Joel Peterson, Ravenswood, Bedrock, Zinfandel, wine, Teldeschi
Adventures Of A Black Belt Sommelier
A conversation with a legendary California winemaker
well, uh, welcome to adventures of a black belt. Somebody ate Joel. It's great seeing your smiling face again. Um, for the, it's not terribly likely, but for someone who's watching this and doesn't know who you are. Can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your place in. The world of California white making has been the last few decades. Well, I'm Joel Peterson. I started a little tiny winery back in 1976 called Ravenswood after doing the stage with a really wonderful older winemaker by the name of Joseph Swan. Uh, where I learned that the Zimfidel was a damn good grape. And he was making some pretty spectacular wines out of it. So in 1976 I had a bit of hubris and I ran off and said I can start a winery and made 327 cases of wine. And that little winery kind of grew slowly to begin with. And then in 1983 we hit on the wine called vendors blend, Zimfidel. And in a few years that became the most sold Zimfidel in all of America. And I have been an advocate of Zimfidel obviously from the very beginning and it is California's great so I've somehow managed to become known as the godfather of Zimfidel. Ravenswood was successful enough so we grew so fast that we never had enough money to support the growth so we decided to go public in 1999. And we were a public company traded on NASDAQ. But public markets don't really understand winders very well so. So at some point along the way, the partners that I had decided that they wanted to sell Ravenswood and we got absorbed into a very large wine organization called constellation wines. And I worked for constellation wines for another 16 years and traveling the world proselytizing for Zimfidel, making wine, working with some really fabulous people but along about, what, 2014 I decided that, you know, I didn't really need to spend the rest of my life in a large organization. I really wanted to do what I love doing which was making wine myself which is what I thought I would be doing when I started Ravenswood. So I started another little winery, winemakers, they're so boring and just start wineries. And I was called once in future wines so once I had a little winery in the future I'm going to have a little winery. Once I made all the wine myself in the future I'm going to make all the wine myself. Once I made the wine like I made it when I started Ravenswood and how I made it with Joe Swan, which is small open top reminders punched down by hand made abuse fermentation is French oh, and really I do all the work. So, yeah, obviously a little helping my friends know it again. But it's, it's been a long and interesting career in wine. I have garnered a few awards along the way and made some great wine along the way and, and still am incredibly enthusiastic about Zimfidel. So that's probably the longer version than you wanted, but it's a short version. I have told you before I'll listen to you talk for three hours if you give it to me. You have this kind of two pronged attack. I'm not sure attacks the right word, but you have this two pronged for rear, which was that you were making with the vendors blend, which was like the most it over delivered at its price point about as much as any wine in history I think. You know, and it's a day it was a $10 bottle of wine and it was really, really excellent. Excellent wine. So, and you're making a million cases a year of it. So you're, you're enormously the dominant player in the Zimfidel world. But, in addition to that, you're also making these single vineyard wines that are among the best wines made in, in California or in the US or in the world. So you're doing both things. That's not an easy thing to do. I don't think. No, it's not an easy thing to do. I started out making single vineyard wines because those were wines that I believed in. You know, I'd grown up drinking European wines and learning about European wines. My father had a wine newsletter sort of as a hobby. And so I got to taste a lot of wines as a very young man. And learned about wines from, you know, people like, you know, Rod Bent and, and the other British wine writers, Eddie Penny Roswell, et cetera, et cetera. Who talked about wine as being, you know, kind of vineyard designated vineyard located, you know, I mean, they talked about great burgundies and great bordeaux and wines from Italy. And those were wines of place. And so when I started making wine, my idea was that I would only make vineyard designated ones. And I was very early on that. I think Ridge had a vineyard designated wine before that, but not too many people vineyard designated ones. And so I sought out vineyards that I thought were unique and really interesting. It was actually turned out to be an advantage that I didn't have enough money to buy my own vineyard. I actually managed to find great old vine zinfandel vineyards in California. They turned out that sinfandel had arrived in California in 1852. They've been through a flax or epidemic in the 70s and there were vines that had been replanted in the 1880s that were still in existence that were very old, very low production, dry farmed, planted in really special places. And that was very much what the profile of a great European vineyard look like. But the grape was zinfandel, which was sort of a California grape and at the time nobody knew exactly where it came from. We now know it came from Croatia. But it was a special, there was special vineyards, and they in fact produced special wines. People hadn't been taking them