Dancing Crow & Scott Kirkpatrick
A Winefullness Interview
John Lennon said that life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans, and my visit to meet winemaker Scott Kirkpatrick at Dancing Crow shows that Lennon knew what he was talking about.
I'd only come here yesterday because my friends Paula and Karen had invited me to meet with them for a get-together to celebrate Karen's anniversary and to chat about our mutual love of the wines of Simiane Cellars, but once I'd sat down and started chatting to the owners Tony and Sarah I sensed that this place might be worth a little bit more time as well.
This was confirmed when I sampled the wines that were being made by Scott, because these little beauties really grab the attention and make you want to know what is going on at this little find on Highway 101, just before you get to Ukiah.
I asked Scott if I could drop by the following day to hear his story and his wine philosophy, and he was only too pleased to meet me in the barrel room as we chatted under the gaze of his mournful dog.
Entrance to Dancing Crow
Scott Kirkpatrick
Winefullness Magazine: How did you end up here?
​Scott Kirkpatrick: Great question. I was working in a winery in Napa called Eleven Eleven for over 7 years, and in that time I started my own brand, and that became so big that I just kind of quit my day job to focus on that full time in January of 2020, which turned out to be a pretty inopportune time to quit a job that paid me a salary because the pandemic happened in March.
I had that project with my ex-wife, and then we broke up in 2021 and I was looking to just do something else, and I reached out to a couple of people.
I was thinking about shutting down my project and I told people that if they heard of anybody looking for an assistant winemaker, or something else, to let me know. I just needed something that paid me a pay check, and I'm trying to just put my life back together a little bit because I had so much change so quickly, and a really good friend of mine was one of three wine makers working for a winery called Dancing Crow. I knew the other two as well, a husband and wife team, and I knew all three of them from my very first harvest internship in Napa. Jason was my supervisor, and David and Catherine worked on a couple projects, and so I talked to them and they were looking for some help with bottling, and looking for somebody to stick around for a while. They were honest about it being a part-time job, but they hoped to work out some other jobs within the company for it to make sense, and so we did that.
I started working in the farmers markets for a little while, and helped to get all the '21s bottled and this was 2022 when I started, and then in the summer of July; Jason, Catherine and David realised at the same time that it was time to move on to other things. I think they saw that I could handle things and all of a sudden I was the last winemaker standing.
It happened pretty suddenly and Tony was freaking out, and I remember that I was in the vineyards one day and I rode my Harley back to my place, and I'd missed about 40 calls by the time I got back to my house, and most of them were from Tony, and I called him and he's panicking. I asked him what was going on and he told me that everybody had just quit. He was wondering what he was going to do, and who's going to make the wines, and I told him that I could make them.
The Dancing Crow Barrel Room
So we have a talk and I did the 2022 vintage, mostly by myself in vineyards I'd never really worked before, but I'd been kind of supervising the winemaking of Napa wines for several years at that point and been working for pretty much all of the most famous consultants that were in the Napa Valley, and I'd learned a lot about what I think are great practices, and I'd learned a lot about things that I thought if I had the chance to do on my own I would try, and my vision of where I thought wine was going kind of aligned with Dancing Crow.
One of the reasons I really jumped in with Tony to begin with was because I thought that here was a place that's making affordable wine, that is thinking outside the box when it comes to how they reach their customers, and it's a winery that's actually going to the customer.
I knew about the farmers market programme where Dancing Crow had boots in about 35 to 40 farmers markets in California every week, and I know how hard it is to make it in this industry as a professional, and as a company, and I know that it really requires out-of-the-box thinking and an empathy for the customer that I think has been lost in a lot of the industry.
I thought that this was a company that I'm willing to hitch my wagon to, and I became the full-time winemaker in July, and we bought a new property in October of 2022 in Mendocino County, where we are right now, and Tony said to me that if I he bought this property would I move up here and help build a winery. I never thought I would end up in a 600/700 person town in Mendicino County, but I gave it a shot.
I had actually been a part of Eleven Eleven in Napa. I was their first employee and I got to see them build a winery, and I had a real knowledge of what it looked like to build something from the ground up. How hard it is, how much you have to scrap to put things together sometimes, and so it was kind of a kismet moment. The fact that I happened to be there at a moment when Tony really needed me, and Dancing Crow happened to be there at a moment when I needed a purpose.
