Martha Stoumen, California

Martha Stoumen at Venturi vineyards

Ukiah, California
Martha Stoumen started her winery relatively recently in 2014 after initially studying Geography and Environmental matters in UCLA with Professor Judith Carney and she pursued her Italian heritage by travelling there, doing apprenticeship in a farm in Tuscany working with endangered farm species and breeds. Over there each intern (there were 9) were put in a specific part of the farm and hers was the vineyard and the olive orchard. She hadn't made ever wine before, but happilly it was small scale, not commercial, just for friends and family. She loved it and after the few months spent there she felt she'd like to do this as a job when back home. She indeed found a job in California but the conditions were very different, it was very structured, she'd not go to the vineyard at all, it was great because she was learning a lot but she definitely wanted to be in a smaller winery. She then went to Australia to work in a small winery, then to Germany (Heymann-Lowenstein in Mosel) where she only worked in the vineyard and this was her initial exposure to totally native fermentation, nothing added. The vines were standing on a stick the old way the canes on the shape of a heart, the picking was old fashion, it took a whole day for the pickers to fill a one-ton bin, the grapes would begin to oxidize but still no sulfur on the grapes, and they would press them the following day. She stayed 6 months.

After this in 2010-2012 she went to UC Davis to learn the microbiology, picking what she wanted to learn also. With friends she was beginning to make wine in their backyard in Davis and she was beginning to drink a lot of natural wines as well. There were few people working with native yeast back then, she remembers Matthew Rorick at Forlorn Hope, also Broc Cellars which she visited back then in Berkeley, but they were mostly drinking European wine at the time. They were learning all the correction methods at UC Davis but there was also a teacher there, Junichi Fujita who was an early guy to bring all these European natural wines under the spotlight at UC Davis (he since has planted a vineyard of his own in Oregon near McMinnville). Enriched with these new discoveries she went to work at Cos in Italy, Giusto Occhipinti being an early player in well-farmed grapes & natural wine (his niece has also started her own winery). They were the ones that pushed her to start her own thing in California. And she did after a stay in a biodynamic winery in New Zealand, this was 2014, working with 3 friends on a cooperative mode (Living Wines Collective), then she started her independant winery in 2016. At the beginning she also worked on the side as assistant winemaker at Broc Cellars from 2014 to march 2017, Chris Brockway being very supportive all the time for her project. She now works from dryfarmed vineyards, most being trained on sticks the old way (pic on left) without trellising system.

Benson Ranch Vineyards

Today Martha makes wine from 1/4 leased vineyards, 3/4 purchased grapes, her facility is located in Richmond near San Francisco but I met her instead near Ukiah, where there are a couple of vineyards she works with. Ukiah is the largest city in the Mendocino county but is still small enough to retain this lovely feel of a small town, maybe there's also still this charm I felt a decade ago in Healdsburg, before it grew in popularity.

Speaking of the vineyards Martha works with, in 2017 she was renting two, but one was in the Calaveras County in the Sierra Foothills and it was too far to go manage it, eand even though she had found someone locally to keep an eye she used to drive there twice a week during the busy season, so now she has only the vineyards in Ukiah. At the time she was living in Berkeley and they just moved very recently to Sebastopol, which is closer to Mendocino where the majority of her grapes come from.

Here at Benson Ranch north of Ukiah she has 5 acres (2 hectares), 3 already planted when she took over the lease, these are fairly young vines, like 16 years old now, and then last year & this year she planted rootstock and later grafted them a few weeks ago. These young vines got some water but otherwise she doesn't irrigate, that's why they cultivate, doing a light plow to get the weeds away, breaking a bit the soil, which brings water from below. I ask if a plowing doesn't accelerate the drought, but she says no, it's counterintuitive but it's a method many old farmers use around here, it works on the dust mulch that works in two ways : the first way is it's creating a crust to cover and seal the capillaries, the channels made by the rain water going down through the soil in winter. The second and probably more important way is that when you turn that soil, it is a little drier on the top, it creates a wiccan like you'd have with a teabag with a string, the water travels up the string because it's drier, so in short it brings the water below closer to the root. Martha seems very skilled on agriculture and soil matters and I understand that's because her initial training was in this particular field. She'd like to experiment a no-tilling viticulture but she doesn't know a dryfarming growers who does that. The owner here is John Chiarito, a descendant of Sicilian immigrants and he planted this vineyard in a very old-fashioned way, like what sh's been doing for her plantings : plant the rootstocks first then wait and let the roots get firmly established before bringing in the budwoods. He also didn't irrigate, they use the rootstock 110t which is quite drought tolerant and fares well in acidic soils which is what they have here.

