Dear friends,
Hello from Sonoma, where we are deep into harvest – our first harvest with two kiddos, in fact! We welcomed baby Drew to the family on May 12 and have already introduced him to the excitement of the winery on a busy crush day. He was somewhat unimpressed – but meanwhile, Cal has been enamored with all things winery related. While dad is at work, we play winery at home with, and I quote, “all the grapes – red grapes and purple grapes and yellow grapes and green grapes and orange grapes and blue grapes.” His alter-ego/imaginary friend is a forklift named Kevin whose job is to lift wine barrels and eat rainbow ice cream.
We’re getting so excited for our fall Desire Lines release, which will launch on Wednesday, September 22 (note the change from previous releases, which are usually on Tuesdays). This release includes two wines from Shake Ridge – our 2019 Syrah and a tiny-quantity 2020 Viognier (!!) – along with our 2020 Evangelho Red Wine, 2020 Cole Ranch Riesling, and an Experimental Series Sauvignon Blanc from Kick Ranch in Sonoma. (In other words, it’s a great time to not be pregnant anymore! -Emily)
Here, we invite you to pause and do a mental shift from Emily’s voice to Cody’s deep-dive viticulture voice. Ready? Ready!
In anticipation of the release next week, we’d like to set the stage regarding the history of viticulture and winemaking in the Sierra Foothills of Amador County, before drilling down to Shake Ridge Ranch specifically in the release letter next week.
The first vines planted in Amador County went into the ground at the same time as gold was coming out, with a mechanical ingenuity made necessary by the mountainous terrain of the Sierra Foothills and an energy reflective of the insatiable demand for wine during the Gold Rush.
Amador County’s earliest known grape grower is Benjamin Burt, an emigrant from Springfield, MA, who by 1851 was supplying miners with fresh fruits from his orchards and garden. Burt’s Garden was planted alongside Rancheria Creek, three miles northeast of Amador City, just a few miles from today’s Shake Ridge Ranch. Burt was renowned for the bounty of his vineyard and orchards, with 1600 vines along with peach, pear, apple, apricot, cherry, plum, and almond trees dotting the hillsides. He grew an incredible 17 apple varieties alone, and had 7000 tree saplings ready for sale in his nursery. In 1881, county historian J.D. Mason described Burt’s Garden in the same striking terms we use today when we describe Shake Ridge Ranch. Mason wrote, “With its green patches of cultivated land, it was like a gem set in the brown hills.”
Another prominent Amador County vineyard was that planted by Horace Kilham in 1855. Kilham owned the Kilham Ditches, an elaborate ditch and flume system, fifteen miles in length, that diverted the waters of the South and Middle Forks of the Jackson Creek and delivered it to miners. The same water being used to wash soil from gold also irrigated Kilham’s extensive fruit ranch surrounding his Tunnel Hill House. Kilham sold his orchards and vineyard in 1860 to Dr. Samuel Page, who that year gave a detailed account of his plantings to the State Agricultural Society. He chronicled, “Two thousand five hundred grape vines, one to five years old; thirty two foreign varieties, including the natives of the Atlantic States Isabella, Catawba, and Clinton… Five year old vines bore abundantly this year, and consist of about four unknown varieties, the labels being lost, one I recognize as the Frontignan Muscat, rich and spicy.” Residing in Page’s collection as well were the varieties Black Hamburg, Black St. Peter’s, Black Prince, Charbonneau, Frontignan Grizzly, White Muscat of Alexandria, White Sweetwater, Gros Noir de Gueslin, and White Syrian.
The agricultural census of 1860 lists just five Amador County vintners, with a total of 144 gallons of wine among them. The county’s first commercial vintner was likely Benidet Murphy of Sutter Creek, who declared 60 gallons of wine on hand. Samuel Page, with his impressively large vineyard, reported only two gallons of homemade wine to the census taker. But, vine plantings and wine production exploded in the 1860s, driven continually by gold fever and a sudden lack of wine in Europe, which was still reeling from oidium. In February of 1861 the San Francisco Bulletin carried a front-page article entitled Vineyards on the Foothills praising the Mother Lode’s vineyards and encouraging more planting:
The fact that the foothills of the state are admirably adapted to the culture of grapes particularly for wine-making purposes, cannot be too often repeated… The experience of scientific culturalists has demonstrated that while the loamy bottom lands produce the largest and most luscious grapes for consumption as fruit, the red gravel lands of the hills and high plains produce grapes which yield the best flavored and most lasting wines… If the majority of our miners, who are destined to year of toil, ending in poverty, at last would plant about their cabins a few acres of vines, they would find more profit therein ultimately than in the diggings which cause them so much anxiety.
