Matt Licklider at Mr Friendly's in Columbia, SC
Matt Cory - What I really want to ask you about today is a series of questions about terroir, but I think they’ll make more sense if I ask you first about the history of LIOCO. A lot of people who’ll read this have met you and know the LIOCO story already, but many others don’t, so first, tell me why you started LIOCO.
Matt Licklider – Kevin O’Connor, my partner and the “OCO” part of LIOCO, was for eight years the wine director at Spago Beverly Hills. I at the time was the national sales manager of North Berkley Imports, a west-coast importer of artisanal French and Italian wines. Kevin was a client of mine, and we had been tasting wine together for six years. We had an ongoing dialogue about wine: who was making interesting wine; who wasn’t, and why? Inevitably he and I would end up lamenting the fact that California was largely by our estimation underachieving in it’s wine growing and wine production. The wines from California we were tasting at the time – mind you, this was back in 2001 to 2005, and much has changed since then – so much of the wine we were tasting was perfectly serviceable, it just lacked any excitement. It didn’t seem to demonstrate the characteristics of the vintage, number one, and also fell short in the area of demonstrating the characteristics of place. Those were two concepts we seemed to get without fail from European wines, whether it was a $14.00 Muscadet or a $75.00 Barbaresco. The wines always seemed to demonstrate those two characteristics: place and vintage. So this conversation of ours would often stop at the question “is it possible to make wine like that at home?”
So after talking about it for six years we finally decided to sit down and write a business plan together. The goal was to see if we could make wines that demonstrated the characteristics of place and vintage. The way we would go about achieving that was by selecting vineyards that had very distinct terrors to begin with and by making the wines in as nonintrusive a way as possible so as to let the intricacies of place and vintage come through.
MC – I used the word “terroir” and you used the words “place” and “terroir.” I think maybe because that French word doesn’t translate into a single English word a lot of Americans have different understandings about what it means when it comes to wine. So before we start talking about the particular places you grow wine, can you tell me what you mean when you talk about place and terroir?
ML – I guess I would start by saying that what’s utterly so unique about the grapevine, what distinguishes it in the fruit and vegetable kingdom as I understand it, is its heightened capacity for interpreting the particularities of where it grows. In other words, a navel orange from Naples, Florida compared to a navel orange from Orange County, California compared to a navel orange from Valencia, Spain are virtually indistinguishable. They’re carbon copies of one another, and any nuance of difference between them is virtually indecipherable to the human palate. Contrast that with a chardonnay vine growing in the Margaret River Valley in Australia versus a chardonnay vine growing in the Russian River Valley of California versus a chardonnay vine in Chablis, France. The resulting wine from those three places is very, very different. Why is that? This sort of begs this question about the uniqueness of the grapevine. So terroir as I understand and know it is all about the winegrower and the winemaker working in concert with the vineyard to best capture the individuality of each place. So to me the great wines of the world are less about fruitiness and more about this other element, this fifth dimension that can only be traced back to soil and to aspect, to water table, row orientation, flora and fauna in the environment. All these other things affect the grapevine and in the best cases come through in the finished wine.
MC - Before we get to those things in detail, you said before you make the wine with as little intervention as possible. What do you mean by that?
ML – Well, again, the nuance of terroir is somewhat elusive and very delicate. I think there’s a danger on the part of the winemaker to use too heavy a hand in the cellar, whether that’s picking the fruit too ripe in the vineyard, pressing to hard on the skins and extracting too much, and ultimately I think the great pitfall is placing the juice in too high a percentage of new oak. All of these things detract from the expression of terrior. So what we want to do, as I said, is, number one, to identify vineyard we believe have a capacity for showing terroir, and then the winemaking is done in such a way that the delicacy is allowed to come through. So for us, our chardonnay program is essentially crushing the fruit, allowing the ambient yeast, that is the wild, native yeast, to ferment the wine, and fermenting the wine in a container that’s totally inert. So in this case we use stainless steel tanks instead of oak barrels. It’s not that we have an aversion to using oak on wine; we use oak barrels for our red wines, and we really enjoy Raveneau and Roulot and many other producers in Burgundy who barrel ferment chardonnay in a beautiful way. But for the purpose of our little experiment to capture terroir in California we felt the best method was to go the whole way with this and ferment in a container that imparts no flavor, no aroma, and no texture to the wine.
MC – I have this idea that people like you who pay so much attention to place and who take it so seriously when they’re making wine can look at a vineyard or learn about a vineyard and have a good idea what wine made from that vineyard will taste like, and that you can taste a wine and have a good idea what the conditions were in which the grapes were grown. Can you describe enough about that relationship in terms of a couple of your wines that you can explain how the facts about those vineyards are expressed in those wines?
ML – Yes. First thing is that we tend to look at vineyards through the lens of what we’ve learned from great European wine-growing communes. So what we know about noble wine from Europe is that the vines tend to be older, and they tend to be rooted in more complex, tough soil. In the case of pinot noir there tends to be great clonal diversity in the vineyard; in Burgundy you might have as many as a hundred different pinot clones in one vineyard. And I think in the best cases there is some measure of stress on the vines, whether that’s coming from tough soil, or a low water table, or elevation, or cold proximity to the Pacific Ocean, or virus in the vineyard, or a number of these things working in concert. The idea is that we look for stressed vines, older vines, tougher soil, good clonal diversity. In other words we have some benchmarks that we’ve established as standards. Then we go out with a viticulturist who can see things in the vineyard that my untrained eye can’t see: nutrient deficiencies, pests, disease pressures, etc., and he helps us make the final decision. That’s how we look at vineyards, and I’ll tell you, Matt, that we look at a lot of vineyards. We probably look at twenty vineyards for every one vineyard that we end up signing a contract on.
