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Will goes on a deep dive into the world of winemaking and the lasting legacy of Alexander Payne’s 2004 film Sideways in Santa Barbara wine country with Dick Doré, Jenny Doré, and David Whitehair of Foxen Vineyards.
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. In the first of our Community Wine & Spirits long-form interview series I sat down with Dick Doré co-founder of Foxen Vineyard and Winery, his wife Jenny, and their winemaker David Whitehair to talk about their winery, the ins and outs of winemaking in Santa Barbara, and just how much Sideways changed the valley (and America’s perception of Pinot Noir). This was a great chance to chat with some real pioneers in the Santa Barbara scene, I hope you enjoy reading it. -Will C. Farley
Jenny Doré (JD): We actually get your Instagram! We like to travel, so I always mark things like that and save certain stories.
Will C. Farley (WCF): Amazing! We love to hear that and have a lot of fun with it. To go ahead and jump right in, it’s been 40 years that you’ve been making wine here. If you had to distill it down, what would the overarching changes be in the region and for Foxen? When you started, were you already growing grapes on the property?
Dick Doré (DD): It was some experimentation I had done. I’d planted some Gewurztraminer and a few other things. Billy was working down at Mesa Vineyards close by. We didn’t have any viable grapes on the property, so the first year we got together on my basketball court to make some wine, we went over to Rancho Sisquoc and purchased some Cabernet Sauvignon, which at that time was the warmest vineyard in Santa Barbara County that could grow it and get it ripe.
I mean, the whole county had a very bad reputation for Bordeaux varietals because we’re not a very warm growing area, right? So, getting it ripe has always been a problem, that is, until they started moving to places like Happy Canyon. The first thing Billy did was to block up the irrigation there to ensure the grapes weren’t getting any extra water, and they still, to this day, don’t understand why we got two-tenths of the acre instead of six like they were getting right, which made all the difference in the world. Ours got ripe; it wasn’t vegetal.
So, from our first endeavor, which was that we did a second hobby vintage of Cabernet, we decided, well, we want to buy some French oak and really get serious. So we got bonded in 1987 and started producing four wines: a Chenin Blanc, a Chardonnay, a Santa Maria Pinot Noir, and a Cabernet, and those were our wines for the initial five or six years.
JD: Billy had made Chenin up at Chalone, so he was very familiar with that.
WCF: Was he there when Dick Graff launched the American Institute of Wine and Food, you know?
DD: Yeah. So he was only there for four years.
WCF: I was aware of that through the Julia Child side, but it’s an interesting little organization that I’ve met a couple of people who’ve been involved with over the years. I was doing my research and thinking, where do I know that name, Dick Graff, from?
For the first couple of years, it seems like you were just a very fun, bootstrapped wine operation. You had a crush pad on a basketball court and then moved the barrels into the old blacksmith shed.
DD: And it was a situation with my family that they had the land but didn’t really have the money to keep up the barn and the building. So we made them an offer they could resist. We’ll keep it standing, and we gradually moved into the shop across the street, into the barn. We were there for 20 years.
WCF: You’ve seen this region in so many different eras.
DD: Basically, we were number 13 behind people like Richard Sanford and Jim Clendenen’s Au Bon Climat…
WCF: When did Jim start Au Bon Climat?
DD: About three years before us in ‘85.
WCF: I think seeing monumental changes in a winemaking region is fascinating. Another place I like to visit is the Anderson Valley. There is a lot to be said for working regions that aren’t just built around tourism. You sell wine across the market [in restuarants and shops] and also through your club?
DD: The wine club has been our redemption. Back in 2010, when there was a downturn in the market, our few thousand members kept us going.
WCF: I mean, it makes sense; you make great wine.
DD: Well, our reputation has preceded us now. Initially, I remember going into the New York market in the early days, saying we’re from Santa Barbara County, and the response was, ‘Who makes wine there except for Richard Sanford?’ Haha.
WCF: So, who else was making wine at that time?
