Jim Rickards
Wisdom and Wine
If you get on to Highway 101 and head north, just before you leave Sonoma County, you come to Jim Rickards property and it's quite a find, because not only does he grow grapes that help others to win prizes, he produces a selection of wines that you can spend hours enjoying as you look out over his vines, in the shadow of the beautiful house he built for his family.
I travelled there on the sort of day when silence drops over the land like a comforting duvet, and not even traffic from the nearby highway could disturb the calm.
I nearly got lost and ended up at a big property that belongs to a film director, but before I slept with the fishes I asked for help and was directed to Jim's place, and the world of a man who I could listen to for an age, and if you're spending time with Jim be prepared to enjoy his company because he likes to talk, and after we met, he led me outside to sit in the shade where we would happily talk for quite a while.
Winefullness Magazine: You certainly have a beautiful property.
Jim Rickards: Well, it takes work because you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.
Winefullness Magazine: So you don’t think it’s down to the winemaker?
Jim: I'm a bit biased. If it’s down to great winemaking they should be able to make the wine with grapes from anywhere. If it's all about the winemaker, they should be able to take those rocks over there and make one of the best wines ever.
I was actually not born to this business. I was born and raised in San Francisco. I was a city kid all my life, but I always knew I wanted to be a farmer, because you have to remember that city kids think milk comes from the grocery store.
I had a dream, so when I got out of the military in '69 I did three things. I grew my hair, grew a moustache, and I moved out of Dodge, and by that I mean that I came up here from San Francisco and did the kind of the hippie ‘back the land’ thing.
I moved to this place in '76, and I initially got into the cattle business because I just thought I could. Meaning, I thought cows were big pets and they walked around and took care of themselves. I was dreadfully wrong, but the fact is that it got me in a direction I needed to go, and that was agriculture.
Now in '75 I started looking around for a property I could afford, and even then vineyard property around here was very expensive. The fact is that down on the flat land, down there good vineyard land is good agricultural land, and up here I found this property and I could afford it for two reasons. Reason number one was that it was considered a crappy place to go grapes, and still is based on the paradigm of the day. This means that back then you had two flavours, red and white and it came in gallon jugs.
So it was about bulk winemaking and volume grape growing, If you weren’t getting 8 to 10 tonnes of an acre you weren't economically viable in those days. Our old vineyard that was planted in 1908 was only getting about 1/2 a tonne to the acre and largely abandoned.
The other reason why I could afford the property was that there were no buildings here. My kids and I lived outside in a tent and in an old wrecked school bus for a year while I built that house myself.
Winefullness Magazine: You must have been the viticultural Partridge family?
Jim: It was a wrecked school bus, and we had to put a tent over the top of it because there were so many holes in it from body rot. I did that and I worked nights, and what I did for a living might be a little surprising to you.
I've just retired from my day job in 2020. I was an ICU nurse at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital and did that for about 50 years…
Winefullness Magazine: You were a medic in the army?
Jim: Yes. I was actually with the marine corp. So, I built my house, worked nights and gradually planted more and more grapes. Now why did I get out of the cattle business? Well in '76/77 there was the first of a series of true droughts than we've had in California and there was no grass to feed the cows, so it was bye bye cows, and I started paying attention to this old vineyard, and as luck would have it this is a perfect example of how luck trumps skill every time.
I had no money to do what everybody else did in those days, and that is to pull out the old vineyard to plant a new one, and I figured that if this was the hand dealt me then I'm going to learn how to get the best out of this old vineyard.
You gotta remember that 1908 was a long time ago and the tractors in those days were called horses, and the kind of blending they did in those days, you couldn't do with a pump like we do now because there were no pumps, they weren't invented yet.
The person who planted the vineyard, Rosa Brignole, decided on the kind of wine she wanted to make, and the wine style and the blending grapes that she would want in that blend, and then she planted them all together, all mixed up, so as you pick the vineyard you get the blend. That's how they made wine two centuries ago.
Gentleman Jin
Winefullness Magazine: And you’ve carried on that tradition?
Jim Rickards: That's correct, and we still make it. It's a pretty exceptional place in so many ways. It’s 1908, a woman owns a winery and farmed 60 acres of grapes. That's pretty exceptional. Then you have the field blend, but nobody really understood the importance of that. In other words, Rosa figured out what she wanted to do by planting the grapes she wanted to have. 80% Zin, 10% Petit Sirah, 5% Carignane, 2% Mataro 1% Percent each of Alicante Bouchet, Muscat Canelli and Chasselas. They did it under 150 years ago and it was done by flavour.
