Meet the Winemakers: Scott Harvey

1.Who influenced you?

[The recording begins partway through this answer. Scott first named Carrie Gott, who taught him the basics of winemaking when he was 19, and then Hannibald, a winemaker he learned from at a winemaking school in Germany.]

...And there I really learned how to make lower-alcohol wines, food wines, European-style wines that give you that first-bite experience all the way through the meal. So that was key.

The next was Charles Myers from Harbor Winery. He ran a little winery in West Sacramento and taught at the city college. I just clicked with him. We smoked cigars all the time and had a great time. I have his 1953 MG, which he bought new, and I drive it to work. From him I learned the guts of the business, and how to enjoy it.

The one who really helped me perfect my winemaking is Dr. Richard Peterson. A young couple came to Amador County wanting to plant Sangiovese. They asked Darrell Corti in Sacramento who should make their wine, and he said, make it at Scott Harvey's winery, which was Santino Winery at the time, and hire Dick Peterson to tell Scott Harvey how to make it. I already knew Dick, and it developed into a wonderful relationship. Today he's 95, and I'm still making wine for him under the Richard G. Peterson label, a Santa Lucia Highlands Pinot Noir. I pick him up at his home in Napa and take him to the winery where we make it, and we spend the day together. I'm very fortunate with the people.

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

I've been making wine for 53 years, so I tend to hire young people, and then they get hired away from me. I consider that an honor. I tell them, look, I want you to improve and become a winemaker here. The best compliment I get is when someone tries to steal you.

Kevin Hommel of Hommel Wines. John Fischer. Rusty Folina of Vino Nocetto, who started working for me when he was 15 and was my apprentice for years. Today I custom crush all my wine at Vino Nocetto, so he's making my wine, and he learned how from me. Molly Haycock, who's at Truffle Pig down south in Temecula. My nephew is a winemaker in Washington State at Crow Vineyards, and he makes my Riesling. They crushed it today, actually.

Just like I have the relationship with my mentors, I have all these people still working with me, calling and asking questions.

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

I've got 53 of them. Winemakers always say, this is the best one I've ever made. After 53 years I've stopped saying that. But '91 was a vintage I really, really liked. You usually can't completely tell until the wine's about four or five months in barrel, when you can see the balance. But I remember walking through the winery in January after harvest, tasting those '91s, and thinking Mother Nature sure gave us some great stuff that year. The wine's ability to tell its story of variety, place, and vintage just came together. Out of 53, there are probably five that were great and ten that were good.

Some Sonoma County winemakers swear by 2018.

It's different by place. I've made wine in Napa and Amador at the same time, and still do, plus Lake County. When Napa has a great vintage, Amador may not, because it's usually a warm year and we're in the Sierra foothills where it's already hot. When Napa has a cold vintage, we often have a great one, because our grapes hang longer and still get ripe where Napa's may not. That long hang time is where the flavors develop.

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

I really started when I was ten, twelve, fifteen years old. My grandfather grew grapes, and we picked them and sold them to the Portuguese in West Sacramento for $25 a ton. If we drove them over the hill, and here the Sierra Nevada is the hill, to Minden, Nevada, there was a restaurant that paid us 35 bucks a ton. So over the hill we went.

Up until the late '70s, a lot of grapes were still picked into 50-pound lug boxes. They were wooden, and you learned how to pack them to get a full 50 pounds in. You carried them against your belly and got stung. Those days are gone. Nobody does that anymore.

5.Describe a day at the peak of harvest.

Today is our last day of harvest, with Riesling being picked in the Yakima Valley. The day starts in the vineyards. You walk out deciding what to pick and when to pull the trigger. You're by yourself, it's crisp, it's early morning light, and you're eating the grapes. Our region is mostly Zinfandel and Barbera, and Zinfandel is an uneven ripener, so it's hard to know when to pick. You pull samples and eat grapes, trying to find that ripe but not overripe character.

Then into the lab to run those samples. Pull samples from the fermenting tanks and run those. Assessing, assessing, assessing. Then writing work orders, which now go to the wineries since everything is custom crush. In the old days it was my own winery.

I don't make wine. Mother Nature makes the wine. I control the environment the wine is in, so she takes it down the path to where the human species wants to drink it, instead of all the way to where the fruit fly wants to drink it, as vinegar. And she doesn't wait for you. You've got to be on top of it.

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

Deciding whether to water back or add acidity, to put the wine in the position to give you that European style and that first-bite experience when it's finished. That's in your head. It's how you think about it and tweak it. I spend hours with an apprentice asking, what would you do with this? Well, that will make it do this, and we want it over here.

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

VA. A harvest with a lot of black rot in the vineyard, and the volatile acidity came in with the grapes. It took me a while to learn how to deal with it. In the old days you couldn't take VA out of a wine. It wasn't until Clark Smith came along with his reverse osmosis machine that we could pull it out. Before that, if you made a high-VA wine, you threw it away or blended it down with low-VA wine. Now there are products, like the ones Scott Labs has, that are organic-friendly and break down the acetobacter. We didn't have that before.