particularly seriously for a long time because of prohibitions of the level of zero before prohibition, been made, been made into jug wines. But there were a few people like rich and Joe Swan who started making them with some serious intent, not because they really wanted to make zinfandel to begin with. Joe Swan was practicing to make Pinot Lorne, Ridge was practicing to make Cabernet Sauvignon, but they made them like they would make a respectable grape and those wines were really terrific. So it was very clear to me that these were wines that could be made well and may have exceptionally good flavor, but also wines that had the essence of what the Europeans like to call terroir, the sense of place. So I began making my first two wines were a wine called vogensen and wine called pulsin. They were both dry creek wines, but they were different because the vineyards had different textures, characters, different soil types, different climate, climate extractions. And then I proceeded to go on from there, and I'd made for years I'd made tell dusky I still make tell dusky. Old Hill, Belloni, bedrock, which is now my vineyard I finally could afford to buy a vineyard, but these are really special special wines of place. And I would have done that solely if I could have, but it turned out that the wine business when I was beginning to get into it was a more complicated place than it is now. I mean, simpler, but more complicated in the sense that it was very hard for wineries to control their own destiny. So you'd make a wine. You didn't, you might have a mailing list, but there was nothing like the, you know, the deep direct to consumer lists we have today. And most of the wine market was controlled by distributors, and those distributors could pay you when they wanted to pay you or not pay you. And it was very, and you couldn't really function in an out of state market without them. So, you know, my receivables and those days would run, you know, anywhere between 140 and 200 days, which is not a really great cash flow project project when you consider that it takes three years to make a bottle of wine. And then you have to get paid for it so it's really five years from the point that you make the wine to the point you get paid for really bad business model. And there's so many things, there's so many follow up questions that I want to ask the what you just said, you mentioned you were your father, let you taste or got you involved in tasting wine at a young age. Can you tell me a story about going to heights with him, and tasting the chardonnay. What's your story right. Yeah, that's my story. You were tasting Cabernet. So I was, I was, you know, I was young, you know, I probably shouldn't have been tasting wines but it was kind of family day of heights for the Berkeley wine and food society and my father and his friends went up there for an event at heights and heights that just built his new, his new, his new salary is very proud of it and he was rightfully, and he was taking people around and tasting wine with them. And, and so my father handed me the glass of the camera now who knows what it was it was made mine have been Martha's Vineyard. And I had been doing some reading about wine, and I had just read about this. How old were you? What's that? How old were you at this time. Maybe 15, maybe 15. Yeah. I am. I've been doing some reading and, and it heard about how Hanzel had been using malalactic fermentation as part of the process and how Brad Webb had done this interesting thing that that made, that nobody really understood before but he really put some legs on it. So my father had handed me the glass and I smelled it and, you know, sipped a little bit even though I wasn't supposed to, and Heights said, well, are there any questions and I piped up and I said, Mr Heights, I said, has this one been put through a malalactic fermentation? And I went an obnoxious question for a 14 year old be asking, and he looked at me, and he said, what's a little shit like you want to know anything about that for. And, and then he turned and he walked away. Didn't respond to my question. My father put his hand on my shoulder and he said, he doesn't know the answer. I'm quite confident I've told you the story about the morning he was at my restaurant in Nashville with Marvin Overton, and Marvin's daughter and his wife and David Corey and Benich and Jose, do you remember those guys from Southern California who had enormous white clothes. Anyway, they're all there. And Marvin's daughter asked Joe about the eucalyptus and mint in the Martha's Vineyard Cabernet, and he just went berserk. And it was really like the Hulk or something. He, he hounded the table and called her all kinds of terrible names and, and told her, you know, kind of like what Joe said to you just you, you, you idiot, idiotic little girl. You know, my wife's the only wine that it can Napa Valley Cabernet that tastes the way Napa Valley Cabernet should taste, and it doesn't taste like you smell or taste like eucalyptus and mint. You're an idiot. I mean, you know, it's just so terrible. And Marvin, if Marvin had a gun, he might have shot him. Well, furious. He paid. He paid Joe. And what was his name? I don't remember Alice's airfare. And the roads is airfare that won Martha's Vineyard and the hotel rooms and provided all the wine. And I donated the whole event. And he's screaming us profanity said his daughter. I mean, it was just, it was just horrible. My plan for the centerpiece at the tables that night had been my pastry chef that made bowls out of chocolate and the centerpiece at the dinner that night was