|
In
1983, when Nancy and I were both working in Cape Cod
restaurants, I asked Nancy when she’d be ready
to move to California. I had a dream of learning to
make wine. “Tomorrow,” she said. I worked
the harvest that year at Mount Eden Vineyards in Saratoga,
starting at the bottom, picking grapes and digging
ditches. After the harvest, we moved to Napa Valley
and worked at a B&B. Nancy ran the place and I
tended the gardens and planted a vineyard. I then
worked at Tonella Vineyard Management, where the owner
taught me why you need to prune, trellis, train, and
generally coddle grapevines, and the vineyard workers
gave me on-the-job-training.
Next
I worked at Whitehall Lane Winery. Though I started
in the tasting room, the winemaker, Art Finkelstein,
took me under his wing, put me in the cellar, and
eventually promoted me to winemaker. Art taught me
that the secret of great wines is in the blend. In
1987, we started Elyse Wines with 286 cases of Zinfandel
from the Morisoli Vineyard, which is still one of
our primary fruit sources. For a decade we were nomads,
buying grapes and crushing at various custom crush
facilities, and then in1997, we finally bought a small
winery on Hoffman Lane.
What
will you find in a bottle of Elyse or Jacob Franklin
wine? I make wines that I want to sit down and enjoy
– juicy, rich, voluptuous wines. I like a little
oak, but I don’t want it to be overpowering
– I want to taste the fruit. I love wines that
pair well with food. A meal without wine is eating;
a meal with wine is dining – it’s a conversation,
an event. It’s what wine is about.
When
I make a wine, my tastes and techniques will influence
the process, but what’s most important is the
fruit. The fruit dictates what the wine will be. We’re
fortunate to work with an amazing group of growers
and vineyards, whose fruit keeps taking us to wonderful
places. We started out making Zinfandel, then expanded
into Cabernet Sauvignon and Petite Sirah. No doubt
those will continue to be the focus of our winemaking,
but now we’ve made a tiny quantity of Chardonnay,
and soon we’ll be releasing our first Pinot
Noir. What wines we make after that will depend on
the fruit that’s available, because I just can’t
say no to wonderful fruit.
As
many of you know, when we started making our own wines
in 1987, we named the tiny, 200 case operation after
our daughter, Elyse. Not wanting to leave our son,
Jake, out of loop, we eventually named our Rhone blend
after him. It wasn't enough. Jake asked us, "When
do I get my own label without her name on it?"
In
1998, we began a new label named after Jake: Jacob
Franklin. These wines are a new departure for us.
With Elyse wines, we've always adhered to the philosophy
that wine is not for the elite, and that wine consumers
deserve to obtain high quality, well-crafted, drinkable
wines at reasonable prices.
We
still believe that and we always will, but we've also
been fortunate enough to gain access to some extremely
limited, incredible Petite Sirah fruit from highly
desirable vineyards. This fruit makes richly focused,
highly extracted, brawny, yet layered wines with fantastic
aging potential. But the fruit is hard to come by
and it is very low in yield. Consequently, the wines
are very limited and they sell out quickly. We've
also included on the Jacob Franklin label Cabernet
Sauvignon from our own estate vineyard near Yountville,
which we feel mirrors the complexity of our Jacob
Franklin Petite Sirah's. We make so little that these
wines are usually only available at the winery, so
we're pleased to offer them here on our website as
well.
|
