Verticals

Wine making is a creative endeavor

that benefits from some technical knowledge.

Okay, it is not pure art,

and it's certainly not pure science.

I have a very low tolerance, as you know,

for bullshit in the wine business.

How's my walk?

It's a good walk, Steve.

It's a good walk.

Not a silly walk.

It's a good walk.

- I've been working on my silly walk.

We should show them our silly walk.

Do you remember how to do that?

We gonna do right first or left first?

Right first, wait, right first.

That's kind of our silly walk.

That's a silly walk.

I think the reason that we can work together

is that I'm not telling you how to make the wine,

you're not telling me how to do the taxes.

I do actually make some suggestions

about what we should deduct on our taxes,

and all of those conversations end the same way.

Carole says,

"Would you like to do the taxes?"

At that point, the conversation's over.

Steve Lagier is Carole's husband,

and they have a little vineyard on Mount Veeder,

he prunes it, he makes the wine,

you know, he does it all himself,

and that's like an old-style vingeron from Burgundy.

So Carole Meredith is a badass.

She is one of my favorite people to talk to about wine,

I love how direct she is,

and I think she's just a real character.

So we picked our '98 Syrah

because it was our first commercial wine,

that came from our vineyard,

it made a wonderful wine, it's aged very gracefully.

It's now 21 years old,

and we expect it to go at least 30,

so I don't expect this is gonna taste

like an over the hill wine.

- You know, we trained those vines together,

I probably did the majority of that,

and I probably did the majority of the vineyard work,

but she, I like to say Carole and I

are Napa Valley's most overeducated vineyard workers.

My role was, once we had made the wine,

we needed a lot of permits,

and so that was up to me to figure out how to do that,

it was up to me to figure out how to get labels,

and then eventually, once we got it in the bottle,

it was up to me to figure out how to tell people we had it,

and ask them if they'd like to buy it.

- And she did all that while she was working at Davis.

Discovering the origin of many grape vines.

- Prior to her life on Mount Veeder with her winery

that she runs with her husband Steve Lagier,

she had this whole other really important career

as a grape geneticist at U.C. Davis.

I think my last year at Davis

was her first year coming in to take over the,

I believe it would be the genetics

and plant breeding department.

- Without Carole, we wouldn't necessarily know

that Cabernet Sauvignon was the offspring

of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc.

She put all of that together.

- I mean I don't wanna say she was intimidating,

but she was, you know, a little intimidating (laughs)

because she was so intense.

- Yeah, I had a 60 hour a week job at U.C. Davis,

and then what became an additional 60 hour a week job here,

and that's why I eventually took early retirement

from the universities,

'cause I can't do two 60 hour a week jobs,

I can maybe handle one, but I can't do two.

All right, we're gonna open the '98.

When we were making this wine,

we had been together for-

We'd been married for 12 years.

- We'd been together for 14 years at that point.

We had lived on this property for 12 years.

We were both still working our day jobs,

Steve was still working at Robert Mondavi in '98,

and I of course was still working at U.C. Davis,

so we were pretty busy, pretty busy.

We were much younger then.

You know, when you're young you can do a lot of stuff.

It's pretty amazing.

I want you to hold that just like that.

- And- - No, just hold the flask.

Hold the flask.

So you're gonna hold the light?

Yes.

It smells divine.

Looks good.

We yell at each other sometimes.

No we don't!

(laughing) Yes we do.

But we're on the same page with most things.

Okay, that's a good decant.

That's a laboratory flask, and you know,

these are just great for wine.

They swirl, they're designed to swirl.

That's why they're shaped like that.

And they cost less than crystal decanters.

And they're more durable.

You bet.

Cheers.

Here's to '98.

There's a little bit of cedar in it,

so there is an aged character.

- It's got the age, but it's still got all the fruit,

you know, that's what always amazes me, every time-

That's Ethan.

There's two of them. - There's two,

there's two. But we don't know that it's Ethan.

We just know it's two, it's two hawks, that's for sure.

This is our resident red-tailed hawk.

He showed up about a year and a half ago,

right after the fire.

We called him Ethan,

because Ethan seems to be an appropriate name for a hawk.

We still get a lot of people asking,

"Why Ethan?"

But it might not be Ethan, we'll see.

We'll see what happens.

Keeping my eye on him.

You know, this wine.

This has lots of life.

Tastes like I was hoping it would taste,

it still has all its fruit.

Yeah, they're getting lower. - Wow.

That was impressive.

We got some hawk activity going on here.

Their wines are great.

The wines are as full of character as they are.

They're not overwrought, they're not overripe,

they're not over-oaked.

They're really honest, and interesting, and complex.

We've been able to experience this wine

from the moment we crushed the fruit until today.

And it's been a remarkable journey.

- And I don't know what the lifespan of this wine is,

it's still got years to go,

so I guess what we would aspire to

is to taste it through till the end of its lifespan,

so I don't know.

Or the end of our lifespan.

One of those is gonna come first.

Everybody has an expiration date.

And the hawks are now gone.

Oh yeah, there they are.

Wow, look at him going straight down.

He's diving, yeah.

- It's like they're having fun out there.

I only see one.

Look it, he's diving down again.

I only see one, though.

He hangs out around here.

And he's gotten accustomed to us.

Oh, there he goes.

Okay.

He especially likes it

when we're mowing with the tractor, or weeding,

'cause that seem to generate food opportunities for him,

it scares off rodents and snakes in the vineyard.

And he will follow the tractor,

he'll land on vineyard posts,

he's pretty reliable,

when we're in the vineyard, boy,

he knows that there's some good food to be had.

- I felt like I kind of talked her into living up here,

and I felt a little sheepish about that

when we first moved up here,

I was thinking, my God, what have I done?

You know, I always wanted to live in a place like this,

but now I've talked this woman, who I've just married,

into moving up here, and I thought,

oh my God, you know, maybe she won't like it.

She likes it more than I do.

I met Carole when I first started working

in the viticulture and enology department.

I was a biochem student who had a degree,

and I was looking for something to do career-wise.

So I kinda fell into wine.

This 1981 Cabernet,

that I made with Charlie Hossom and Mike Stowe,

under the Chateau Nonchalant label,

so I had never made wine before,

and the best way to learn about making wine

is make some wine.

We got some fruit from the Oakville experimental station,

in the middle of Napa Valley,

which is the middle of the best

Cabernet growing area there is,

Oakville Cabernet, if you could even get