That said, the one vineyard I think is great example is the Michaud Vineyard up in the Chalone Pinnacles. Chalone Pinnacles is the AVA, the county is Monterey, although I always make the caveat that it has almost nothing to do with the rest of Monterey. It is the mountains above Monterey way up in the highest parts of the Gavilon Mountain Range, and the microclimate is very distinctive. It’s the high dessert, it’s bone dry, there’s no water. It’s on the most active seismic fault in the western United States, the San Andreas fault, and so, from what geologist have told me, long ago a number of different plates crashed into each other, so we’ve ended up with a braid of different soils: decomposing granite, volcanic soil and calcareous soils that were pushed up from the ocean floor. Again, if we go back to our example, Tough soil: Most definitely, some of the most interesting and complex soils you find anywhere in California are in the Chalone Pinnacles; Clonal diversity: The grower, Michael Michaud has planted a number of French clones as well as propagations from some old California selections, like Joseph Swan and Mount Eden clones; Stress on the vines: Most definitely, it’s extremely hot in the day, like a dessert environment, and extremely cold at night. There’s no water, so vines are shooting their roots very deep into the soil, so they’re stressed; and Older vines: the vines are approaching thirty-years-old.
All of this incredibly complex flora and fauna up there make it like no other place in California. It’s cactus and thorny desert plants and rattlesnakes and wild boars. It’s the wilderness; I always say this is wilderness farming, and it’s trying to grow grapes at the far reaches of where it might be possible to do so. By the way and as an aside, I’d put forward that the most interesting wines are always made at the margins of where growing those grapes is possible, whether it’s syrah in Hermitage, Riesling in the Mosel, chardonnay in Champagne or Chablis, or pinot noir in the Cote de Nuits; you can go down the list. Those are all places where the vines are pushed to their absolute limits. To the degree that we can reproduce that at home and find the places where the vines are pushed to their limits I think we have a better chance of making terroir-driven wine.
MC – Why is that? Why do the limit conditions produce the most interesting wine?
ML – That’s a good question. I don’t know that I have a scientific answer; it may be more of a philosophical one. I think vines can be compared to a human being in that the more a vine suffers and struggle through life, the more character the vine displays in old age. You just never find interesting wine growing in the valley floor on top of deep, fertile soil next to an abundant water supply. You have problems with vigor there, whereas a vine growing in an extreme situation, like Michaud Vineyard, will have a biological response to send all of the energy into ripening the clusters to make a more attractive lunch for a would-be scavenger that could come by to snack on the clusters, process the fruit, so to speak, and deposit the seeds back into the soil, which would propagate new vines. That’s why stress is good for a vine. It tells the vine it needs to spend it’s energy ripening the fruit.
MC – So what do you taste in the LIOCO Michaud Vineyard pinot or chard that you see as an expression of that complex soil, that clonal diversity, those stressed vines that you’ve just described.
ML – I think, Matt, it’s more about what you don’t taste. You don’t taste a bunch of super-ripe fruit, which again distinguishes this vineyard from so many others in California. This vineyard produces wines that are very savory and non-fruited. It’s mineral that you taste and herbaceousness. To me that wine is all about the chalky, limy, white soil. It smells like the asphalt right before a rain storm, and it tastes like licking a rock and the sun-baked dessert where you can taste the sap dripping out of thistly desert plants. That’s what the wine smells like to me, and I love that about it. I love how savory it is, because it transports me right to the vineyard. It takes me there. I guess that’s how I would quantify that idea of terroir: wines that express terroir have the ability to transport you to the place.
MC – One of the things that exciting to me about LIOCO is that you’re using the same winemaking program with grapes from very different vineyards. You’ve described a lot of positive qualities that it sounds like you’re looking for in every vineyard you’re going to use. Is there a vineyard that is different enough from Michaud that you can describe the ways in which it’s different and the way the wines grown there are different?
ML – I like to show the Michaud chardonnay in contrast with the LIOCO chard from the Heintz Vineyard. The Charles Heintz Vineyard is kind of the polar opposite of the Michaud Vineyard in terms of microclimate. Michaud is the high desert; Heintz is the true Sonoma coast. At Michaud you have cactus and thorny desert plants and scorpions; at Heintz you have redwood trees and mushrooms and salamanders. It’s cold, foggy, ocean climate. It’s just as you would imagine the true Sonoma Coast to be. I think that manifests in the wine with a kind of saline quality, as if all of the fruit quality of the wine has been washed in a saline solution. There’s a brininess to the wine, and even the mineral component in the Heintz wine derives from this very different soil complex. At Charlie Heintz you have what’s called goldridge soils, which are a blend of sand and clay together. It’s soil that retains water, whereas at Michaud you have soil that drains water. I like to highlight the difference between chardonnay growing in soil that retains versus chardonnay growing in soil that drains. They have very, very different mineral expression. I call it clay-mineral, and it’s less about licking a rock and more like Bull’s Blood, that sort of irony minerality in meat and organ meats. I don’t know if that’s going to make you want to drink this chardonnay, but it’s a different mineral aspect than you find in chalky-mineral wine.
MC – Do you think this is because there’s iron in the vineyard that’s making it into the grapes?
ML – It’s a good question. There’s an active discourse about the question. To me it makes logical sense. I’m not ready to weigh in as any kind of scientific expert, but philosophically again I’d say that it makes perfect sense to me. A grapevine growing in clay, which has a lot of iron, is feeding off of that soil or, at least, the water is filtering through on it’s way up through the root system, which eventually make it up into the vine, which eventually make it up into the fruit. Something is translated. And I almost like the idea that we don’t use science to describe it, but that there is something unscientific and unexplainable about this magical grapevine. So it makes sense to me: there’s a relationship between the soil and the flavor and aroma compounds in wine.