Winefullness: What's the one thing you've learned in your time here?
Scott: Can I cheat and say two things? One thing is perseverance. Not every day is easy and I think we're in a uniquely difficult time in this industry in general. There have been moments when you wonder if it's worth continuing.
I'm not here to make money necessarily, I'm here because there have been a couple of moments in my life where I found out about wine and it lit something up inside of me that I have never been able turn off. I'm really passionate about it, I really love it, and I think in tough times you need that passion to carry on. There are days when that feels not enough, but learning how to move forward when it's tough has been a huge lesson for me.
It's also important to know your purpose and to know the why of what you're doing, and that's something that is always developing for me.
I do a lot of sales travel around the country, and the more I get out and meet customers and retailers, sales reps, and all these people that wine has to pass through to get to the eventual end customer, it's really important to be able to explain why you exist, because there's a million wines out there. There's a lot of competition wherever you go and you have to give people a real reason to put their money behind you.
Dancing Crow Van in Profile
That can be affordability with a great product or a great package, and the reality of where we are right now means that it has to be everything. You have to hit it on all fronts if you want to stand out in this industry.
Winefullness Magazine: What would you say is the unique selling point of Dancing Crow?
Scott Kirkpatrick: I think there are a lot of wineries making great wines, and I think there are a lot of wineries making wines that are somewhat in the same style as us, but I think the simplicity and clarity of what we do, and a real lack of pretension about how we go about things set us apart, mixed with affordability.
I've told several people this recently. If you want to know what it looks like for a small company to fight it out with the big companies in the marketplace, that's us.
We're big in the sense that we make about 20 to 25,000 cases of wine, which is not a small amount of wine, but when you compare it to other things that are hitting grocery store shelves around the country we're less than 1/10 of the next kind of wine business that we're sharing shelf space with.
Winefullness: Would you say that your volume allows you to hit a low competitive price point?
Scott: That's certainly a big part of it. Having our own vineyards are a big part of it. Shrewdness, in the sense that we run a lean ship. We don't have a huge crew and we don't spend money on marketing. I've gone into retailers and said that I was sorry that I couldn't buy them a polo shirt like the company that's on the polo shirt they're wearing. I can't send you on vacations or give you animatronic displays for your store, but I can promise you that we're real people who really care about what we do, and we're really passionate about making affordably great wine.
I want to make this thing that I really care about available to as many people as possible, and I think that people who can't afford expensive wine still deserve great wine, so while I don't have the money to spend the same as some big brands, our honesty of approach is a currency that that goes a long way.
Winefullness: You said about your vision of wine. How would you sum it up?
Scott: I think affordability is huge, and I think that any business you're in, hopefully you understand who your customer is.
I think there's people in Napa doing great and wonderful things, but in general I think that there's a pretty big stylistic change in California wines.
I think we've been working to convince customers, or potential customers, that wine is this really special luxury product that is so special that it's actually somewhat unknowable, and there's only a handful of people in the world who know how to make it so well that it's going to be worth spending several hundred a bottle for it.
We've done this thing where we've taken and we've created so much obfuscation in how we've been marketing wine as an overall industry that people and kids feel like wine isn't for them. It's not because they don't drink, it's that we have lost our respect for new generations in the industry, and I think we haven't taken the time to understand who they are, and what they want.
Young people do have access to everything, and their taste is a really important currency in modern culture. I think our ability to sift through global information and come up with things that feel meaningful to us is a form of currency in culture, and we have to find ways to speak to people, and not just assume that our customers are going to have the same spending habits as their parents or grandparents, because every generation spends their money differently from their parents.
I think younger people are spending less money on things like alcohol. New flavours of the week are coming up all the time, whether it's cannabis drinks or canned cocktails or ready to drink in the can, and I think there's room for more than we like to think. If you think about where consumption was, I would bet that we're still up from where we were 10 years ago.
Whether it's America, or modern culture, or whatever, we have this somewhat evil obsession with growth. We think that infinite growth is not only possible but we demand it, and I think it's a really unrealistic way to think about the economy or think about a business, especially a business that is so tied into our hearts and our passions. We have to have room for ups and downs, and we have to be able to be flexible in multiple environments.
