Will goes on a deep dive into the world of winemaking in Santa Barbara wine country with Chad Melville of shop-favorite Melville Winery.
I recently spent some time in Santa Barbara’s wine country working on an article for Condé Nast which gave me the chance to connect with a few amazing winemakers that we love and carry in the shop. This conversation was with Chad Melville of Melville Winery, one of the most visible wineries in Santa Barbara that has had an amazing run of making all-estate wines on their property. I had a great conversation with Chad about their history, why they do what they do, and what the future holds for Melville.
-Will C. Farley
Will C. Farley (WCF): I’m going to start with some of the history. At the beginning, before Melville in Sta. Rita, your father was growing grapes in Sonoma and selling them to other people, but you grew up all over California, right? Tell me a little bit about what brought you here today.
Chad Melville (CM): My dad got into wine in the late 60s. Which at that time, there was not a whole lot of wine knowledge out there; we hadn’t entered an American wine movement yet. You could get first-growth Bordeaux for 25 bucks, right?
I grew up on the Southern Coast of California, and there’s a wine shop down in Costa Mesa called Hi-Time, and that was my dad’s go-to place. He met a guy there who just walked him through the wine industry. My dad fell in love. He said, “This wine thing is crazy.” He was really moved by the artistry, the flavors, the aromas, the culture, and the food component.
So, fast-forward a little bit to the early 1980s. We had some family friends with a ranch in Alexander Valley, and we would visit them all the time.
WCF: I love the Alexander Valley.
CM: Totally. And as kids, we would rip around on ATVs and shoot guns. My brother had a fake ID, haha. It was a place where the kids would just run off, and the adults would just sit on the deck and barbecue and drink wine. And my dad saw an opening for this wine thing. He hadn’t explored farming at this point, but he always loved growing things in the backyard. My dad was a finance guy and wanted a balance that with a connection to Mother Nature, to the earth…
WCF: Versus a career that’s totally abstract, haha.
CM: Exactly. And this family, they’re still there and are still good family friends. Roger Stonemuller, the dad, was the same way as my dad. He was in real estate development, and he had this ranch, and that was his balance, right?
So, over time, my dad found a piece of land up there in Knights Valley, right on the border. To get there, you go over this little hill with a white stripe of paint that says “Napa County, Sonoma County.” And it used to piss my dad off because he could never get Napa Valley pricing from the fruit in Sonoma. The piece of land he bought was already planted in the late 70s, which is so, so different than we plant today. A large part of it was Napa Gamay, which is one of the reasons why the vineyard was for sale. The guy couldn’t figure out how to make money, haha. And as cool as it is now, it very much wasn’t cool back then. So he bought it and hired a vineyard manager who took my dad under his wing.
My dad went to [UC] Davis and took a bunch of classes. He saw it as a business, not a hobby, and said, “I want to grow the best fruit, I want to reinvest in this land, I want to elevate our quality and reputation.”
And so he did. He grafted over to Merlot. Back in the mid-80s, Merlot was just starting to get popular in California, even Chardonnay. I mean, it’s not that long ago when people said, “What’s Chardonnay?” But this was the time when there was an evolution in the wine business. So he sold fruit every year but kept a little to give to Gerard, the assistant winemaker at Chateau Montelena at the time, and he would give us 12 cases back and keep 12 for himself.
But now we had a label on our table that said it was our vineyard, and he was stoked. He would take out one of those wins at dinner with other winemakers and say, “Check this out, and if you’re interested, I have fruit for sale.” And what happened was that he elevated his contracts. It’s super smart, but that was also his goal. At first, he could only sell to the Jackson family (Kendall Jackson today); they were the only ones who would give him a contract, but soon he was selling to Chateau St. Jean, Chateau Montelena, Dry Creek.
But all along, he loved Pinot Noir. So, being from Southern California, he would make this trip on the 101 pretty often, and he always stopped in Buellton for gas but ultimately discovered Pinot.
WCF: They did call it Servicetown, USA.
CM: Totally, but it wasn’t until one day he was at Little Nell in Aspen, which was definitely not his usual kind of haunt, but he was there, and Bobby Stuckey was the sommelier. You know Bobby?
