Well, if not an egomaniac, at least a winemaker who believed in his ability to change the perception of his appellation and to focus the 150 years of history prior to his personal landing here on the thing he was doing. I look at myself now, 30 years later, and see equal parts putz and the deliverer of joy, slightly ahead of his time (if varietally misdirected).

I don’t know of a lot of other appellations that have world-class quality viticultural potential and only one winery that is compelled/willing to stick its neck out to demonstrate/shout out that potential. Progress has been really slow the last 25 years, carrying a bag of wine over the shoulder trying to show the glories of the place and losing out to the myopic sense from the winebuying community that has the Napa virus stuck in her/his head. That lack of progress corresponds exactly with thinking that high-end Cabernet Sauvignon would be the key to the sales lock.

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Sensorially profligate, promiscuous in its aromatic fecundity…when made the way it should be, the greatest of grapes is textured, complex, fun, delicious…sexy as hell.

Cab Franc has a mischievious streak to it too. It can be polarizingly herby (I call this quality simply intentful winegrowing imperfectly executed), and it can seem too austere in cooler climates: a liquid X-ray of perfect litheness.

It could never be just a coincidence that the grape cosplaying virginal rectitude in Bordeaux and libidinous merriment in Livermore and the Loire would accidentally roll up on a young and slightly skewed winemaker aching for his vinous muse.

Luck it was not, but inevitability.

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We need to know that there are wines that exist that flaunt Beauty, that brush critical determinism away like so many summer bugs. We need to know that there are wines that rise above residual sweetness and the appeal to the cynical lowest common denominator inherent in that undrinkable presentation. We need wines that press out envelopes, that promote uncertainty; wines that ask questions and don’t just pat heads.

“If Cab Franc did not exist, we would have to invent it.” Apologies to Voltaire and his concept of moral authority. We’re talking flat-out transcendence here.

We’ve always had a basic need for apotheosis, for something, someone, some grape variety in this case, to show us how far beyond the ordinary we are capable of moving. We need to be inspired…we need to know that our quotidian existence can be gotten out of.

We need to know that there are wines that exist that flaunt Beauty, that brush critical determinism away like so many summer bugs. We need to know that there are wines that rise above residual sweetness and the appeal to the cynical lowest common denominator inherent in that undrinkable presentation. We need wines that press out envelopes, that promote uncertainty; wines that ask questions and don’t just pat heads.

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There are some wines that are connected to the green center of all growing things. That seem connected to the first Garden. This was a garden that bloomed equally of life and death; the thriving things, therefore, had an active muscularity to them…like Cab Franc — the lithe body of a gymnast, not the swell of the weightlifter.

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We are not alone in our pursuit to make more Beauty in the world; there are many others who feel, like us, that laden tug toward some deeper level of understanding that Cab Franc seems so uniquely capable of unlocking. This grape is like a password that opens up an immense room that doubles as a refreshed and innocent and open state of being. Everything tastes better in this room; people know you in this room; and everything will be ok in this room.

Well, if you’re going to be spending all your time writing, podcasting, proselytizing, cajoling people, sampling people on, making and selling Cab Franc, you may as well add organizing a festival for 500 people with 50+ wineries and nearly 100 wines to that list of things to do.

We came up with the idea of throwing a big party for Cab Franc over several glasses…of Cab Franc - four years ago. We figured that a fun and funky event would match Cab Franc’s vibe and would hopefully create a spring home for those so wonderfully self-disposed to let the Franc Flag fly.

It would also, selfishly, give us the opportunity to taste a huge number of Cab Francs without going on a bunch of press tours we weren’t invited on anyway.

Festival #4 is only four days away now, and a shit-ton of last minute T-crossing and I-dotting has occupied practically every spot on the to-do list. To paraphrase Dr. Evil’s description of his growing up, there really is nothing like tracking down 50 wineries’ certificates of insurance to make you appreciate just about anything else.

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Great weather in Livermore, great local food, amazing live music, and gallons of great Cab Franc make the day of Palooza

itself an absolute home run. The answers to the larger question of what does CabFranc-A-Palooza mean? hits that emotional and vivifying chord much more clearly even than all the satisfaction we feel watching our guest having a great time during the 4 hours of the event.

