Brecon Unfettered in the Wild West

For this month’s maker profile, we looked to Paso Robles and had a rollicking chat with Brecon Estate proprietor Damian Grindley, who’s been playing a compelling part in California’s Malbec renaissance. What a delight – a Welshman's flair for language and fruitful meandering, wrapped around a winemaker's grounded bluntness. 

Speaking of ground, Grindley named Brecon after a town in his native Wales that sits on soils that are similar to the limestone-infused land at the estate. Brecon is an anchor of Paso’s forward-looking “emerald necklace,” a lush loop of ambitious properties along Vineyard Drive. The estate is piercingly beautiful owing to its award-winning, modern-timeless building and gracious 300-year-old oaks. We highly recommend you put this spot on your road trip wish list. 

But the Adelaida District is of course not just pretty; it’s celebrated for its Linne Calodo soil series, where clay sits atop a calcareous base. Before he was a winemaker, Damian was a caver, mapping some of the longest and deepest caves in the world. He tells us about following limestone to the Wild West of wine, importing rare Malbec clones from France and Argentina, and why “playfulness” largely explains the serious quality to be found at boutique wineries. 

And, bringing the backroads to you as always, our Signature Series members will get to enjoy Brecon’s elegant, luscious 2023 Adelaida District Malbec, which earned Best in Class at the Boston Wine Competition and Double Gold at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. 

Without further ado, enjoy Damian. Be sure to read this one to the very end.

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You’re sharing the 2023 Malbec with us, so let’s touch on that first. I read that you have a rare clone of Malbec on your estate that’s only the second planting in California. Does this bottle draw from that block?

It does, but the 2023 is not solely that clone. One of the reasons we're planting more Malbec this year is we never had enough. So the 2023 was a combination of ours – which I brought in from Cahors, France – and the hilltop of a partner vineyard called La Vista. Two or three vintages ago, the Malbec was the first wine of ours that got 100 points at an international show. It’s not reinventing the wheel… you go back to Cahors, which was the center of my work in France, and they put up to 30% Tannat or Merlot in their Malbec. So I went, we should try that. And over here you can't really use 30%, because you won’t be able to call it Malbec anymore. So we put 25% in, and went oh, it’s kind of good. And then a year or so later, we got 100 points, and now we're co-fermenting them together – if they arrive at the same time, which is hard, because the Tannat comes in late and the Malbec comes in early. It doesn't quite always happen, but close. 

And did you plant more of the same clone?

That’s an interesting story. So our winemaker, his wife's also a winemaker – and her viticultural lecturer back in college was Argentinian. He brought over his family’s clone from Argentina, and planted it in the community college he was working at. So we're the first special planting, if you like, in the U.S. – on decent soil and decent slopes and all that, and a nice appellation. So we're really excited about that one. That's a few years down the track. But it paints a picture of the sort of things we do. 

What does the Tannat bring to the Malbec?

It's a four-seed variety. Most varieties are two seeds. It’s called “Tannat” because it adds tannin to the wine, because there's not a lot of room for juice with all those seeds in there. It tends to add a lot of color as well. And it helps with the structure, which is what we’re really using it for. We don't have any issue with color.

The color of the 2023 is an incredible deep purple-red.

Tannat can also add a little bit more in the red fruit spectrum, red currants and cranberries, all that sort of thing. So it adds a little fruit complexity as well. 

Where did you grow up? 

A small Welsh island called Anglesey. It’s the kind of place where it rains ten times a day. It's very windswept, on the Irish Sea. You take the dog for a walk on the beach, some years the sea froze. It's a great place to grow up. Not so much in your teenage years. But it was also the kind of place where no one drank wine. It was a beer community. Maybe the doctor did and the lawyer did and a couple other people. But generally, if you drank wine, you were considered soft in the head. It was a fishing, mining-type island community. Wild and rugged. 

And then you were in Australia for a while?

There was a time where it was about a third, a third, a third – I’d spent a third of my life in the UK, a third in Australia, and a third in the US. I did my master’s in winemaking in Australia and did a fair bit of caving there, and met my wife, Amanda, through that. I did a few vintages of winemaking in Australia, but mostly got my foundation in the US. 

What propelled you to seek a master's in winemaking? 

I actually stumbled into the wine trade in the UK. My original degree was horticulture, which helped down the track with viticulture. I took a weekend job working for a wine merchant, just driving a van, paying my way through college, and that led to assistant manager, branch manager, and then regional manager. It’s the kind of place where you had a tasting counter and they'd have Lafitte against – oh, I don't know –  Opus One or something – for you to try. So I got hooked. And then an opportunity came where they were restructuring and they were closing the side I was on. Because it was the UK, they had to offer you a redundancy package, and they also offered me a job somewhere else. And I went, you know what? I’m going to reinvest that in my future, and took the redundancy package and ran down to Australia and spent it on a master's and never looked back.

