Reserve Pinot noir Club™
October 2007
Club Selections:
de Lancellotti Pinot noir 05
Quercus Cadmus 06
Two new wineries you want to know about are featured this month. influential Bergstrom Winery is owned by the berstrom family, whose sone Josh is winemaker. Josh's sister, Kendall, is married to Paul de lancellotti, and their de Lancellotti Family Vineyards makes this month's de Lancellotti Pinot noir 05. Very different in style from bergstrom's de Lancellotti Pinot, this wine is best descrribed as a wine of finesse and elegance.
Michael Beckley of Quercus Wines
Michael Beckley, whose one man Quercus Wines makes Quercus's Cadmus Pint noir 06, has seen some changes this year. He is no longer winemaker for any one winery but is consulting, making wine for several wineries.
Michael Beckley's Quercus Wines
Michael Beckley didn’t become a respected winemaker via a university program, or though other “conventional” routes. After graduating from high school, Michael explored the world as a vagabond of sorts working in a number of industries while traveling across the country, Kerouac-style, hitchhiking, working the odd job or two and winding up in San Rafael, California, with “seventy-three cents and a bag of oatmeal.”
Once Beckley made it to California, he settled down for a while, living for a year in a sailboat and working as a (self-taught) assistant to the harbormaster, amongst an assortment of other jobs. He treated each new work opportunity as a chance to learn the rhythm of that lifestyle. At that time, from Beckley’s standpoint as an inquisitive consumer of regional wines, the rhythm of wine work sparked an interest.
He had been a wine-lover for years, and his interest continued to blossom after taking wine tours in Mendocino and Sonoma. The cyclical nature of harvest, fermentation, barrel aging, bottling, harvest, etc., appealed to Beckley, as did the rural, agricultural lifestyle. Oregon was attractive to Beckley in that there seemed to be lots of opportunities popping up in wine work (if you were versatile), and it was overall less flashy than Marin County. He and his wife, Claire, decided Oregon would be a great place to raise their then two-year-old. In 1989 the family moved to an apartment in McMinnville, in the heart of Oregon wine country.
It was there that Beckley learned his next-door neighbor was the winemaker for Sokol Blosser Winery, where he subsequently took his first job in the wine industry. It was a learning curve, as Beckley assisted in his first wine job during harvest time.
“It was a good proving ground for me, being thrown into the thick of having to deal with so many things—filtering white wines with residual sugar—tasks that one might go to school for,” Beckley said.
In 1994, Beckley was hired by Domaine Drouhin as Chef du Cave, the French equivalent of Cellar Manager. There he familiarized himself with even more cellar techniques, particularly the method of racking wine (separating the liquid from the lees) by hand as opposed to by pump or by using compressed gas to move the wine.
Because the center of Drouhin operations was in Beaune, France, Beckley also faced the unique challenge of negotiating cellar procedures with people overseas. Once a month, he would send samples of the wine via FedEx to Drouhin’s “huge, modern lab” in Beaune. Tests would check the pH and for potential problems and allow the French staff to taste the wine from Oregon.
The exposure to the French wine enriched Beckley’s idea of winemaking, especially Pinot Noir. “I learned more what it takes to produce finesse and elegance, more about European/French-Burgundian wines,” he said. “I started to consume more and realized the benchmark that Burgundy is for Pinot noir.”
After eight years of working at Domaine Drouhin, plus a year and half working as Production Winemaker at Erath Vineyards Winery, Beckley decided knew enough about the winemaking process to produce his own wines. “It was time,” he said.