going to be both chocolate bowls filled with eucalyptus and mint. But after that, I had a rose on the table, but I made a big pile of eucalyptus and mint and the parking line halfway through dinner we went out and set it on fire. And I said this is the end of the myth of eucalyptus and then Martha's Vineyard Cabernet. Well, you know, Michael Bryant personally. I have met him several times. I wouldn't say I had a close relationship with him. I had been, I had been in several tastings with him. But he was a, he was a very interesting character, a really good taster and, you know, an exceptional writer about wine. I could have known him better than I did, but I didn't. His son and his son Bartholomew and I were, I mean, he lives in Virginia and I live in Minnesota, but we're pretty, pretty good friends. We talk, we're not as, you know, maybe once a week or something, we'll have a conversation about something he, people ask me questions. I don't know the answer to call people like you and him to who are smarter than I am that can give me the correct answer. We just had a lot more experience in certain regions than you have. Bart is also a great guy and super knowledge and really knows the wine business well. Yeah, yeah, and I'm proud of my relationship with him. He, he, like you, was drinking really great wine at a young age. His father poured Bartholomew and his sister first growth board, I was with dinner every, you know, like every night. I mean, you know, he got, he got indoctrinated into great wine earlier. So I wanted to ask you a big picture question because I think you're as qualified to answer this as anybody I know personally. Are you up to that? Sure. What do you, so you've been doing this since 1976, that's 48 years since you started your winery. What, how would you describe the current state of affairs in California wine making? Well, it's an interesting question. It's obviously a very broad question. The wine that's being made in California now, generally speaking, is better wine that's ever been made in the history of California. There are vineyard practices being installed in California that are more interesting and more sustainable and more organic than they have ever been. There is a group of younger winemakers that are sort of forming a base phalanx in California with small, little tiny wineries and they're making really great wines. People like our Lady of the Sunshine and polis polis and bird horse and even my son's wine bedrock are all doing super interesting things and they're either organic or biodynamic and the wines are super interesting and they're not just Cabernet or Chardonnay. They're making lots of interesting other varieties as well. Having said that, that's one layer of the California wine business, but there's also the kind of middle layer of the wine business, which is a glomerations of smaller wineries or middle sized wineries. And one of those groups just went bankrupt, leaving, you know, 15 wineries, you know, including things like B.R. Cohen and others. Kind of kind of high and dry, you know, they're all there. People are going to be like, oh, they were making solid wine. It wasn't great wine necessarily, but it was really drinkable interesting wine. There are a couple of other groups that are very much like that. And so they provide a lot of sort of moderately expensive wines and have facilities with tasting rooms that really provide a good solid center for the wine business. As the, as we have entered this period of recession for the wine business, they have suffered the most, and some of them that overextended themselves. So we see some not particularly interesting things happening. And then of course we have the big wine business. And the big wine business is constellation, and Gallo, and the wine group. So they have really large mega brands, but they're also pushing to get into the sort of upper end high volume or not high volume the high price categories. So for instance, Constellation bought Robert Mondavi, they own tocolon vineyard, they bought them Schrader, which are high end Napa Valley Cabernet's. And Gallo's done some of the same kind of thing. They, they bought. Robert, excuse me, Louis Martini, and they really revamped that and they put a whole wine making staff in there. It's hard to know exactly what will happen to that. And, and interestingly enough, Gallo bought the brand Ravenswood from Constellation, the wine I started years ago. And they've been in touch with me about restarting Ravenswood, which is kind of interesting. I don't know how that will all work out, but the California wine business is dynamic, it is moving, but the high volume business is suffering. There are a lot of vineyards being taken out in the Central Valley, people are having trouble selling Zinfandel, for instance, in this relatively high volume vineyards in South Valley to to low dive. And then out of that area is being replanted with, you know, almond trees and pistachio for us that tend to bring more money, but also use a lot more water. And so, yeah, it's a, it's a business that I think is at the point of having sort of a read readjustment, you know, and is looking kind of for a soft landing. There is a lot of anti alcohol literature out there now that is pushing against drinking. There are, you know, and there are the primary support for the wine business came from boomers, you know, my, my category, these were people who loved wine and love dinner parties and, you know, love sharing with other people. So, that group is beginning to fall off the cliff a little bit now. And it'll be interesting to see, you know, what