1.Who taught you?

My most important mentor was André Tchelistcheff. But I also got a master's degree from UC Davis, and it was the golden age of Davis, with people like Ann Noble, Roger Boulton, and Ralph Kunkee. It was a who's who of really great wine teachers.

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

Oh gosh, there have been a lot of them. James Becker of Oakvale in the Hunter Valley and M & J Becker Wines is one of my old favorites. A younger favorite is Jake Fetzer of Masút. He's a really good guy. Luke Bass of Porter-Bass Vineyards. Ross Cobb of Cobb Wines. And I had a number of interns and people who came up and stayed with me at Flowers, like Andy Erickson and Thomas Brown. Brian Maloney and Katie Carter, who are at DeLoach now, are two more I mentored.

I'd add Malia van der Kamp. I've been very close with the van der Kamps for decades. She was my intern, and now she's running the van der Kamp Vineyard and making her own wine. She is a terrific young grape grower and winemaker. And Evan Damiano, the young winemaker I'm handing the reins to now. I think he's going to be really great.

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

I don't know that it would be my favorite, but one of my most formative was 2008. My mom died very suddenly, and my dad was supposed to die within a couple of weeks, but he lived for a year and a half. So I spent a lot of that vintage down in Southern California, and winemakers came out of the woodwork to help my wife, who was running the brand. Brian Maloney, Katie Carter, David Vergari, Ginny Lambrix. All these people came out of the woodwork to help my wife get the 2008 harvest in, and it was pretty gratifying.

I actually wrote a short story about it called "The Old Winemaker." I had spent all those years in service of the grape, and suddenly the grape was giving back to me in a way I never would have believed. Through all those tears and the loss of my parents, I found a lot of gratitude, and so did my wife.

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

The industry has become a lot more commoditized. All of my contracts with my growers are still handshakes, but in general people treat grapes much more as a commodity now. When I came on board, and I still have this with my growers, we tended to have each other's backs. If I knew a grower was losing his shirt on a short crop, I would say, look, I'm going to pay you a couple hundred more bucks a ton. And when I wasn't able to pay for grapes and I'd go to a grower and say, I'm sorry, I can't buy your grapes this year, most of them would say no, you take the grapes, we'll find a way to make it work. You just don't see that so much anymore. But I still have those relationships with my growers, some of them for several decades.

5.Walk me through a typical harvest day at the peak.

It usually starts early, getting in the car well before light and getting into the vineyards at first light to collect samples or just walk through and check on things. Then I head into the winery to do punch-downs and pump-overs, look at Brix and temperatures, make any corrections that are needed, and change any temperature settings.

In the afternoon it's staging half-ton picking bins and lug boxes, making sure they're sanitized, and delivering them to the vineyard. We usually start picking right around dusk, as soon as it's cool enough and the grapes no longer hold the sun's heat, and we pick as late into the night as we need to. Then we bring the fruit into the winery and put it in a cold spot, or if the night is cold enough, just leave it outside. First thing in the morning we process the fruit, whether that's destemming, crushing, or pressing. We'll often foot-tread a lot of our whites, let the juice soak with the skins overnight, and press them in the morning.

6.What decision do you make that you can't fully explain to someone else?

One of my favorite concepts is carbohydrate repartitioning, where you get the grapevine to shift its carbohydrate resources from vegetative strategy to reproductive strategy. One of the best layman's explanations I've ever read was written by Randy Caparoso in his book on Lodi. It's a great coffee-table book with beautiful pictures, and he's a very good writer.

Basically, a grapevine can do two things with its carbohydrates. It can follow a vegetative strategy or a reproductive strategy, and its default is vegetative. That way it produces more leaves and canes and can outclimb its competition, and if it throws a cane out on the ground, it will root adventitiously, so it can reproduce that way too. Roughly speaking, it takes a gram of photosynthate to make a gram of cellulose, the building blocks of a grapevine. But to produce one gram of color molecules, anthocyanins for example, takes two grams of photosynthate. It's a very expensive proposition. So why would a grapevine ever do anything as silly as make grapes, when it can outcompete its neighbors and reproduce anyway? The answer is to get the vine to think, hey guys, it's getting a little tough here, there's not enough water or nitrogen or whatever is limiting. Then the vine says, okay, we're going to repartition our carbohydrates from vegetative to reproductive, so we can fulfill that ancient biblical command to be fruitful and multiply, with the birds eating the seeds and dispersing them. Having six kids, I know a little bit about reproduction.

