Tuesday, June 10, 1997. A Visit To Gallo's Fine Winery. I was up very early, and needed to be. I packed up and said goodbye to the Round Hill folks, then to the Napa Valley. I exited to the north, crossing the twisting passes on Highway 128 into Sonoma. It seemed that the vineyards there were much more extensive than in Napa, and I saw a lot of familiar names on signs. My next trip out here must be a Sonoma investigation.
My appointment, for which I was running a bit late, was Gallo. Although the fact has not filtered down to the typical winedrinker, Gallo is turning slowly away from the supermarket jug wines that made it the world's biggest winery and focusing on the quality end of the spectrum. Possessing vast quantities of two important commodities--cash and marketing skill--the Gallos have the wherewithal to produce wines as good as anybody's.
On the other hand, Gallo has a reputation for being aggressive to the point of brusqueness, and not all that hospitable. I can vouch for that: a few years ago, a trio of Gallo guys invited me to Arnaud's to sample their wines, and at the end of the lunch they hunched across the table, narrowed their eyes, and asked me, "Now, tell us what you're going to do for Gallo."
I was instructed this time to appear just inside the unmarked gate of Gallo's Frei Vineyard, just outside Healdsburg. I opened my car door and stepped into a lush bush of poison oak. Here we go again, I thought. But then Debra Morris got out of a four-wheel drive and walked over with a smile. We stood in a chilly, stiff breeze, and she asked me what I wanted to see. I said, show me everything.
For the next four hours, she did. I think it was the most impressive winery operation I've ever seen.
We started in the vineyards, where she showed me the many experiments under way on the matter of trellising. The way the vines grow has a great effect on the quality and quantity of the fruit it bears, and although the Gallos and the people they bought this vineyard from have been growing grapes here since the Thirties, they were still trying new ideas all the time.
One of the big-time new ideas was to bring in large earth- moving equipment to re-sculpt the hills. First they removed the topsoil, re-shaped the contour of the hills to make for best sun exposures and least erosion, replaced all the topsoil, and put the vines in. In all my exploration of the wine world, I've never heard of such a thing, but often heard vineyard managers wish for it.
We drove around the gigantic vineyard for a long time. We passed a section as large as the average Napa vineyard being set up for new planting. I saw a vineyard whose rootstock had been put down and was growing undesirable American vine shoots, all of which will be cut off next year and replaced by buds of the European varieties most of us limit our wine drinking to.
Debra said she wanted to discover the way up to what she called "Ernest's Catwalk." Four-wheel drive was engaged and we slowly negotiated an almost invisible path in the grass up the side of a steep hill. At the top was an aluminum footbridge, extending to a point in space about forty feet out. From that wobbling perch the view was arresting: the entire Frei Vineyard complex spread out before us, showing just how extensive it was. The subtle differences in trellising and vine spacing I'd seen at ground level were now quite obvious, as were sections of the older vineyards that seemed to be a little weak--from phylloxera, perhaps? The three reservoirs gave a paradisaical punctuation to the vista.
After negotiating back down the hill (the maneuver bordered on a thrill ride), we drove past the largest of the reservoirs. It, like everything else here, had been created by the Gallos. After winding around a maze of dirt roads, we wound up at the winery itself. In contrast to the bucolic vineyards, it showed a distinctly industrial face. It was much bigger than I expected. With good reason: it's here that all of Gallo's top-end wines are made, with grapes coming from many other prime vineyards in Sonoma and the Central Coast. All around the outside were large metal tanks, connected by involved networks of pipes. Not all that different from what I'd seen at other wineries, but vastly bigger.
"See those tanks that are on their sides?" asked Debra. "Those are something new we're using here, and the winemakers love them. The fermentation takes place inside them as usual, but as it does a screw slowly turns the entire contents. The juice gets much more skin contact than it would using the upright fermenting tanks, but the process is so gentle that the harsh tannins are kept under control." In other words, this is the Nineties successor to stomping grapes by foot in an open tank, with close control over all the variables.
The aging cellars were built into the side of a hill, behind forbidding concrete walls. It could pass for a bomb shelter. Inside, it had a similarly military look, except that those stacks of identical storage units piled about twenty high and filling a space about the size of the Convention Center were small oak barrels. Most were the $600-each-and-up French kind, although the Gallos were experimenting here too. "We're getting very good results from barrels we're getting from Eastern Europe," said Debra. I've seen some big storehouses of wine aging in oak before, but this was bigger by a factor of five or six.
As if all this were not big enough, there was heavy construction going on to build what looked like a major addition to this behemoth. More of those sideways fermenting tanks were being installed, and a large concrete bridge for delivery of grapes was being poured. We left through the main entrance, which looked like that of any factory; it was a far cry from the Poison Oak Gate I'd come to. We then toured some of the other vineyard holdings the Gallos have in the immediate area; each was as expansive as the the last, and each was under some sort of major reworking. The one that seemed closest to the ground was the former vineyards of Italian Swiss Colony. Here absolutely everything was ripped out of the ground (the vines grew wild for years before the Gallos took over) and new vines had been planted--after, of course, more than a little realignment of the earth was accomplished.
