It also enables him to keep prices reasonable, enabling him to achieve the “affordable luxury” he strives for: “I want the end user to feel like they got a deal.”Īmong the wines tasted that are appellated to California is Mannequin. Why wouldn’t you give yourself more options?” Blending is a good way to hedge as a winemaker, it gives us more tools to play with.
“What we like to do with a blend, whether it’s red or white, is start with a variety and build around it. Speaking further on the merits of the California appellation, Phinney said: “It allows us to establish a certain style and maintain consistency, because to me, there’s nothing more frustrating as a consumer than when you have an expectation of what it is going to be like, and the next year it’s twice the price and half the wine.” There’s a lot of parts of California where there are grapes growing, but people just don’t know about them because they’re not Napa or Sonoma.” The reason we chose to appellate it to California is because we have this amazing state that has everything from the coolest zones, like Mendocino County in the northwest, all the way down to Santa Barbara in the south, and everything in between. While many winemakers might preach about the beauty of individual plots, Phinney has a rather different view: “To me, the easiest way to get complexity is through geographic diversification. Phinney’s not one to get caught up in the romanticism of the wine world, as he stated: “It’s not the wine hobby, it’s the wine business.”
25 years on, and Orin Swift is considered to be an iconoclastic icon of Californian wine. ‘Orin’ is his father’s middle name, while ‘Swift’ is his mother’s maiden name, and also his middle name. I joke that there’s 27 adjectives that can be used to describe wine and they’ve all been used, so why bother?”Īrmed with a well-informed palate and a good grasp of the wine business, Phinney established Orin Swift in 1998. Learning via tasting, Phinney kept in mind the advice of Dean Sylvester, now former winemaker at Napa’s Whitehall Lane: “No matter where you are, on a plane, on a train, at dinner – sh*tty wine, great wine, good wine – just put it in your mouth and think about it for a second, because that goes into the Rolodex of all your experiences with wine.”īut, despite his considerable tasting experience, Phinney is not overly fond of the jargon commonly used for tasting notes: “I don’t take a lot of notes, if I do, they’re very succinct. Having worked his way through every supermarket wine that Florence had to offer, Phinney was left ruminating on what to do next: “At the end of our six month sojourn, we were sitting out on the terrace of our room, lamenting that we had to go back to the real world, and Tom said ‘have you ever thought about the wine business?’, and the light-bulb went on.”Īn internship in the University of Arizona’s agriculture department and working at a wine retailer enabled Phinney to put his foot on the ladder. That particular friend is Tom Traverso, who now works with Orin Swift as a national sales manager, and whose family was in the wine industry in Sonoma.ĭuring his time in Tuscany, Phinney did what might be expected of most students: “I went to Florence as a beer and whiskey guy, but we would go to the local supermarket and each get a magnum of red wine and go back to our accommodation, where 26 of us were living.” I had one year left in college, and then a friend called me and told me they needed a roommate for a study abroad programme in Florence, Italy, and so I went out there on a whim.” I was interning at the Public Defenders Office and also working for congressman, and realised that I didn’t want to be involved in the legal system or politics. Phinney, who grew up in Los Angeles, described his ending up in the wine world as a “total accident”: “I was studying Political Science, Law and History and thought I wanted to go to law school. Orin Swift winemaker Dave Phinney speaks to db about the advantages of the California AVA, how Merlot can recover from “the Sideways effect”, and why there is a mummy on one of his wine labels.
0 kommentar(er)
