1. Who influenced you?

I didn't have one person, but if I had to name one, it would be Tom Rochioli. I was working in wine retail in Texas and had fallen in love with a bottle of Rochioli Pinot. I came out to see if I could get the wines into Texas, and Tom spent an entire afternoon and early evening with me. I think he pissed off his wife pretty good, because they were supposed to go see a movie.

How much I learned technically from that is a good question. But the desire to learn came from that meeting. And I was fortunate. I ran some very good retail stores, and winemakers came through all the time. You listened a lot and learned a lot from those people.

2. Who have you taught, and where are they now?

That's probably my greatest pride. People ask what my favorite wine is, what I'm proudest of. But the people. The winemaker at Brander started with us. Matt Duffy from Vaughn Duffy did an internship with me at Siduri. Ryan Zepaltas came in as cellar master, and he's now the winemaker at Copain. Scott Shapley's first winemaking job was as my first employee, assistant winemaker at Siduri, and he's now the winemaker at Roar.

A wine has a finite lifespan. Even the greatest wines in the world do. But people who worked at your place go out and make their own wine, or wine for other people, and then they inspire other people. That goes on and on.

3. Is there a vintage you date your life by?

1999 is my all-time favorite. An incredibly long, cool growing season with no heat spikes. You could pick on Tuesday or Thursday, whatever you wanted. We didn't pick until October.

It might also have helped that my oldest son, Christian, was born in July that year. That was the first crop at Garys' Vineyard, and near the bottom of the vineyard there's a block called Christian's Block. It was the first vineyard he ever went to, and Mark Pisoni, Gary Pisoni, and Gary Franscioni just started calling it that.

4. What's changed in the trade since you started that someone new would walk right past?

You used to be able to make money. And wine writers were incredibly important when I started. I still think they matter, but nobody has the impact Bob Parker had back then.

Then social media, doing this kind of thing, where you get in front of people. We have more ways to reach people than ever before, and generally we're doing a crappier job of getting our message out. Somehow it's getting lost. We need to figure out how to make whatever message we have relevant to people again.

5. Describe a day at the peak of harvest.

Do I look tired? I am tired. On a pick day I'm up at 2 or 3 in the morning. Say I'm bringing fruit up from Garys' in the Santa Lucia Highlands. They'll have started picking around 11 p.m. or midnight. At 2:30 I text Gary Franscioni to see how many bins we have per section, because I need to know which tank to get clean. If we thought it was eight tons and it's six, or ten, you adjust. I find out when it's on the road, email the custom crush, start calculating whole-cluster additions, and figure out when I need to be there to sort.

We get to the winery around 7 or 7:30 and taste everything already in tank to see how the ferments are going. When the fruit comes in, we weigh it, and Marie and I hand sort all of it and decide on whole cluster. You get incredibly sticky. A lot of days I'm home and showered by 1 or 2.

Then around 3 or 4, lab reports come back from ETS on fruit we brought in two or three days earlier. Do I add acid? Nutrients? Nothing? Then put in an order to turn the tank temperature up. On top of that there's running a business, the customer who didn't get their wine and wants a tracking number.

Marie is a huge partner in this. Her schedule naturally runs to 1 a.m., and I go to sleep at 8 to get up at 2. She's billing out customers until 1. During harvest there's maybe one hour a day nobody's covering.

6. Is there a decision you make day to day that's hard to explain to someone else?

I like to think I'm pretty good at explaining things. The one that always shocks people is how much cleaning goes on. It's not all going out to the vineyards. In the morning you clean the tank you need, even though it was cleaned the day before. You clean before grapes or wine go in, and you clean after they come out. It's a working place, it doesn't have to be perfect, but a clean winery is incredibly important.

With a bladder press, after the bladder retracts, there are folds in it. You have the interns clean out the press, and then you go in and pull out all the grape skins they missed. They figure it out. But that's one of the very first lessons.

7. Tell me about a harvest that went terribly wrong.

2020, with the smoke and fires, is the one everyone would say. But 1995 was the second year of Siduri making Pinot Noir from Oregon, and a big rainstorm was coming in unexpectedly. We tasted fruit off every single vine and picked only the ones we thought were ready. The refrigerated truck we'd arranged wasn't ready that early, so we rented a Budget truck and drove the fruit down ourselves. That matters: Budget and Ryder trucks don't have wheel wells, so the bins sit next to each other. U-Haul has wheel wells.

