Buena Vista Carneros walked away from the Sonoma County Harvest Fair’s wine competition in September with three Best of Class awards for its 2005 Buena Vista Syrah Carneros, 2006 Buena Vista Pinot Noir Carneros and 2007 Buena Vista Pinot Gris Carneros. But for a company that has had five new owners in just six years, those awards were merely the icing on the cake.
The storied winery had returned to private ownership just three months earlier, when a small group of local investors successfully reclaimed it from corporate giant
Constellation Brands.
“We’ve gone from being part of the biggest wine company in the world to one of the smallest,” said Jeff Stewart, Buena Vista’s vice president and winemaker. “We haven’t liked going through all these changes, but throughout the transition, we were growing good grapes and going forward.”
While industry heavyweights controlled its future, Buena Vista’s employees kept doing what they do best – cultivating grapes in the 107 small vineyards that comprise the winery’s 500-acre Ramal Road estate and turning them into award-winning vintages.
Jeff Stewart, winemaker, produced a map of the different varieties of grapes within the vineyard.
The vineyards benefit from the cool, moist air that blows in from San Pablo Bay and the Pacific Ocean, but company spokesman Tony Lombardi gives Stewart credit for winning the awards. “He has a great ability to pull the best from people around him, to create camaraderie and team spirit,” Lombardi said.
Stewart came to Buena Vista in 2004 when its British owner, Allied Domecq, was shifting the focus away from mass production of grapes grown throughout California to small batches using estate grown fruit. While decreasing the annual output from 400,000 cases to 40,000, Allied Domecq wanted to concentrate on grapes their vineyards were best suited for – chardonnays and pinots – along with some syrah, merlot and a little pinot gris.
Stewart was perfect for the job. He grew up in Lake Tahoe and was properly introduced to wine on a high school exchange trip to France. “There they have bread, water and wine at every meal,” he said. “It opened my eyes to the different cultural roles wine can play.”
Guided by his high school chemistry teacher, Stewart enrolled at University of California at Davis to pursue degrees in enology and viticulture, cutting his teeth on cabernets and merlots as an intern at Napa Valley’s Robert Keenan Winery. After graduating in 1988, he zeroed in on Russian River chardonnays and pinots at Laurier, De Loach, Mark West, Kunde and La Crema.
He arrived at Buena Vista just in time to help Allied Domecq spend between $5 and $7 million on upgrades at the winery and vineyards. They divided the acreage into subsections with distinct soil and weather conditions, some as small as 3 or 4 acres that were planted with varietals best suited for their unique terrain. They also upgraded 30-year old winery facilities, adding a series of smaller tanks that can be used for fermenting the fruit from individual subsections.
“The diversity of terrain and grapes gives us a spice rack of flavors we can use as the raw materials going into each vintage,” Stewart said.
The first vintage produced under his watch was well received, with the 2004 Buena Vista Syrah Carneros winning a rare Golden Bear award as Best Red Wine at the 2006 California State Fair. Accolades have followed each year, with new vintages often earning ratings of 90 and above from Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast.
“We do a lot of little things right, from pruning to leaf pulling and shoot thinning,” Stewart said. “When it’s time to make harvest decisions, we try to pick that perfect day, sometimes picking just 3 or 4 acres at a time and always picking them by hand at night, when the grapes are 50 to 52 degrees.
“We do it right in the vineyard, and then we try not to screw it up (in the winery).”
To that end, his crews sort the fruit by hand, discarding stems, leaves “and anything you wouldn’t want to eat” before sending intact berries to the fermenting tanks. “They arrive very clean, very happy and with very little abuse,” Stewart said.
Founded in 1857 by August Haraszthy, the father of California’s wine industry, Buena Vista is Sonoma’s oldest commercial winery. It went out of business during Prohibition, and after several new efforts, closed again in the 1970s. Germany’s Racke family revived it in the 1980s, building the brand into a household name before selling it in 2002 to Allied Domecq, which changed its name to Buena Vista Carneros in 2004. That company was swallowed by Pernod Ricard in 2006, which was gobbled up by Chicago-based Fortune Brand in 2007. Constellation Brands inherited Buena Vista in November 2007 when it purchased the Beam Wine Estates group from Fortune Brand.
In June 2008, a small group of California investors bought Buena Vista Carneros, Geyser Peak, Atlas Peak, Gary Farrell, XYZin and three other wineries in Washington and Idaho. The group is called Ascentia Wine Estates and is based in Healdsburg.