So I need to be able to think like a grapevine, or like a wine yeast. Winemakers are accused of thinking like one-celled organisms, and in my case it's true. You have to partner with the yeast to give it what it needs, because with both grapevines and yeast, if you make them fat and happy, you're not going to get the flavors and textures you would get by providing a little bit of stress. My job is really to be a coach for my grapevines, to hold up the map and say, hey guys, we're here, we want to get there, how do we do it together? And the same thing with the yeast.

7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.

2005 was a tough year, when about 15 percent of the Chardonnay in Sonoma County rotted away. I had just sold my custom crush facility, but I was still making my wine there. The new owner didn't want to use my dairy tanks, which I like because of their surface-to-volume ratio. I also had a Greg sorting table, which was basically a slide. If you wanted to go faster, you tilted it more, and it fed into an old destemmer I had bought and refurbished, with a frequency converter and an automotive jack in the back to change the angle of ejection, so you'd get fewer jacks and stems. They had mothballed all of that.

All the grapes were coming in at once. Sauvignon Blanc was coming in with Cabernet. It was a crazy, rainy year, everyone was trying to harvest at the same time, and winemakers were eyeing five-gallon buckets covetously as fermentation vessels. So I went to the new production manager and said, I know my contract says I have to give you 24 hours' notice before I bring my fruit in, and I know it's crazy, so I'm going to give you 48 hours. He looked at his calendar and said, you can bring your first fruit in eight days. So I stormed into the new owner's office and said, you're not using any of my old equipment. Let me use it. I'll put it all outside in front of the winery. I won't send a single drop of juice or a single berry across your threshold. Just give me back my old equipment and stay the hell out of my way.

The first day, I had 20 tons to sort, and my sorting crew was my six children, the youngest of whom was four, plus my wife and me. The new owner had bought the vibrating sorting table, the magic fingers that pop the berries off gently, and the escalator that goes up. That was maybe $150,000. I had put all my things together, tanks included, for probably about $10,000, because I bought everything used and we built the sorting table ourselves out of the stainless steel scraps from the tops of the dairy tanks. In two hours my wife and kids and I processed 20 tons, and the must looked great. In the same two hours, a professional crew of six or eight had done about four tons, and it looked like crap. By the end of that harvest they were using my destemmer and my sorting table. The next year they sold off the vibrating table and the magic fingers, which sounds like a cheesy Midwestern motel. Right up until they closed in 2024, they used all my old equipment, except the dairy tanks, because those are hard to shovel out.

We also bailed out some of our growers that year. I had taken on Kent Ritchie's vineyard when I was working for Kendall-Jackson, after they dropped it over a stuck fermentation. I recognized how good it was, so I started making wine from it for myself, and I turned David Ramey, Mark Aubert, and Jason Pahlmeyer on to it. In 2005 all three of them rejected most of their fruit. Kent called me and said, Greg, what am I going to do? I said, bring the fruit to me. I'll process it and make wine out of it. I'll give you a thousand bucks a ton to cover your costs, and if I do any vineyard designates, I'll pay you the normal amount. I split it with DeLoach, where I was also making wine. We each got 92 or 93 points from Wine Spectator, better than the winemakers who kept the little bit of fruit they thought was better, and I was able to write Kent a $10,000 check, the vineyard-designate amount I had promised him. Today the Ritchie Vineyard is one of the most famous Chardonnay vineyards in California. It's another example of working together with your growers and everybody pitching in to help each other out.

8.Who's the legend around the winery?