It's not instinct. My neighbour, who recently died at 103 years old, told me about how he helped his grandpa make wine, and basically nobody ever knew what the varieties were, and what they did was taste the grapes, and at the point of ripeness they would say that Y will go really well with X.
We try a glass of Sauvignon and Jim tells me more about it.
This guy's got a big mid-palate and a long lingering flavour, and what makes it unusual is how it’s grown. Up at 1200 feet of elevation, south of here, at the other end of the valley. You can actually see it from here. It is where the Russian River courses through very tight areas around Healdsburg, and the far bank does not do very well, and it builds up and rises, and then it goes through this notch where the vineyard is located.
It has the most radical diurnal temperature changes you ever seen in your life. It could be 100° at 4:00pm and dropped to 40° at 6:00pm. At the same time you get a heat that adds a ripeness, and you get the cold to add that nice acidity and bright fruit. There's nobody around here that makes a style like that because it's hard to find a site like this. It's a place where Sauvignon Blanc shouldn't ever be planted because you should have planted Cabernet.
Winefullness Magazine: When you were starting out you sold most of your grapes?
Jim: I still do. I planted more and more vineyards over the years and we farm about 50 acres total, 43 here and the balance down the road, a mile or so. We pick about 150 tonnes of grapes a year, half of which are sold to other wineries. I keep certain blocks myself and certain blocks go to other wineries.
Winefullness Magazine: Do these wineries try and dictate your growing style?
Jim: Nobody ever told me. We grow high-end fruit. Our yield here is around 3 tons an acre. Not a lot, so what you get is quite good.
During my course of life here I've had two epiphanies. Epiphany #1 happened in 1978. I just finished my house, well just enough that we could live in it, and I just had the old vineyard, and I said to myself, you know there's probably only about 5 or 6 tons of grapes down there. I don't need to hire a big crew to come and pick it, I can pick it myself, and I wound up actually picking 10 1/2 tons, and it took me about 7 days to do that, and I was picking in lug boxes, 40 LB lug boxes.
I was loading them into my truck, off-loading at the winery and then coming back for another load. I was actually moving that 10 tonnes by myself three times, and my epiphany came when I realised that I never wanted to do that again, but it got me thinking about how I wanted to be a farmer and how I wanted to approach this thing?
Now, I wanted to be a small farmer, and 50 acres is not small, however if I divided that up in Cabernet, Petite Syrah, Zin, Malbec, Grenache and so forth, my picking window now went from the 1st of September through to third week in October. I didn't need a big crew to pick everything all at one time. I could space it out, I only have to pick a little every day, and that means I only need a small crew, but they certainly work hard.
It takes us a long time to do the various tasks, and the guys are constantly working, moving through, and there's no off time. That means I have full-time employees in agriculture and that's fairly rare. The deal here is that the crew who stay with me can be developed into working and doing things that are exceptional around grape growing. They are skilled professionals, and like all skilled professionals they are well paid, and they get health care and things like that.
They get bonuses, not production bonuses, but skill bonuses. For instance, when our wines get gold metals and scores of 90s and so forth everybody gets a little cheque, and because of that things work very well and we can train them to do extraordinary things.
I do my own grafting, which nobody does anymore, but we graft like they did in the 1800s. It’s called field grafting, or chip grafting. I don't buy nursery stock because it's all raised here on the farm, and there is far less chance of anything going wrong.
This means that I don't have a lot of those other diseases everybody gets, like Leafroll and Red Blotch. I've tested my whole vineyard for Leafroll and we don't have it because when you're collecting grafting wood we collect it at harvest. When we talk about the grapes being right, we also talk about the wood being right. My crew are trained to do that.
Winefullness Magazine: You’ve got The Lost Children haven’t you?
Jim Rickards: You’ve heard of that? That's a Port style, but is different because it's more like a Madeira than a true Port.
The Lost Children refers to years ago when the leaves would fall off the vines and you could see all these bunches lying out there that the pickers had missed. I would say think about all those grapes and all that money I’ve lost.
In 1992 I decided at the end of the year, usually it's right at the first two weeks of November, we go out and have the crew pick everything that's left, raisins and whatever, and it is really very high in sugar at that point. It's very difficult to ferment, and it turns out I have a native yeast that we've isolated here, and it sat in the bin for about two weeks, and then all of a sudden it started to ferment, and that was the first existence that I know that we had a native yeast here.
