Wine & Spirits - December 2019 - 35

"Vines are not being farmed for long life. People think
their lifespan is twenty years. In my opinion, that's when
vines are just getting to be mature."
-Cathy Corison

produced scraggly tiny clusters of little tiny berries. So it had crummy
yields but incredible concentration-the grapes are packed with flavor.
"Now all the fancy Napa cabernets are extremely limited in crop [by
dropping fruit]," Corison points out. "At one cluster per shoot, I think
they're not balanced. If you're going to cut it that far back, why not be
on St. George and Clone 2 and have the same crummy crop with little
tiny berries?"
Over the quarter-century that Corison has owned it, Kronos has yielded
an average of one and a quarter tons per acre. "I don't know anybody else
who would put up with that," she says. "For a business person it's a disaster, but for a winemaker it's a gift. I don't know how to explain it-people
say [vine age] doesn't matter, but after forty-two vintages, having made
wine all over the valley and up in the hills, I've never, ever worked with
another vineyard like this. They're just wise, gnarly old ladies, with very
deep roots. Right now we're having a two-day heat spike, and they're sailing through it majestically. And the wines are incredible, though stylistically I'm doing something different from other people."
Corison cabernet is famously lean, understated and ageworthy-out
of step, as she notes, with today's lavish-fruit-bomb ethos. For related reasons, she isn't afraid of virus. "All St. George has a little red-leaf virus," she
says. "For me it's not a problem. I believe it slows down sugar accumulation, so the grapes are very slow to ripen. Kronos is always the last to be
picked-and when it's ripe, it comes in at lower sugars than the others,
which allows everything else to stay apace."
Compared with Corison's other estate vineyard, Sunbasket (which is
half as old), the 2016 Kronos tastes more balanced, mellow and integrated.
"The word 'brooding' always comes to mind," she says. "It's dark and
deep. Sunbasket leans more toward brighter red and blue, Kronos toward
purple and black. It's tighter and more reserved. Another thing I can't
explain, though I've picked it out in blind tastings, is that Kronos always
has a viscosity that's singular. It has nothing to do with alcohol, because
that's lower-in the twelves and thirteens. I'm not sure why, but the tannins are so velvety in the Kronos."
As it turned out, one section of Corison's vineyard, between the winery and Highway 29, was indeed on AXR ("Sure enough, it died"). This
year she replanted it on St. George and Clone 2 with "modified" vertical
shoot positioning.
"In these parts, strict VSP tends to expose the fruit way too much to heat
and light," she says. "I think everybody's moving away from it around here
because there's been a lot of sunburn over the last ten years. People have
just been going for crop as soon as possible, then pushing the vines by
growing as many grapes as they can-they're even planting green bench
grafts, where the rootstock and scion have already been growing in pots.
You can get a crop sooner that way, but I don't believe you're going to get
the same root system as you do if you plant the rootstock and let it grow
all year without worrying about the scion.
"Vines are not being farmed for long life," Corison concludes. "People
think their lifespan is twenty years. Often by then the production is slowing down, so if they're farming for crop or have virus issues and it starts
to decline, they replant. In my opinion, that's when vines are just getting
to be mature."

here's so much economic pressure here compared to other places," agrees Graeme MacDonald. "Most vineyards now are trained to higher
canopies with higher density and higher yields,
but California sprawl is still our highest quality."
The MacDonalds own fifteen acres of
Oakville's 500-acre To Kalon vineyard, which
dates back to 1868. Surrounded by such highgloss names as Opus One, Beckstoffer and Mondavi, the family sold all
its grapes to the latter (since its founding in 1966, and to the Mondavis
at Charles Krug before that) until 2010, when Graeme and Alex launched
their eponymous brand, reserving some of the fruit for themselves.
Graeme, now 35, a Davis graduate who has worked for Opus One, Colgin
and Abe Schoener's Scholium Project, serves as both winemaker and vineyard manager; Alex, 33, went to UC Berkeley and worked in wine retail
and hospitality, and now handles their business and customer relations.
The property contains four vineyard blocks: a half acre planted by their
great-grandparents in 1954; seven and a half acres by their grandparents
in 1974; six and a half acres by Mondavi in the late Nineties (rather than
by their parents, who "lived a little too hard in the Sixties"); and a half acre
by Graeme and Alex in 2015, using budwood from all the other blocks.
"Every time we've worked with a vineyard management company, they
wanted to pull the old vines out," Graeme says. "Old vineyards sort of
farm themselves, which is not a great monetary drive for a management
company-they want to redevelop and put more stuff in. At one point,
when I was eighteen and still in school, I heard they were in here pulling
individual vines. I drove back and told them they had to ask my permission because it was the only remaining connection I had to my greatgrandparents. It didn't endear me to them, and that relationship fizzled."
The brothers now run the show themselves, but don't have carte
blanche. "The vineyard is owned by the generation above ours," Graeme
explains. "They're dependent on it for their retirement. I had to underbid
the vineyard-management company by a thousand dollars."
"We're also paying the family the same price [for grapes] that anybody else would," says Alex. "Which, at To Kalon, is not inexpensive." As
a result, they started small with their own operation, producing less than
100 cases while taking time "to figure out how to best represent the site."
When Graeme started making wines from each block separately, he
found the fruit from the 65-year-old vines was different. "And it was so
classic. The modern style is pushing toward power and bigger-is-better, but the old vines are all about elegance and finesse. It has ethereal
aspects-the nobility really comes across."
Those vines produce only two barrels of wine a year, and Graeme has
been hand-bottling five cases apiece for his children's future. The remainder goes into the winery's only commercial release: a $175 blend of all the
blocks planted by previous generations.
"Each generation added something of value," Graeme explains. "The
oldest vines have this incredible complexity, with layers and layers of
things happening. The forty-five-year-olds are austere, dark, dense and
concentrated, and the twenty-year-olds have a fresh blackberry and blackcherry fruit character. The classic vines impart this wonderful history into
WINE & SPIRITS

DECEMBER 2019

Wine & Spirits - December 2019

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