Sineann's Peter Rosback:
Over-the-Top Style and Selection
by Cole Danehower
March, 2006
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“If they weren’t all different, I wouldn’t make them,” says Peter Rosback, as we survey the impressively long line-up of his Sineann wines in his cellar lab cum tasting room at Medici Vineyards in Newberg. I start counting the individual releases; I stop at nineteen, but Peter is still mentally calculating. “We’re missing four pinots, one zin, one chardonnay, one cabernet, a sauvignon blanc . . . and a late harvest viognier.”
In the Northwest, few individual winemakers release as many wines under one label as Peter—and our final count (28, ranging from a $60 cabernet sauvignon to a $12 red table wine) doesn’t even include the wines he makes on a consulting basis for other people!
“I don’t know if what I’m doing, in the grand scheme, is the smartest thing business-wise,” says Peter. “But I’ve found that there is a loyal following for each type of wine. I have people who simply love the pinot gris, and only buy that every year. I have a batch of pinot noir lovers who just buy those wines. At some point I’d be disappointing a lot of people if I stopped doing any one of these wines!”
But I doubt he’ll be stopping any time soon. While tasting through the wines with Peter, it becomes clear that he personally loves—and lives—each one. He frequently exclaims, with unaffected enthusiasm, how much he loves the fruit in this wine, or how satisfying the aromas are in another.
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Sineann's White Wines
While Peter is known mostly for his red wines, he makes Gewurztraminer, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot gris, and Riesling in years when he can find grapes that meet his demanding standards. Peter's white wines usually come and go in about a week each spring. This year, Avalon's wine and food writer extraordiaire, Michael Sherwood, got preview samples of some of Peter's white wines. His reviews are here: Sineann Gewurztraminer Sineann Gewurztraminer Oak Ridge Vineyard
Columbia Gorge 05 $16.20/$18.00 Sineann Gewurztraminer Medici Pinot noirs
The Medici Pinots are all made from the Estate vineyard, a steep, southwest facing slope of 20+ year old wines that surround Peter's winery. Not well known, we at Avalon like these wines as much or more as Peter's bold, huge Sineann wines. And the prices- well, for the price, you get a lot of wonderful wine. |
“Some wines I make exclusively because I love them,” he admits, pointing to a small bottle of “Sweet Sydney” (named after one of his daughters) “That’s my zinfandel ice wine,” he says, “that’s what I have for desert.”
After spending some time in Peter’s company, it is clear to me that the sensual enjoyment offered by good food and wine is a vital component of his life—and the driving force behind his pursuit of quality and flavor in his wines. Whether it is savoring the sushi at his favorite Japanese hangout, or simply sipping the superb fruit concentration in his Old Block cabernet, Peter revels in the sensuality and variety of flavor.
“One of the reasons I moved to Oregon was because I liked the quality of the soft fruits. The strawberries, raspberries, and blueberries were the best I’ve had on earth—they were just tremendous things. Little did I know that soft fruits would become my livelihood!”
FROM PEACHES TO PINOT
It was because of peaches that Peter began making wine as an amateur in 1985. He was in the habit of picking peaches late in the summer from the orchard of his friend Bill Beran (“Gosh, they were so terrific,” he remembers), and he would always walk by a quarter acre of old pinot noir vines on Bill’s property (Bill now makes his own pinot noir under the Beran label).
Along with another friend who had some winemaking equipment, Peter made his first batch of pinot noir.“You know how great the grapes taste in their raw, native state?” he recalls rhetorically, “the juice is so incredible! And then it turns into this raw, alcoholic thing, and then that tart raw thing goes through malolactic fermentation and mellows out and turns into beautiful pinot noir . . . I was hooked!”
From that first year’s five gallons, Peter went on to make 30 gallons the next year, then 100 gallons the following year, and then 170 gallons—near the legal limit for home winemaking. Going commercial seemed inevitable.
By the early 1990s Peter was taking vacations from his engineering job to work harvest and help out in the cellar at Elk Cove Vineyards. There he met marketing maven David O’Reilly. David especially liked one of the wines Peter was making for himself, saw a good marketing story in the vines, and thought the wine could be a commercial success.
In 1994 Peter and David partnered to commercially produce 125 cases of what is today still one of Peter’s best-selling wines: the Sineann Old Vine Zinfandel.
THE PRIMACY OF PLACE
“I quickly figured out that the quality of the wine was directly related to the quality of the fruit,” says Peter. “In other words, the vineyard source mattered a lot.” Whenever he found a locally produced wine he liked, Peter would seek out the vineyard source for possible use in his own wines. Back in the late 1980s, demand for grapes was less than today, and Peter found he could obtain excellent fruit if he worked with the growers.
“I gave them good prices, and I was picking it myself, so I made it easy for them to sell me grapes; I almost never got rejected when I called up looking for fruit.”
