1.Who taught you?

Taught, or influenced, I'd say. My parents were the first influence. My mother discovered food, read that the French drank wine with their meals, and went out and bought a bottle of 1945 Châteauneuf-du-Pape. That bottle changed my parents' lives. My father started a wine club and a wine newsletter, and he taught me to taste when I was ten, because he thought a kid would have better words for wine than an adult.

There were many others. Reed Foster, my partner in Ravenswood, taught me a great deal about business, which is what you need in this business, because winemaking is only part of it. Jerry Draper provided some of the early financing for Ravenswood. And my mentor, the man who really taught me to make wine, was Joseph Swan. Winemakers like Tom Dehlinger, who were starting up around the same time, let me use their equipment. I started a winery with no grapes, no skills, and no equipment, so I was running on everybody else's goodwill.

I also belonged to winemaking groups and tasting groups, and in the late sixties and early seventies I got to taste some of the world's greatest wines, older Rhônes and older and younger Bordeaux, wines that are mostly out of reach now because of cost and scarcity. It was a remarkable time to be alive.

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

I've been making wine for 54 years now, and a lot of people have come through the winery. The right way to put it is people I've mentored rather than taught, because it's a shared education. They work for me, I work for them, and we work together on whatever we're building.

The first would be Peter Mathis, who had been a fine woodworker, brought all those skills with him, and became my assistant winemaker. Jen Beloz is now the winemaker at Faust and Flowers for the Huneeus family. Gary Sitton is the winemaker at Joel Gott. My son, Morgan Twain-Peterson, is an MW with his own wine company. Bénédicte Rhyne came to me from France with a big degree, but she didn't know anything about California wine. We worked together for ten years, and then she moved to Texas and changed the Texas Hill Country into a wine region. Kryss Speegle, also an MW, works at O'Neill Vintners. And my first assistant was John Kemble, who had been in the Boy Scout troop I used to take to the mountains. He went to Hawke's Bay in New Zealand and started a winery called Kemblefield.

At one point I had twenty cellar workers, and they've all gone on to do other things at other wineries. It's been wonderful to work with great people and watch them go on to do lovely things.

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

1976, of course, was my first vintage at Ravenswood. I had been making wine with Joe Swan since 1972, learning the nuts and bolts, and 1976 was when I said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to be in the wine business. It was the big swerve. I had been doing medical research at UCSF and decided I didn't want to spend all my time in a small white laboratory. I wanted to be out in the countryside doing something. It was definitely the back-to-the-land movement. My hair was down to my shoulders, and I was living in the Gourmet Ghetto in Berkeley, so I was highly influenced.

If you wanted an alternative, the first half of the nineties were magical years. We made some fantastically great wines, and it seemed like Ravenswood was finally fulfilling its promise. You could pick any one of those years. Those were the years the pirate ship was running at full sail. That's what we called Ravenswood, because we had a lot of misfits who worked together very well.

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

There are so many things. We are no longer totally dependent on distributors and snail-mail sales. We can do our own direct-to-consumer sales and direct retailer sales. We still rely on distributors, but not the way we had to.

Nobody recognizes the change in gender. There are so many more women in head winemaking and viticulture roles than there were. It's pretty remarkable.

Then there's the total number of wineries. When I started, there were something like 48 wineries in Sonoma County, and now there are more than 400. That's true of the world at large. Wine has become ubiquitous in many ways.

A new person walking into a winery would accept stainless steel, filters, sorting tables, reverse osmosis, micro-oxygenation, and fining agents as standard. They weren't standard fifty years ago. Those were all new innovations. Closures have changed too, from synthetic corks to agglomerated corks to natural cork and glass, and bottles have been lightweighted in ways they never were before.

The other change is certification for things that never had certifications. Everybody knows what an organic or biodynamic certification is these days. You can get certified for old vines and for regenerative agriculture. There are people who actually care about these things and will check that you're doing what you claim, which is a big change from how it used to be.

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

We probably all have our own quirks in the way we do it. I'm running a small winery now, so my days are easier than they were when I was running Ravenswood. A typical day starts early, four-ish or five-ish, driving to the site of the pick, usually some old vineyard. I oversee the pick. I don't do any of the picking myself, but I make sure the grapes I want go into the bins and the leaves are handled correctly.

Then I move on to other vineyards that are almost ready. I check sugars, look at the condition of the grapes, and decide whether to call a pick for the next day or whether they can wait.

Then it's back to the winery to check on fermentations and punch down, or pump over if that's what we're doing. These days we send out the labs. In the old days we ran them ourselves. At the same time I'm thinking about what needs to be pressed. If a fermenter is ready, I dig it out, put it in the press, press it off, and get it into a tank, and if all my tanks are full, I might barrel down that day. Then I sit down and plan out the next day, and we start all over again.

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

A lot of winemaking is intuitive. The big decisions are easy to explain. They're pretty obvious. The hard ones are like walking into an old-vine vineyard planted to mixed black varieties and deciding when to pick. All the grapes are at a different ripeness, and you can't just measure the sugar, because there are so many varieties, they all contribute something, and they're all ripening at their own pace. Knowing the gestalt of a vineyard, which is what I call how the whole thing works together, is very hard to explain. You do it from experience and by looking at the vineyard.