Other view on Benson Ranch

There's also Petite Syrah on this vineyard and at the beginning, to get started, she sold the grapes to another winery to get cash, making some wine with the other varieties and selling this one. Now she keeps everything. The farming is organic here but she can't use the word on her website because she's not certified. The only thing she does in this vineyard is spray two or three times emlemental sulfur, but no copper. She looked for a vineyard in this area because the transition from winter to summer is quite quick and it's very dry. Threre's a little chance in spring for powdery mildew, but not downy mildew, and it's a short window, so it's easy to farm organic here.

Taking samples from the vineyard at Benson Ranch

Martha takes the opportunity to this visit to grab a few samples for analysis. Apart from the occasional shallow plowing it's very hands-off, Martha says, the vineyard isn't much shoved, the vines grow their foliage around the old way which is a bit more difficult for the pickers. The pickers come from the Johnson Family Ranch, a 5th-generation farm in the valley that grows pears and grapes. Because she's so small, it's hard to have a picking team for herself, and they are always the same pickers, they're very good and know what she wants. Peter also comes here and keeps an eye on the vineyard when she's not there, he knows what's going on including for the mildew risk in the valley. As we walk along the rows she says it's not the most manicured vineyard but for her it doesn't matter what it looks like, the fruit is what is important. A lot of farmers still have this mentality that there must be nothing on the ground (like weeds) but not her.

New plantings

Her new plantings here are Nero D'Avola, Negroamaro and Petite Syrah, and for the older vines she has the same varieties, she replanted more because she liked the resulting wines. For the young vines she says it'll take more time before they reach volume capability to vinify them, anywhere between 5, 6 or even 7 years, it would have been much shorter with irrigated vines. She likes to see the vines regulate themselves even if there's water in the area and irrigation would be feasable. Here the soil has a lot of loam with equal parts of sand, silt and clay, with maybe more sand and the clay isn't close, between 1 to 3 meters, so she wants deep roots for her vines. She says here around it's pretty common not to irrigate, but that's for the already planted vineyards, nobody plants new vineyards without irrigating, even though it's not as dry here as, say, the Central Valley. Of course in these conditions and even though the loves the flavors, her berries are small. She made a Rosato from here which we'll taste later and this was the lowest yielding they ever had, they were food treding and it took half an hour before they got any juice in the bin...

The vines were first grafted one and half month before this visit took place, another serie was grafted 3 weeks before. When they planted the roots they dug holes something like 70 centimeters deep and 30 centimeter wide, and this because there isn't that clay layer and it's mostly sand and loam. The soil is pretty well draining with the sand part. And they think theere's an underground river, you can see in the spring a diagonal where the vines fare better.

Baby vine

Martha stops and kneels near a new planting, she pulls up a cardboard protection which I thought was intended for the rodents (the whole parcel is protected by a fence, deers can't come in) but it's something else : They protect the baby vines from the sun, they do have a few rabbits but the sun is the real danger here for baby vines. The heat was indeed very punishing that day in july, about 106 F (41 C) if I remember, possibly more.

Magnificient old vine

Grapes and logging are the two main industries in Ukiah, but grape growing came relatively later in this area because the Spanish influence stopped south of here, the Spanish had these missions and were growing grapes and thanks to that these regions further south in California had a longer grape/wine culture. But Ukiah which is north of Sonoma only got grape growers when the Italian immigrants brought it here around the 1850s. Benson Ranch itself was a logging company in the 1950s.

Viognier 2017

We then drove to Venturi Vineyards, another farm where Martha buy grapes, there's a trailer there with a terrace in the shade where it was convenient to taste the wines. Venturi is an old established grower, it's organic and it is the first farm where she purchased grapes to make wine. She bought grapes in 2014 and 2015 there. The has a plot of Carignan which she gets every year now. Speaking again about this region she says she couldn't afford to buy grapes on the coast and decided to look inland instead, selecting the varieties that are best sited for this climate. She worked with Léon Barral for 90 days in 2013 and I understand she learnt there working in similar conditions.

