We hope you’ll enjoy our thought-provoking chat with Damian Grindley (pictured) proprietor of Brecon Estate in Paso Robles, California. He has a Welshman's expressive flair and a winemaker's directness.
Grindley named Brecon after a town in his native Wales, which sits on similar soil to the limestone-infused land at the estate. Brecon has become an anchor of Paso’s forward-looking “emerald necklace,” a verdant loop of ambitious wineries along Vineyard Drive. The estate is piercingly beautiful, anchored by an award-winning, modern-timeless building and gracious 300-year-old oaks. We highly recommend you put this spot on your road trip wishlist.
But the Adelaida District is of course not just pretty. It’s celebrated for its Linne Calodo soil series, where clay sits atop the calcareous base. Before he was a winemaker, Damian was a caver, mapping some of the world’s longest and deepest caves. He tells us about following limestone to the Wild West of wine, and why “playfulness” is the lynchpin of serious quality at boutique wineries.
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Before we talk about how you became a winemaker, let’s touch on the wine we’re featuring. What does Tannat bring to the Zinfandel blend?
Tannat is a four-seed variety; most varieties are two seeds. It’s called “Tannat” because it adds tannin to the wine – 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. 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. The Zin-Tannat is not your big jammy sort of style – it's much more structured, elegant – very food-friendly 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.
What propelled you into 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 they were restructuring and 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 in winemaking and never looked back.
I 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.
How do you meet someone caving?
It's an extreme sport, and you rely on other people, so there tend to be clubs. Over there, they're called grottos. She was not in the same club, but was associated with it. There was a world heritage cave over there and she was one of the guides.
Sweet. And then?
What you do when you graduate as a winemaker is you bounce around the world, trying to get ideas, work out where you fit, what kind of things you like. So I worked in Sonoma. I worked in the Barossa in Australia. I did a stint in Sweden. France. Monterey. I was pulling in ideas from all over the place. I worked all over the world, including at La Crema in the Russian River. That’s a big operation – it gives you a lot of corporate discipline.
Brecon is such a different animal – boutique. 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 – 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.
I was the winemaker for the first decade or so. As the company's grown, 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!
You’re about 20 miles from the ocean – tell us about your positioning as far as soil.
Because we were cavers, and we went around the world, we were always in 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 in the wine, and carcareous is one of them.
I've been in caves where you can actually see the vine roots coming through from the ceiling. 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.
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 have 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.
And I think the question you've then got is: Is it actually better these days? Because now you can refrigerate, and you can add acid. Is our palate just so accustomed to having the wines like that since Roman times, that's now what we expect to taste?
Provocative question! I do feel the limestone influence speaks to the palate on an aesthetic level that goes beyond just tradition.
You’re right – and it's helped us. In some places on the estate, the calcareous bedrock pokes through. In other places, there's a thin layer of the Linne Calodo clay on top. That traps the moisture in, which means we're dry-growing a lot of our older Cabs and all the Cab Francs.
How cool is it that wine is a way to drink geology?
Yeah! I suspect there are other products that could reflect that, whether it be oranges or something, but it’s not been widely identified.
Talk about the mesoclimate at your estate, and how it’s reflected in the wines. People 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 with a lovely kind of haunting nuance.
Yes, we are a little cooler and a little bit more European in style. And you'll find that the calcareous soil makes the acid very bright.
What’s your oak program like?
Generally, with very few exceptions, it's all French and it's about a third new oak. Our Zin-Tannat is nearer 20 or 25% 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.
And since you’re pretty restrained with the oak, the wines are approachable younger.
Exactly. It’s a framework of new oak. 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 Paso? I was listening to an interview where you talked about a feeling of freedom. Paso’s known for its Wild West spirit – different from places like Napa with intense financial constraints.
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. Generally, it doesn't plant well around the world. It's really only in 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. 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 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. As a winemaker, that’s much more fulfilling.
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.
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.
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, you're in this sort of modern-esque but warm, friendly 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.
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.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
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Club members, please reach out to us if you’re heading to Paso Robles so we can arrange a complimentary visit to Brecon for you.
P.S. Their building really is fabulous. Damian and Amanda together have a sharp eye, saying, “We wanted clean, elegant lines that will stand the test of time.” The design firm they worked with, Aidlin Darling Design, happened to win the Smithsonian’s prestigious National Design Award for Interior Design just a few days after the Grindleys hired them.