We are not alone in our pursuit to make more Beauty in the world; there are many others who feel, like us, that laden tug toward some deeper level of understanding that Cab Franc seems so uniquely capable of unlocking. This grape is like a password that opens up an immense room that doubles as a refreshed and innocent and open state of being. Everything tastes better in this room; people know you in this room; and everything will be ok in this room.

Next year’s CabFranc-A-Palooza is set for May 23, 2027 in Livermore. Tickets are on sale here. For all my substack wine writer friends, DM me for a pass so you can experience this community and movement for yourself.

Shut…up…Mick Jagger.

You don’t get what the weird todays allow; You get what you make of and from them.

Your own kind of weirdness can transcend today’s weirdness only if it has a deep magic.

For christ’s sake, let’s just write it plain: with Cab Franc, ALL is possible.

The reality of the region becomes a recursive loop: we love this wine…this wine is perfect from this place…lets plant that grape here…because we love this wine and it is perfect here. A philosophy that self-fulfills.

Appellations are a codification of accidents of history. Sure, monks spent 1000 years figuring out what grew “best” in Burgundy, but Chardonnay and Pinot Noir were just the closest approximation of perfection available to them at the time.

And because humans self-select for pleasure and because most of us want an expert’s confirmation of our own choices, the small number of possibilities get ossified into the only possibility. The reality of the region becomes a recursive loop: we love this wine…this wine is perfect from this place…lets plant that grape here…because we love this wine and it is perfect here. The philosophy self-fulfills.1

Up until the last ten or so years, the Livermore Valley was content to let the world of wine act upon it…like the storm-driven leaf in the curb-side river. That leaf - a symbol of self-abnegation - only had one place to go - lost to time and to memory - to the dark effluvium.

Never has one region needed this grape so much, has asked it to do so much heavy lifting. It is a hospitable place though…and that’s not nothing. May be the most perfect place for it of you want wines of balance and intrigue, deliciousness and profundity.

If you are thrown a life-line, even if you don’t yet see your twirling as the inevitable flush, it probably makes sense grabbing onto the rope. If you don’t see the removal of half of your appellation’s vines (even if they are torn out for age and not exactly for over-production), and acknowledge that the consequent money and energy needed just to get back to square one is an existential threat - especially if the next generation of vines is merely the offspring of what was so unimaginatively and cautiously planted before - you deserve Charybdis’ maw.

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The things we think are important when we first start out in the wine business and just how silly they turn out to be in the light of experience (and the real world batting-about-the-head-and-shoulders we subsequently take ) still have toe-curling power.

I created a business in 1996 in an appellation not known outside clonal circles rife with possibility. The vineyard quality in the Livermore Valley was woefully misunderstood and undervalued by practically everyone, and no brand had yet appeared, until mine, whose mission it was to show the world just how great the area could be.

Though a branch of America’s oldest family of winemakers, my experience up until Steven Kent’s founding was as a tween sweeping out warehouses and disgorging champagne (yes, we could still call it that, then) and working the bottling lines of the family’s South Bay outfit in the summers before school started again in the fall.

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I had less than zero understanding of the business of wine when my father and I started our brand with the aforementioned goal. Back then, when I was in my thirties, it was crucial to me that we make the most expensive wine from Livermore and that we be seen as being equal in quality to the best wines from Napa. Business plans were created to justify what are in my backward ruminations now, ridiculous goals and were as quickly tossed in the can when the reality of the marketplace smashed the ego-scarred scales in front of my eyes.

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Well. I guess it does.

[W]hen the right grape meets the right place and those two are aligned with that wine community’s need to differentiate itself from every other place then the right mission is the result.

Cab Franc is defining the world-class contours of the Livermore Valley. If you want a wine that checks the Deliciousness, Gorgeousness, Accessibility, and Food Compatibility boxes, no grapes does it with the aplomb of Cab Franc.

And no other grape is as perfectly suited to the terroir-driven characteristics of Livermore as Cab Franc is either. Warm days, very cool, wind-driven nights (especially in the eastern foothills) contribute to a very long growing season that typically lasts into November.

Wind shuts vines down, decreasing the daily number of photosynthetic hours that plants have to create sugar. So we have to add days at the end of the season to get physiologically ripe fruit; this fruit has only sipped at the sugar-producing teat, as it were, instead of gulping it down—as happens in regions north and south of us.

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Cab Franc: Already done.