"Look at those vineyards up that hill," said Debra, pointing to what looked like parched earth with thin stripes of green on it. "Those are on the other side of our property line, and that's something we'd never do. Those people tried to put in vineyards where they don't belong, and they slid down the hill in the first rain. If there's one thing the Gallos believe in, it's in taking the long-term approach to farming. The Frei Ranch has been under vines since the Thirties, and it keeps getting better because we take care of the resource."
We then went to lunch at a great little place called Bistro Ralph, on the town square in Healdsburg. Here I had a pile of fried calamari and some great little braised chicken livers in a sauce of caramelized onions and balsamic vinagar with polenta, and tasted a half-dozen of Gallo's estate-bottled Sonoma wines, all vineyard-designated. No matter what your associations are with the Gallo name, there is no way that you would not be impressed by these wines. We started with the Chardonnays from the Stefani and Laguna Ranch Vineyards. The latter, coming from the much cooler area to the south, is the more intense, but both are full of fruit and elegance. Next we had the Barrelli Creek Vineyard Valdiguie (that's a new name the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms--a federal agency that spends far too much time riding herd of the wine label design--has imposed on what used to be called Gamay). This is a light red wine in the same realm as Beaujolais, good chilled a little bit, not tannic, very fruity.
The best wines under the Ernest & Julio Gallo Sonoma label are the Cabernets. We tasted two of these: one from the Frei Ranch, the other from the Stefani Vineyard, both from the 1993 vintage. This was almost a coin flip, but I'd give a slight edge to the Frei. Both had everything you want from a Sonoma Cabernet: dark blackish color, tremendous aroma of berries and wood, and a long-lasting, deep flavor, with more than enough fruit to taste good over the very substantial tannins and acid. Without doubt these will grow beautiful in the cellar, but they're very damn good right now.
With dessert we had the huge and alcoholic (15.1 percent!) Frei Ranch Zinfandel, 1994. My luck with Zins in this style is that they become spectacular in the nose and mouth after only about five years in the cellar, and that's where the bottles I will buy will go. It's almost portlike. It also puts one in a good mood, and Debra and I discussed at length another of our favorite topics: our respective kids. We decided that you could almost generate electricity from the power games played between a mother and a daughter.
We returned to Poison Oak Checkpoint and went our separate ways. For me, that meant the US 101 freeway to and over the Golden Gate Bridge and back to the Westin St. Francis. There waited an even better room than I had the first time. I arranged a meeting with Marsha Monro, the mouthpiece of the hotel. She had a dental appointment between now and then, and while waiting on her I walked around the town looking for gifts. I found most of what I needed at the F.A.O. Schwartz toy store a few blocks away.
Marsha set our rendezvous at the most San Franciscan of places: next to the clock in the lobby of the hotel. The outsize, ornate grandfather clock, operated not by a pendulum but by a complicated set of motors, chains, and gears, is the symbol of the St. Francis Hotel (and, for that matter, of the whole Westin chain of which this is the flagship).
Marsha wanted to show me two things. First was what had become of Victor's, formerly the main dining room of the hotel, on the 32nd and top floor of the newer part of the St. Francis. "You know what has happened to hotel restaurants," Marsha said as we pushed through the big doors. "In a city like this, with famous restaurants on every corner, nobody wants to eat in the hotel. So we turned Victor's into the best private function room in the city." The premises did not belie this claim. A fanciful, regal, Russian-accented ballroom rose twenty feet to the ceiling and fifty miles to the north and east. The tall windows have onto the unmistakable skyline of San Francisco, with the Bay and the Golden Gate in the distance. Here and there, private nooks along the glass margin created tables with absurdly atmospheric views. "This is for royalty, this is for the big events," Marsha said. "This is for $200 per person parties, plus plus."
We then went down to the oldest continuously operating food-and-drink venue in the hotel, the Compass Rose. Up a flight of carpeted steps past a row of very large columns, this has been a hangout since the founding of the hotel in 1904, and it still is. Afternoon tea is a big deal, and late in the evening there's enough Champagne poured that the room is reputedly the number one seller of bubbly in San Francisco. Marsha took her leave after recommending that I get the tasting menu of appetizers: smoked salmon, crab cakes, and the like. That became my supper, lubricated by a Martini from the repertoire of a dozen or so variations on the theme.
That was about enough for supper for me. I pushed out onto the street and walked up Post Street to see if Mike Fennelly was at Mike's. He was. In fact, he was cooking in the tiny open kitchen in the window at the front of the restaurant. The cramped space--which he shared with a sous chef--was equipped with two woks and very little work space. When an order was ready, Mike hit a gong. [Update: Mike has closed this place and may return full-time to New Orleans.]
The menu at the San Francisco edition of Mike's is much like what Mike left behind in New Orleans, with perhaps even more of an Asian flavor. It seems perfect for his new venue. "We just started, and it's been slow so far," he said. "But we just got a good writeup in the newspaper, and it's starting to pick up." Mike was less enthusiastic about the report printed in the Times-Picayune about his departure from New Orleans, which seemed to indicate that everything would go to hell once he left. Those who know the inner workings of Mike's on the Avenue know this is probably not the case, since Mike wasn't doing all that much cooking on Lafayette Square anyway.
I walked downhill back to the hotel. I attempted to write my one-day-late column for CityBusiness, but couldn't work up a head of steam, so I just gave myself over to sloth.