comes into replacement, which is why I have such faith in the sort of the underlayer of younger, more ambitious wineries that are smaller, and more specialty. To the sort of the next generation perhaps a little bit more than five volume wineries do. So, there's a, I'm sure there are, there's a lot that I've left out of that dissertation, but that's, that's sort of top line. You're spot on about go and Louie Martini, it's a, it's an enormous accomplishment. I mean, their, their wines are, I want to say that the best they've ever been because they made a great wine for a long time or he did but their wines are, you know, they're just excellent I don't expect things, things to be excellent after go by some but they, they really, they're really in and out of the ballpark. On a specific note, you mentioned be our cone. If you ever tasted the 84 be our cone silver label Cabernet. Yeah, it's very good. It was like terrific. I actually, I actually in 1986, I made a what was then called olive hill Cabernet from that vineyard, which was pretty hilarious. It was, I made all of like three tons of grapes, and that was when Bruce Cohen was still a rock promoter. And so I, he wanted me to sign a contract for the grapes so he invited me over to the, the ranch to sign a contract and I got there and they were like, you know, I think there were five lawyers and Bruce, all dressed in suits. And a like 10 page contract for four tons of grapes. Look like a rock concert contract and I'm going, wait a minute. This is ridiculous. I said, yeah. And eventually after I said, look, I'm not going to sign this contract because I can't read the whole thing I don't even understand most of it. I said, you want to make a simple contract, we've got a deal. And he did, which was good, but it was just, was one of those moments where, you know, two industries, you know, two, two jobs, things came together and didn't quite mesh the same way. You know, Bruce was the manager of the doobie brothers, and he spent a lot of time in Nashville, so I got to know him pretty well and had, you know, had a glass of wine with him. Pretty much anytime he came to Nashville, we, we got together. But, and I drank, we drank the 84 silver level together a couple of times. He told me, I assume it's true that Helen Turley was his winemaker for that one year, that one vintage. And, but he, and she made this extraordinary wine that probably sold for $3 a bottle in 1986. And then he fired her because she only made 300 cases of wine. Yeah, I think I think that it was actually a little more than that, but still. Well, that's the story he told me back in, you know, the late 80s, I think, would have been the mid 80s that I would have known him. When I was, I was selling the point. I was going to sell it to Cabernet in the mid 80s for almost $10 a bottle so surely Bruce was doing better than I was. I might be exaggerating. You know, Joe told at that, at that lunch, Joe told the story of when he got the 85 got the first hundred point rating for the Martha's finger got the first hundred point rating from one spectator for an American wine. And then the door of the winery the next and they're like 500 people standing in line went to buy it. And so he said you can buy six bottles and it's whatever price it was. And he sold like half the production and there were still 500 people standing in line because he didn't have any distribution. And then he sold like another 50% of what was left. So he doubled the price again and said you can buy one bottle. And then like six o'clock that night he just closed the doors and people's faces. I'm not, you know, I think, you know, what he was suggesting is it could have sold every single bottle he made if he left the doors open. And he could have kept raising the price and people will still would have still bought it. Yeah. Again, I don't know that that story is true but that's the story he told. And my restaurant nationally about I think it was 1990. What was true about that period of time was that the wine specter had a tremendous influence on wine buyers. I got a 95 points on one of my cabinets on. I remember which one, but it was, you know, one of my cabinets early in the 80s. And you could watch the circulation of this wine spectator based on the calls that I was getting from people about the interest they had. And it started in Europe and the UK and then it moved to the East Coast and then the Midwest and finally to the West Coast. It was fascinating to watch. When we got the grand award from them at the well bore in 1994, our business doubled overnight. The next night, we were sold out, you know, and people coming from all over the country. They ended up by $5,000 $10,000 loss of wine. It was the impact was a hundred times more than we would have dreamed of. Because, you know, at that time, there are only 100 grand award winning restaurants in the world. So it was a major accomplishment to get that. The problem with, you know, these ratings publications, they've killed, they've committed suicide. In some regards because they give so many high ratings now. And, you know, it is, I remember when Gigola Turk, I think it was '85 also, was the first 100 point rating from Robert Parker. And there would be, in a year's time, the wine advocate Robert Parker would give maybe two or three hundred point rating. If that, if you go, you can go on the wine advocate website right now and search. 