The other is tasting and evaluating a wine and deciding when to pull it off the skins, when to press, and how hard to press. You can give people a general idea, but a lot of that is the art of winemaking and your own predilections about tannin, acid, flavor, and aromatics. Everybody has their own preference, and it's hard to explain.

7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.

I've never had a whole harvest go wrong, but I've had harvests where things went wrong. At one point I was custom crushing grapes at a winery north of Santa Rosa, which shall remain unnamed. This was one of the years I was making Vintners Blend, so there were large volumes of grapes and I was using their very large fermenters. I gave them a standard routine for when and how to pump over. I had Merlot and Zinfandel fermenting. Somehow they pumped the Merlot tank into the Zinfandel tank, and then pumped the Zinfandel tank back into the Merlot tank. I no longer had two varietals. All I had was a mix. I got slightly outraged, and I was assured it would never happen again because they had addressed the issues. The next day, the same thing happened.

Early on, I was driving back from Dry Creek with about four tons of grapes in the back of a truck, and the truck tipped over in the middle of the road and dumped the entire load, which in those years was about a third of my harvest. We scraped it all back up, got it into bins, and took it to the winery. We lost a bit. Little incidents like that make a harvest much more interesting.

8.Who's the legend around the winery?

Paul Draper, for one. I worked with him in marketing and sales and other things, never in the winery itself, but he's definitely somebody people talk about, a notable character in the California wine business. André Tchelistcheff was one of Joe Swan's best friends, and I spent a lot of time with him. He had a very particular way of looking at the world, and he left a big influence on the people he consulted for. And Joe Swan himself.

Then there's Jim Bundschu. Ravenswood and Gundlach Bundschu were both known for bringing humor to wine. Jim had his brand and I had mine. We were the No Wimpy Wines people, Nullum Vinum Flaccidum, no vino sin huevos. Jim organized things like the Wine Patrol, which hopped on the Napa Valley Wine Train, dumped out everybody's Napa wine, replaced it with Sonoma wine, and jumped off at the other end. When we heard tour buses were coming through Sonoma on their way to or from Napa, we stopped them and rerouted them to Gundlach Bundschu, so they had to taste Sonoma wine before they could be set free. And there were Jim's Gundlach Bundschu posters. My favorite showed his mother, Mary Bundschu, very old at the time, sitting in a 1950 Ford while a giant cop who had pulled her over got ready to write her a ticket. It was the Sonoma Sobriety Test Number One: say "Gundlach Bundschu Gewürztraminer."

And there are the influencers who are long gone, people like Agoston Haraszthy and William McPherson Hill, who planted the vineyards I get to work with these days. I don't get to work with them directly, but I work with what they left behind: Old Hill Ranch, and Bedrock Vineyard, which was planted by George Hearst, William Randolph Hearst's father. There are some wonderful people out there that people talk about and should keep talking about.

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

The things you do at the end are cleaning up and seeding the vineyards. But we always get together with the interns and the rest of the winery staff for one final party. In many ways harvest is a party in itself. You cook for each other at lunch, and you get together in the evenings and taste wine. But the last thing is the harvest party. We get around fires in the vineyard, recount the harvest, and figure out where we're all going to be next year.

Many of the interns are mobile. They work harvests in the southern and northern hemispheres, so they're working year-round, and most of them want to start their own winery someday. They're interesting, fun people with lots and lots of experience.

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

They love the romance of it, the agrarian nature of it, the artisanal craft, and they love the wine, which is all good and true. But they rarely understand how much back-room work is involved: government paperwork, regulations, permits, excise taxes, budgeting, employee issues, benefits, marketing, sales, the distributor interface, and individual state laws that have to be negotiated. Then there's transportation and storage. It's a lot of paperwork, bar graphs, and busywork that just makes you crazy. If you really want to be out in the vineyard and making wine, you still have to do all of those things.

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

I probably got lots of things wrong early. My vision of starting a winery was to buy land, plant a vineyard, and build a winery. It was a lovely idea. I even had plans drawn up for the winery. But it was a terrible use of capital, and I was as poor as a church mouse, so I didn't have a lot of capital to begin with. Reed Foster, a Harvard Business School graduate and a good friend who helped me raise money, said we could approach it differently. He didn't say I was wrong. He just said that wasn't going to work very well.

So we bought grapes from vineyards that were probably better than any we could have planted, and we used other people's facilities to make the wine until we had enough cash flow and enough reputation to buy our own winery, which we eventually did, and then we built on that. We never did plant our own vineyard. I ended up owning one, but that was a little different, because we specialized in old-vine Zinfandel, and it's kind of hard to plant old-vine Zinfandel.

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

There are dozens of those, but the most memorable is the open-top redwood fermenters that I still punch down by hand and still dig out by hand. It's a very old-school way of making wine, and it gets you very close to what you're doing. Yes, you can put it in a stainless steel fermenter. Yes, it empties faster, and you can do everything more efficiently. But I prefer this method. It gives me exactly what I want, and it's how I've been making wine for a long time.