WCF: That’s the guy behind Frasca, right?
CM: Yeah, yeah. He said we have a special on Santa Barbara County Pinot.
WCF: What year was this?
CM: 1990 or ‘91.
WCF: So it was Sanford & Benedict, Babcock, Foxen, and Jim Clendenen?
CM: Exactly, it was Jim’s Au Bon Climat Pinot Noir from Mount Carmel Vineyard in the Santa Rita Hills, but back when it was just called Santa Ynez or Santa Barbara County. My dad had this glass and was like, “holy shit, Mr. Sommelier, what is this?” Bobby told him it came from right outside this little town called Buellton. So, the next time he was there, he stopped by Babcock and introduced himself to Brian. He tasted all the things around. Then he looked at the pricing and said holy shit. He’s been really good at potential. His brain works that way.
He did more and more research, and the more research he did, the more it was just like, “Wow, this is the place.” And what was going on in the industry with clones. The Dijon clones weren’t available until the mid-90s. And that access combined with newer philosophies on vineyard density, how you plant it, and even the row orientation north to south where you get 20% more sunlight than you east to west.
WCF: I would guess he learned a lot of this at Davis? That was an exciting time at Davis when they first did DNA profiling.
CM: Yeah, and if you open up the lens a little bit more, you see it was happening in beer. The microbrew scene had just started. The same with coffee: You could get more than just black coffee; it was Ethiopian or mountain-grown java. Really, all across food, it was happening. Beef became more than ground beef, and you could find a specific type of beef from a specific place and know what it ate. We all started to pay more attention to things, including wine.
This culminated in his idea that this was a good opportunity to start over, take all this viticulture knowledge, and apply it by designing a vineyard. I was 24, my brother is two and a half years older than I am, and I had just graduated college and moved up here in 1997.
It’s so funny how old-school my dad was. I said I wanted to come work even though I was doing finance in downtown LA, and he literally said, “Why would I hire you? You don’t have any experience, you know?” I was like, “Oh, that’s fair, you know.”
So, I got a job at a winery. And that was great because the deal was that I would work nine months in the tasting room to learn how to sell wine, haha, which is actually one of the most important things, and then I would work the rest of the season in the cellar as an assistant, Assistant winemaker or cellar rat.
I was so hungry. I wanted all the knowledge I could get. When I made the decision to leave LA and come up here, I knew in my heart it was the right decision. It didn’t make a lot of financial sense,
WCF: Money is why we all got into wine, haha.
CM: Haha. My heart knew it was the right thing, so I dove in. It was all-consuming: articles, conversations, events, tastings. I was in it. So, after a year at that spot, my Dad brought me onto the team. My brother and I lived in this little trailer in the back and planted the vineyard, drilled the wells, and after a little time, we told our Dad that we should really be making some wine with these grapes.
At this point, his relationship with winemakers was seeing them as egotistic, prima Donnas, diva-types, and that’s just not my dad. He just wanted to grow grapes, sell them at a premium, and build a reputation as farmers, and that’s how we’ll do it. I said that’s fair, but if we really believe in it, then why not take 10% of it and make wine and see how it goes? Just look at the math.
WCF: Yeah, investing in yourself makes sense.
CM: I mean, exactly, we have to sell it, but that’s part of what I had been working towards. My Dad agreed, and Greg Brewer, who was working at Santa Barbara Winery, was my age, passionate, and very smart. We totally hit it off, and I said we should hire him. At the time, he was doing Brewer Clifton and Santa Barbara winery, and we approached him, and he came on here.
WCF: So now we are moving closer to today. In 2015, Eric Asimov from the New York Times called Melville the best wine in the valley. And it feels like that was a tipping point for the style coming out of Santa Barbara. But you weren’t always like that. How did you go from the big bruiser-type Pinots to these elegant, lifted, finesse-driven Pinots? What precipitated the stylistic change?