What we do with it is add a brandy, not to taste but we added to flavour the wine, and typically the alcohol is around 18%. We make it in the Madeira style, meaning that every year we take some out of the bottles and then add new wine to it.
I have three rules of wine tasting here. Number one, we're tasting not drinking, and that means it's perfectly okay to pour any untasted wine out.
Number 2 is to stay hydrated and drink lots of water.
Number 3, and the most important, is to never ask me a question unless you're expecting a 20 minute answer.
Anyway, going back to the yeast. It is very fruity and you don't want to use it on a Zinfandel. That is already fruity, however, where you have traditionally muted big Reds like Petite Syrah, Cabernet and Syrah, this is where we let them all go native and it really brings out the pretty aromatics with fruity components.
Winefullness Magazine: Do you see a moment when you won't grow grapes for other wineries?
Jim Rickards: No. I like a diversified environment. People ask me all the time what I make more money on, selling wine or selling grapes, and that's a fair question, and the answer is selling wine, but with every agricultural endeavour, where you have vertical integration you always make more money.
In the wine industry you only get your money back after about 3 or 4 years. When I'm growing grapes it's here's my grapes give me money, so it helps with overheads, production costs and these kind of things. So the answer is, I do a lot of things but give me enough money I'll do anything for you.
Winefullness Magazine: As a prime grower are you sometimes in the background and wish that people knew about your product?
Jim: We make wine for other wineries, and one of the wineries we just made some wine for, in the North Coast Challenge, this winery just won the top three Whites, and we made those whites here, but it's her winery, it’s her wine and she can take the glory.
Of all the wineries that we've made wine for here, three out of four of them all have top flight awards associated with their wines. It's not about me, it's about the product here.
Winefullness Magazine: How is business at the moment. I keep hearing the area is taking a bit of a hit?
Jim: Yeah, we're definitely overplanted, and I will give you one of the coolest examples of overplanting in a vineyard. Everybody thinks that the grape growers went out of business during prohibition. They did not, and all the little wineries, I hate the word pivoted, because what they ended up doing was perfectly legal during prohibition, but every adult could make 100 gallons of wine, legally for personal consumption. That was 200 gallons per family. Think about that, you can’t even drink 100 to 200 gallons of wine.
So these wineries loaded up their grapes and drove down to the cities and sold them. They crushed them for people who would bring their containers. Grape growers in the early part of that period made more money than they ever did selling to the wineries.
What happened next? They overplanted because they were making too much money, and by the time prohibition ended the price of grapes had collapsed and that is a great story of overplanting.
So, over the last 20 years or so prices have been good and the markets been expanding. This is only my view, but what has happened is that we have an overplanting situation because people could easily sell grapes, but there's a finite audience out there. At the same time prices have been expanding, and we are now back in a depression/recession again and a period of extended inflation.
In times like these when people come under pressure from inflation, in the past they bought cheaper wines, but this time that hasn’t happened because I think that the wine drinker is not willing to drink cheaper wine. They want a good wine they can afford, so they’re not going to buy that expensive red, they're going to buy a Sauvignon Blanc, and cheaper, but good wine.
Also, two years ago you were comfortably drinking a bottle of wine a week at between $35 and $50 a week. Well you still want that wine, but instead of drinking a bottle of it, you're saving it for the weekend. I see that in my own sales.
Winefullness Magazine: Is this a new phenomenon for the wine industry?
Jim Rickards: I think it's not a new phenomenon. It just explains the sales scenario that we see here. I think it’s a little better than saying everybody's drinking other things. I don't believe they're drinking other things.
It's like the whole fear about cannabis. The fact is that it's never happened, because people that use cannabis are the same people that buy a six pack of cheap beer and drink it down. They're interested in the effects of the drug. They’re not going to sit down and drink a six pack with their dinner. They're not going to smoke a joint with their dinner. They’re after the effects, the high.
So, the only wines and beers that were affected by cannabis are the cheap beers. It’s true. Their sales have plummeted.
Winefullness Magazine: What about the high-end market?
Jim: The high-end market for beer is, I think, there, but then again most of those beers don't fit the supermarket ideal and they’re fighting for three feet of shelf space.
Winefullness Magazine: Would you say the same about the wine industry? What about all those boutique wineries I used to hear about?
Jim: You won’t hear about them at the moment. The fact is that Sonoma County is really the last bastion of small family owned agricultural ventures. I mean, we're not just talking grape production, we're talking about dairy, cheese, beekeeping or whatever you’ve got there's somebody attached. You don't see anywhere else, and it's just a really cool place, and as a result people tend to be real, they tend to be honest and the people that work the land are honest…
Hard Graft
Winefullness Magazine: Even more so than say Mendocino County ?