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

Very early in my career, it was de rigueur to inoculate fermenters with a known yeast. Lots of companies produced them, and it's gotten even crazier since. You can now get custom-made yeasts for all sorts of things. I stopped inoculating. I had tasted enough European wines to know how good they were, and I knew they didn't inoculate.

I also used extended macerations, which you weren't supposed to do. Peter Mathis, who was well read in the wine literature, came to work with me when we were doing twenty-day macerations with a submerged cap, and he said, this Peterson is going to get himself in trouble. All his wines are going to be full of VA. None of them were. He said, wait until next year, and the next year it didn't happen either. I take risks a lot of people in the wine business won't take, but I've learned how to work very carefully with uninoculated fermentations to get exactly what I want, which is better terroir flavors and character in the wine.

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

I think by nature we all name the things around us. The most memorable is the Spike of Death. It's a stainless steel tube about six feet long with a sharp point on the end, full of little holes, that hooks up to a pump. We push it into the open-top fermenters to suck out the juice when we drain them. Held by itself, it looks like a weapon. People look at it and ask what you're going to do with that, because you could knock somebody off with it.

We also have the plank, the two-by-twelves we lay across the redwood fermenters and stand on when we punch down. That's known as walking the plank. And in the early days, when I had to cobble things together, I found an old Caltrans Unimog in a junkyard, painted bright orange, and we called it the Big Orange. We kept calling it that even after our resident artist, who was a bit of a character, painted it with psychedelic paisleys. I'm sure there are others that are escaping me at the moment.

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

What I want them to know is that this is one man's translation of time and place, made with fifty years of experience, to create something beautiful and lovely and to give them a pleasurable organoleptic window into a moment of time and place. It's more than just a wine. It's about place. It's almost an ecosystem that I'm bringing to them, along with the experience I have. That's a little in the fantasy world, but I think people get it when you tell them.

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

It's pretty much the same answer. They should bring an open mind to the wine and appreciate the experience it provides, because that, ultimately, is where the translation is. It's where the rubber meets the road. If I've done my job well, translated a vineyard truly, and made something I like and I'm proud of, they can take that away when they taste the wine, just by being aware and conscious of what they're tasting.

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

In the best of all possible worlds, a person drinking a glass of wine would be sitting in the vineyard, looking at it and smelling the place. They'd start by smelling and looking at the place and figuring out what the vines do, because each place has a garrigue that carries its flavor and character, and that frequently gets translated into the wine. If you can get people to actually see the vineyard, particularly when you're working with old vines, they say, oh yeah, I get it. I understand this complexity. I understand this lexicon of flavors.

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

I hate questions like that. For me, the glory of wine is its diversity. There's really no other beverage like it. Beer is diverse, but it's not as diverse as wine, and it doesn't have a home in a particular place in the soil. So my favorite wine really depends on who I'm with, what I'm eating, and where I am.

I do have a glass of Champagne every night, to remind myself to celebrate life. That was a goal I set for myself after I outlived my father, who died at 57, and here I am almost 80 and still doing it. But I enjoy all wines. I've always sought to learn from wine and take something away from it, if it's made well and it speaks of its origins and the people who made it. Those are the elements that are really important to me. But there's no single one.

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

There is such a thing as a bad wine. I've seen a couple of those, though nobody else has.

There's a whole lead-in to making a wine that has to do with the vintage, the character of the weather, and how a particular vineyard is developing. You follow it, so you're pretty clear when you have material to work with that has potential. Once it's in the fermenter, you don't really know. Fermentation can go sideways sometimes. But when you press it off and taste the wine coming off the press, you have a pretty good idea of its general quality, and I know pretty well what a really good wine looks like these days. Then I spend the next eighteen months trying not to screw it up while it's in barrel. But yes, I know pretty well when I have a good wine coming down the pipe, and potentially a great one.

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

The 1986 Old Hill Ranch Zinfandel. The vines were planted around 1885, and it was one of the first vineyards planted after phylloxera devastated California's vineyards. It's a classic California field blend, mostly Zinfandel with twenty other varieties interspersed. It's dry-farmed and organic, and production is exceedingly low. In those years it was about half a ton an acre.

When it was young, the wine was intense, rambunctious, dark, vigorous, and structured. Some people probably would have rejected it as too much. With time it has become a beautiful wine, with beautiful aromatics, dramatic flavors, and deep complexity. It can tell you about place and history. So before they taste it, I'd say, please enjoy this gem of California history and winemaking.

One more: What does this work take away from you that people don't see?

At the end of our session, Joel pointed out that I had skipped one of the questions I sent him, so he answered it anyway.

It's one of those road-less-traveled questions. I guess it takes away the other lives I could have lived. I might have been a medical researcher. I might have done any number of other things. On the other hand, being a winemaker is such joy and such total engagement that I can't possibly imagine doing anything else. So ultimately, what the wine business has taken away is my need to reassess myself, reevaluate myself, and remake myself.