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The New California: An Interview with Jon Bonné
Posted by Interviews | Posted on 01-31-2014
| Posted in“Slowly, I encountered other winemakers with similar beliefs. I found people who remained committed to restrained, compelling wines that spoke clearly of their origins — and who shared my frustration with California’s modern style.
“Some… had been toiling for decades; others were upstarts with the same energy and ambition as the pioneers from previous generations. Eventually, the brushstrokes began to turn into something recognizable: the seeds of a new movement, a new California wine in the making.”
These words appear in the introduction to The New California Wine, the just-released book from Jon Bonné of the San Francisco Chronicle.
To say I’m excited about Jon’s book would be an understatement. The wines that fill the pages are both compelling and delicious – and all the producers he highlights deserve the attention.
Last week, Jon and I chatted about his book. Check out the interview below!
David White: What inspired you to write The New California Wine?
Jon Bonne: I think it was just realizing, after seeing a lot of clues, that there weren’t just some people doing interesting things in California, but really a sea change that was starting to happen. It was finally something that was worthy of spending the time that’s required to do a book.
Second, it was really important to get there early because it had been about a decade since there’d been a serious California wine book — and it was a moment that needed to be captured, because you just don’t get too many moments like this. So it was a very distinct case of right place, right time.
In your book, you obviously spend lots of time discussing the new, exciting producers. But you’ve said that a defining moment in your understanding of where California wine is headed was a meeting Paul Draper at Ridge Vineyards. So talk for a moment about how a winemaker like Draper fits into the New California paradigm. In other words, you talk a lot about the folks who have been doing the same things for decades – Paul Draper, Josh Jensen, and Cathy Corison – but also folks like Steve Matthiasson and Matt Rorick, who are relatively new. How do those two planets align? Is what’s old new again?
There were two things at play there.
One, it became really clear to me that if I simply made this about people who had come to this relatively recently, it was going to diminish the book. It was going to make it just about new and shiny things, and make it look like, “Well this is just the millennial wine book.” And I really didn’t want it to be that, mostly because I felt that this wasn’t about the amount of time someone had spent working to make California wine and pioneering, but it was about style. It was about an ascetic, and a social change that was taking place.
So I had to include people like Cathy Corison and Paul Draper and Josh Jensen, who had really been inspirations for a lot of younger winemakers and whose wines had come back into currency. It’s important to remember that Ridge and Calera, after having sort of found their way into the background for a long time because they just weren’t doing flashy, were finding a new audience once again. So it became evident I had to include them.
That leads to the second point, which is that there’s obviously a stylistic continuity between the wines they make and the wines that some of those younger or newer winemakers in the book make.
More specifically, and this is what I thought was really important, there were two generations of pioneers that I needed to capture somehow.
One is the current generation. But the second is a generation that included folks like Draper, Cathy Corison, Josh Jensen, and Bob Travers of Mayacamas. And honestly, that really included, more than anyone probably, people like Robert Mondavi and Warren Winiarski. And that generation — the generation that pioneered great wine in California 40 years ago — had spiritual similarities with the current generation. What’s happening now is really a new iteration of the pioneering spirit that put California on the world stage in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
So I needed to include the people who had really been the original pioneers and kept the faith. But also, there was a kinship. If you look now at how those two generations have come together, I think there’s finally this realization that what made California great as a wine region is very much being explored again, and being explored in a similar way to how it was successfully explored about 40 years ago.
So guys like Josh Jensen and Paul Draper avoided the rise of what you call “big flavor.” Let’s talk about that for a bit. In one interview, you note that it isn’t just about alcohol but that it’s about “some fundamentally cynical beliefs in what California can achieve.” What do you mean by that? To what do you attribute the rise of big flavor? Read the rest of this entry »