I worked all over the world, including at La Crema in the Russia River. That’s a big operation – it gives you a lot of corporate discipline. There are issues you don't come across very often in a small winery, but in a big winery, “Oh, we get 20 of those a year…” so you know how to deal with it. It was certainly a good experience in that sense.

Brecon is such a different animal – boutique. It’s principally you and your wife and a small team, but there’s another couple involved?

Simon and Anna Hackett are the angel investors. So yes, it's really myself and my wife who are the day-to-day face of the brand. I was the winemaker for the first decade or so. As the company's grown and I'm moving towards semi-retirement, my former assistant winemaker, Alex Kemp, has come back as winemaker, but I'm still involved in all the blending decisions, finances, any grape buying. But I don't drag the hoses so much every morning! 

At a certain point, you don’t need to be the one climbing eight barrels high. 

Yeah, that's a young man's game. 

You purchased the property in 2012?

That's correct. It was an existing winery called Norman. He'd passed away about five years previously, and his son had taken over, and his son was a monster truck driver… so it kind of turned it into a bikey hangout. It had become less about wine, so they were hurting. We stepped in, and we renovated, and we opened Brecon in March 2014. 

It’s an incredible building now. I know it’s been written up a lot in design circles. A gorgeous place for our members to visit! Was there any Malbec on the estate when you bought it?

The only grapes left on the property were Cab and Cab Franc. So we planted some Petit Verdot and some Malbec as one of the first things we did.

You’re about 20 miles from the ocean as the crow flies. Tell us about your positioning as far as soil, and the connection with caving.

Well, that was the whole point. Because we were cavers, and we went around the world – it's always a limestone soil. So we wanted to be on this calcareous soil. 

It’s an underlying base profile, but so many things can happen to the fruit: different clones, the oak influence, the winemaker’s influence, the blending, what yeast you used, fermentation temperature, all those sort of things. There are a few places in the world where the soil influence remains quite noticeable, and carcareous is one of them.

I've been in caves where you can actually see the vine roots coming through from the ceiling. We were actually surveying these caves – this was near the Kunoara in Australia. The vineyard owners knew there were caves down there and they were worried about their mechanical harvesters dropping into the cave. So they paid us to go through and survey them. And there was one spot where the harvester could have fallen through. 

But anyway, my take on why calcareous soils are important… technically, it's the potassium takeup. That soil inhibits the potassium takeup, which means you get low pH wines. If you imagine a time before refrigeration and before electricity, when you couldn't add acid and you couldn't refrigerate the wines, then wines that had a lower pH survived longer, aged better, and were microbially more stable. You were planting grapes all around, let's say France, and strangely, the ones that seemed to age better and had less spoilage were the ones on the calcareous soil. It’s the Cote d’Or, it's Saint-Émilion. It's basically half of Italy. 

Talk about the mesoclimate at your estate, and how it’s reflected in the wines. People generally think of Paso as hot. 

I'm Welsh – I like the cold weather. So I wanted to be on the limestone soil, but I also wanted to be as close to the ocean as possible to get those cooling breezes. So we're right on the edge of the region’s main, big block of calcareous soil. The fog just sits on the ridge in front of us, and it's like having the refrigerator door open. We're also in a bit of a bowl. We have one hilltop, but we're in more of a valley, really. And so we tend to be a little cooler and a little later than the rest of Paso. 

That makes perfect sense as far as the Brecon wines we’ve tasted. Ripe and rich, but a lovely, kind of haunting nuance. Not fruit bombs with obvious alcohol.   

Yes, we are a little cooler and a little bit more European in style. And you'll find that the calcareous soil – ironically, it's a high pH soil, but it makes the acid very bright and low pH. The Malbec has a lot of brightness, a lot of minerality, as well as a lot of structure. You'll find it a little brighter and more food friendly than a lot of Malbecs on the market. 

We're often picking in late October, early November. Though the Malbec is earlier – late September, early October. 

What’s your oak program like? 

Generally, with very few exceptions, it's all French and it's about a third new oak. The California Wine Club has picked up two wines, the Zin-Tannat and the Malbec. Zin tends to handle a little less oak, so maybe it's nearer 20 or 25%. rather than the 33% new. That one has a little bit of American oak in there occasionally. It’s actually the same oak that goes into Pennfolds Grange. It’s American oak sent to Australia, made into barrels there, and we bring the barrels back.

The Malbec is in barrel from 14 to 18 months, depending on how the oak’s expressing itself with that particular vintage. 

So that time in barrel, combined with the natural acid profile you get there, lends itself to some cellaring if customers want to? 

Yes, and being very food-friendly as well. The Zin-Tannat is not your big jammy sort of style – it's much more structured, elegant – and same with the Malbec. Think of Argentina and how much meat you'd eat and how greasy it is, and the Malbec cuts through it really well.

And since you’re pretty restrained with the oak, the wines are approachable younger. 

Exactly. It’s a framework of new oak – we’re not there to dominate it. We're trying to let the fruit and the site come through and express it. So it's a balance. We do very well in the international shows. We don't even bother with the Paso show anymore because,often it's rather a heavy hand here, and they tend toward a lot of extraction. 

