Learning the ABCs of enology

By David Shaw

June 25, 2003 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Craig Jaffurs’ son Patterson was 5 years old when the Montessori School he attended was evicted from its quarters and found itself so desperate for money that the principal and his wife took out a second mortgage on their house to help cover school expenses.

Jaffurs, owner and winemaker at Jaffurs Wine Cellars in Santa Barbara, decided he could help -- and in a most unusual (if not unprecedented) fashion.

“Why don’t we have the kids in the school make some of our wine themselves?” he suggested to the principal. “They could even make their own labels for the bottles, and then we can sell their wine to raise money for the school.”

Done.

For the 2001 harvest, Patterson’s preschool and kindergarten classmates foot-stomped what ultimately amounted to five cases’ worth of Syrah grapes from the Bien Nacido Vineyard. Students in the first, second and third grades attended to the fermentation. Fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders pressed the wine into small, French oak barrels. Seventh- and eighth-graders bottled the wines. And each student in the school designed a label to go on one of the bottles of 2001 Jaffurs Wine Cellars Syrah.

“Some of the little girls were a little squeamish at first about stomping on all those grapes with their bare feet, but the boys loved it,” Jaffurs told me recently as a friend and I sat in his small winery, sipping that very Syrah.

I would hate to suggest that winemaking is, well, child’s play, but I thought they did an excellent job. The Syrah was rich and deep and full of fruit.

“We had a little resistance at first from some of the parents,” Jaffurs says. “They were afraid we’d let their kids drink wine.”

Jaffurs says he promised the parents that while the kids would taste the grape juice as grape juice, “once it was in the fermenter, they wouldn’t do any tasting.... As long as they don’t taste or drink, it’s perfectly legal for kids under 21 to work in a winery.”

The five cases of wine, auctioned off in one-bottle lots -- mostly, no surprise, to the parents and grandparents of the students -- brought $7,500 to the Santa Barbara Montessori School.

So everyone pitched in again for the 2002 harvest.

“We sold eight cases the second time,” Jaffurs said, “but instead of auctioning them off, we set the price at $100 a bottle” -- substantially more than the $30 retail price for the non-school wine but less than the $125-per-bottle average paid at the first fund-raiser.

The kids also made enough wine to fill six 3-liter bottles, and each class decorated one with materials and designs of the students’ devising. One class used mosaic tiles. Another draped beaded necklaces around the bottle. A third used dried-flower decoupage. The big bottles were auctioned off and, with them, the second sale netted the school $11,000.

“Making wine also helped improve our science program for the older kids,” says Jim Fitzpatrick, principal of the school.

Indeed, Jaffurs says, “as important as the money was to the school, making wine was just as important to the kids as an educational experience. The first-, second- and third-grade kids, for example, used a hydrometer to monitor the amount of sugar in the wine every day and then recorded their readings to see if the yeast was metabolizing it the way it’s supposed to.

“When you make wine and talk about making wine, you not only learn about chemistry and biology and food science but about teamwork and history and geography and culture.”

Jaffurs is a small winery, producing about 3,000 cases a year of red and white wine in the $20 to $35 price range. The wines consistently get scores in the 86 to 90 range from Robert Parker and Wine Spectator, and the most recent ratings -- in the current issue of Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar -- all range from 88 to 90.

“When I was in college in San Francisco, I developed a liking for Zinfandels with 15%, 16% alcohol that sold for $4 or $5 a bottle,” Jaffurs says. “They were perfect for a college student, and they probably cultivated my taste for powerful wines.

“Besides, when I decided to make wine, I asked a friend’s advice and he said Syrah. So I went to a Syrah tasting, and they just stole my heart -- especially the Syrahs from California. I thought they were more fruit-forward, more opulent, hedonistic, ready to drink than the ones I tried from France.”

Jaffurs’ wines are certainly hedonistic -- especially the big, rich Syrah from the Thompson vineyard, the most expensive of his wines ($33) and his personal favorite. He made 294 cases of it in the current, 2001 vintage, and when I put my nose in the glass and again when I tasted it, I thought of a bucket of blackberries.

Jaffurs has four single-vineyard Syrahs and one blend -- 2,000 cases of Syrah in all -- as well as a Grenache, and two whites, a Roussanne and a Viognier (250 to 350 cases each); in alternate years, he also makes a late-harvest Viognier (of which he produces only 44 cases of half-bottles).

I actually liked his dry Viognier best of all. It’s made with the grapes from three vineyards, has strong tropical aromas and is a bit lighter on the palate than several California Viogniers I’ve tasted recently.

“When I started with Viognier, in ‘96, I tried to make a typical U.S., over-the-top, Dolly Parton” -- he gestures with his hands to suggest an immense bosom -- “kind of Viognier, but I didn’t like it. I like the French, Condrieu-type Viognier better than what I made then.”

Jaffurs is clearly -- and understandably -- proud of the progress he’s made in a fairly short time.

He started the winery in 1993 and for almost five years, he kept his day job as a cost analyst for an aerospace company and made wine at night. He’d previously taken a few wine classes and he’d worked at harvest time in a friend’s winery, but making wine himself was both exciting and exhausting.

“I was a one-man, lean, mean, wine-making machine,” he says. “I never worked so hard in my life.”

At 47, he’s still lean -- a wiry 5-foot-8, with sparkling brown eyes -- and he’s still working hard. He quit the aerospace industry in 1998 and started spending all his time on his wine -- buying grapes from several different vineyards and making the wine at Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria, where he shared the facilities with several other small winemakers.

Two years ago, Jaffurs bought an abandoned two-bedroom house in the industrial zone of Santa Barbara. He hired workers to tear it down and build his winery.

“We have the only winery within the city limits of Santa Barbara,” Jaffurs says, “so we don’t have our own vineyards. We still buy our grapes, but we buy them from really good vineyards -- Thompson, Melville, Bien Nacido, Stolpman -- and I’m in the vineyards a lot, making sure things are done my way. I’m a control freak. I’m not a drive-by winemaker.”

Jaffurs says he doesn’t want to see the winery grow much beyond its current 3,000-case capacity.

“I want to make better wine, not more wine,” he says, “and I want to have a life, not go out on the road trying to sell 5,000 cases.”

He certainly has a life now. Dave Yates, a former aerospace colleague and fellow wine-lover, became Jaffurs’ general manager in charge of sales early this year -- the winery’s first full-time employee apart from Jaffurs himself. That’s helped ease the workload so Jaffurs can focus on what he likes best -- making wine. Equally important, the winery is just a seven-minute drive from the house he shares with his wife, Lee Wardlaw, the author of 23 books for children and young adults, and Patterson, who just turned 7.

“It’s a whole different ballgame when you do something you really like,” Jaffurs says.

It sure is.

David Shaw can be reached at [email protected].