Verticals (2019) s01e01 Episode Script

- Wine making is a creative endeavor
that benefits from some
technical knowledge.
Okay, it is not pure art,
and it's certainly not pure science.
(Beethoven's "Fur Elise")
I have a very low tolerance, as you know,
for bullshit in the wine business.
- [Steve] How's my walk?
- [Carole] It's a good walk, Steve.
It's a good walk.
Not a silly walk.
It's a good walk.
- [Steve] I've been
working on my silly walk.
- We should show them our silly walk.
Do you remember how to do that?
We gonna do right first or left first?
- Right first, wait, right first.
(Carole laughing)
That's kind of our silly walk.
- That's a silly walk.
I think the reason that
we can work together
is that I'm not telling
you how to make the wine,
you're not telling me how to do the taxes.
- I do actually make some suggestions
about what we should deduct on our taxes,
and all of those conversations
end the same way.
Carole says,
"Would you like to do the taxes?"
At that point, the conversation's over.
- Steve Lagier is Carole's husband,
and they have a little
vineyard on Mount Veeder,
he prunes it, he makes the wine,
you know, he does it all himself,
and that's like an old-style
vingeron from Burgundy.
- So Carole Meredith is a badass.
She is one of my favorite
people to talk to about wine,
I love how direct she is,
and I think she's just a real character.
- So we picked our '98 Syrah
because it was our first commercial wine,
that came from our vineyard,
it made a wonderful wine,
it's aged very gracefully.
- It's now 21 years old,
and we expect it to go at least 30,
so I don't expect this is gonna taste
like an over the hill wine.
- You know, we trained
those vines together,
I probably did the majority of that,
and I probably did the
majority of the vineyard work,
but she, I like to say Carole and I
are Napa Valley's most
overeducated vineyard workers.
- My role was, once we had made the wine,
we needed a lot of permits,
and so that was up to me to
figure out how to do that,
it was up to me to figure
out how to get labels,
and then eventually, once
we got it in the bottle,
it was up to me to figure out
how to tell people we had it,
and ask them if they'd like to buy it.
- And she did all that while
she was working at Davis.
Discovering the origin
of many grape vines.
- Prior to her life on
Mount Veeder with her winery
that she runs with her
husband Steve Lagier,
she had this whole other
really important career
as a grape geneticist at U.C. Davis.
- I think my last year at Davis
was her first year coming
in to take over the,
I believe it would be the genetics
and plant breeding department.
- Without Carole, we
wouldn't necessarily know
that Cabernet Sauvignon was the offspring
of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc.
She put all of that together.
- I mean I don't wanna
say she was intimidating,
but she was, you know, a
little intimidating (laughs)
because she was so intense.
- Yeah, I had a 60 hour
a week job at U.C. Davis,
and then what became an additional
60 hour a week job here,
and that's why I eventually
took early retirement
from the universities,
'cause I can't do two 60 hour a week jobs,
I can maybe handle one,
but I can't do two.
- All right, we're gonna open the '98.
- [Carole] When we were making this wine,
we had been together for-
- We'd been married for 12 years.
- We'd been together for
14 years at that point.
We had lived on this
property for 12 years.
We were both still working our day jobs,
Steve was still working
at Robert Mondavi in '98,
and I of course was still
working at U.C. Davis,
so we were pretty busy, pretty busy.
- We were much younger then.
You know, when you're young
you can do a lot of stuff.
It's pretty amazing.
I want you to hold that just like that.
- And-
- No, just hold the flask.
- Hold the flask.
So you're gonna hold the light?
- Yes.
(piano music)
It smells divine.
- Looks good.
We yell at each other sometimes.
- No we don't!
- (laughing) Yes we do.
But we're on the same
page with most things.
- Okay, that's a good decant.
- That's a laboratory flask, and you know,
these are just great for wine.
They swirl, they're designed to swirl.
That's why they're shaped like that.
And they cost less than crystal decanters.
- And they're more durable.
- You bet.
Cheers.
Here's to '98.
- There's a little bit of cedar in it,
so there is an aged character.
- It's got the age, but it's
still got all the fruit,
you know, that's what always
amazes me, every time-
- That's Ethan.
There's two of them.
- There's two,
there's two. But we don't
know that it's Ethan.
We just know it's two, it's
two hawks, that's for sure.
This is our resident red-tailed hawk.
He showed up about a year and a half ago,
right after the fire.