100 point ratings for the 1999 vintage. And there are hundreds of lines. Hundreds of points with 100 point rates from one day. So there's, there is the problem, of course, that the scale, of course, is defective. But beyond that, wines have gotten better. And so maybe there are that many hundred point wines out there. Because when I started to make wine, you know, you could get eight bad wines or eight defective wines, at least out of 10, every 10 bottles that you bought. It wasn't that they were terrible, but they definitely were in the '85 to '88 point range. But winemaking, winemaking technology and people who make wine and understand the chemistry of wine and, and the ethic of winemaking have just gotten better. So they've, they've really forced everything, a lot of things, a lot more things up to, you know, that high echelon. So what is, what do you do? Do you change the scale? You know, so that you expand the upper, upper end of the scale or, you know, and so the ones that were 100 points previously would only make 95 now and other ones. So ultimately, there probably are more 100 point wines, but it's, it does, that does look like a rate inflation for sure. The average customer in the store I work in cares a lot more about what Vivino says than they do about what the wine advocate or wine spectator or wine enthusiast says. Dad, it's like the Yelp, Yelp restaurant reviews, you know, it's just people that don't really know what they're talking about giving you advice. Um, what, what I was the question I was actually asking you about the current state of California ones. The wineries that historically great wineries, the wineries that that you think of in California is being the top echelon. That would became a Staggs Lee wine sellers, Silver Oak. And I really, you know, and, and the sad thing is that those wineries do not make the average customer doesn't notice that Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvino Napa Valley is not really a great wine anymore. But they don't notice the Camus, Napa Cabernet is, you know, tastes like bad for. Yeah, well, you know, it's, it's interesting how times and, you know, and people change and it's gone through multiple generations and we know multiple generations kind of changed the nature of a business. And of the ones you mentioned, Camus is still, you know, a family operation, Silver Oak is still a family operation. What was the other one you mentioned that's actually been. Oh, Staggs Leap is now, I believe, Antonori, I've been acquired by the Italians. But they've all gotten much bigger. And Silver Oak has got its base in Sonoma now. They've gotten much bigger and, you know, within limits, you can make wine well at the top echelon, you know, up to a certain limit. When you go past that limit, it's very hard to do, because not all grapes are made equal. And so it means you have to buy more grapes. So it means you have to, you know, probably compromise on your grape standards a bit. You're working with higher volumes. You're not as likely to do as careful as sort as you would if you were doing lower volumes. I mean, there's a reason, you know, that the Great Wardo Chateau were not massive. There's a reason that burgundy's are thought of as, you know, it's great wine, because most of them are very small operations, where they are very precise about what they grow and how they grow them, and how they make the wine. So, big is not necessarily better. But this is the nature of being in a capitalist world, you know, and for places like those wineries. They, they find that they can sell wines that are, you know, for based on the reputation that they've had in the past, that where they were making really exceptional wines. So they make more. And there's always compromise in that. You know, we mentioned Hello Dearly, do you know John what law for John, once again, I've met him I don't know him well now. I had heard he was in very bad health. I was wondering if you. No, can't, can't give you enough data on that one. Yeah. So what's the future for you? What are you, what are you, what, well let me ask you this, what does your son do your son makes them the Dell high quite very high qualities in the Dell. You have ratings as wines all get like 95 98 points for everyone. It seems like every vintage of every vendor gets. So what does he do different, that's different from what you do, you do in the same venue, you eat, he makes Telesky right. And, you know, the differences that he gets a different block of Telesky, I get a very precise block of Telesky, which was the oldest block on the ranch that was Frank Telesky's favorite block. And my blend is, you know, Zinfadil, Alicante and Carignon, which is different than his blend, which is, you know, more Zinfadil. You know, he, you know, practices very strict vineyard practices, he has a whole team that works with growers about, you know, the kind of things that they're spraying on the vineyards, how they're doing their farming, how much crop is there. So his success really starts in the vineyards. My success starts in the vineyards too, but I choose vineyards that are naturally having natural propensity towards pretty good grapes. He works with a broader range of vineyards, but they, you know, with work they do produce great rates and he's also very selective about those vineyards and he's got a fabulous sense of taste. He's, you know, he's an MW, so he's actually more skilled in that, you know, that area than I am, certainly more educated. So he really has a strong sense of what a vineyard is capable of and what the wine is able to make. In broad strokes, yes, he and I make our wines the same way I mean in a sense I use small open top record fermenters and on a bigger than four tons. He does, he ferments a stainless steel and they're slightly larger but they're not