to remove any sediment or haze. I like to allow the wines to represent the vintage, so some years the wines are a little more restrained (2008 comes to mind), and some wines are a little more dense and ripe (2010 is a beast!). I prefer the grapes to be harvested between 23.5 and 25.5 degrees Brix, or percentage of weight that is sugar. Yeasts convert sugar into alcohol at a rate of about .6% alcohol by volume per degree Brix, so a 24 degree Brix harvest would produce a wine of around 14% alcohol. So 14% alcohol by volume is my target for Clos Pepe, but 24 brix is never a magic number. Sugars change day by day. They spike when it gets hot, and may even go down a little in cool spells or by virtue of irrigation or rain. Wines under 15% alcohol seem to age a little more gracefully, although they give up a little 'sluttiness' and extract in their youth. As is true in life, flash does not always equate to character, and an amazingly complex pinot noir often requires a level of patience and cellaring (5 years at least), that is usually difficult for American consumers. So be it. There's plenty of wines on the market for those who need something to drink right off the shelf. A vintage to a winemaker is like a wave to a surfer. It dictates the ride and the nature of the experience. Sometimes the wave is small and manageable, sometimes it is massive and dangerously chaotic. Like a surfer, the winemaker must adjust constantly to avoid being wiped out and crushed on the reef. Nature will be the final arbiter of the wave or the vintage, and all we can do is hope for a good ride, and a nice drink afterwards to discuss the experience.

Chardonnay: Chardonnay is a grape varietal that is provably schizophrenic. She is both a rock star and a charlatan, a soft spoken ballerina and a brazen harlot, generic as a white label with a blue stripe across it and as expressive as a zealot with a bomb strapped to her belly. Why is this varietal so likely to cause both passionate debate and bored indifference? Americans were some of the last to plant Chardonnay, and some of the first to take it for granted. In the 1960’s there was less than 1000 acres planted in California, and most of it was mislabeled as ‘Chablis’, which of course is a region, not a varietal. So from the get go Californians screwed it up, doing more damage to the noble wines of Chablis with our unfair mislabeling as any devious ad campaign could have. Innocuous, cheap, uninteresting, flat Chardonnays from California stole the name from Chablis—and Chablis is still used as a name for the generic white wines that come out of large grape production areas of the Central Valley of California. Shame, as the REAL Chablis produces some of the most beautiful, long lived, and expressive white wines (100% Chardonnay, as always) in the world. There is currently about 100,000 acres of Chardonnay under cultivation in California, three times the amount that is bearing in Burgundy and Chablis, the Homeland of Chardonnay, and arguably the world’s greatest terroir for producing white wine. (Notice I only use the term terroir when it applies to French wine regions with Centuries of history and pedigree. We don’t have the history to use the term yet, in my never-to-be-humble opinion.) Other regions (besides California, and specifically Sonoma Coast, Santa Cruz, Anderson Valley, Mendocino, Chalone, Monterey County, Santa Barbara County, and specifically the Santa Rita Hills) that have shown great promise with the Chardonnay grape include Margaret River, Australia, Oregon, Washington (especially in the Columbia River Gorge), New Zealand and New York . Of course as soon as I think I’ve tried wines from all the areas that can grow world-class Chardonnay, a wine arrives in my glass showing me just how generous the varietal it can be. Like Pinot Noir, I believe Chardonnay suffers no fools, but unlike Pinot Noir (a very distant relative of Chardonnay), Chardonnay can take a lot of manipulation by the winemaker. It’s a varietal, as a famous winemaker once told me, that ‘you can hang a lot of clothes on’.
That means that the treatment in the winery can dictate the wine’s final style almost as much as the appellation of the sourced fruit. Oak treatment is famous in Chardonnay production. During America’s undeniable love affair with oaky Chardonnay in the 1980’s and 1990’s (a trend I’m happy to say is dying slowly in most regions), some producers (even in France!) bragged that they were using 200% new French oak in their Chardonnays. That means the wine would be fermented and aged 6 months in a brand new barrel, and then racked into another brand new French oak barrel. While some would call this a ‘luxury cuvee’, putting almost $10 of new oak in every bottle of Chardonnay is like drenching a beautiful prime ribeye in A1 sauce. It may taste good to some, but to most of us it seems a waste of quality base product, and will surely obliterate the uniqueness of flavor either in a well-bred Angus steer or some nice coastal Chardonnay fruit. Malolactic fermentation (which is not a true fermentation but more accurately a bacterial process of decarboxylating malic acid into lactic acid by leuconostoc oenos) is another process by which Chardonnay can be stylized, and the buttery style (as distinct or combined with oak treatment) still has many fans in the white wine world. It can be argued that the combination of malolactic treatment and oakiness made Chardonnay in the 1980’s and 1990’s so recognizable, that Chardonnay, as Jancis Robinson once famously quipped, “Virtually became it’s own brand”. It became synonymous with white wine. So now that the tide is turning stylistically in Chardonnay, what is the varietal today and what direction is it moving? Of the hundreds of Chardonnays I taste judging international wine competitions each year, few remain the big, buttery monsters of the late twentieth century. Chardonnay is losing weight in the new Millennia, becoming more yoga and less elephant, more like a crisp green apple rolling on earthy river pebbles than caramel and butter popcorn absorbing the aromas of a French lumbermill. As a true believer in the varietal, I couldn’t me more pleased. Chardonnay has a flavor of its own—one of the few wine varietals that screams place and represents the vineyard where it was grown, and seeing the wines become more transparent to the pedigree is always a step in the right direction from my perspective as a wine lover and educator.