Appellation America: You got Vie off to a great start with vineyard designates from Napa and Sonoma. Why the investment in a new label on land in Lake County?

Bryan Kane (BK): When your winery has to buy all its fruit, you figure out quickly the difference between grapes grown for wine and grapes grown for agriculture. Once I realized that I want only vintner-driven grapes, the evolution to [becoming a] grower went pretty fast.

AA: Yet Lake County is still known for the kind of grape you apparently don’t want.

BK: That’s not just because of agriculture; it’s also because of market economics. Cabernet [Sauvignon] sells, so people grow a lot of Cabernet in Lake County even if it’s not the best place for it. On top of that, the better-known Cabernet regions get priority for picking and tank timing, so Lake vineyards get picked earlier or later than is sometimes optimum. You wind up with too much fruit, grown in the wrong places, and picked at the wrong time.

AA: There must be a reason you’re swimming against this tide.

BK: Lake County is great for what I want to grow, which are Rhône varieties and Zinfandel. I can get exactly what I want as a winemaker: the right grapes at the right ripeness, from great soil in a beautiful place. And if we make good wine, we’re helping change the reputation of Lake County like other estate producers in the appellation.

AA: What do you think made your early wines resonate so well with both critics and consumers?

BK: I started as a wine lover, not a winemaker. I had the good fortune to taste widely over a period of years, so I was able to learn what all the great wines of the world taste like. When most California winemakers taste my wines, they say, “Gee, this is different.” That’s because they’re used to what all their peers are making. I come from the rest of the world, not from the American winemaking education system.

AA: Were the wines to your satisfaction from the beginning?

BK: The commercial wines, yes. My first home wines, no! But even those wines taught me something. I would take fruit from second crops in good vineyards, no matter how little I could get, just to see what kind of difference the vineyard made. And it was obvious.

AA: Site matters?

BK: Totally. Your fruit is your destiny, and that starts with the site.

AA: Before we move deeper into your destiny in Lake County, let’s talk about Sol Rouge.

BK: It’s a partnership with my wife, Jill Brothers. Like Vie, we make lots of different wines from small lots and designate the vineyards. But the focus is on Rhône varieties and Zinfandel. People think I’m crazy to make so many wines in such small lots, but I’m still a wine lover. I don’t want to drink the same thing every night.

AA: You certainly wound up in an appropriate custom crush situation, with Wells Guthrie and Copain.

BK: It’s great for me. I put in my time with UC Davis to learn winemaking, but there’s nothing like having this kind of relevant expertise resident in the building. We discuss all kinds of things, not just with the folks from Copain but among the other winemakers that crush here.

AA: How hard is it to get fruit now that you’re more established?

BK: I don’t know if it’s easier, because I keep going for better grapes. But I still do it the same way. I just go ask people. I asked [Napa Valley grower] Tom Beatty for Zinfandel for two years before I got it. The most I ever take is five tons, which, for a lot of growers, is too small an amount to care about. So maybe that’s the difference. People who might not have bothered to cut loose five tons before will do it now.

AA: Will you keep buying small lots for Sol Rouge after your vineyard comes online over the next few years?

BK: Absolutely. At this point, with only six acres in the ground, I could not possibly make the numbers work without buying fruit. So the first planting at Sol Rouge is really a series of test plots for future planting. We need to determine the yields we get [in the vineyard], the quality we can deliver, and the demand for the wine.

AA: There’s upside potential for all three of those in Lake County.

BK: When I was in corporate marketing and business development, we did a lot of research on where to put our time and money. Jill and I did the same thing with the vineyard. Although Amador County penciled out best on financials, I was dead set on Paso Robles because of the success [winemakers have] there with Rhônes and Zin.

But Jill was not crazy about moving to Paso, and I was not crazy about the short growing season in Amador. It takes white Rhone varieties a long time to ripen in the Southern Rhône! It came down to Lake for the growing season and the proximity to other things.

AA: Do you find similarities between your terroir and those of the Southern Rhône?

BK: We don’t have the limestone they do there. But the growing conditions, particularly the climate and the light, are right. The property we bought was everything we wanted.

AA: You wanted something that steep and hard to farm?

BK: Well, yeah, it’s pretty aggressive as a vineyard site. Some of the slopes hit 60 percent. But we look at it as giving us a whole bunch of microclimates to play with at one site. We have pretty much every [exposure] aspect except due east, and we’re on the far northern edge of the Red Hills, so we have three different soil types rather than one dominant one.

AA: You’ve even got terraces, left over from the walnut days.

BK: They were one of the things that sold us on the site. Not modern, technical terraces but human terraces that fit the scale of the property. We got Zin wood from Beatty Ranch to plant there. Petite Sirah is in the middle of the property, and the Cinsaut is up high. There’s Mourvedre below the terraces, along with the Grenache. Counoise is in near the house, where we can keep an eye on it. You really have to grow that grape yourself to get the kind of fruit you want.

AA: Even though the total acreage planted is still small, Grenache is your biggest investment at this point. Is that a sign of anything?

BK: We think Grenache will do really well here. I love the way they grow and make Grenache in France: delicate, fragrant, floral. It’s been made so hit-and-miss here in California, as if people are intentionally trying to do something completely different. I don’t see anything wrong with making Grenache in the style of one of the great wines of the world.

AA: Will you go all the way back to the future and head-prune the vines?

BK: Funny you should ask. We’re planning to do that with the Syrah, Mourvedre, and Counoise.

AA: And the local reaction is…?

BK: People think I’m nuts. No pure grower thinks I’m sane. I’ve had to change vineyard management companies twice because the vineyard is so much work. They start out enthusiastic and then get frustrated. So I went out and found local people who actually like the amount of handwork we do.

AA: Will you take a crop from the second leaf this year?

BK: No. I’ll let the vines increase their strength and deepen their roots another year. We want to limit irrigation as much as possible and let nature find its own balance, so we’re not interfering much in the first few years.

AA: That means you’re going to be designating the vineyards of other growers again in the 2008 vintage.

BK: It’s really fascinating to me to find the five tons or so that can be marginal to a big grower but make a great wine if the fruit is given the respect it deserves. Finding those lots is partly economics; it’s partly science; and it’s partly luck.

AA: Kind of like corporate marketing.

BK: Exactly. This approach takes a lot of work when you’re as small as we are, but it’s what you have to do. When people ask how we got so successful so fast, we tell them that it’s the vineyards. Our goal is to be able to say the same thing about our Sol Rouge vineyards one day.

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Photos by Thom Elkjer