massive by any means. We both use indigenous use for most of our wines. We both use French. Oh, you know, I do more hand punched hands. He does a combination of hand punched and a remotage of whole cluster, which is what she thinks is appropriate for certain wines. So he's a very skilled winemaker. I would say, is this is, excuse me, is this wine making more complex, not the wines but the process more complex. Can be depends on which wine he's making sometimes it's very simple, you know, sometimes it's more complex. So this he is, he makes slightly more volume than I make. So my typical lots run between three and 400 cases. This typical lots probably, you know, are running more like sticks or 700 cases, with the exception of his, like old wine belt, and his old wine surah or as California surah, which are composites of a number of vineyards, but very well chosen very carefully made vineyards. So he has more selective capacity. So I don't throw away. And I use that term loosely throw I don't, I don't opt out of very many barrels and one of my blends, and they're all pretty good. So he's very diligent about taking barrels out that he doesn't think are perfect or are going to be additive to the blend and those end up in his old wine zinfandel, I don't have a program like that that's the way used to do it at Ravenswood. And so that is a difference. But let me tell you something else why that winemakers make little micro choices along the way that make a difference. So I used to have an assistant winemaker and I'm John Campbell who ultimately went to New Zealand and started his own winery. Early this would have been in the cell kind of mid 80s. And I said to John one day I said, hey John, why don't we make the same wine all the way to the end, and let's see if they turn out the same, you make wine the way you think we make wine and I'll make wine the way we think I think we make wine. And so we split, you know, through through why a crush of grapes, and he made one that and I made the other that even though he used the same kind of opening technique I use and even though I made the same kind of decision. It's about a big decision about fermentation and when depressing. You know, those micro decisions changed the nature of the wine enough. So they were distinct wines, even though they had a kinship, you can say, wow, you know, that's a little bit different than this one or that's barely different. It's pretty remarkably different than this one. So, you know, decisions along the way, even though people use the same techniques can be can can lead to fairly different results. It's kind of like two chefs following the same or cooks following the same recipe the results are not the same. Yeah, you know, I mean, that's, you know, well, I used to be for several years I was one of the whites, but the so many days at the wine experience, the wine specter wine experience. And one of the things you did in that was to taste every bottle that was going to go out to the ballroom to be poured for the attendees. I don't remember exactly how many bottles we would taste but you would taste, you know, several six seven cases of the same wine right in a row. Say 72 bottles in a row of the same wine, sometimes young wine, sometimes over one. One time I got assigned a very young vintage of Taylor port had to taste 72 bottles of young Taylor port. And by the end of that I was hallucinating my lips had swollen up my tongue was all of his intense experience. But one of the things that you discovered because you don't really have there's no other like. Paradigm where you do that where you taste 60 bottles of the same wine just one after another. But you have to because if a corked bottle goes out to the ballroom and those people have paid all that money to take attended states and it's a catastrophe. And so what you discover is that every bottle is different, even in young wines as you taste through 72 bottles. There's always about ten that are really really special. There's always about 10 that aren't good enough to go out to the ballroom and then there's the ones in the middle that are correct and whatever quality they are but they're every they're all different. Because why it's a lot it's a lie you know it's magic it's not it's not a can of peas. Although I suspect if you tasted 100 cans of peas you'd find variation and pea cans as well. I'm not going to do that. But you know particularly it's particularly true with with older bottles of wine that are probably more than 10 or 12 years old. I think it was Michael broadband back to who said, you know when wines get old there are no good wines there are only good bottles of wine. You know so generally speaking, the variation becomes more extreme as the wines get older. And they know that's definitely the case that they range from being kind of exceptional from the same wine to being okay who occasionally being bad has to do with storage it has to do with transport has to do with lots of things. But why does you point out as a living thing, and it's affected by you know the world around it as we all are. I opened a 2010. Is it Plavic Malo or Malo Plavic the Croatian red grape that's the. Plavas Mali it's the. Plavas Mali yeah. I opened a 2010 three nights ago expecting to pour it out. And it was absolutely absolutely a fabulous wine. Wow that's great. 