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It’s only when you have to fill out a slew of forms for the California State Crush Report that you realize how a day-to-day obsession with Cab Franc manifests itself in the actual amounts of fruit that are being harvested each year.

These totals represent the smallest drop possible in the big wineries’ bucket, but they represent for The Steven Kent Winery real-honest -to-goodness tangible growth, and — if the goal is to put a bottle of beautiful and affordable Cab Franc on every kitchen table in the US — (which it is!), this trend is the beginning of reality meeting a plan.

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The Steven Kent Winery website has gone through many iterations, unfortunately none of them has been good. I’m not even sure what the website is actually supposed to do for us which is probably why it’s shit. But I digress.

I did find this video lurking, unseen, on one of my website’s many superfluous pages. This is good stuff, I think.

My focus has evolved over the years from Cabernet Sauvignon to the much more expressive and real Cab Franc. But my desire to make great wine has not changed. And though times are tough in the wine business right now, and the urgent exigencies of trying to stay afloat consume so much energy and optimism, too often taking me away from the crucial but not emergent core of what I stand for.

The video was made for the 10th vintage celebration in 1999 of Lineage, our flagship Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant blend. It’s true purpose, however, is to document what the WineLife means to America’s oldest family of winemakers. Watching it again after several years, being with my father and my son — generations 5, 6, and 7 — I realize that every day is the best day when you get to do what I get to do.

And the inclusion of my friend Nick Liang’s great food as the inspiration for and the trestle that spanned California and the Loire Valley, providing the palette of textures and flavors, the literal “meat” upon which we munched.

How many times have you had a conversation about which dish goes best with the latest RTD, or that martini, or that hefeweizen? None times is the right answer.

The Cab Francs changed the duck and the wagyu and the lamb, and the wines were, in turn, changed by the food. We tucked in deep, and the subtleties of texture and flavor evolution were fascinating. Chronicling these changes was the reason we were here, to be sure, though the time spent with friends was far more valuable for me.

The more I thought about this afternoon in subsequent days, and the more I consulted my notes about the pairings, the more convinced I became that the whole wine/food thing is a barrier to the growth of enthusiasm for wine. Much as the “proper” stemware will enhance the complexity of the wine in it, the right wine and food combination —though exciting to those who have had previous experience with the concept— is by its very nature exclusionary and unwelcoming.

Wine and food pairings are a level 300 course. The folks we need to reach are in their freshman year.

What does that “food/wine” thing mean? I suppose it means trying to create a vocabulary for a special use case for wine that, by this contingency, precludes an organic, unfussy, and quotidian adoption of wine for wine’s and pleasure’s sake by those new to it. In my 30 years of experience as a professional winemaker and a life-long lover of wine, a relatively observant fellow, and one who thinks about wine 24/7/365, the number of times wine and food are talked about in the same conversation is practically 0.

How many times have you had a conversation about which dish goes best with the latest RTD, or that martini, or that hefeweizen? None times is the right answer. I would argue that wine’s ability to be changed by and to change great food is one if its myriad and inherent advantages over all other beverages.

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With Whitmanesque echoes, James Kaplan declares the immensity of America’s one native art form.

To be exuberantly supportive of wine is to push back on the forces that would have us yoked to a dismal anti-life, full of self-abnegation, eventually willing to deny, even, that glorious thing to which we are emotionally beholden.

I yawp! too at the inevitability and the imperative that is wine. It does not matter to wine what laws are passed to curb its availability or how strong its misanthropic deniers’ influence might be at any given time. Wine is sui generis, an adamantine force of goodness, the bringer of joy, the healer of rifts, life’s lube, has always been here (if recorded history is the starting point) and will always persist as daily existence’s balm.

These are comforting thoughts to me. The commercial environment for wine these days is fraught and too many who do what I do seem to be apologizing for helping to make peoples’ lives better. To be exuberantly supportive of wine is to push back on the forces that would have us yoked to a dismal anti-life, full of self-abnegation, eventually willing to deny, even, that glorious thing to which we are emotionally beholden.

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To cleave oneself from the bosom of the world (that place where ambrosial wine has knit-up the wounded places) as a symbol of virtue is to foreclose on the extravagant potentialities of our own humanity.

