One of my favorite assignments every year is The Independent magazine’s August issue on the three-day Harvest Wine Celebration. There are now more than 50 wineries in the Livermore Valley and this special edition includes a short feature on every single one. This year, I was asked to profile three wineries: Chouinard Vineyards & Winery, Garre Vineyard & Winery and Page Mill Winery. Because the magazine is only produced in hard copy, I can’t provide a link to the articles. So, here are the features that were published last week:
New Tasting Room Enhances Idyllic Setting
By Elizabeth Campos Rajs
Although Chouinard Vineyards & Winery has a Castro Valley address, its hillside, wooded location on Palomares Road lends a peaceful ambiance that is far more countryside than city.
The six-mile drive in from the 580 freeway sets the tone for a visit to this idyllic, welcoming retreat. PalomaresRoad is a two-lane country road with rolling hills rising and dropping around every turn as it wends past open pastures, horse properties and white-fenced ranch homes.
The location is exactly what attracted George and Caroline Chouinard to the property when they first set eyes on it more than 30 years ago. An architect, George’s work on a project for a winery sparked the couple’s interest and they started dreaming about owning their own winery in retirement.
“That, and we enjoyed drinking wine,” Caroline said, smiling. “Wine was an interest of ours.”
Even though their sons were in junior high and George was a good 15 years away from retirement, they started laying the groundwork for their dream business sooner rather than later. “It took a lot of planning,” George said. By 1977, they began seriously looking for property and as soon as they saw the 10-acre Palomares Road property, they were sold, Caroline said.
The couple was able to look past the dilapidated home and the neglected 90-year-old barn to see the beauty and potential of the diamond-in-the-rough setting. The family planted vineyards on the property with an old garden tractor, constructed arbor-shaded picnic areas and renovated the aging red barn to accommodate a barrel room and tasting room.
This past summer, the Chouinards built a new tasting room on the first loor of the barn, adjacent to the barrel room. It’s more spacious and provides easier access for visitors thantheoriginal room on the second story. As withthe rest of the winery, they did all the work themselves, with the help of family and friends. The result is a lovely light-filled space that faces the vineyards and opens out onto the patio and picnic areas.
The winery officially opened in 1985, the same year their son, Damian, graduated with a degree in viticulture. After completing an internship in the Champagne region of France, he returned home and became the winery’s first – and only – winemaker.
They started winning awards immediately, as evidenced by the wall of ribbons in the upstairs tasting room. Among the many honors, their wines have garnered 15 “Best of Show” awards, four “Best Desert Wine” awards and the Golden Bear “Best of Show” at the California State Fair.
“The awards are really a tribute to Damian and his winemaking,” George said proudly.
Their vineyards provide about 15 percent of their total grape needs, George said. They purchase the remaining grapes from Paso Robles, Livermore, Monterey, Lodi, and occasionally, Mendocino.
With 14 wines on their current list, the Chouinards are preparing to release two new wines – a Petite Sirah desert wine and a Malbec red wine – both of which have already won awards in recent competitions.
In a fun twist, the red wine was created by members of their VIT (Very Important Taster) wine club. The Chouinards held a competition among club members and the winning blend, named MJ Cuvee for the winning team, is a complex blend of five wines, George said.
“It was a kick,” Caroline said of the spirited competition. “They worked so hard and they were all so serious about it.”
In addition to an outdoor summer concert series where tickets are sold by the carload, the winery hosts special events throughout the year, including live music on the second Saturday of the month, as well as special tasting events each month.
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Garre: A Glass From the Past, A Toast to the Future
By Elizabeth Campos Rajs
For Bob Molinaro, owner of Garré Vineyard & Winery, winemaking is part of his heritage, handed down from one generation to the next, and across two continents.
First introduced to winemakingas a young boy, he vividly recalls the truck loaded with grapes making its annual trek from Healdsburg to his San Francisco neighborhood. As a kid, it was not always a welcome sight.
“Every year that truck would come and I would try to run,” Molinaro recalls, smiling. “My father made wine when we were kids so we all had to help. He and my uncles used an old fashioned crusher. The grapes went in, stems and all.”
The wine was made to be shared among the family and given away to friends, he said. For his father, who worked in garbage collection, winemaking was an enjoyable hobby.
Molinaro followed his father into the garbage business – he owns Pleasanton Garbage Services – and after acquiring land in Livermore in the 1990s, decided to turn the family winemaking tradition into a business.