__ Viognier 2017, nice label, Martha has the majority of her labels designed by a friend, she's in Oakland, she knew her long time before starting her business and always loved her art because it's very textural. Made from a dryfarmed vineyard in Calaveras county in the Sierra Foothills south of Lake Tahoe, the parcel on the hillside is about 1700 feet elevation and it's mostly schists with quartz, otherwise red oxidized iron soils. They only sulfur-dusted the parcel twice, otherwise nothing. She coleased the parcel with Noel Diaz of Purity Wines who had found the vineyard and offered her to co-lease. She got Mourvèdre and Syrah there as well but the pH was quite high (3.9), so she blended them with something else. This is the only time she worked with this vineyard, it was small, faraway and just large enough for one producer alone rather than colease.
Nice feel appealing mouth. Unfiltered wine and so sulfur. Nice wheat nose, nice feel overall, ful mouth. Easy drink, 12 % alcohol. It took 3 days to ferment on wild yeast in high-density polyethylene tanks, then she filled two barrels with the wine on its lees for 6 months, no stirring. Was whole-clustered pressed, because Viognier can be quite tannic if foot stomped and with 30 minutes skin contact. Martha says with a laugh that she call this a varietally-incorrect Viognier, that's because people in California always speak about varietal crackness, meaning, does it taste like it does in France, but that doesn't mean nothing. We'd say atypical Viognier and I love it, too bad she'll not make that wine again.

Rosato 2017

__ Rosato 2017, Nero D'Avola, grapes from Benson Ranch, the label says also young vines, dryfarmed (printed very small, I say to her she should tell that in bigger print). She intended to make a red initially but last year was the heat wave for 2 weeks and the grapes' metabolism just stopped, the acidity just froze (it had a very high acidity, it was 13 % with the pH of a Riesling) and she turned it into a rosé, doing the experiment of taking a bit of the fruit, foot-treading it, leaving it overnight on the stems and skins, which downed a little bit the acidity, and then she made this fruity Rosato from it. The red part from this batch is still in barrel, it needs a little more age there. This rosé is all sold but she keeps a few bottles on the side like this one. People really love this wine and I can understand, there's this little tickling on the tongue, she says she kept a bit of CO2, there was around 3 grams of residual sugar and she added 4 ppm before bottling, very low indeed, the feel of the wine is like there's none.

Post Flirtation 2017

__ Post Flirtation 2017, grapes from two locations, bon dryfarmed, one is, for the Carignan (45 % of the blend) Mendocino County, Redwood Valley 5 miles north from here, and the Zinfandel comes from the Contra Costa County, from an interesting place 40 minutes West of Berkeley, a very hot, dry and windy place with cooler influence from the Carquinez Strait and Sacramento river nearby, almost like a Mediterranean island climate. Soil is almost pure beach sand, it's impressive. Carignan was planted in 1948 and the Zinfandel in the 1960s'. The wine is a classical California blend but she made it more in a style like Beaujolais, it's not carbonic but it has the freshness. Carignan is whole clustered and Zinfandel destemmed for the vinification. Martha vinifies in small-size fermenters, like 3/4 ton and thanks to that you don't get too much heat and not too much extraction. She started to make this cuvée in 2016 and hopefully will keep making it in the future.

Very enjoyable wine indeed, super nice nose with pepper lovely to drink. 12,7 % only. Only racked once, unfiltered, she laughs as if to excuse herself about the cloudy bottom, but That's a high point for me.... What a juicy, chewy fruit here indeed... Martha says the vineyards are beautifully farmed by a woman and her husband, they put out compost, have bees and chickens. She still had some of this wine available when I visited, this is her largest cuvée (almost 700 cases).
The name of the cuvée comes from when her boyfriend John Patch (he worked at A16, an Italian restaurant in San Francisco, at Terroir, Ordinaire, Punchdown, all natural-wine hotspots) helped her one evening, she had asked him to take sample from a barrel of pre-filtration and another of post-filtration and he jokingly changed the word into post-flirtation... She and her boyfriend John Patch designed the label.
Even with the high temperature that day in the shade (it's more than 100 F when we taste) with the wine warming up quickly in the glass, it feels still fresh and lovely, with this tannin freshness feel, super nice !. She added 12 ppm SO2 at the end here. Sells for 25 $.

Nero D'Avola 2016

__ Nero D'Avola 2016, grapes picked in two different places, one week apart, so vinified separately. 40 % comes from Fox Hill Vineyard, planted in the 1970s' and as far as she knows it's the first vineyard of Nero D'Avola in California, and the rest comes from Benson Ranch, from a vineyard created from the cuttings of Fox Hill, kind of mother-daughter connection here. She destems these grapes, she did at one point use whole clusters but while nice, Nero D'Avola can become very, very tannic. She then makes one to two punchdowns per day, she usually does one delestage to all of her fermentations just to round out the tannin a little bit. She does all her wines in old oak, like ( years old, but the Nero D'Avola gets somehow a more woody character compared to her other wines, but it may come from the grape itself.

Small red fruit notes, more woody indeed; 12,4 % alcohol only, very moderate. 2013 washigher, like 13,2 %, this grape can get really fat easilly and muscular, it has this wild forest fruits aromas but also with a strong acidity. Elevage was 18 to 20 months, she put a bit more SO2 here, like 25-30 ppm, some of the barrels getting SO2 depending of how they tasted. Bottled with mobile truck trailer. 2nd biggest cuvée, 500 cases, sells for 35 $. She is going to experiment with bottling the 2017 a little earlier but bottle-aging it a little longer before the release, she's curious about it. Unfiltered also, although with the longer élevage the lees settled in the bottom of the barrels, but there may be some sediments here too, she says.

