(published in the Santa Barbara News-Press on October 23, 2011)
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| Richard Sanford |
“I thought,
‘I could either have a degree in four years, or I could have grapes in four
years,’” he recalls. And I chose
grapes.”
That
unabashed pioneering attitude has been well recognized by the Santa Barbara
wine community for decades. The vineyard
that has long bared his name – Sanford & Benedict – remains to this day one
of zone’s more stories sources for Burgundian grapes. And the wineries he founded – Sanford first and,
most recently, Alma Rosa – have been indisputable pacesetters in quality wine
production.
Now, that acknowledgment
has officially gone mainstream. The
Culinary Institute of America is inducting Sanford into its 2012 Vintners Hall
of Fame, an honor that recognizes his profound contribution to an industry that
may be as much about business and marketing as it is about instinct and
art. The new inductee feels humbled.
“I am
flattered and proud,” he says. “Just
sort of overwhelmed, frankly.”
But even for
the characteristically modest Sanford, there’s also as admission that the road
to recognition has been paved with plenty of hard work and a fair share of
innovation.
“For a long
time, people have been talking about me as some sort of pioneer, and it’s all
felt silly, really. But truth is, it has
been a long effort and experience and commitment. And it feels great to look at the whole
region and to see the quality we’ve achieved here. That’s the biggest reward.”
The region
Sanford refers to is the Santa Rita Hills, those roughly 100 square miles of
now-prime grape growing real estate that stretches west of Highway 101, from
Buellton toward Lompoc. It won the
federal stamp of approval as a unique appellation 10 years ago, and was touted
as an area especially well-suited for cool climate grapes like pinot noir and
chardonnay for at least a decade before that.
But back in the late 60s and early 70s, when a young Sanford spent many
a day driving through the rolling valley with a thermometer in his car to study
temperature and climate, “people thought I was nuts,” he recalls with a laugh.
No one was growing wine grapes there, with plantings relegated instead to
warmer areas like Foxen Canyon and Los Olivos.
“But I had confidence.”
In many
ways, this environmental experimentation was cathartic for Sanford. As soon as he’d graduated from UC Berkeley in
1965, he’d been drafted, and he spent the next three years at war as a sailor
in the U.S. Navy. “Back from Vietnam, to
drive around in a tractor in nature was very healing,” he says. “That time was precious, a spiritual kind of
journey and a great period for me, personally.”
But the
young man who’d opted for planting grapes instead of seeking a school degree
had still managed to do his homework. An
early admirer of French wines, “I’d done a lot of research into the climates of
Burgundy, went back 100 years in gathering climate information, and started
comparing it to climates in California,” he recalls. “My prejudice then was that pinot noir was
going into climates that were too warm. And
I found that the east-west mountains [in the Santa Rita Hills] allowed weather
to come in and make it cool. That marine
influence was important. It’s about a
degree Fahrenheit cooler for every mile you go west. And that’s unusual for almost anywhere in the
world.”
This, of course,
was Sanford’s eureka moment. It was the
birth of a winemaking movement that, today, is responsible for some of Santa
Barbara’s most lauded wines. But in the
years that followed, pioneering was a relatively lonely business.
Sanford and
botanist Michael Benedict established the Sanford & Benedict nursery in
1970, cultivating cuttings from an experimental vineyard that had been planted
in the Tepesquet Mesa in the mid 60s. A
year later, they put in the ground their namesake vineyard, which would take until
1976 to offer the young winemaker viable fruit.
That vintage was aged for two years and finally released in 1978.
“That’s when people started to take some notice of the possibility here,” says
Sanford, who left Sanford & Benedict in 1980.
Sanford Winery
was founded in 1981, and much of the first decade of his solo winemaking project
took Sanford on the road. “I spent a lot
of time traveling and talking about the region,” Sanford remembers. And touting something brand new was no easy
task. “It would have been a lot easier
if I was in a recognized region, like Napa.
And on the East Coast, everyone was looking to European wines in those
days.”
Sanford
admits that the Santa Rita Hills finally attained more widespread recognition
in the 1990s, but he speaks about that period with a bittersweet tenor. “By 1995, Prudential and Bank of America were
the biggest vineyard owners in Santa Barbara County, and they were looking to
get rid of them,” he says. “Napa guys
like Mondavi, Kendall-Jackson and Beringer were already buying up chardonnay
from here to blend with Napa chard to increase quality, so they ended up buying
all the vineyards from the insurance companies.
Of course, I lost the opportunity to buy grapes from Sierra Madre
Vineyard when Mondavi bought it.”
He adds, “Once
they had major investments here, that’s when they finally started to toot the
horn. It’s curious how it takes the
effort of marketing to create a buzz,”
Sanford sold
his eponymous winery in 2005 (the new owners continue to capitalize on the
name) and launched his current and very personal winemaking endeavor, Alma Rosa
Winery.
“This whole
new effort is a chance to recognize the quality of the grapes growing in our
region,” he says. “At Sanford, we were
making great wine but it was more classic and used more oak aging. But I thought, here we are with these
beautiful bright grapes and high acids, why not preserve that?” The Alma Rosa wines include pinot gris, pinot
blanc, chardonnay and pinot noir; much of the latter is sourced from the latest
vineyard planted by Sanford, La Encantada in the Santa Rita Hills. The wines are produced sustainably from
organic grapes and are typically brilliant and light; Sanford uses absolutely no
malolactic fermentation, a process that converts tarter malic acid to softer
lactic acid, to give wines a fuller, more buttery mouth feel.
And he uses
screwcaps, no corks, in all his wines.
He and wife Thekla “are very pleased with the way the wine keeps in
terms of freshness and aging,” he says.
He admits that some traditionalist consumers are yet to be won over, but
“I’m sold on it.”
Spoken like
a pioneer.
Sanford will
be inducted to the 2012 Vintners Hall of Fame on February 20th,
2012, at the Culinary Institute of America’s Greystone campus in St.
Helena. The induction class, the 6th
annual, will also include Peter Mondavi, Sr. of Charles Krug Winery, Professor
Albert Winkler of UC Davis, Joe Heitz of Napa’s Heitz Cellars, former Beringer
winemaker Myron Nightingale, Mendocino vintner Joe Parducci and soil scientist
Dr. Eugene Hilgard. Tickets are
$175. For more information, visit www.ciachef.edu.
And for more
on Richard Sanford and Alma Rosa Winery, visit www.almarosawinery.com.
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