I’ve been a fan of Hank’s winemaking since I met him and Caroline at a Chambers Street Wines tasting a few years ago.
He’s part of a community of California winemakers scattered across the state that have collectively redefined what the craft of making natural wine means in the new world.
This group of first generation winemakers, many nomadically sleuthing out small plots of unique and organic vines, have shifted the idea of natural wine making as less of a passive stewardship of the land to an active and more deterministic approach to the craft.
What I like to think of as improvisational winemaking.
Highly skilled individuals throwing themselves into the process, trusting the outcome and making their own rules as they go along.
I had the good fortune to be given one of twelve seats at a special dinner with Hank and Caroline and the David Bowler wine crew at Racines a few weeks ago to taste through eight vintages of Hank’s Cedarville Mourvedre.
From its first vintage in 2007–in Hank’s words a science experiment- to the 2014 with its big bouquet and a sexy vibrancy that graced my Thanksgiving table this year.
I simply can’t separate the wine from the pleasures of the evening and getting to know this couple a lot better.
La Clarine Farm sits north of Sacramento at 2600 feet in the Sierra foothills.
On one hand this is Hank and Caroline living the Idyllic dream, producing 30 thousand bottles of wine a year surrounded by goats, bees and a gaggle of vineyard cats on their own hillside plot.
On the other hand, he is an astute oenologist, thinking way beyond organic agriculture as the endgame and mashing up pieces of Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic theories with the natural farming teachings of Masanobu Fukuoka.
Hank narrated the evolution of his winemaking on the Cedarville plot as we drank and ate. Diving into the foibles of the land, the vagaries of the weather, the nature of the Mourvedre grape itself.
Through the deep pours of each year, I was thinking about the evolution of the quite delicious wine but equally about the narrative. About how we are really talking about terroir and how winemakers themselves learn to trust the process and focus the results through their decisions.
How far this is from the romantic and bombastic ideas of some natural wine populists that the winemakers are simply riding the wave and tending the land.
How the winemaker by intent and by craft, by embracing the natural process is creating something very much their own. Where what they produce on one plot will be quite different from that made on an adjacent one by someone else.
And how what Hank is describing in an almost almanac-like vernacular, echoes very similar conversations I’ve had with Hardy Wallace of Dirty & Rowdy in Napa and Scott Frank from Bow & Arrow in Portland.
It was telling as well that sitting with this most wine geeky group for hours, we were talking about philosophy and music in the same breadths as natural approaches to wine.
This haphazard collection of random people–winemakers and trades people, me the tech guy, lawyers and bankers around the table were weaving this together effortlessly. Almost communally.
I came away thinking about how this ties into what I’ve called The Ethos of Taste that is getting ingrained into our very culture.
That while there is certainly a dramatic change in the wine world happening now, there is a true tectonic shifting of how we think about what we eat and our relationship to the world at large.
And a growing mass market comfort in pairing scientific knowledge and natural rhythms not dissimilar to what is occurring in functional medicine.
This is where the evening took me.
If it touched your fancy, I encourage you to look up Hank and Caroline’s wines.
They sell their wine priced to be fair. It is invariably a delight and sells out quickly.
Enjoy them, as they are truly delicious and interesting by any standards.
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Big thanks to my friends David Lille and Ariana Rolich at Chambers Street Wines for saving a seat for me at this very special table.
To Chef Frederic Duca for a brilliant pairing menu and my buddy Arnaud Tronche ( Racine’s co-owner) Arnaud Troche for being the always generous host.
And to whomever deserves credit for the photo that I pulled off the web.