DD: Well, there would have been Bien Nacido from the Miller family down the road. They were a family with property down north of LA at the Seabee Valley, okay, and they had orchards. They sold those and came up here and took over the land.
WCF: And then Babcock, I guess, would have been around too.
DD: Yeah. Babcock and Sanford were the first two down here, right? Now we’ve got almost 200, and that’s what’s changed. The competition has gotten fierce.
WCF: Do you feel more competition from neighbors or a place like Paso Robles? As far as tourism goes, LA people are coming here, but they could also go to Paso Robles or even the Valle de Guadalupe in the Baja.
DD: We’re still benefiting from the Sideways effect. We still do to this day. We have people coming from Japan or Sweden wanting their picture taken in front of the bar that the boys were taken to in the movie, you know?
JD: 2022, we had an all-time record year.
WCF: I hung out with Chad Melville (Melville Winery) this morning, and he was saying that in the earlier days and really through the mid-2010s, they would get big bumps when they got good reviews, but that nowadays, you get a 96, 97, point wine and it’s not even noticeable. It’s the same as it ever was. Is that true for you? I imagine it’s industry-wide.
JD: There’s just so much competition, too much, too many new wineries, and too many SKUs to keep track of. A lot of wineries are being divested from bigger groups because of it.
WCF: Everything seems to have really blossomed in the early ‘90s, with a lot more growers. How did that change the process of sourcing good fruit from other parts of the valley with all the added competition?
DD: Well, we started out sourcing from Santa Rita Valley, right from the Miller brothers at Bien Nacido, and we gradually branched out into various other areas in Santa Ynez for Bordeaux grapes, like Merlot and Cabernet. But we make such limited quantities of those anyway that it’s really only a small part of Foxen, whereas Pinot Noir, luckily for us, happened at the same time as Sideways.
JD: In the late 90s, there was a more serious and moneyed effort to plant vineyards as a region where we learned a lot. We knew more. More clones were available. The orientation was different; there were high-density vineyards, so in the early 2000s, these beautiful new vineyards started really producing. Billy found the site and designed Sea Smoke, and we had access to great fruit from it for 10 years. We were kids in a candy store with all the different clones, but now, with disease and climate change, it seems like there’s a return to the heritage clones.
DD: On their own roots, ungrafted! They seem to be more disease and climate-change-resistant. The Dijon clones tend to ripen a little too quickly for the September heat spike we get now.
JD: It’s seeing the pendulum swing back. Now, it’s who has heritage, deep roots, and is own-rooted.
WCF: Yeah, water usage and heat are things I think about and ask growers about in warmer regions. You benefit from the Pacific winds, so it seems to stay cooler, and with all this green, it looks like your water table is more robust here, too.
JD: Our east-west mountain ranges and the proximity to the ocean. I mean, we’re surrounded by the ocean on two sides, and it’s huge enough to keep us cool.
WCF: But that also means you also get a lot of salt in the sea air, which, if it builds up, can cause salt burn on the vines, right? I feel like a lot of the wines I’ve tasted so far have a distinct salinity.
JD: We’ve been lucky the last two years to have significant rain that washes out the salts that build up in the soil during the multiple-year drought. When they build up, the vines start getting stressed. Yeah, if you’re irrigating only a vineyard, it’s very hard water.
WCF: But you do a lot of dry farming?
DD: We’re dry-farmed in the original vineyard we planted in ‘89. It was intended to be an irrigated vineyard. We put 18,000 gallons of storage up above the vineyard, and it took us a week from our water source to fill those. Then, it only took us half a day to water half the vineyard. Haha. So we decided to dry farm.
JD: People ask how deep those root systems go, but they probably go all the way down to the creek.
DD: We have heavy clay, so you have to look for water with a well. You’re drilling down for what they call the Careaga Formation, which is more gravel and lets water through, right? And that tends to be higher here, which means less water. We have five wells on this ranch, and the total production of all five wells is about 30 gallons a minute. So, we have enough to survive, but we don’t have enough to frost protect.