We are headed into the dark months of the year. I wake up every winter morning in my 1880’s house with no heat and the machine on the counter shows 38 outside and 52 inside. There is no not facing the cold.

The holiday season is nearly done and the strident new year approaches. The wine-fed warmth of the end leads to a miserly, impoverished beginning.

Their foreshortened vision does not grok the more subtle meanings. Wrapped up in such strict negation, the joy and the beauty and the friendship and the fun and the deliciousness and the comfort of wine are subsumed by an ashy adherence to a fetishistic, denialist esthetic.

It is possible that a dryness will take over the land in the month(s) ahead; it is likely that too many will mistake abstention for freedom and will traffic in the lie that wine is only its measure of alcohol.

These will blind themselves to the truth. They will not see a burgeoning Spring with the hillsides green with pre-break growth, nor smell the faint flora as vineyards bloom. These stunted ones will miss the raucous Summer and the first grapes being unmoored from vine, the chaotic ballet of forklift and press on the crushpad.

They will miss the long sun rays of early-evening Fall, when the winemaker disappears between the rows, plucking berries, lifting them to her mouth and communing with juice and acid. She will stop and bathe in the warmth of the season and the explosion of life around her, and she will be brought breathless by the potential there, connected to the very center of the green, growing world.

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I read today, that an operatic version of the Judgment of Paris, will be opening soon.

And while I’m a big fan of finding artistic inspiration anywhere you can, the first thought that hit me was isn’t it time to retire that old chestnut of a story?

We, in the business, decry the lack of Gen Whatever’s interest in wine, falling sales, the decimation of vineyards. How much of what ails our current wine environment can be tied to the same fucking boring story being told?

For christ’s sake that publicity stunt/blind tasting was 50 years ago. 50 years!! You know how much wine has flowed over the gums since then? How many times California winemakers have proven that the state has world-class terroir, and the winemakers have the requisite skill and sensitivity to translate it successfully? Bazillions!

It is not as if this mythic event hasn’t been taken apart a thousand ways from Sunday. It’s importance to the high-end wine business, especially Napa Valley’s, is indisputable; it is also the oldest hat.

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We, in the business, decry the lack of Gen Whatever’s interest in wine, falling sales, the decimation of vineyards. How much of what ails our current wine environment can be tied to the same fucking boring story being told? When was the last time, you were actually surprised (in a good way) by a wine you could find at any supermarket. When’s the last time you went to the most famous wine regions in California, those long ago anointed by the wine press, and found something that really blew your vinous skirt up? That made you see wine in a new way?

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It is convenient to tag onto a blossoming trend and to claim that you were an enthusiast of said trend since the very beginning…especially if there is no real money or effort behind your advocacy. I suspect there will be a number of these types touting their Cab Franc bona fides in the years to come.

It is another measure entirely when you have spent practically every wine hour making and tasting and talking about and trying to sell Cab Franc and devoting more and more of your fruit and harvest dollars on this ideal even without a guaranteed payoff in sight.

I have always been fond (I’m not sure why) of being the David in the story, of battling on the ramparts, especially if all hope seems lost. There is a dignity underlining the hard scrabble and dirty efforts required to lift a mission from the muck, polish it off and parade it forward no matter how jeering the opposition might be.

As Harvest 2025 fruit receival is put to bed (plenty of punchdowns and pressings yet to come), a recap of Steven Kent Winery’s Cab Franc year seems appropriate.

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Back in 2020, months of late evening writing culminated in my first book, Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine. I distinctly remember the feeling of being in a bourbon and blues-shaped bubble each midnight as the recounting of hundreds of years of family winemaking and a life in wine trickled onto the page.

I have grown sufficiently old to forego the self-scolding of my youth. I count it a very good day when I can pull out of the torrent of every day work just long enough to breathe that magical air of book writing.

It’s about that time now, and my wife and I just got back home from doing night punchdowns. I’m a little wired, too tired to sleep after a nap, and tonight is the first in a very long time that I feel explicitly connected to those long and seemingly long-ago hours.

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I have thought about the writing of Lineage over the years since its publication and have, too many times, blithely figured that I could pop out another book every year or so. I haven’t given the process enough credit, nor attributed enough motivation to the wacked-out confluence of Pandemic and the promise of publication that my previously written scraps elicited for its final creation.