Garré Vineyard & Winery, named for his grandmother, encompasses 20 acres of land at the intersection of Greenville and Tesla roads. Molinarofirst purchased the land in 1996 and soon planted half the property with Merlot grapes – the most popular wine at that time, he explained.
He removed some buildings from the property, renovated others and built a restaurant and barrel room on the site. The café, which serves lunch daily and is open for dinner during the summer months on Wednesday and Friday evenings, first opened in 1999, specializing in Mediterranean and Italian cuisine. Ty Turner has served as executive chef since day one.
In addition to the restaurant and tasting room, the winery also features two venues – a grand pavilion and the adjacent Martinelli Center — for weddings and special events, bocce ball courts, and an annual summer concert series.
Molinaropays tribute to his grandmother’s legacy with a picture of her in the tasting room, raising a glass of family-made wine. That picture not only inspired the name of the winery, but its motto as well: “A glass from the past. A toast to the future,” said Gina Cardera, Molinaro’s daughter who works alongside her father at both Pleasanton Garbage and the winery.
Garré’s wine club is called Nonna’s Family Wine Club – the Italian word for grandmother — and members enjoy private wine tastings and special events.
While Molinarooversees the winery withhis daughter and bothhelp out with the bottling, he leaves the winemakingto Wayne Re, who has been with Garré for eight years. The winery produces about 2,500 cases of wine a year from their grapes as well as ones purchased from nearby vineyards.
Garré’s award-winning wines, which include Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Bordeaux, Petit Sirah and Syrah, are primarily sold at the winery and the restaurant, and are served at special events in both their events center as well as the adjacent Martinelli Center.
A new addition, a Primativo, will be released soon said Cardera, who is currently serving as vice president of the Livermore Valley Winegrowers Association.
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Page Mill: A History of Fine Wines
By Elizabeth Campos Rajs
When visitors to Page Mill Winery ask Dane Stark if he’s the winemaker, he likes to answer the question with a question.
“I ask, ‘Did you like it?’ If the answer is yes, then it’s me. If it’s no, I say it was my dad,” he says laughing. The truth is, while he learned winemaking from his father, he’s been the only winemaker since his dad retired from the business in 1996.
The Page Mill Winery was started in the mid-1970s after his dad – in what Stark attributes to a mid-life crisis — decided he wanted to be a winemaker and rented a Bobcat to excavate a barrel room under the family’s Page Mill Road home in the Los Altos Hills. As Stark likes to recount, his dad did this despite making his first batch of white wine a year earlier that was so bad, it was the butt of family jokes.
Completely undaunted by his initial lack of success, his dad built the basement winery, quit his full-time job selling lasers and set out to learn everything he could about winemakingby taking classes at UC Davis and comparing notes with other independent winemakers. “He did it before it was fashionable to quit high tech and start a winery,” Stark quips. His father, though, proved to be a quick study and started selling wine in 1977.
Dane Stark helped out before leaving for college in Colorado where he majored in French. He decided to return to the family business after spending a year in France studying winemaking.
“I got a chance to tour some of the best wineries in Burgandy. I met winemakers who didn’t have degrees in winemaking,” Stark said. That knowledge gave him newfoundconfidence in his decision to join his dad at the family winery. Before long, in addition to making wine with his dad, Stark was also contributing on other local wineries in Santa Cruz.
When he decided to relocate his winery, he searched for property in Paso Robles, Healdsburg and Santa Cruz before decided on his current location on South Livermore Avenue. “I decided on the Livermore Valley because of the South Livermore growth plan and its focus on the wine industry,” Stark said, adding that his was the 24th winery in the area that now numbers more than 50. “We could see the desire of the community to establish wineries.”
Page Mill Winery now has 19 different wines on its wine list, including several varieties of Chardonnay, Syrah and Petit Sirah, he said. Stark tends to his vineyards himself and makes all of the wine. His business partner, Gary Brink, runs the tasting room.
In addition, Stark shares his knowledge by offering component classes, where he teaches participants how to identify the different ingredients in the wine.
“When we do a component tasting, we take a base red wine and base white wine and start adding things. It lets you calibrate your palate. We doctor 20 or so wines with aromas,” Stark said. “Some people can smell it right away. It’s fun and we get pretty good reviews.”