WCF: Do you get much frost?
JD. Not anymore.
DD: We haven’t had frost damage the last few years.
JD: I haven’t had to turn on the frost protection in Santa Ynez in 10 years.
WCF: As I was driving, it looked like there had been some burning, and while you might not have as much frost, it seems like there are a lot of fires.
DD: Yeah, fires are burning hotter and bigger, especially after all this dryness. After this winter’s tremendous rains, we had feet [of grass] around here like you wouldn’t believe, and nobody could mow it in time, so one little flicker, and it went up like a chain. We were having a meeting and saw the smoke, got there, and stopped it in time, but it could have been the whole hill.
JD: Our partners were grabbing files. We were ready to evacuate.
DD: Can we taste the Chard and Chenin?
JD: So that’s the Chenin. So this vineyard is three and a half acres that Dick’s great uncle planted in 1966.
WCF: I actually have a bottle of this at home; I’m really excited to try this.
DD: It’s one of our best-aging wines. Such a fun wine. We’ve been making it now for almost 40 years. Chenin is one of the most underappreciated wines out there.
JD: So this is a wine that doesn’t leave the winery. This is our estate Chardonnay which comes from just up the hill, seven acres total.
WCF: How do you say that name? [Tinaquaic]
JD: It’s Tenn-Ah-Quake. It means ‘Little Creek.’ We have these indigenous words here that are spelled the way the Spaniards interpreted the Chumash words. So it’s neither Chumash nor is it Spanish. The Chumash didn’t have a written language.
WCF: I was so sad when I realized the Chumash museum isn’t open yet.
JD: The Natural History Museum in Santa Barbara has a really good Chumash exhibit with a recording of the last surviving person out on San Miguel, one of the Channel Islands, who spoke pure Chumash.
This property is Spanish land grant property that’s been in Dick’s family since 1837. When Benjamin Foxen, Dick’s Great Great Grandfather, went to get a ranch brand for his horses and sheep, he wanted an anchor because he was an English sea captain. He went to the local blacksmith who was Chumash, and they used rocks tied with hemp ropes as anchors. He’d never seen an English-style curved anchor, so the design was drawn out in the dirt, which we still use on the Foxen labels, but that’s why it’s crooked.
DD: I donated the original brand to the museum but decided I wanted a copy to have in our winery. So I went to a blacksmith in Santa Maria, showed him the design, and said, “I want a black branding iron like this.” I went to pick up the copy and looked down, and he said, “It was crooked, so I fixed it!” Haha. Needless to say, we remade it incorrectly.
JD: [Pours Pinot]
WCF: One of the things I think that most people who don’t live in wine country, even people who love wine, don’t really get is the relationship between winemakers and grape growers. Everyone likes to think that all the grapes are from the estate, that there’s a chateau right next to the vineyards. But I always have to say that there are a lot of excellent winemakers who don’t grow anything.
JD: We’re best known for our Pinots, but Foxen Canyon is too hot for Pinot. This canyon flows two miles down and opens into the Santa Maria Valley. When they start harvest, you can see it as they pick because it gets a degree warmer every mile inland you go, which I learned from Richard Sanford 40 years ago. They start at the old Byron Bay site and the crews just work their way westward. And on that day, it’ll be three degrees warmer on the Byron side vs. the Bien Nacido side.
WCF: How formal is everything these days between growers and the producers?
JD: Dick had a handshake to buy Julia’s every year [one of the best Jackson Family vineyards].
DD: Still do! Barbara has respected the handshake I made with her husband. And not only that, but they put us into the best vineyards they have. They appreciate us, although I don’t think their winemaker can understand why our Julia’s gets $60 a bottle, and their Julia’s is only $30 a bottle.