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I was heading out of the winery tonight, after morning punchdowns and readings and afternoon pouring at a local restaurant, and the fall of the sun in the west made me think of Wyeth’s Christina’s World.

That world is circumscribed completely and only by what the audience can see, Christina standing in for all of us. There is a sense of completeness there, even in her longing. Larger worlds exist, to be certain, but they are of little importance in the quotidian drama of her…and my life.

Truth is always buggered by context. What stands in as the whole of one’s existence is circumscribed by the moment. During harvest my moment, my place, my duty, the extent of my vision, my want and need, is occluded by fermenters and punchdowns, and aching shoulders, and falling brix, and burgeoning beauty.

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Two days after the crush1, We take a sample of the must and test for Brix2, pH, TA, YAN and malic acid.

Yeast Assimilable Nitrogen (YAN) tells us how much “food” yeast has and - intuitively - how likely it is to get to dryness without having to be fed. We do not add food (in our case, DAP - di-ammonium phophate) - prophylatically. We check each of our fermenters several times per day as we punch down and smell for any tell-tale signs of yeast distress (the bins smell of ground-up vitamins or poopy diapers). If this condition persists, we add DAP to give the yeast a boost. Frequent punch-downs not only help with the extraction of tannin and color but they can also assist with reductive aromas (aforementioned poopiness) by getting more air into the must. In the second half of the video below, Beth is using a pulse-air wand that employs compressed air to turn over the cap from the bottom up thereby gently infusing the developing wine with color and tannin.

The graph below plots a snapshot of the daily differences of Brix levels and temperature. What we want to see is a 23.5 degree must at harvest, several days of cold soaking in which gentle extraction of color occurs and the native flora that come in on the grapes begin a short-lived fermentation of their own, then a week-long period of primary fermentation that takes the grapes from about their starting Brix level to -1.7 degrees…and dryness.

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Last night was the Livermore Valley Wine Community’s most fun and delicious night of the year. TASTE is nearly a week of events that highlight the Valley’s wines, beauty, and spirit of camaraderie. Thursday’s event is a sold-out wine and food pairing in which wineries and local restaurants collaborate to create the perfect pairing of wine sip and food bite.

Nearly 20 teams entered the competition and awards were given out for several judges awards (Classic Pairing, Most Innovative Pairing, and Best Pairing) and for the crowd’s favorite white wine/food and red wine/food duos.

The Judges (writers Clive Pursehouse of Decanter Magazine and Keith Beavers of VinePair and restaurateur, Emily Lim of Dabao Singapore, gave the Best Pairing award to Almost Famous Winery’s Cab Franc and a lamb dish from Demetri’s Taverna.

The People’s Choice Red Wine Pairing went to our very own 2023 Livermore Valley Cab Franc and Wingen Bakery’s “Italian Beef” sandwich. The announcement video is above.

Even casual readers of Wine Saves Lives! know how invested I am in Cab Franc, especially from the Livermore Valley, and any opportunity we get to show the quality of what we are doing as a region to a national audience has immense importance to our efforts. Keith Beavers, the Wine Director of VinePair magazine posted the following to his instagram account:

Never-ending Harvest?

Harvests take shape over time. They start very early in the year with pruning and are always defined by the weather, terroir, and outside events (even with wet ground we knock wood against fires). Often the quality of the vintage takes years to come into true focus though the major wine magazines feel compelled to conclude quality even before wines are actually released.

Being a lover of balanced, appropriately-alcoholed wines, cool vintages are absolutely up my winemaking alley. 2025 is certainly going to be one of these. Climate change means marginal weather at both ends of the spectrum…not just ever increasing heat. With the rains earlier this week, coupled with the dramatic lack of warmth most of the growing season, 2025 reminds me of 2011. By the way, the 2011 harvest was slammed at first. Lots of writers had to walk back their inexperienced and myopic assessments later.

Harvest, strangely, started earlier for whites than in 2024, one of the hottest years every recorded. I assumed, then, that our reds would come in early as well. Not the case. While most of our Cab Franc from Livermore is in, the Cabernet Sauvignon is still 3-4 weeks out…mid November (in keeping with many harvests over the last 10 years)

More important than the machinations of time and weather, the quality of the Cab Franc already in the winery being punched down is very exciting. We will end up with wines that hit at 13.5% alcohol and have all the beautifully complex flavors Cab Franc should have.