When one part of the industry starts struggling it puts strain on everybody else, and if one part of the industry is focusing on things that aren't healthy long term it can cause a cascading effect.
I don't think I'm speaking out of turn when I say that I think a lot of Napa wineries are uniquely struggling with having a lot of stock that they don't know how to sell because people aren't spending that much money per bottle, and they still have stuff in the warehouse and they're going to start producing less, but a lot of Napa wineries subsidise their costs by buying fruit in places like Lake County and Mendocino County to blend in legal amounts into their wines. Once they start struggling more they're going to stop buying that bulk wine or stop buying that fruit from other counties, and that creates a strain on those counties because they were being supported by these Napa wineries with more money.
The cost of bulk wine has plummeted to being almost valueless. A couple of years ago I was able to sell Sauvignon Blanc for $20 a gallon and now I probably couldn't sell it for $2.00.
There are all these pressure relief valves that are no longer available. Even if people are making smart decisions and doing things in a healthy and intelligent way we know this world is connected, is so global.
Tariffs not withstanding, we know that when we intentionally limit somebody it's going to put pressure back on us. Maybe it's not immediate but it's going to come back and do us harm.
Winefullness Magazine: Do you think tariffs will have a real bite on the industry?
Scott Kirkpatrick: I think there will be short term benefits for some American wineries and I think some of our sales are probably motivated because of the tariffs, but I think that anytime you have to tear somebody else down or step over somebody else to get to where you're going, you better think long and hard whether or not it's worth being there.
We have a pretty simple classic style of wine that we make here that is maybe a little bit more European than classic California in terms of structure and acidity. Almost all of our distributors are European focused, and if all of our distributors can't get 60 to 80% of their portfolio out to the market that really endangers the health of their company.
We rely on their company being healthy because if they're going place a case order they need be able to pay that bill. If these companies can't survive then we're never going to be paid, or if they go out of business we've got to find a new distributor, and that's a really difficult process right now because nobody wants to take on new customers.
Maybe I'm being naive but I refuse to believe that punishing people in our orbit is ever a good solution to helping us move forward.
Winefullness: So how do you see the immediate and long term future of wine production in Mendocino and California?
Scott: Our wineries are in Mendocino County, our vineyards in Lake County, which have, I think, been left behind in a lot of the wine conversations of the last 20 years, although there's so much history. There's just so much winemaking history up here, but because it's further away from San Francisco, further away from a major airport it's hidden away from a lot of tourist traffic.
Lake County in particularly is difficult to get to physically because you have to drive through the mountains to get there. Our vineyards are 15 miles from the winery but it takes me 40 minutes to get the vineyard, and for an average person that's a bit of a barrier. For a tourist to go up into the mountains to go to these wineries is a difficult choice when they could just drive down the street.
I think Mendocino and Lake County have been held back in terms of finances. The fruits not as expensive, the wines are cheaper, but I think if you experienced Napa in the 80s and you come up here, I think it's probably pretty similar to what that was.
We're possibly forty or fifty years behind in terms of the feel of what we're doing. I've told this to a lot of folks that it's frustrating that we all haven't got rich like you see down south, but I think that's our superpower right now. We haven't been priced into a corner and don't have to charge $150.00. I've literally made Cabernet that people paid $45,000 a ton for and that's not even that uncommon down there.
Dancing Crow Gazebo
I mean a cheap Cabernet in Napa for long time was $15,000 to $18,000 a ton if you wanted anything decent. You're not even going to find anything costing $5000 up here. I think the wine consumer is definitely going to be really cost conscious for a while, and so being able to make affordable wine is essential right now, and being able to move a lot of wine at once is essential, and so I think that places like Lake County and Mendocino County are actually the future.
I think if anybody is going to do well in this environment it's going to be Mendocino and Lake County, and places like Lodi. I have a lot of love for Lodi, made a lot of wine there for a long time.
It will still be a struggle for a while, but I do think that the future of wine is in making real wines in reasonable quantities as cheaply as you can, and as well as you can. Then doing everything you can to get in front of your customer, meet them where they are because you can't just sit in the tasting room and expect people to come to you.