By 1868, Amador County was producing 250,000 gallons of wine per year. Regrettably, vineyard fortunes in California changed quickly in the decades leading up to Prohibition, oscillating wildly between over- and under-supply in a cycle characteristic of agriculture markets without price supports or planting restrictions. A severe depression in the price of wine between 1874 and 1878 crippled Amador County, where miners were already fleeing the area for new mineral discoveries elsewhere. Adding insult to injury, most of the land within the county was classified by the federal government as “mineral” and thereby not available for ownership. Farmers were free to clear the soil, but capital improvements were impractical without a path to ownership. By the time that Congress passed legislation opening mineral lands to ownership, much of the money invested in the wine industry was flowing to Napa and Sonoma counties, regions that benefited from a closer proximity to San Francisco. The Amador Wine Association, incorporated in 1871, lasted just a few months. Winemaking survived in the small home cellars of the many Italian families that populated the county.
Amador County’s most influential vineyard is the Sierra Foothill Station, an agricultural experiment station established in the 1880s near Jackson, on land granted to the University of California. The vineyard was one of seven planted across the state under the direction of Eugene W. Hilgard, the first Professor of Agriculture at Berkeley. Hilgard was a consummate scientist – the father of modern soil science and a pioneering viticulturist – and a skilled politician as well; his experiment station research efforts were supported by members of the California legislature. He laid out his vision for the project, and the results of hundreds of experimental fermentations (complete with full chemistry panels and colorimetric measurements for most musts and wines!), in a publication entitled Report of the Viticultural Work During the Seasons 1887-1889, with Date Regarding the Vintage of 1890. He wrote:
It has been alleged that "wine making is an art, and has nothing to do with science." It would be sad for this important industry if this were in any sense true, and if at the end of the nineteenth century it had still failed to participate in the advance of all other industries — from the making of indigo and madder color from coal to that of butter and cheese and even the feeding of hogs — to the benefit and dignity of a scientific basis. The allegation is simply untrue. It is true that good wines have been made for a long time in certain regions or localities, upon no other basis than long continued experience; but it has cost centuries of time and floods of bad wine before that point was reached, and even now the vast majority of the wines made in the old wine districts of Europe is, according to the unanimous testimony of both merchants and scientific experts, very far from being the best that could be made from the materials given. Unless California wine makers are willing to go through the same protracted performance that has been required to enable Europe to protect its choice vintages, they should avail themselves of the principles that have been deduced from the experience of centuries in the Old World, as formulated by the exact observations of experts. It is idle to pretend, at this late hour, that blind imitation is to be preferred to the intelligent application of principles that hold good under all circumstances, and that we have only to plant the same vines and follow the same modes of operating practiced in the Old World, in order to produce similar vintages, when the climatic conditions under which we operate are radically different, as are also our soils.
The Foothill Station was abandoned in 1903, due to the cost of operating the vineyard in such a remote location. The station was re-discovered in 1963 by Dr. Austin Goheen, a plant pathologist from UC Davis, on a hunch that own-rooted vines would have lower incidence rates of diseases like leafroll virus. He theorized that the use of phylloxera-resistant rootstock may have contributed to the spread of grapevine viruses. He identified 132 grape cultivars still growing, miraculously, at the station. Of the 110 vines tested, only 20 had leafroll virus, and none had fanleaf or other viruses, which was a dramatic improvement over the 80-100% infection rate they were finding in commercial vineyards. There were many unusual varieties planted at the Foothill Station, like Freisa, Cinsault, Mondeuse, Tinto Cao, and Trousseau, along with the litany of past and present work-horse varieties – Burger, Folle Blanche, Mission, Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, and Sauvignon Blanc. Many of these clones are now propagated as “Jackson clones” by the grape program at Foundation Plant Services. The most famous Jackson Clone is Clone 6 Cabernet Sauvignon, which was the pride of Beaulieu’s clonal vinification experiments in the 1980s, and is popular today among growers looking for California heritage selections who can rationalize its miserly yields and floral aromatic profile. Though the Sierra Foothill Station was tended for only 15 years, its progeny are Professor Hilgard’s remarkable legacy.
And, with that, next week we’ll dive into Shake Ridge Ranch and Ann Kraemer, who ably follows in Eugene Hilgard’s footsteps as a pioneering, scientifically minded viticulturalist in the Sierra Foothills of Amador County. Thanks for following along!