CM: That’s a really good question. I mean, there’s a couple things: one is just slightly different philosophy on style, right? So Greg Brewer, even to this day, is known for making wines that are a little bit more voluptuous, a little bit bigger, and riper. But at the same time, he has the ability to keep tension there, too. Same with Justin Smith up in Paso at Saxum. Those wines are big and bold and juicy, but there’s still that interesting tension that keeps them grounded
We came to market and 1999 was our first vintage, and we got a lot of really good recognition early on. Robert Parker, Wine Spectator and that really helped our business. When you got a 96 back then, the phones would ring off the hook. We just got two 96es last week, and there’s not been a single phone call, haha. So, all that to say, no one was arguing about the style of the wine. We felt like we were on to something. I was also 25, 26 years old, and my entry point into appreciating wine was through Australian Shiraz.
I liked the bigger, juicy stuff, but after maybe 10 years, I started to get bogged down a little bit like it was too much. I have kids; I can’t be waking up groggy after one bottle. The other thing is, when you have young vines, it’s a lot easier to make a showier wine than a subtle, delicate wine. If you go after the subtle delicacy with young vines, you can see the youth of the vines, right? But if you turn the volume up a little bit, you can’t hear the youth of those vines.
WCF: What age does that start to change in your experience?
CM: I think around 12 or 15 years old, kind of like human beings. They start to connect and change, so that led to some of the change as our vines aged, alongside working with Greg, which is where it changed for us.
Greg still had his Brewer Clifton thing, and he planted his flag on that hill, and it’s been super successful. But I was trying to rein it in a little bit here at Melville. I’ve always been in charge of our vineyards, so we would work in tandem to crop here or reign in the canopy there to ensure our fruit stayed delicate. I didn’t want Melville’s direction to keep going in that really big, juicy, bold kind of style.
WCF: Well, you’re also in a cold weather climate. There’s still fog, and it’s what 11 am right now? It’s significantly cooler here than Buellton, and it’s just ten minutes down the road. People always talk about microclimates, but until you go there, it’s so abstract.
CM: Totally; as a side note, the thing about Santa Rita Hills that’s really interesting is that you can pick on the earlier end and be successful, and you can pick on the really ripe end and be successful because this climate allows for such a big window. You can have a lot of success with a lot of different styles, yeah, whereas diurnal shift is everything, right? But if you have a hot climate, your window is short. This area is really unique because the windows for picking are so long.
WCF: And that allows you guys to handpick everything, which means you’re making multiple passes, which is super labor intensive. How long is harvest? Two months?
CM: It’s three months. I start harvesting next week [the first week of September] and won’t finish pressing off until Christmas. It’s not super intense the whole time, but there’s maybe a four-week period where everything is coming in at the same time. I’ve got buddies that grow in Cornas and Burgundy or Cote Rotie, and it’s crazy; their windows on harvest are five or eight days at the most! It’s one of the things I love about this industry. We all have different ingredients, but we all have very similar goals.
WCF: That moves us to a relevant question I had. You’ve described the way you farm as “aggressive but careful.” What do you mean by aggressive?
CM: We push our vines out here; the soils are pretty weak, and there’s sand that’s neutral and well drained. So we planted our vines very densely, almost 2,000 vines per acre, which is not normal. Normal is more like 1,000 or 1,200 but back in Calistoga in those days, it was 500 vines per acre. We’ve quadrupled that amount of vines per acre. Everything there was sprinkler irrigated; think about how fucking stupid that is. But what’s great about vines in these kind of conditions is that when you do give the vines nutrients and water and sunlight, they respond. So it’s almost like growing something hydroponically. I can’t control the wind, the temperature, or the sun, but I can control the nutrients and the water and the canopy management.
WCF: It’s not precision agriculture, but it is precise agriculture.
CM: The aggression part is turning off the water when the vines need it the most. It’s leafing the fruits really aggressively. We expose the fruit to the sun, depending on the varietal exposition, but my winemaking buddies come out here, and they’re usually like, “Whoa, dude,” but that’s what works for us. We use a lot of stems in our winemaking.
WCF: The fogs rolling in also have to help keep the sunburn at bay in the mornings. And the I would imagine that, like having the fog roll in helps keep sunburn off and keeps things damper.
CM: Yes, it gives the vines some moisture because we don’t get a lot of rain here, right? My buddies who grow in Europe obviously don’t irrigate, but they also get two to three inches of rain every month in the summertime.