You have to think outside the box because there's a lot of wineries, and most of them kinda have the same story. It's like so and so made this money doing this and they put it into this winery, or we are a young family and we really loved wine and we had some money and decided to start making some wine.
You have to differentiate yourselves. Something that can be a unique pathway into the industry, or maybe you're making a unique wine uniquely or reimagining ways to make certain varieties. Whatever it is, you've gotta be able to set yourself apart, and it's really hard because there's a finite amount of shelf space and you've gotta be compelling enough to not only get on the shelf, but to get somebody to pick that bottle off the shelf.
I think so many people assume that because they make a good thing it will find a customer.
Winefullness: You were saying about the sort of distances from here to San Francisco, and Dancing Crow are using various markets to promote the brand. Have you ever thought about sharing tasting room space with other wineries?
Scott: I've certainly thought about it when I was doing my own thing, and there's a lot of things that I probably should have done a lot differently when I was doing my brand. I really burned myself out trying to do everything myself, and I would do it a little bit differently now.
I have some friends that started a kind of collaborative tasting room in Napa that seems to be doing really great, and they make really cool wines. I think it's called the Napa River Club. They share a tasting room in downtown Napa, and they gave it a good feel that felt right to them and it seems like it's doing really well.
I think it's tough to have a tasting room in the city if you don't have a realistic presence in the city, because nobody is going to San Francisco to go wine tasting. I think it's important to stop relying on tourism, and to be a compelling enough thing in your own community where you can get enough support, because in times of economic uncertainty I think we tend to stay a little closer to home instead of going away for the weekend.
So, I think making sure that things close-by are taken care of and really focusing on your own community is actually a much healthier way.
Winefulllness Magazine: Is there one question you wish I'd have asked and how would you answer it?
Scott Kirkpatrick: That's a good question. Maybe a better question is why have some taste changed? I think kombucha is a thing we don't talk about enough and how it changed customer tastes around the world and made it possible for sour beers and natural wine to have a presence in people's homes.
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I'd like to thank Scott for taking the time to chat because I found what he was saying to be so interesting and enlightening. This is a man who thinks about the Californian wine scene because it informs the wines he nurtures, and it is obvious from what he has said, and what I've tried, that this is a man who's reputation can only grow.
Recommendations
Barrel Sign to Dancing Crow
2023 Chardonnay
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It's unoaked, crisp and lovely. There's a freshness that's based in acidity, and a mixture of pears and grapefruit melding together in a satisfying mixture.
These California Chardonnays are moving so far away from those heavy wooden numbers and that's allowing the nuance to come through and exciting those who come across them.
2021 Corbeau Rusé
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It's a wow from me as this blend of Grenache and Syrah grabs my attention.
I'm getting black plum, vanilla, dark cherries and a little bit of chocolate.
It's a fine example of just what one can do when one is thinking outside of the box.
2021 Old Stake Cabernet Sauvignon
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While this may not grab the attention like the others listed here, don't make the mistake of thinking it's average, because it's far from that.
There's blackberries, cherries, vanilla, oak, leather, and a nutty accompaniment that makes this so satisfying it's like watching your favourite football team win easily.
2021 Old Stake 1901 'Field Blend'
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Scott is certainly producing the goods consistently, and this addition to the Dancing Crow portfolio doesn't let down the team.
There's blueberry, a sliver of pepper, smoke, cloves, cigar and a rich mouthfeel.
The range of varieties that are here is a roll-call of the good and the interesting, and the winemaker has been adventurous, and been fully rewarded with a wine that one wants to take the time to discover.
The union of Scott Kirkpatrick and owners Tony and Sarah is a real meeting of minds and ambitions because they want to produce great wine that is interesting, approachable and very affordable
The wines I tried at Dancing Crow really took me by surprise because I wasn't expecting them, and though I have mentioned a few above, there is such a range for the taster to explore that I know you're going to be able to find so much to enjoy.
If Scott, Tony and Sarah are also around when you visit to taste then you are in for a real treat because the philosophy of Dancing Crow, the history of Napa, and Tony's lovable enthusiasm for people are waiting to be discovered, along with some damn fine wines.