WF: So I’m going to ask you a question that is close to the worst question every journalist who doesn’t know much about the industry asks (“What’s your favorite wine?”), but my question is: what was a vintage that was really difficult that you can now look back on and say, “This was a formative moment in my life” or “This wine has aged into something spectacular, 10, 20, 30 years on or even it’s still horrible but I can see the vintage, and it was important.”?
JD: I have one from the end of my time with Cambria. It was ‘98, and we got a monsoon right at the beginning of harvest. I had winemakers on site freaking out. Rot was setting in. But we had this wonderful vineyard manager who went on to Bien Nacido. I asked if there was any way we could do an hourly pick instead of piecemeal. Chris figured it out and was able to get an hourly pick for the artisan winemakers like Foxen, Hitching Post, etc.
On every bunch, they would knock off grapes that showed any sign of rot to save what they could. That year, [Wine] Spectator panned the vintage because of the rot issues. But we were one of the top Pinots in their eyes. And so, in sales, we had to convince people that it’s okay. But it’s like difficult years in Burgundy. You go to the top and expect the best producers to make a good wine in challenging years, right? But because they had panned the whole vintage but also given us these great reviews on our Julia’s, it was so challenging but so rewarding to sell that wine.
WCF: Have you tasted that one recently?
JD: Yes, at Pinot Fest, a wonderful Pinot event in San Francisco in their 20th year. So, in 2020, just before the pandemic, all the winemakers brought ‘98 and ‘99s to help with the celebration, and our ‘98 Bien Nacido and Julia’s just blew the socks off of everyone.
WCF: Yeah, the ability to age wines from this area is actually a really interesting point; you have the fog and big diurnal shift that helps with the structure and phenolics.
JD: Even this Pinot we are sipping on now, we pull out for wine dinners with age, and it shows really well. It’s bottled unfined and unfiltered and is made correctly. It’s retained acidity. This wine is quintessential Santa Maria Bench, which is different than the Santa Rita Hills, which is different from the Santa Lucia Highlands. All credit to Jim Clendenen for this; 30, 40 years ago, he was describing Santa Maria Valley Pinot as being full of red fruit and hard spice—the clove, cardamom, and cinnamon elements, that those two things without any new oak elements like in this wine are just pure Santa Maria.
WCF: Noted for my blind tasting.
DD: Picking a vintage or wine is hard. They’re all difficult for me; I have to sell them. Haha. Probably our most difficult one was in our little vineyard in Santa Ynez. We got hit by a late frost and lost the whole vineyard, except for Mourvedre, and that was all we got. It was so late, the 25th of April, the day of our Vitners Association barbecue.
JD: And we were a little hungover.
DD: Everybody was in bed. We had this inversion layer come in. Some of the lower vineyards were okay, but it was hard because we ended up with only 150 cases of Mourvedre.
JD: We lost the entire four acres of Syrah, an acre of Sangiovese, and all the Grenache. We had had a heat spell the week before, so we had these tender, green vines, and it looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to all of them. Napa got hit the same way because we’d had this warm weather.
WCF: How was that wine? Have you tasted it since?
DD: Oh, we opened a bottle for my birthday party last week, and it was delicious, just excellent.
JD: Dick just turned 80.
WCF: Congratulations, and congratulations on the wine still tasting great! Off-vintages can be absolutely great and are, in many ways, so much more interesting from a human standpoint to me. A bad year can result in something that is harsh at first but ages gracefully, especially if it comes from a great producer. There’s just something about the challenge that spurs some winemakers.
JD: I find it interesting. I love to listen to Billy, who was a viticulturist before they teamed up; he’s seen it all. He is a master of mitigating.
DD: When all the young winemakers are panicky because a big, dangerous heat spell is coming, he’s alright. He starts picking before he would probably ordinarily pick so that the end result is better. In that situation, even if you’re picking 24 hours a day, you can’t get it off fast enough.
JD: He never stops learning and figuring it out.