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

Dr. Peterson. He's 95 now, and he's done so many things. He was the first person to get a doctorate in fermentation science from UC Berkeley. He ran Gallo's first commercial lab, then went to BV when André Tchelistcheff hired him to take it over, and then he built Monterey Vineyards. While building Monterey Vineyards he developed the barrel pallet rack you see everywhere today, where the barrels sit on a metal pallet you can move with a forklift. He gave it to the industry at no charge, in a paper, so he gets the credit. I basically worship what I learned from him, and still do. I'm fortunate to have him as a friend.

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

Collapsing out of exhaustion. The fall weather comes in, the leaves turn, and it's the end of the struggle. From budbreak in February and March, it's a race through harvest. You're putting blends together and opening up space for the new grapes, and then you get them in. This harvest was very small, so there wasn't much stress juggling tanks. But it's that relief. My favorite time of year is the holidays, because harvest is over and I can relax. The days get shorter, and I don't feel guilty because it's still light out.

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

They see it as very romantic, which is how we want them to see it. But they don't see the stress, Mother Nature getting ahead of you, a wine going bad. So a lot of people want to become winemakers or own a winery with their name on it, and a lot of them think they can just do it, with no understanding of what they're getting into.

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

Volatile acidity. One of my mentors, Charles Myers, who ran Harbor Winery in West Sacramento, tasted the wine and said, what the hell are you doing? You can't sell this. And back then there was no way to fix it, except to blend it down.

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

My lab. Today that type of lab is called a wet lab. You do the work one test at a time: your free SO2, your alcohols with an ebulliometer, and so forth. Most labs today have spectrometers where you put a little dab of sample on and it spits out all the numbers. Those machines are expensive, I'm pretty small, and they take a lot of calibration, which I'm not familiar with. So I still run my lab the old way.

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

When I started making wine, back in the late '60s and early '70s, pH meters were not that accurate. So we did everything by total acidity, what we call TA. It was Dr. Richard Peterson who taught me to make wine using pH. The meters got much better, and I don't run acidity at all anymore. I never even run a TA. I don't pay attention to it.

It's really the concentration of free hydrogen ions in solution, which is what pH is, that affects your palate. It also tells you how hostile the wine is to spoilage organisms. Make wine at high pH and you have a much better chance of Pediococcus and those other things destroying it. Below about 3.5 or 3.6, a lot of them can't live in the wine. Making wine by pH has improved my winemaking tremendously.

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

Oh, yeah. We all do that. I have a box truck, sixteen or eighteen feet long, that used to be a Penske moving van. I use it all the time. I call it Big Bird. Bright yellow.

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

Stress. Winemakers, as you can see, are kind of happy people. It's a positive-feedback job. People come to see you because they like what you're doing, instead of a doctor, where all they see is sick people. But there's a lot of stress, especially now, and especially if you're running the business as well. We're in a shrinking industry. It's changing quickly. Managing your finances so you don't run out of money is extremely stressful right now.

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

We make wine that tells its story. So much wine today is made from overripe grapes, and raisins make wine that tastes like plums and raisins, whether it's Napa Valley Cabernet or Tokay from Lodi. We try to pick the grapes when they're ripe and not overripe. And we make the decisions of that European style of winemaking, so the wine keeps giving you that first-bite experience. It cleanses your palate and washes the fats off your tongue, so the next bite tastes like the first bite again.

When I put a blend together in the lab and think I have the one I want to bottle, I make up a whole bottle of it and take it home, and my wife and I cook. She's in sales and marketing and I'm on the production side, and I rely on her palate. She has a very good palate. If we're not getting that first-bite experience from the blend, I go back and keep blending until I find the barrel that gives me the right acidity and makes the wine complete from beginning to end.

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

I don't think they have to watch me. They just have to understand what I'm trying to accomplish.

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

I do consulting work around the world. I've been sent to Bordeaux, Spain, Germany, and Australia. In Bordeaux I was sent to assess a winery in Entre-Deux-Mers. You've got two rivers coming together, and on the outsides of them you have the $150 and $200 wines of the Left and Right Banks. Then there's this huge area in the middle, between the two rivers. The wine is cheap as heck, twelve bucks a bottle in the United States, and it's great. For everyday reds I'll buy a Chianti or an Entre-Deux-Mers, and I get the flavors of the place. For white, it's always a great German Riesling. That's what I cut my teeth on.

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

No. I know after about six months in the barrel. Then I can say, this has the flavor profile and the balance, it doesn't need to be worked, and I caught it without high VA.

I have a 2005 Napa Cabernet that I really didn't like when I bottled it, and I'd made a lot of it. So I didn't sell it. I left it in the warehouse, and ten years later we released it. To this day it's one of the better Napa Cabs I've made.

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

Probably Barbera, because I think it's the best variety in this region and the best red we make. It's made to tell its story of place, vintage, and variety.