WCF: You have a 650-foot deep well, and I’m curious what’s happening to the water table here. Last year was super rainy here. Is it maintaining, being replenished?
CM: Oh, man. That’s a really interesting subject, especially for the state of California.
WCF: I was in the Valle de Guadalupe in Baja, and that water table is being decimated. Who knows what wine will look like from there in 30 years?
CM: Well, now the government, the local government, and the state government are coming in and asking for data, which is the first step of regulation. The next step is them telling us: “This is what you’ve used for the past 15 years. This is what you’re allowed to use now, and if you go over that, it’s going to cost you x more.” So there’s a lot of old school farmers, like, vegetable farmers saying, “fuck you, we own our land and the water rights.” So there are gonna be some situations where it will be finished in court.
WCF: At least y’all are on this side of the mountain; it’s not like you’re fed by the Colorado River.
CM: No, we’re not. We have the Santa Ynez River and the Cachuma Lake, which, by law, have to release water no matter what, even if it’s 20%, to fill the water table that goes down.
WCF: I stopped by on my drive in yesterday and saw the no-swimming signs and was so confused why you couldn’t swim, but that makes a lot of sense.
CM: Yeah, you can fish and put motor oil in, but you can’t swim. It’s also a source of water for Santa Barbara County, mostly Santa Barbara City, but they also release it for the Steelhead [trout]. But no one’s seen a steelhead for fifty years. I’m an avid fly fisherman, so I’m all about protecting them and would love to see one, but we average about 10-12 inches a year in December, January, and February. Which though the vines are dormant, it cleans the soil. Washes off the salt. And salt isn’t bad. The vines need it, we need it, but too much, and it’s toxic.
So one of the beautiful things about the winter rain is that it pushes down the salt, and the vines wake up from dormancy in this beautiful, fresh soil. But if you don’t get rain like we did in ‘11, ’12, ‘13, ‘14, and ‘15, the vines start to get salt burn. In 2015 we started pulling fruit at 22 brix because the vines were shutting down. So it’s low alcohol but super savory.
WCF: So I’m gonna ask you a question that is close to the worst question junior wine writers or journalists who don’t know much about the industry (What’s your favorite wine), but what was a vintage that was difficult that you can now look back on and say “this was formative moment in my life” or “this wine has aged into something spectacular, 10, 20, 30 years on or even its still horrible but I can see the vintage and it was important.”
CM: Wow, yeah, it’s a really good question. That’s how I typically answer the “What’s your favorite wine?” by actually answering with something that challenged me. I’ve had wine in barrel, but from the moment it’s started fermentation, I know it’s fucking money. It’s perfect. It doesn’t need anything except to sit in a barrel and age. In some vintages, it’s more of a challenge.
WCF: Yeah, I’m always interested in supposed “off vintages.” Some of the best wines I’ve had have been from “bad” vintages. What was your worst year, and how are the wines tasting now?
CM: Well, so in 2004, around this time of the year, we got a massive heat wave, and we had the Santa Ana winds coming off the desert. It makes everything dry and hot.
WCF: Oh yeah, Randy Newman sings them at the beginning of “I Love LA.”
CM: Haha. It means that the nighttime doesn’t cool off, and in a hot, dry year with warm nights, the vines get an acceleration of sugar and dehydration. It’s a sugar spike without tannin development at the same pace. And when I say tannin I mean seed, skin, and stem. And ‘04 was one of those vintages. Granted, it was our sixth vintage, but we decided to hold on and irrigate because it wasn’t ready. We don’t want to pick underripe and make underripe wine.
So we irrigated, we protected, we scrambled, but the heat wave that was supposed to last four days ended up lasting 12. Around day nine, we said fuck, we have to pick. Things were falling apart. As a result, the wines are ripe and juicy, and they’re still good now. They got 95, 96 points. So, for me, it wasn’t my style. They’re not my favorite wines, and they’re not wines I’m proud of, but everyone else loves them.
The 2010 vintage sticks out to me as a really cold vintage. When you’re picking fruit here in August, the intensity of the sun is a lot different than it is in September and October, right?