Oh boy. I'm not a big believer in legends. I'll leave that up to future people. But I would dare say Brian Maloney has done an awful lot for Boisset. He's making all the Boisset wines here in the U.S. And Katie Carter, who worked alongside him, is now essentially the winemaker for DeLoach. She's come a long way. Brian is really talented, and he's come a long way too.

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

Personally, I tend to get pneumonia every year after harvest, because in the past I would work three days straight without enough sleep or rest. As a team, we celebrate the very last press load. We have a barbecue, and I play the bagpipes. I play in the first grapes, and I play out the last grapes for the last pressing. That's been pretty consistent over the years.

And Captain Crush has been known to show up at the end of harvest. He wears a mask to hide his true identity so his children won't get ridiculed, but he has a cape and red tights, and he fights for truth, justice, and the microbial way. He brings beer to all the good little boys and girls in the cellar, and to the ones who aren't good too. On the very last day of harvest, he actually brings people more beer than he drinks.

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

I can use the old joke. How many winemakers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None, because winemakers don't screw in light bulbs. They screw around in hot tubs, usually with a glass of Chardonnay. A lot of people think winemaking is just tasting a lot of wine. It's a contact sport. I've broken a bunch of bones, and I've had injuries I won't even speak about. You're working with heavy equipment and barrels that weigh several hundred pounds, throwing 45-pound lug boxes, pushing half-ton bins, driving tractors, driving trucks and not losing your load. It's a great combination of blue-collar work and a lot of muscle, with a lot of using your head too.

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

I was working at Beaulieu Vineyard, and they had very old solenoid valves for the cooling once fermentations started. My job every evening was to go around and check the solenoids. They were old and rickety, and I got one wrong. I couldn't really hear it click. By morning it was the reserve Chardonnay, and it had gotten up to about 110 degrees. It went from being a reserve-quality wine to going into their regular Chardonnay. That was a big mistake.

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

Oh yeah. For instance, I like using dairy tanks. They're really laborious to shovel out and to get into, but they have a great surface-to-volume ratio. They're not set up for high flow, and you have to shovel them out right over your head. That's something my wife and I tended to do together. We'd jump into the dairy tank after it was drained and shovel it out together at two or three in the morning, and we'd usually end up body painting with the lees. It takes more time, but I like it.

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

A lot of winemakers swear that if you get reduction, you just splash the wine. That's absolutely the worst thing you can do. If it's hydrogen sulfide alone, that will blow off, yes. But if you have mercaptans, adding oxygen pushes them to their disulfide form, like dimethyl disulfide or diethyl disulfide, and those can no longer be removed with copper. So when you get reduction, the wrong thing to do is splash the wine.

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

Many pieces of equipment, like my dairy tanks. There's the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María. There's the Coffin, because it looks like a coffin, and the Baby Coffin, a really small one-ton dairy tank. And the G-Spot, because that tank has a big G on it with a black spot below it.

I got in trouble at Beaulieu, where the tanks had really sterile names like FST 12. I named all the white settling tanks, the white settlers, after white settlers: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, David Bowie. But I got in a lot of trouble for that, because I named one Generalissimo Vallejo, and somebody thought that was racist. My current tanks all have Star Wars characters, like R2-D2 and C-3PO, and one of the big ones is the Ice Planet Hoth. Instead of a number, each tank has a picture of Han Solo or Princess Leia or whoever on it.

15.When someone who knows nothing about wine walks in, what do they already know that you can build on?

Put a punch-down stick in their hand and have them start doing punch-downs. They get a real good idea of the aromas and flavors coming off, and when they plunge different fermenters, they can see the different stages of fermentation. I teach them, like I've taught all my kids, to always sanitize the stick between plungings. If you go from one fermentation straight into the next, the first one might already be in full fermentation and the second one just getting started, so you're cross-inoculating.