14 year old indigenous Croatian grape. And you know what, I had a second glass the next night and it was even better. Yeah, so you know that grape is the grape that replaces infantile. In Croatia, which was called tributary and symphonic and Croatia, and it's really one of the parents of that grape. So it's just one of those things that we're talking about today. It is symphonyl. In Croatia. Symphony is one of the founder grapes along the Adriatic, there are almost 30 grapes. That are related to it that have symphonyl DNA and a tributary DNA in it and Plavas Mali is one of them. It was and it's got thicker skins. So that made it a really good candidate for an area that is fairly humid and warm and so it held up. So when flocks were came, they began replacing all the tributary. A.K.A. is infantile with Plavas, which was one of its juniors. And for a long time people looked at Plavas and they thought it was infantile because it. In fact, I think my garbage thought it was infantile because it. Grows in a similar fashion, the clusters look similar. It just tends to be more astringent than symphonyl and can be a little sharper. But winemaking in Croatia, I'm the post the Soviet block, has improved substantially. So it does not surprise me that you found a great Plavas. As I said, I expected to pour it down the drain and it was beautiful, you know, beautiful. So, you know, I opened and I've won one more thing. I've taken a lot more of your time than I asked you for seems like all I always do that. But, you know, I opened a bottle of your 2019 Teldeski. It's infantile this past week, coincidentally. How good a wine do you think that is? And I mean, because. Never asked. I've took a lot of Zenfindel in my life, going back a long way to, you know, that, that tasting with Paul Draper, all those. That ridge tasting with old Geyserville and. You know, I've done a lot of Zenfindel in my life. And, you know, so I bought a case of this wine and that's the second bottle I've opened. It's five years old. Paul would say I need to drink it, I think. Yeah, because I mean, he thinks the Zenfindel is five to seven years is its lifespan. I enormously disagree with him about this wine. It's five years old and it's, it's infant. It's an infant. Well, you know, this five to seven year niche was something that was carried forward from historically made Zenfindel. So wines that were made in the 70s and 80s from Zenfindel were not very interesting, honestly, they were kind of made to be consumed early, you know, to be, you know, they were the alcohols were quite low. The fruit was not nearly as ripe. They weren't made, you know, they were made in large volume. They weren't made with French oak or any other kind of oak for that matter. So they were never made with an intent to age. And so yeah, that that was the right thing to say about that. But the way Zenfindel is made now. It's made with much more attention to the kinds of things that, you know, cause a wine to age, you know, the way the way you process it, the kind of tanning you get, how you pick it, you know, how you punch it down. And it's a whole different world. And I can show you wines that I made in the 90s from Zenfindel. In fact, I pulled a bottle of 86 old hill out for a group. Two months ago, and it was absolutely spectacular. People were just completely blown away. And that's probably the exception. But that's a really special venue. But, but I've been making wines that because of my background of one of the elements that I throw into the cattle when I'm making a wine is, can I make this wine. And so it will be spectacular for a really long time so that somebody who opens it up in 20 years, because they forgot it and their seller will go. Oh, wow, why didn't I save it all. But that doesn't happen. So that 19 tell Baski that you tasted, yeah, great, great, great vineyard great little section of the vineyard, you know, really solid vintage. Probably not the best wine ever made, but certainly far from the worst and, and that vineyard because of the balance of acidity and anon and the mix of grapes, make spectacular wines and I'm so glad you enjoyed it. So, I am, that's why I make wines for people like you go, wow, that was spectacular. It doesn't sound like you think it's as good a wine as I thought the bottle I had that night was, but I think it's great wine. The bottle I had, the bottle I opened was very, very special. It was absolutely superb wine. So one last question is something they'll capable of making a 100 point wine it never has. Is it capable of that? Is that just prejudice. Only if it can overcome the prejudice that people have about it. You know, I once asked Parker the same question. And he said, he said, it would be very hard for me to rate a simple bill 100 points he ultimately did at some point, because he said, I don't, I don't consider it one of the great grapes in the world, which is an interesting point of view. And probably one that he ultimately would change at this point. But, but yeah, there's a, there's a significant prejudice about rating some of the 100 points. And I don't know whether the spectator has ever done that or the, or whether they ever will for instance. Yeah. I'm going to pause the recording for a second because I want to ask you a question off, not recorded. Well, Joe, this has been, you know, a great privilege pleasure. Hopefully good time and very informative as I knew it would be as it always is. It's not my place to say why I'm getting ready to make this request of people that view this, but I would ask that people that view this podcast would keep you in their prayers. Because you are a good friend and a great asset to wine. And I just want you to be good, want you to be okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. And I, I appreciate all good wishes and prayers. They're always very supportive. Thank you. Thank you, Joe. Thank you so much. You