DD: He started so young with the godfather of all the grapes here in the county, Dale Hampton, who came in in the ‘80s when all the vineyards were going bankrupt and corrected their mistakes. And then, you know, learning from that experience here in the Santa Maria Valley, and then going up and tending the Chalone vineyards he had planted years before. When he came back after that, he advised on most of the vineyards that were planted: Sea Smoke, John Sebastiano, and a lot of the Happy Canyon vineyards.
JD: Billy is the first one a lot of people call, and it’s a great advantage because Billy will then call me about the fruit. I remember the year that we got our first Sea Smoke, he called and said, “The fruit is going to cost $8,000, $10,000 a ton, and can we can get it.” And so my response was really easy to ask Billy, “Is it worth it?” Without any vintage behind it, Billy just said, it’s beautiful fruit. I think we got five tons. We got 5% or 6% of the yield on a handshake.
DD: And we’re doing that with another vineyard, now called Fe Ciega, and Billy has partnered with Adam Tolmach from Ojai, who used to work with Jim Clendenen, and they’ve revamped the vineyard. This is our new our new Sea Smoke.
JD: It’s at the same elevation as Sea Smoke, halfway between there and Mount Carmel.
DD: It’s just this beautiful and unique little location. So it’s in that perfect zone, oh…Hey, David! Will, meet our winemaker.
[Enter David Whitehair, Winemaker at Foxen]
WCF: Lovely to meet you; it’s nice to meet someone from the next generation who grew up in the valley. What are you working on right now? What are you shooting for in the cellar?
David Whitehair [DW]: A hundred-point wine. Haha. I get 97s, but I’m trying to figure out what the deal is with those other three I keep hearing about.
Seriously, I try to maintain the consistency of high-quality wine without trying to reinvent the wheel. I like to say I’m a new-age winemaker who has been classically trained by Billy. I’ve learned to do a lot with a little and let the wines speak for themselves. We do as much as we can in the vineyard, upstream, which allows the wine to express itself. I want to maintain quality while innovating. During harvest, we made a carbonic Cab Franc. Doing things like that pushes us and allows us to explore and expand our knowledge. Coming into this place, the bar was already set so high.
JD: He says that, but he went from intern to assistant winemaker to winemaker in just a few years.
DW: Billy already had everything in play, and he taught me everything he knew, and I am very appreciative of that. I just upped the game as far as cleanliness goes. When I came in, there wasn’t really much to change because we were already buying the best grapes and making some of the best wine, so what I learned from Billy, especially, was how to do everything out in the vineyard.
At my old winery, we were taught to think like a cactus. Water is such a valuable resource out here, and we don’t have much of it to begin with. So, for tasks like cleaning, you have to think, “How do I use this water efficiently? Can I double-use this rinse water to clean something else?
WCF: Did you come from brewing?
DW: No. I didn’t
WCF: Okay, so I feel like there’s this funny thing where a good amount of technical brewers who want to get into wine can make the transition because they understand cleanliness but it doesn’t typically go the other way. Are there any winemakers you can think of who make great beer?
DW: Haha. Our warehouse manager, Bobby, makes great beer, but he’s mentioned the same thing. We’re really clean; it’s the first day of grapes back there, and you’re not gonna find a grape on the ground. It’s a lot of squeegee work. Making incremental improvements.
DD: He’s keeping us all honest.
DW: I didn’t think 17 years ago I’d be where I am today, able to stay with a small company and find a place.
WCF: How many people work here?
DD: Between 20 and 30.
JD: David has been the perfect transition for Bill. We have the next generation stepping in, and it’s time. As a winery, you either sell or figure out a succession.
DD: If anyone is looking to buy…haha.
DW: We say if we can’t drive to a vineyard in a reasonable amount of time, then we aren’t getting the fruit. I talk to these other winemakers who say, “Oh, I’ve got this great fruit.” I ask them how it looked in the vineyard, and they say they never saw it!
DD: That’s why we don’t make a Zinfandel.
