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Monday, May 12, 2008
Where Lust and Rapture meet: the Michael David Winery
David Phillips polishes off a slice of pie at his family’s market and restaurant at the Michael David Winery
LODI, Calif. — The Michael David Winery takes their winemaking seriously. The names of their wines — not so much.
The winery — one of the trailblazers in the quest for higher quality in California’s next up-and-coming wine region of Lodi — produces a broad array of wines with whimsical names such as Seven Deadly Zins (which naturally led to its companion wine, Seven Heavenly Chards), along with the Earthquake line of “ground-shaking reds” and luxury bottlings named “Lust” (zinfandel) and “Rapture” (cabernet sauvignon).
It all comes from the twisted and talented minds of David and Michael Phillips (why yes, they DID go to Catholic grade school, how did you guess?) and their families, the fifth- and sixth-generation farmers here in the fertile flatlands of Lodi, 90 miles east of San Francosco.
The brothers’ ancestors started planting wine grapes in the late 1800s to diversify the family farm, and by Prohibition, were loading railroad boxcars with grapes headed to Ohio and New Jersey for purely, um, sacramental reasons. Folks back east ate a lot of grapes — and churches held many communions — back then.
Through the 1970s and early ’80s, the Phillips family did what virtually all of their neighbors in Lodi did: grew lots and lots of grapes and sold them to the local cooperative, which in turn sold to giant producers such as E&J Gallo and Sutter Home. In 1984, though, the family, with Mike Phillips as winemaker, started bottling and selling a portion of their crop at $3.99 or $4.99 a bottle.
Growth and accolades followed, as the Michael David Winery helped lead a quality resurgence in Lodi. Winemakers and vineyard managers in the region discovered they could take advantage of the region’s climate — a break in the mountains to the west funnels in ocean air that cools the vines nearly every afternoon — and its winemaking heritage: the region boasts some of California’s oldest grapevines, including acres of zin vines that are over a century old. (The Phillips brothers themselves own some 135-year-old Cinsault vines whose juice goes into the “Incognito Red, a Rhone-style blend.)
The Phillips and their neighbors started pruning their vines more aggressively, limiting irrigation to stress the vines, reducing crop loads and taking other steps to enhance quality. The resulting wines boast lush fruit, very mild tannins, wonderful concentration and, more often than not, very attractive quality-to-price ratios.
Today, the Michael David winery is a bustling place. It produces 250,000 cases of wine per year under its own label and farms 500 acres of grapevines, while also growing other fruits as well as vegetables and herbs. It also operates a fruit and vegetable market and restaurant, with a menu that takes full advantage of the fresh produce. My wife, in fact, ate what she described as “the best piece of pie I’ve ever had” — an apricot pie still warm from the oven — at the Michael David restaurant. And let’s just say my wife does not praise pie lightly.
Thus proving that at Michael David, rapture isn’t limited to just the wines.
(Photos by Mark Fisher)
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