We'd picked all day in a driving rain, and we got to the California border in the middle of the night and realized there was a fruit inspection station. Those poor people didn't want to be working in that rain either. They asked if I had any fruits or vegetables. I looked down between the seats and said I had a few grapes. I didn't tell them about the 2.47 tons in the back. They said, a few grapes, go ahead, welcome to California. It worked out, but for a while there everything was going wrong.

8. Aside from you, who's a legend people tell stories about?

This was less someone I worked with than one meeting that meant a tremendous amount to me. I was working in the tasting room at Benziger, three or four years into Siduri. Benziger got invited to an event at Robert Mondavi Winery for a big international wine competition, and the Benzigers didn't want to go. So they sent me. I figured buffet, 200 people, I wouldn't have to say anything.

It was a seated lunch for maybe a dozen people, well-known winemakers, the Mike Grgiches of the world. I'm a 31-year-old kid with a label nobody knows, and I get seated between Robert Mondavi and his wife, Margrit. I'm scared to death. Three courses, a reserve Chardonnay, a reserve Pinot, and a reserve Cab.

At some point the conversation turns to selling wine on this new thing called the internet. I'm the only one there young enough to know anything about it, and I'm on my third wine, probably my sixth glass, so I speak up. People listen and are kind, and the conversation moves on. Then I feel this incredibly strong hand on my shoulder that literally turns me around in my seat. It's Robert Mondavi. He bends down and says, “Adam, I don't know about this thing called the internet. Tell me everything you know.”

Here's a man with more experience selling California wine than anyone, and he was willing to start a conversation by saying “I don't know.”

9. Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year, the same way?

Kind of. We try to run away for a couple of days and relax. This year is weird because harvest was so early that we're going on the road to sell wine. Usually it's too late. Distributors don't want to see you in November and December. So we moved the getaway up to this past weekend.

We still wanted to check on the tanks every day, so we just went to Glen Ellen. Funny how some parts of Sonoma County seem farther away than others. We rented a house with a hot tub and had an amazing dinner at Glen Ellen Star. Two days. Some work, not a lot.

10. What do people outside the trade always get wrong about what you do?

Some people online have heard there are something like 85 possible additions you can make to wine, and they've got the idea winemakers are using all 85. That makes zero sense. Some of those add acid and some take acid out. Why would you do both? And additions are expensive, time-consuming, and mentally taxing. Marie and I spend so much time in the vineyards beforehand so we can do very little winemaking.

Grape juice goes to wine and then to vinegar. Vinegar is the point of stability. All you're trying to do when you make wine is stop a natural process in the middle. If your raw materials are really good, you can stop it at a point where it's really good and not do much to it. Our winemaking is not a lot of making and a lot more caretaking.

11. What's the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

Before I ever made wine. My first wine job, as a stock person at a store in Austin. They had me clean out the bargain bin, eight or ten cases of two- and three-dollar bottles: take them all out, clean the bin, put them all back. I started setting bottles on the floor and kicked one across the store. It broke against another rack and took out some bottles that weren't bargain wine. They told me, always, always, if you put bottles down, put them in a box. That was my very first day in the wine business.

I've kicked more than one at home.

Just put them in a box. If you kick the box, it's not great, but nothing breaks.

12. Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?

I still write things down. Every harvest I get one of the old stenographer's notebooks and keep my additions in it. Right now we're pressing into barrel, and I list the barrels by hand. Our winemaking software would let me just select them, but there's comfort in doing it manually.

Same with travel. I live in the calendar on my phone, but when we're planning trips I need whole month pages laid out so I can see we're in Virginia this week and Kansas that week. And if I'm adding a bunch of numbers, I do it in my head. Hoping it keeps me sharp a while longer.

13. What were you taught that you've since stopped doing?

We used to paint mildicide around the middle of the barrels. It looked pretty and kept mildew from growing. I think it was pretty unnecessary, and I don't see anybody doing it anymore. I don't know if temperature and humidity control in cellars just got better.