DW: Fa Ciega is our furthest, and it’s about an hour. I spend so much time in the vineyard making sure that it’s all dialed in before we get it here. I just can’t fathom when I talk to people and they say, “Well, I just bought the fruit.” I’m sure, in certain circumstances, that works, but as a winemaker, you have to be in the field. I mean, you gotta. You gotta know the people out there and what’s going on with the grapes. There’s just so much more to it to make sure the fruit is good.
JD: These days, we are one of the few that still source fruit from sites all over Santa Barbara County, with the exception of Ballard Canyon.
DD: We’ve been, by far, the biggest promoters of Santa Maria Valley.
DW: I think everyone talks about Santa Maria, and I don’t want to say they have negative connotations, but everybody’s like, “Ooooo Pinot…Santa Rita,” you know. But that’s why we’re so proud to be Santa Maria because we’re showing the actual potential that this place has.
JD: We work, and we work, and we make some beautiful Pinots from the Santa Rita hills with fruit from John Sebastiano, Fa Ciega. We’re no longer in La Encantada, but we can speak to the differences. The winters are a little warmer; bud break is a little sooner here in Santa Maria Valley, but the average temperature is the same. So it can be a little hotter there, but it averages out.
From a taste perspective, we get red fruit here; they get more black fruit there. If you can make eight different Pinots, there’s no sense in making eight unless they have those differences.
WCF: Yeah. This seems to be a place where microclimate is everything, everything’s pockets, little hills, micro terroirs.
DW: There’s a huge discrepancy between this vineyard beside us and the dry farm vineyards, which are 700 feet up and not even a quarter mile away.
WF: Of course.
JD: The soil differences are huge. In the original vineyard, there’s more sand.
DW: It’s the sand pit, and it’s just a massive difference within the block itself—the soil composition is so different. We have the clay loam here, the Careaga sand up in the corner, and the water-holding potential is so different. You can visibly see the demarcations, especially in the canopy this time of year. To speak again to being in the vineyards: knowing your fruit and soil allows you to multi-pick a block of Chardonnay to separate that out instead of shotgunning and picking it all at once.
WF: And you guys hand harvest, right?
DW, JD: Everything, everything [in unison].
JD: We usually do night picks. We were one of the first to do farming contracts with Bien Nacido. Au Bon Climat was first there, but it allows you to pay by the acre, which means you can control the farming, so Billy can have his hand in how big the crop is and how much fruit to drop…
DW: Prescription farming is what we call it. Haha. But, really, we do everything here by hand. We don’t have machines. I was out there with a two-stroke hedger for two days, hedging that vineyard. That’s what we call the Foxen way; we’ll get it done. It’s hard work, and we are proud of the end result. We think the hard work shows.
WCF: And the wines are joyful and fun to drink.
DW: When I hear somebody say that, that is the ultimate gratification for what I do. At the end of the day, that’s why I do it, seeing how much joy brings people; for me, that really is it. I don’t want to pat myself on the back, but it’s an overall great feeling, you know, to produce something that people can love, but it also has a point of view. And unfortunately, I gotta go finish up for the day, but it’s been great chatting with you. [David leaves]
WF: You too! Thanks so much for the time. Dick and Jenny, I have just two more easy questions and we’ll go about the rest of our days. The first is related to why I took the trip out here for Condé Nast. What are the most significant changes, especially in the last 20 years, that you’ve seen in the valley—especially with regard to tourism? There’s obviously a balance between having a wine-nerd destination and a place that’s meant to host bachelorette parties from Los Angeles, but what has that looked like for you?
DD: As soon as the movie was released, literally the weekend after it was released, I came up to the tasting room, and instead of old people, there were limos with young people that had earrings and tattoos all over.
JD: God bless Fox Searchlight.
DD: And I always feel the need to bring this up. The Michael Jackson trial was going on at the same time in Santa Maria, and every two or three days, the journalists would have a day off from court. So, the press from all over the world, Scandinavia, Argentina, Germany, Australia, Japan, and the list goes on, were out here sampling wines, getting our stories.