That's another good thing to teach people, that there are different stages of fermentation, especially with wild ferments. A wild fermentation is like a bare patch of ground after a forest fire. The first organisms to colonize it might be grass seeds that blow in. The grass grows up and builds tilth and organic matter in the soil and reduces erosion. A bird flies in to eat the ripe grass seeds, and while it's there, it deposits a bush seed with its own form of fertilizer. That bush builds even more tilth and water-holding capacity and, more importantly, shade, so when an acorn falls into that shade, it can grow. Each organism prepares the way for the next one, and eventually you end up with the prime species of the forest, which in my neck of the woods is redwoods. That kind of succession happens in about ten days in a vat of wine, if you don't inoculate or cross-inoculate.

The first yeast might be an apiculate yeast, with two pointy little ends, very easy to see under the microscope. It's a cold-loving yeast, but it warms up the must for the next yeast, which likes it a little warmer, and it produces carbon dioxide that keeps the bad guys like vinegar bacteria out. As it dies out, it produces a compound that smells of smoked meats or roasted venison, which I like to get in my Pinots. The next one does the same, makes it a little warmer, and the compound it produces will eventually smell like forest floor and mushrooms. Eventually you get to Saccharomyces, the finishing yeast, which brings more of the fruity esters, rose petals, violets, things like that. I want all my fermentations to be true multiple-organism events. I want to invite everybody to the party to deposit their own little bit of excitement in the milieu.

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

If they're tasting across my wines, no two of them are going to taste like a house palate. I don't just make a Chardonnay from Manchester Ridge. I make a Manchester Ridge wine that is its own unique thing. I recently did a tasting of four different Chardonnays for my wine club members, and they were blown away at how different all four wines were. So be prepared to be surprised, or be prepared to see the vineyard through the wine.

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

That would be lees tasting. Very few winemakers actually use a lees thief. You put your thumb over it, go all the way down to the bottom of the barrel, release your thumb, and pull up the gloppy lees from the bottom. Those lees are a good indicator of how the wine is aging, or whether it's in trouble. A lot of reduction happens first at the bottom, in the lees, which is why most winemakers rack off the lees really quickly. Although Chardonnay sur lie has become really popular, and I actually wrote a book on it.

If you get someone to smell the wine and then the lees, when the wine is clean but the lees are reduced, that really helps illustrate how my winemaking informs what ends up in the bottle. Or say you've got a stinky wine but the lees are great. The worst mistake you can make is racking that wine off the lees, because the lees aren't the problem, and they may help cure the wine. Someone has to see me actually doing that to understand how I end up with the wine in the bottle.

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

I love Brian Maloney's wines. He has a very fine touch with Pinot in general, and especially his van der Kamp Pinot Noir, which has all the elements of earth and forest floor you would expect of a van der Kamp Pinot Noir. He and now Katie Carter make that wine very, very true to the vineyard, so I enjoy their wines quite a bit.

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

Well, I've been accused of not practicing safe winemaking. For instance, I love to go to barrel with my Pinots a little dirty and sweet, a little bit like I like my wife, because I want the yeast to finish in the barrel. The yeast will biotransform a lot of the oak volatile phenols, and sometimes you get bit in the butt by that.

I also like doing Pinot Meunier with 100 percent carbonic maceration, and a couple of times I've had that wine basically turn into vinegar. It's high risk. Carbonic is 100 percent whole cluster and 100 percent anaerobic, and you have to leave it alone and keep everything as clean as possible and be very careful not to cross-inoculate. If things aren't particularly clean, carbonic will go south really quickly, and it has for me a couple of times.

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

The DeLoach 30th Anniversary Pinot Noir. That was a really terrific wine, and several people told me at the time, Greg, this is probably the best wine you've ever made. I had just started at DeLoach in 2004, and I did a partial carbonic maceration on it. There were old vines out front, planted decades earlier, that weren't being taken care of. The berries were very small, and the vines had been under a lot of stress with no water at all.

The old vineyard manager ripped out the irrigation without telling me. I had intended to water one or two more times to get the vines across the finish line. I said, you have to put those lines back in, and he said no, I'm not. I said, then I'm going to go over your head to the owners, and I did, and they made him put the irrigation lines back in. That wine became the DeLoach 30th Anniversary Cuvée, and Wine Enthusiast named it the number one wine of the year in its worldwide Top 100.