A Sonoma Mountaintop aims for the heights with Cabernet
by John Bonné, San Francisco Chronicle, 11/4/14 [excerpt]
We’re bouncing up an old dirt fire road on Pine Mountain, somewhere northeast of the town of Cloverdale. Mark Burningham’s dog trots in front of our off-road vehicle on one of the last glorious October days of the year, and I’m trying to figure out which side of the Sonoma-Mendocino border we’re on.
Seriously. This is as far north as Sonoma County gets before it becomes Mendocino. It’s also the heart of one of Sonoma’s newest official wine regions — although, technically, half is in Mendocino County — a good 20 minutes drive from the valley floor, up slopes covered with madrone and live oak….
As with any nascent wine region, its proponents believe it could be Sonoma’s next star.
The best shot might be amid a handful of smaller wineries, including Pine Mountain Vineyards, whose owner Hien Nguyen makes wine under the nascent Ampère label. Nguyen similarly tapped rock stars: winemaker Thomas Rivers Brown and viticulturist Ulises Valdez. But he is that rare example among new vineyard owners in these parts willing to admit he’s not quite sure what his land’s potential might be.
“If this is A to Z, I’m right now at B,” Nguyen says. “I’m a very insecure person. I want to make sure. Winemaking, to me, is still a mystery.”
Raised in Saigon and in Paris, he came to California looking for a vacation retreat after a successful career as a mathematician at the University of Montana and CEO of a Missoula software company, and in 2009 bought a 650-acre property on the southern edge of Mendocino County that reached up to 2,700 feet. Between the patches of pine and madrone was a vineyard, planted mostly to Cabernet. Plans to make a simple table wine soon spiraled.
We stand atop a newly planted parcel, looking southwest over the broad Alexander Valley, stubby young vines cascading down a steep slope. There’s a momentary feeling of deja vu, of other Cabernet plots in ruddy soils along the ridges of the Mayacamas.
And there’s a whiff of potential, which might be why Nguyen and his family are also trying to learn the mechanics of grape farming, applying a scientist’s brain to the vagaries of agriculture and what he calls the “awful lab setting” of the vineyard. If nothing else, it reveals the promising curiosity that has always guided California to its best successes, and that might help to reveal what Pine Mountain’s great talents truly are.
“It’s not a recipe book,” Nguyen says. “It’s more of a communion.”