His foresight paid off by allowing him access to vineyards that would develop formidable reputations in years to come.
For instance, Peter’s association with Washington’s Champoux Vineyards has proven most successful. In addition to being among the select few winemakers able to work with fruit from the Old Block of Champoux Vineyard, Peter was the first winemaker to use fruit from the first block planted by Paul Champoux when he took over the vineyard (formerly known as Mercer Ranch Vineyard). Cabernet sauvignon from the so-called “Baby Poux” Vineyard has been in Sineann bottles since the beginning.
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Peter also views his relationships with his growers as being vital to Sineann. “If you look at the model for success in the world, it’s collaborations of people. My growers are all really excellent; they’re great at what they do—I could not replace them. Guys like Kevin Chambers at Resonance Vineyard—good God, what could I tell him? He’s one of the best growers in the country.”
By paying top price for his fruit, doing the best job he can to make wine with it, and honoring the vineyard with their name on the label and his continued patronage, Peter believes he can create a framework where both he and his growers can be happy and successful. The end result is that everybody is proud of what gets bottled.
RIPE FRUIT AND INTENSE FLAVORS
The Story of "Sineann" Peter Rosback’s red hair and freckles are evidence of his Irish ancestry. So it seemed appropriate to give his wine label an Irish image. In Irish mythology, the bright red fruit of the Rowan tree fell into a clear well full of salmon. The salmon that ate these fruits gained red spots and great wisdom. Men would strive to capture these fishes and eat of the “salmon of knowledge,” but women were forbidden. Sineann (also spelled Sionan) was a rebel woman who caught one of the fishes. Upon her eating of the salmon of knowledge, the well flooded, carrying her westwards to the sea along the course of what is now the River Shannon. |
Peter’s focus in the vineyard is to get ripe and balanced fruit; in the cellar it’s to wring from the fruit focused flavors and ripe, controlled tannins. “I’m trying to ratchet-up flavor intensity,” he says simply.
A key strategy is to keep crop sizes low. “Cropping low increases the intensity of the fruit you get,” Peter explains, “it gives you more minerality—which I notice more in the whites—and the fruit ripens faster because there’s less work for the plant to do. So in every way cropping low plays to making more intense wines."
For example, Peter recently took an acre of what he considers his best pinot gris vineyard and cropped to a single ton of fruit—just one cluster per shoot. While this is not uncommon for the most expensive pinot noirs, it is highly unusual for the lower-priced pinot gris
.“It’s a tremendous wine,” Peter says of the results, “but I’ll probably lose money on it. Yet when I taste the fruit and the wine side-by-side, I have to ask why I’d bother doing anything else, it is so good!”
Peter’s winemaking style is to produce wines that are full-flavored and somewhat approachable upon release. Like other quality producers, Peter is very careful sorting and handling fruit as it comes in from the field.
He is concerned to control tannins, and presses only once, and then only lightly. “I want ripe tannins so that there’s a good feel in the mouth,” he explains, “I don’t want astringent and drying tannins.”
To
help build a creamy quality on the palate Peter does some fermenting
in barrel, and to build sweetness
and length into them he uses a large proportion of new and one-year
old oak.
He also bottles earlier than most other winemakers. Concerned that the fruit qualities tend to diminish over time in the newer barrels, Peter will bottle his pinot noir and zinfandel in August, his merlot and approachable cabernets a year after harvest, and what he calls his “big reds” between February and May in the year after harvest.
“I think I already have enough of the textural properties I want in the wine by the way I make it,” he explains, “so I bottle young to try and capture all the fruit I can.”
VARIETY AND QUALITY
“I like different types of wine,” Peter concludes. “I’m not just a pinot lover—though I drink way more pinot than any other wine, and I think it makes the best red wines. But I also like zinfandel and I like cabernet. Good gris is wonderful, and there’s nothing like a great gewürz.”
Peter makes all these wines because he likes all these grapes—and he makes his wines as well as he can because that’s the only kind of wine he likes to drink himself.
“If I open a mediocre wine at my own dinner table,” he says, “I’m back down in the cellar getting something else—I have no time for mediocre stuff. If I have a lesser wine in the winery, it won’t get my label. I’m all about making people happy with my wines!”
Author Cole Danehower:
Combining his love of wine with his skill as a writer, Cole created the Oregon Wine Report in 1998 to give consumers in-depth information on the wines, wineries, and winemakers of Oregon.
In 2003 Cole and the Oregon Wine Report were nominated for the most prestigious award in American food and wine writing: the James Beard Foundation Journalism Award. In 2004 he won the award for the “best newsletter writing on food, beverage, restaurant and nutrition,” distinguishing the Oregon Wine Report as the best newsletter of its kind in the country.
Cole is a frequent contributor to Avalonwine.com, writes
the “Inside Northwest Wine” Column for Northwest Palate magazine,
and is a frequent contributor to local media on Oregon and Northwest wine
topics.
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