Marking barrels, too. The cooperages put my name on the heads now, free. You used to have to identify them yourself, and it wasn't just spray paint. A lot of things were much harder in the old days.

14. Is there a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

At Siduri, yes. I make wine at a custom crush now, so I can't name the tanks. I'm a long-suffering Dallas Cowboys fan. I've at least lived long enough to see them win Super Bowls. My sons grew up Cowboys fans and have never seen a real successful season.

I named the tanks after classic Cowboys. The tallest tank was Too Tall Jones. A shorter, fatter one was Larry Allen. There was a Landry tank, so it wasn't only players. There was never a Jerry Jones tank. I'm still pissed at him.

15. What does this work take from you that people don't see?

That's a tougher one to talk about. I've asked my children, two boys and a girl, whether they'd want to be part of the business. All three said no. When I asked why, they said winemaking took me away too much at the start of the school year. I missed the back-to-school barbecues, things like that. Having your own winery peeled me away from their early lives. I still regret that to some extent. But you can't go back and undo it.

16. When someone pours your wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn't in the tasting notes?

The story of the place and the people behind it. Some growers are gregarious and their stories come easy. Gary Pisoni is one. I always joke that Gary has never met an addiction he didn't embrace in some way. Fortunately he's just as addicted to growing grapes.

Others are quiet and even-keeled, and finding the story is harder. But there is one. I used to buy from Mark Lingenfelder, who was about the opposite of Gary. His vineyard was immaculate. I'd tell people that if there was a chance of rain, I'd bet you'd find Mark out there with an umbrella in each hand over the vines.

Yes, the Clarice Pinot tastes good. A lot of Pinots taste good. If you can find the story and share it, people will relate to it. Some will take to a different story than yours, and that's fine. At least they had the chance.

17. What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?

Wine has been part of history, of people's lives, of relationships. A glass of wine is a way to bring people together. I'm in my cellar right now. Here's a bottle of Domaine des Bosquets Gigondas. If Marie were out of town I could open it and say, boy, that was a fantastic bottle. But it would be missing something if she weren't here to share it, or you, or whoever. I wouldn't say it sucks because no one was around. It just wouldn't be at the same level. That's where the glass by itself falls short.

18. What's your favorite wine that you don't make?

For a long time the answer was Grenache and Syrah from those old vines and big rocks in the south of France. Now Marie and I, our friend Sasha from Paso, and two friends from the southern Rhône make a wine there called Etienne. So I can't say that anymore.

Marie has convinced me I need to go to New Zealand. She's been and loved it, and we've drunk a good number of New Zealand Pinots. Making wine in the south of France is silly, same hemisphere. New Zealand would at least be six months off. But I'm getting old, Patrick, and I'm looking for less to do, or different things to do, not new winery projects.

19. When you make a great one, do you know right away?

No. I know right away when a wine is going to be crappy. A bad year is pretty apparent. But I reserve “great” for very few. Maybe a handful in my life, and at one point I was making 30-plus Pinots a year.

With three kids, there's very little time a dad gets alone with the baby right after birth. It's focused on the mom, and well deserved. But there's one moment when the doctor takes the baby aside and does an Apgar score. They check the joints, shine a light in the eyes, clap to make sure there's a response. The doctor isn't telling you whether your kid will be the bank president or the bank thief. Just that nothing's wrong right now. A brand-new wine is like that. If it's reductive, if it stinks, if the ferment is stuck, it'll have a much harder time becoming great. Otherwise you don't really know what it's going to grow up into.

20. One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

The 1999 Christian David. My favorite vintage, named for my son. It didn't come from Christian's Block. It came from Hirsch Vineyard. It was the rare case where at every step I'd taste it and think, this is incredible, but it won't be as good after malolactic. And it was. Then it won't be as good after oak, or after bottling. And it always was.

There's a lesson in there too. I made wines for my daughter, Amber Rose, and my son Truett Nolan from their birth years, and those vintages weren't nearly as good as Christian's. But you can't not make a wine for Amber and Truett. Think of the resentment. Still, when the wine and the time and the person all go together, it's fairly magical. I'd pour that, and I'd probably have them meet my son.