Jim: I think that's because Mendocino is not as diverse.
Winefullness Magazine: What changes have you seen in your time here in the wine game?
Jim Rickards: What do you mean?
Winefullness Magazine: The first time I went to Napa you'd either not pay to taste or it'd be $5. No by appointments, no reservations. Sonoma seems to be slowly following that.
Jim: Our tasting fee is the equivalent of $5. It’s based on the cost of the wine, but reservations are important for us. Remember I said to you that our tasting is more immersive. It's not about pounding down wine, it's about appreciating what is in that glass, and the total preparation of that takes a lot of time.
It's important for us to be able to take the time with visitors that come here. We have an entirely different kind of person that comes tasting here.
Winefullness Magazine: What sort of person?
Jim: A lot like you. People that come here are putting in an effort. We're isolated and there are hardly any wineries or tasting rooms nearby. That means you want to come here and experience what we have to offer, what's in the glass, who makes it, where it came from and why we did X to make the wine we’re proud of.
That’s a different kind of wine person. We get people that are like you, wanna know why did you do this? I’ll say, let's go down in the vineyard and I'll show you.
I do a newsletter once a month and it’s mostly about farming. I do very little about wine, mostly because everybody that reads it understands about wine and so why do I need to tell them, but I do want to tell them what's happening out on the land.
Last year we did this kind of funny part. Every year we do a theme on a T-shirt, and last year I got one of my sayings, one of what they called 'Jimisms' on there, and it was Jim’s Rules of Farming Number 3. Tractors only break when you use them, the rest of the time they're in perfect condition.
Last year I got really excited to see all four of my tractors working, and I did a video newsletter and started them all up so everyone could see that they were working. They lasted for about two weeks.
Winefullness Magazine: I saw on your website that you have a lot of recipes. Have you thought about a doing cookery book?
Jim Rickards: Not really. I told you my epiphany's. I didn't tell you about what happened in 2010. At that time I was doing all the grape growing, all the winemaking, and everything. My typical day would start at 3:00 in the morning, when I would get up to get ready to pick. We would pick 'till about noon when it got warm, and then we would process the fruit in the afternoon, and then I would clean up.
One day I finished working about 11 at night, and I was thinking to myself that I only had so many 20 hour days left in me. Did I want to spend them doing this? The answer was no, get help, much like I did with my farming part.
I put a great deal of thought into how I wanted to organise things, and what happened next was that I got a really good winemaker, and we have a collegial style of winemaking and grape growing.
In other words, Blaine Brazil is our technical winemaker, and I'm the grape growing part of that winemaking team. I still get to do what I really love to do, the farming, and we put the blends together, we taste together all the time, we work together, walk together during harvest time to decide when to pick, because here we pick on flavour, not numbers, and it's a great team, and that means I don't have to worry about the small stuff, just the big picture.
The quality of the wines we make for others and ourselves are extraordinary. They know it and we know it. It’s not about me it's about the product.
Only ONE to Try?
2021 Old Vine Zin
There's a powerful Aroma coming from the glass, from quite a distance, and this gets me more excited than an episode of South Park at the moment.
Take a sip, and you're rewarded with clusters of youthful Blackcurrants, graphite, and bold, big fruit that doesn't overwhelm the whole.
When I first tasted Zinfandel all those years ago it could be so brutal that you felt your tastebuds were getting mugged. Jim's take on a classic is to polish off the rough edges and let the fruit speak for itself, but in a restrained manner that reminds me of a slow-burning fuse. Just give it a minute and a multitude of tastes will come along to say hello. This is absolutely gorgeous.
This is what Jim says.
This wine pays tribute to the grape growing and winemaking predecessors that came before us in the Alexander Valley. Jim Rickards has taken cuttings from a number of Old Vine zinfandel blocks in the area, including the Pastori, Nervo, Vasconi, Mazzoni, Patchetti and Osborne vineyards. Additional fruit from several area vineyards was combined with our estate zin to create this classic blend.
The grapes for our Ancestor Selections Zinfandel were all picked at the same time and co-fermented in the classic field-blend style of the early 1900s and then aged in French and American oak barrels for 21 months.
Aromas of black cherry, licorice, and white pepper predominate. Well-structured on the palate, rich flavors of plum and boysenberry yield to an extended finish of toasty vanilla oak that perfectly rounds out this wine.