We called him Ethan,
because Ethan seems to be an
appropriate name for a hawk.
We still get a lot of people asking,
"Why Ethan?"
But it might not be Ethan, we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
Keeping my eye on him.
You know, this wine.
- This has lots of life.
- Tastes like I was hoping it would taste,
it still has all its fruit.
Yeah, they're getting lower.
- Wow.
That was impressive.
- We got some hawk activity going on here.
- Their wines are great.
The wines are as full of
character as they are.
They're not overwrought,
they're not overripe,
they're not over-oaked.
They're really honest, and
interesting, and complex.
- We've been able to experience this wine
from the moment we crushed
the fruit until today.
And it's been a remarkable journey.
- And I don't know what the
lifespan of this wine is,
it's still got years to go,
so I guess what we would aspire to
is to taste it through till
the end of its lifespan,
so I don't know.
- Or the end of our lifespan.
(laughs)
- One of those is gonna come first.
- Everybody has an expiration date.
And the hawks are now gone.
Oh yeah, there they are.
Wow, look at him going straight down.
- He's diving, yeah.
- [Steve] It's like they're
having fun out there.
- [Carole] I only see one.
- [Steve] Look it, he's diving down again.
- [Carole] I only see one, though.
He hangs out around here.
And he's gotten accustomed to us.
Oh, there he goes.
Okay.
He especially likes it
when we're mowing with
the tractor, or weeding,
'cause that seem to generate
food opportunities for him,
it scares off rodents and
snakes in the vineyard.
And he will follow the tractor,
he'll land on vineyard posts,
he's pretty reliable,
when we're in the vineyard, boy,
he knows that there's
some good food to be had.
- I felt like I kind of talked
her into living up here,
and I felt a little sheepish about that
when we first moved up here,
I was thinking, my God, what have I done?
You know, I always wanted to
live in a place like this,
but now I've talked this
woman, who I've just married,
into moving up here, and I thought,
oh my God, you know,
maybe she won't like it.
She likes it more than I do.
I met Carole when I first started working
in the viticulture and enology department.
I was a biochem student who had a degree,
and I was looking for
something to do career-wise.
So I kinda fell into wine.
This 1981 Cabernet,
that I made with Charlie
Hossom and Mike Stowe,
under the Chateau Nonchalant label,
so I had never made wine before,
and the best way to
learn about making wine
is make some wine.
We got some fruit from the
Oakville experimental station,
in the middle of Napa Valley,
which is the middle of the best
Cabernet growing area there is,
Oakville Cabernet, if you could even get
a small amount of it,
it would probably be 10.000 a ton and up.
It's very expensive.
And we had access to free
Cabernet Sauvignon fruit
that was grown by the university,
so we had this fruit,
and we made wine in the basement
of the Oakville experimental station.
And bottled it about a
year and a half later,
and we're about to open it up.
I'm gonna use the Durand,
because this is a very old cork,
and we really wanna make
sure we can get it out
as best we can.
So it's a combination of
an Ah-So and a corkscrew,
and wine this old will have some sediment,
so we'll carefully decant it.
Voila.
(suspenseful orchestral music)
It smells great.
I think we hit the jackpot.
An old bottle of wine can be spoiled
by an inadequate closure, like a bad cork,
or it could be delightful.
I think I'm gonna stop there.
Mm.
That still has some fruit left.
Yeah, that's great.
Still has fruit, but it
has that cedar-y cigar box,
old wine flavor.
I knew that being able to have access
to the Oakville Cabernet
fruit was a real gift.
And we took advantage of it,
and here's the result.
And I thought I would
get a degree in enology,
and that I would go to
work for Robert Mondovi,
which I did for 14 years.
By the time I left in 1999,
we were making 2 million
cases of wine a year.
Cabernet makes fantastic wine,
but we don't grow any Cabernet here,
because I worked at a Cabernet
house, for Robert Mondovi,
and I didn't really wanna
compete with my day job.
In addition to that I married a woman
who doesn't like to drink young Cabernet.
So I couldn't see planting a grape,
despite how great it is,
that my wife wouldn't even
wanna drink for 10 years.
- This is a 2009 Mondeuse.
And 2009 was the very first vintage
that we made of our Mondeuse.
Mondeuse is a very old grape
from the Savoie region of France,
which is in the foothills of the Alps.
If you were to go from
Lyon to Switzerland,
you'd be passing right through Savoie.