WCF: Right.
CM: The intensity of the sun, not sunlight hours, not temperature, but the intensity of the sun when you pick in August…the sun is just too intense for the fruit. I never like the fruit when it comes in August. I don’t care.
I mean, this is my opinion. I don’t care what anyone says. I know winemakers that pick purely off of TA (titratable acidity) or pH, and some of them pick purely off sugar. I think it’s a huge mistake. You have to factor in everything. But 2010 was one of those vintages that was so cold and perfect in my eyes. We didn’t start picking until the middle of September, which means we didn’t finish picking Pinot until the first week of November. Syrah didn’t come in until the third week of November!
WCF: That’s kinda like your last year, too, though.
CM: It’s exactly like last year. And the ’23s are smoking.
WCF: I believe it.
CM: I mean, this is all just my personal opinion, but those are two vintages that show both sides of the coin.
WCF: When’s the last time you tasted those?
CM: I haven’t had 2010 in a little while, but I did taste the ‘04 about two months ago. And it’s impressive and in the perfect drinking window at the moment. Even though you get ripeness, you know, the acidity is really intense, especially our whites. I don’t let the Chardonnays go through malolactic conversion. So, that malic acid just keeps the wine, the chemistry, and the structure really tight. The ‘04 Chardonnays are unbelievable.
WCF: So what are the goals for the winery moving forward, and for you?
CM: So, I’ve got two kids. My daughter is a junior in college, and my son is a senior in high school. Ultimately, I’d love for them to get involved here, but only if they have the passion and the drive. So, my goal is to build that passion and drive in them. I think I’ve done a really good job, at least up to this point, fine-tuning their palates and making them aware of mother nature’s signs like the moon phases, the taste of the thing. We taste foods and think about them. Things like: here’s a cheese. Now, can you tell me the difference between cow and sheep? Now my daughter is asking me to send her wine, and I say, what, so you can beer bong it, and she says, well, yeah.
WCF: Haha.
CM: So I send her new juice. In the winery, my focus is to keep making things better, both in terms of quality and through farming. It sounds kind of like a generic answer, but I’m my own biggest critic, you know.
WCF: Let me dig into it a tiny bit; what does quality mean to you at this moment?
CM: Well, the wines have to have beautiful, intoxicating aromatics, and after that, the biggest thing I focus on is texture. So having complexity layered, you know, wine that when you first you look at it, it has to look, but then you smell it, taste, and you really feel it—it fucking makes you emotional, you know? I get the chills. That’s quality, you know? I don’t drink wine to get buzzed. I don’t drink wine now for any other reason than to provoke my mind. It’s an intellectual pursuit on every level.
WCF: I feel like it’s two sides of a coin, the heart and the head. It’s endlessly intellectual but also delicious, hedonistic, and communal.
CM: Once a month, I get together with some winemaker friends to blind taste. But it’s also just an excuse to hang out. We talk about the intent of a wine and whether it was successful. There are these awesome conversations that we don’t always agree on, but we all have the same passion.
And that’s really the key to this business: relationships. Even when we’ve gone through these cycles of a pandemic, real estate bubble, or financial crash, we’ve always found a way to survive here. And I think a large part of that is our pricing. My dad’s been very, very adamant from day one about always over-delivering for the price point. Our main estate Pinot Noir is a really good deal, really good for what that wine delivers.
And I think we do that. Who else are you meeting with while you’re here?
WCF: I’m going to Foxen this afternoon to hang with Dick and Jenny before dinner with Gray Hartley at Hitching Post. Tomorrow, I’ve got lunch with Greg from Bell’s, then to Presqu’ile, and I’m having dinner with Sashi (Moorman) at his place.
CM: He’s an awesome chef.
WCF: I’ve heard that! My friend who connected us (Remy Giannico) said dinner at his place is one of the best hangs in the valley. The last day I’m meeting with Alice from Amevive at one of her vineyards.
CM: That’s awesome. All those people you mentioned, they’re all really, really good people. It doesn’t hurt that all those people make really good wine, too. Do you want to go taste some wine?
WCF: Absolutely.
If you’d like to read the final article follow the link to Condé Nast Traveler here.