Melville is an iconic winery in Santa Barbara County, with 20 years of growing and bottling their cool-climate Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Syrah.
In an AVA that’s fewer than 20 years old, Melville is something of an OG. Ron Melville saw Sta. Rita Hills’ cool-climate potential back in 1996, before it was even recognized as an AVA, moving his winemaking operation from Sonoma to its current spot off the 246 highway. Now it’s in his son Chad’s hands, and it’s thriving. After working as the lead winegrower for years, he officially took over the winemaking from Greg Brewer for the 2016 vintage. And he knocked it out of the park. The wines from 2016 exhibit concentration and thrilling aromatics, and they’re picking up a lot of positive press.
There are many special things about Melville, but the fact that they own and farm their own land helps them control the quality as well as the prices, so they can put an amazingly well-bred, textured Pinot out onto the market for under $40. More than any of their wines, the Estate Pinot demonstrates the overarching personality of their site, and at a crazy value. They harvest lot by lot, and ferment each pick separately, then carefully blend with the aim of representing the fruit in a symphony that reflects the estate. Chad Melville very generously took some time to talk with me about the Estate Pinot in the 2016 vintage, which has been rightfully receiving a lot of acclaim. (95 points Vinous, 92 points Wine Advocate, 91 Jeb Dunnuck.)
2016 Melville Estate Pinot Noir is truly special.
CM: This wine in particular is one of the most fun and challenging that we produce. It comes from 21 different blocks, 16 different clones, 5 different soil types. There are different orientations of rows, exposures to the wind and the sun. This bottle is like looking at a completed piece of art. It showcases all the components of the estate.
It has all the new-school Dijon clones to the old-school California selections. Each clone brings something else to the table, whether it’s early ripening, late ripening, etc. The wine is 40 percent whole cluster, and the stems do bring out the savory aromatics and tannic structures. It’s all done by hand, 100 cases at a time. All neutral wood. All estate fruit. All Melville.
Chad Melville on left and Ron Melville on right.
KS: Offering the wine at such an affordable price was part of your dad’s ethos, right? I read that he was very down to earth.
CM: His whole MO is to overdeliver. He wanted people to taste it and like it, then to see the price and like it even more. We can control the costs by owning our land.
The Estate Pinot has always been a great value. But this vintage epitomizes the work we’ve done over the years to adjust and try to perfect. The quality of the wine has gotten better and better. It’s taken us time to learn and understand how to grow better and better fruit. 2016 is where we really landed.
KS: This was the first complete year without Greg (Brewer). How was that transition for you?
CM: I’m always a big believer that some of the best wines come from people who have one foot in the vineyard, and one foot in the cellar. Greg and I worked really well together. I was the voice of the vineyard, and he was the winery. Now, it’s about one person making the bridge between the land and the cellar. It wasn’t a big thing, but emotionally and spiritually for me it was a big change.
KS: How does that bridge between land and cellar work in this wine?
CM: Our harvest lasts for 8 weeks. As a reference point, some Burgundy harvests are done in 5 days. We pick gradually based on the readiness of individual lots. The first lots are picked early in the season and destemmed. We get high-toned, high-acid, fresh crunchy cranberry, pomegranate, and rose petal flavors from those grapes. Certain blocks perform really well at that high-acid, less-sugar, less-ripe state. As the season goes on, things ripen up then the stems ripen more; that’s when we start to incorporate more whole cluster.
And then toward the end things are coming in at 100% whole cluster. The fruit is darker, richer, with bassier tones. Everything goes into barrel as its own individual lot. For 2016, we had 134 different 1.5-ton fermenters. We keep them separate without SO2, in neutral wood for 9 months.
KS: It must be a complicated process to blend all of that into a final wine.
CM: We go out and taste the vineyard first. The blending is done at harvest time. I’m consciously picking to highlight a certain component of the vineyard, so when it comes time to blend we have all the elements in place.
KS: In other words, you are tasting the whole time you’re harvesting, and have a sense of what the wine is gonna taste like before its in bottle?
CM: Yes. This is the only fruit I’ve ever worked with, and I planted these vines. I know these vines well. We all do. It’s the same fruit, same vineyard, same crew each year. Some of the people have been here since I’ve been here, 23 years. They really know the fruit. The understanding is so important. We grow better fruit every year. We’re constantly tweaking the vineyard to make everything better.
KS: Can you talk about the vintage?
CM: 2016 was a big rain year. The vines could grow roots in an environment that wasn’t salty, which accumulates from the water we irrigate with. The yield wasn’t higher, but the quality was. Vines have a tendency to make up for whatever happened last year. But that’s not the case in drought conditions. They want to produce. It’s how they propagate. But in the drought they became unhealthy and were more prone to disease pressure, mildew.
But what we do best here is farm. You just do everything you can and then just hold on. The Sta. Rita Hills has plenty of upsides, but we really don’t get a lot of rain. We have the cool breeze, the natural acidity, but we’ll never be able to do dry farming. We’re 12 miles from the ocean so we get moisture in the form of fog, we get wind to dry that out, and that keeps yields low, berries small, vines working hard. All of that characteristic in the fruit is thanks to Mother Nature. We try to take advantage of Mother Nature by exposing the vines to the wind, providing a nutrient-dense cover crop program.
We really view ourselves as winegrowers. We’re a 100-percent estate program. We own our land and do our own farming. We are farmers first. So to be all-estate grown, we’re really proud of that. We don’t buy any fruit from anybody. Our dedication is even seen through no new oak—we use neutral barrels in order to showcase the vineyard’s nuances. It all makes sense.
KS: And do you see your kids wanting to go into the business and take the reins as the next generation?
CM: My son wants to be the quarterback for the 49ers. After he’s done he’ll come back and make wine.
- Kate Soto