Not that long ago, few wineries in California employed women winemakers.
Fortunately, those days have past and today many California wineries have female winemakers. At Cakebread Cellars, we have two, including our assistant winemaker, Stephanie Alstott, who was promoted recently from her previous position of Enologist and reports to our longtime winemaker, Julianne Laks.
Born and raised in Orange County, California, Stephanie took a somewhat unusual path to becoming a winemaker. When she enrolled in the UC Davis Fermentation Sciences program, it was to study brewing. Required to take a course on winemaking, she was fascinated by how dramatically wine, unlike beer, varies from year to year. “I decided wine was more interesting,” Stephanie says, “so I switched to the Viticulture and Enology program.” She adds, sotto voce, that she still makes some beer at home.
After graduating from Davis in 2000 and working for two wineries in the Sierra Foothills, Stephanie joined Cakebread Cellars in March 2004 and has since managed all our fermentations during harvest, as well as overseeing activities in Cakebread’s laboratory. “She’s a talented lady who fits in very well with our team,” enthuses Julianne Laks.
Stephanie is looking forward to the birth of her first child at the end of this year’s harvest.
Life is full of mysteries, and so is wine. When we planted our estate vineyard in the Anderson Valley of Mendocino County in 2000, we expected it to behave like other cool-climate Pinot Noir vineyards throughout California—i.e., to produce grapes with elegant fruit flavors and plenty of crisp acidity, much like our Pinot Noir vineyards in Napa Valley’s cool Carneros Region.
From the outset, however, our Anderson Valley Pinot Noir has been a big, rich, wine, why?
First, the vineyard is located in the warmer, southeastern end of Anderson Valley, near the small town of Boonville. The afternoons here, removed from the fog that lingers in the western end of the valley closer to the Pacific, are warmer, which ripens our fruit thoroughly.
Also, we have five, low-yielding French clones of Pinot Noir planted in the vineyard, which deliver small crops of very concentrated fruit, resulting in rich, full-bodied wines. (The sixth clone is a California selection culled from the legendary Joseph Swan Vineyard in Sonoma
County.) The famed Pommard clone provides abundant color, weight and richness, while our Dijon and ENTAV clones, though early ripeners, supply deep, intense, black fruit flavors.
We ferment each clonal lot separately to optimize its distinctive personality, with some lots fermenting with native yeasts from the vineyard. Prior to fermentation, each lot receives a three-day cold soak to gently extract color and tannin while accentuating the Pinot Noir grape’s fruit-forward character. In traditional Burgundian fashion, the juice ferments in open-top tanks with gentle, manual punch-downs of the cap. After fermentation completes, the wines macerate on the skins for another two weeks, with daily assessments of color and tannin development. After draining the wines off their skins, we transfer them to French oak barrels, roughly 50% new, where they age 14–16 months before blending.
Our 2006 Anderson Valley Pinot Noir provides a good example of the character and quality of the fruit we harvest from Anderson Valley. The
2006 growing season was among the coolest in recent memory in northern California. It began with a wet winter, which delayed bud break and led to late flowering of the vines. Fine weather arrived in June, followed by a sustained heat wave in July, but cooler weather returned in August and continued throughout the harvest season, resulting in a long grape ripening period. It was a year in which many growers struggled to ripen their fruit; yet our Anderson Valley Pinot Noir is full and rich, a decidedly masculine style with ripe, dense aromas of earthy black currant, black plum and spicy brambleberry fruit mingled with pronounced dark chocolate and roast coffee scents. On the palate, the wine is big, rich and concentrated with intense, spicy black fruit and dark chocolate flavors bolstered by ripe, mouth-coating tannins. Delicious now with hearty fare, this big, strapping Pinot Noir will continue to soften and gain further complexity with another 3 to 5 years of bottle age.