What does it mean to you, being in the Paso playground? I was listening to an interview where you indicated a sense of freedom. Paso’s known for its Wild West spirit, as opposed to the constraints one contends with in a place like Napa with really high land cost.

Right, in that area, you can't afford to plant anything but Cab, because it’s the only one that gives you the return on the investment. Here, it's not the same. There's a bunch of space, there's a whole bunch of things that haven't been planted, a whole bunch of microclimates where you wouldn't want to plant Cab anyway. And there are a number of soil types. That means that in the old “five minutes by tractor,” you've got a choice of 20 or 30 varietals. And you can make wonderful blends thereof. 

There is a danger that you go down this obscure rabbit hole and bring out varietals that no one's ever heard of. But we are really about being a Paso winery, and elucidating what Paso's going to be in 20 years time, and what it’s going to be known for. 

The example is Tannat – both of these wines have Tannat. Generally, it doesn't plant well around the world. It's really only Madiran [France], Uruguay, and a little bit in the North Coast of California.

But in Paso, it's doing something a lot softer and a lot more approachable than Madiran, and much more intense than Uruguay. So, I put my money where my mouth is and we've planted 

Tannat on the property. It is a little bit of a weed, so I plant it on top of a hill to hold it back. You know, in Napa, you'd have to hold that position for your best Cab. And so that's an exciting thing. We like to control our blenders. There’s plenty of Cab around, but the blenders are the one thing that makes your brand what it is. 

Ahh, that’s a nice observation. I was looking at all the fun blends on your website. About how much wine do you make every year?

We’ve got to do 12, 14, 16 wines to keep our club interesting. And we make eight to ten barrels of each, I suppose. We had a five-year plan to get to 5,000 cases; we did it in 18 months. But we didn't want to be more than 10,000 cases, because you've got to start competing with the big boys, and economies of scale… you can't do it. We’re nicely between the two.

We've got our niche. We do a lot of Albariño, a lot of Cab Franc. We're very happy and comfortable where we are. 

Second-to-last question: Is there a certain kind of customer you tend to attract? 

It’s across the board. We've got this laidback kind of Australian, but professional, sort of atmosphere. We've got a very alfresco tasting experience. You're in the old vines, you're in the old oaks, but you're in this sort of modern-esque but warm, friendly kind of environment. We're not trying to wheel people in and wheel people out in this kind of marble emporium. I would say, the majority of the customers are professional people, but there’s a more relaxed kind of style to the whole thing. There's a chill factor. We're more approachable than a lot of the places that make it snobbier than it needs to be. 

If you want that sort of thing, yeah, we can do a formal tasting at the back in the members’ lounge. But if you happen to be in town with your dog, you want to mosey on up to the outside bar with your boots on, that's fine, too. If you want to sit on the comfortable couches and while away the afternoon with your girlfriends, we’ll tailor that to you. If you want a more traditional style, sitting at the bar, doing a curated tasting, we can do that. The reason it's a hard question to answer is because we cater the tasting to the person who walks in the door. 

I saw the phrase “unfettered wines” on your website. Do you have a particular philosophy in the cellar?

There is no set recipe. There's a tool bag, and every vintage is different. When stuff comes in, we've got a plan in the back of our mind, but we veer off the plan all the time. And to be honest, I think it comes from having been in the big corporate thing. Because in the corporate world, you don't want to lose that shelf space. You don't want to lose that restaurant listing. You don't want to lose that spot in Costco, or whatever. So even if your Cab Franc’s not ready, you'll release it. So the flip side is, when you're a small winery like us, if one year I think the Cab Franc is not stylistically where we want to be, or it looks better as – I don't know – a Cab Franc-Tempranillo (not that we’ve ever done that) we’ll do that. Because we're not chasing that shelf space, we're not chasing that restaurant listing. We are trying to make your best wine possible. 

It means we can be more playful, the word being “unfettered.” We've got nothing telling us what we should do, or we have to do, because you've got that shelf space or that country club and you always have to produce, produce, produce. 

Or another thing that can happen in the corporate scenario is you're selling out of this stuff, so you have to go and find some wine to stretch it. And then it’s not necessarily quite as good. We don’t have to do that. We sell out; we make a small batch of something different and sell that instead. As a winemaker, that’s much more fulfilling. 

That’s a great explanation of why small-production wines are oftentimes better. The agility and playfulness. 

We’re winemaker-driven, we think outside the box and all those buzzwords. It’s great to be sales driven, but it can go too far. We’re actually making the best wine every vintage. For example, this year we’re not bottling a reserve Cab. I just didn't think the quality was there, and it did better by blending with other varieties. 

Sometimes wineries will say “we only make this one in the very best vintages,” but then you look at their archive, and they've never skipped a year.

[Laughs] Right! Whereas our customers know this – that we don’t make everything every year, and hopefully they feel that adds a certain gravitas.

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This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.