>Old Carignan in spring

At this point Martha show me a few pictures on her phone including this one of her old Carignan planted in 1948, they're in goblet, no trellis, and by the way all her vines are like this, standing alone without training or wires, except those at Fox Hill. The picture here was shot at springtime, lots of flowers, and here depending of the type of flowers the grower knows the type of soil beneath, for example for the clay. These vines are on Saint George rootstock, she has already worked with ungrafted vines but the ones she works with now are mostly on rootstock.

Try It Out - Pet-Nat

__ Try it Out, natural sparkling 2017, French Colombard old vines (planted in 1950), same head trained vines. The very last grapes she picked in 2017, 3rd week of october. She was supposed to pick this the 2nd week but the fires broke out with the vineyard very very close, it was hard to decide and they could get the samples analyzed by the lab which was totally booked, they didn't know if the smoke had already gone into the skin, but they decided to take the fruit, plus she likes this grower. The other whites she makes she usually foot treads but here she opted for whole clusters, cutting the heads and the tails, keeping the hearts and tasting the juice until it didn't taste anymore smoke. When they picked it was 38 F (3,3 C) outside, almost freezing and you couldn't smell the smoke.

This is her first pet-nat, named Try it Out like the disco song partly because it was her first, partly because of the unknown consequences of the fire on the wine. Tastes a little sweet, could be the fruit character too, lovely. She bottled it at 24 grams, high pressure potentially, probably not eaten all the sugar here. She did the disgorging herself, quite a lot of work, and low tech (or low-fi in this case...) : she uses Mike Roth's method for the disgorging, she just freezes the necks upside down for one minute, then takes the cap off and as it defrosts it pushes out the sediments by itself, it works well, very easy, they also used it at Broc Wines. Otherwise the lees on French Colombard are not delicious, they're ok but not as good as on Chardonnay.

In the Venturi Vineyards

After this nice tasting in the shade we drove to her other vineyard in the area at the Venturi Vineyards, Martha is going to get Zinfandel from here for the first time this year, she got Zinfandel prior from upon the hill, but he took out the vines because they were too old and not producing anymore. Martha also gets Carignan from this vineyard which she labels specifically from Venturi Vineyard. This farmer has mostly Carignan, Zinfandel, also Sauvignon Blanc (very old vines from the 40s, makes great wine), also dryfarmed and head trained. Originally this land before the prohibition was cleared by his grand-grandparents using dynamite, the old way to clear land back then up here. At the prohibition the vines were uprooted and most of the replanting took place after WW2.

On the picture above and left you can see the Zinfandel Martha is going to work this year, the vines are relatively young, 7 years, and trhe wine will be probably fairly fruity, but you can't say really, this is a rocky and gravel soil. the clone is a Demple clone, specifically grown in Sonoma County on the Russian River, it has a looser cluster than normal Zinfandel and with its thin skin it's a nicer clone that people now kind of consider unique to California.

Old Caterpillars at Venturi

Redwood Valley (we're in Calpella right now) is currently applying for its own Appellation (AVA) because the soils are unique here. Many of the wines tasted above come from Redwood Valley which is 4 minutes north from here and although it's so close it's about 2 to 3 weeks behind in ripening compared to here, it's cooler over there, possibly because of air currents or fog incursions.
Here I asked Martha to pose near these vintage caterpillars, you know i love these old machines, and it seems many farms and ranches here keep them, farmers are the same all over the world, very sentimental. And pragmatic, these will last longer that the computerized models... Martha doesn't drive these caterpillar, not really needed for her type of farming.

Martha Stoumen info [at] marthastoumen.com www.marthastoumen.com Martha's Facebook page 2016 audio interview by Levi Dalton (I'll Drink to That)

4th of july in Dorris, CA (video here)

Listen now :

Ashokan Farewell (by Igor Glenn)

With the flag ceremony of this illustrative photo you need deep, meditative music and this one will fit so well : You may know this now-folk-classic, Ashokan Farewell, a slow Irish waltz composed not so long ago by Jay Ungar and made famous by its interpretation by Jay Ungar & Molly Mason Family Band, but (sorry for them) the best interpretation I've come across (and there are many !) was this one by legendary folk musician Igor Glenn of the Jazz Cowboys, this guy has the right touch and vibe playing what now sounds like an ageless hymn...
Read the story behind the making of this music.