I did tapings for all these people, and it just persisted. We still, to this day, have little foreign couples come in and try to stand in front of the place where they stood in the movie.
JD: But then you also had Pinot Noir consumption skyrocket, right? It went up 16% the year after the movie came out and became a cool thing. We went from six of us sitting around saying how can we make Pinot cool? And this movie…
WCF: Not only did it make it cool, but it taught people how to say what was good and why it was good. Yeah, it did it in a way that was not preachy, and it was funny.
JD: It was raunchy.
DD: Virginia Madsen’s soliloquy is perfect.
JD: We still had no idea what was coming. When Alexander Payne called up Dick and asked to film in the shack, he wanted us to shut it down for the weekend. Which, first of all, it wasn’t big enough, and secondly, we were only open on the weekend, so Dick said you can be here Friday for half a day. It was a big shock when we ended up on the movie poster, even though our part in the movie ended up being cut to almost nothing. It was so fleeting, we thought, well, that’s it, but then came the Fox Searchlight Wine map, and this movie really had legs to it.
DD: People are constantly coming in, trying to grab the bottle away and pour it into their glasses. So we had to move the bottles back. Haha.
JD: Our first employee, Sandy, was the tasting room manager. She worked here three days a week and a few days at the Hitching Post, and we’ve heard she was one of the inspirations for Virginia Madsen’s character. Alexander Payne is still a club member, and we’ll be forever grateful to this thing he called a “low-budget indie movie.”
WCF: It was low-budget!
JD: We’d been invited to the premiere, but we weren’t going to go. They were doing a premiere screening at the Arlington in Santa Barbara, and I was driving home from San Francisco that morning, and the movie reviewer on NPR, who I love, said this is going to be one of the best, if not the best, movies of the year. We were nervous.
WCF: Yeah, I’ve heard that the rumor was that it wasn’t going to be flattering to the valley.
JD: There was some raunchy stuff, and we weren’t sure what was going to make the final cut and how everything was going to be presented. There’s a rough there’s a rough side to it, which I think is what was part of the appeal. They’re real people. It had such legs that I was at Burns in Tampa, Florida, and the wine buyer came out and wanted me to sign the pages Foxen is on.
DD: In mid-February, right after the movie came out, it’s cold. We were still at the shack, and there shouldn’t have been anybody there; we suddenly went from a couple hundred a week to over 1000 a week. You just can’t plan for that. It’s like, it’s lightning
JD: I love his films, The Leftovers, Nebraska. Alexander owns the rights to the sequel that Rex Pickett wrote. I asked him if he was going to make it, and he said, more or less, he bought it because he doesn’t do sequels, and doesn’t want anyone else to do it.
WCF: God, good for him, that’s amazing.
JD: It was so refreshing.
WCF: You stopped making a varietal Merlot in 2006 and then brought it back in 2016. Was that because of the movie?
DD: Ha, no. We mainly harvest Merlot as a blend and blend it with Sangiovese, Cabernet, or Petit Verdot. We do it every once in a while 100% Merlot; I love Merlot when it’s well made.
WCF: Oh god, me too. The Cheval Blanc Miles drinks, too, which is just such a great joke to drink a wine with Merlot in it.
DD: You’re having dinner at the Hitching Post tonight?
WCF: Yeah, with Gray Hartley.
DD: Oh my god, Frank and Gray are the two nicest people in our industry. Gray is just a riot.
WCF: And I hear the food is great? Sharing meals with winemakers is always a good time.
JD: I mean, it’s one of the reasons we can be in the wine industry; we can eat and drink beyond our means.
WF: I like to tell people I got into print journalism for money. Haha. It’s not a great way to make a fortune but a great way to experience. To taste and eat and travel and have conversations that are interesting with interesting people—at least hopefully—and that’s what makes all this work worth it. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me and for making such fantastic wines.
If you’d like to read the final article follow the link to Condé Nast Traveler here.