The reason that we planted it
is because in the course of
my research at the university,
we discovered that Mondeuse
is a very close genetic relative of Syrah.
- People used to speculate
on where all these grape
varieties came from,
and they speculated
without any data at all,
and she got some data.
- She was doing research, fingerprinting,
as the techniques developed
more and more over time,
and identifying the family history
of the varieties we work with today.
- She took the DNA
fingerprinting technology
that had been developed
in simpler systems,
and she moved it and
used it for grape vines.
- We certainly wouldn't know that
Zinfandel is actually Croatian
in origin and not Italian,
I mean, she really
transformed the wine industry.
- She took Chardonnay, and found that
it was a cross with a very ordinary grape
called Gouais, with Pinot Blanc,
and that cross made Chardonnay.
She did the same thing for Syrah.
- If you have a Mondeuse wine from France,
it's a light-bodied, light-colored wine.
Very aromatic,
more like what you'd
expect from a French Pinot.
Whereas Syrah, from the northern Rhone,
tends to be quite a
full-bodied, dark-colored wine,
and so for being two varieties
that are so closely related genetically,
how come they seem so different,
at least in France?
Well, the obvious question is
how important is the place?
You know, because Mondeuse
is grown in the Savoie,
which is foothills of the Alps,
quite a short season, quite cool,
Syrah's grown in the northern Rhone,
where it's on slopes
and it can often get plenty
of heat to fully ripen,
you think that could have
something to do with it?
You think place is important?
So obviously it is,
but we wanted to be able
to actually test that idea,
and in France you would never see
Mondeuse and Syrah
grown in the same place.
But we here, we could do that,
because we can grow whatever we want,
and so we decided that we would plant
some Mondeuse here right
next door to our Syrah,
and that we would keep
everything else constant,
so the only difference
between the two wines
would be the grape variety,
and we find that our Mondeuse
is not light-bodied and light-colored
like the French Mondeuse,
it is more deeply colored, and a richer,
more full-bodied wine than our Syrah.
(cork pops)
It's got that deep color
we've come to love.
A deep, dark, rich, delicious wine.
This is what we've come to
expect from our Mondeuse.
When we first thought
of planting grapes here
and making wine, it was never,
oh, I'm going to somehow
intertwine my two lives,
but yet it's worked out that way,
and we planted Syrah
because we loved the wines,
but just after we had made
the decision to plant Syrah,
in my research lab, we
discovered the parents of Syrah.
So all of a sudden there was a connection
between that and what were planting.
And then the Mondeuse was the second one,
we planted Zinfandel,
because I had done so much work on that
that I felt I had to
have some Zinfandel here,
so it's been a lot of connections.
(playful orchestral music)
The hummingbirds were
here when we got here,
but there were no feeders then,
and they just lived on just
the natural sources of food,
which is still quite plentiful for them,
there's always something flowering,
and they eat little bugs, too.
We put up feeders just because
we liked having the hummingbirds around,
and we thought, well, if we put up feeders
then we get to see more
of the hummingbirds.
So we now have this resident
population of hummingbirds,
and it bothers me as a biologist,
because I know I have created
an artificial environment.
I used to really worry more
about their dependence on us,
and thinking, what's
gonna happen if I die?
What's gonna happen to
all these hummingbirds?
All of a sudden, they're
not gonna have any food.
Well, we had this fire, right?
So 18 months ago we had
this fire, and we evacuated.
And we were gone for eight days.
I have been filling these
feeders every single day,
and supporting a large
population of hummingbirds,
and then we're gone for eight days.
And nobody's feeding these hummingbirds,
so when we finally came
back after our evacuation,
you know, I looked up at these feeders,
and they're bone dry, of course,
'cause they haven't been
filled for eight days,
first thing I did was put some food
in the hummingbird feeders.
Two hours later we had hummingbirds.
So now I don't worry so much,
because now, if I die,
I know these birds are gonna
take care of themselves,
they're apparently able to
adjust to that kind of situation.
- Well, the earthquake
was a hell of a thing.
Shook us out of bed on a
Sunday morning at 3:20 a.m.
We had very little damage up at the house,
couple broken pipes.
But we kept our barrels in South Napa
at a different warehouse from this one,
and it was a disaster.
It was essentially a
pile of scrambled barrels
all over the floor.
(somber piano music)
But we spent about two weeks,
took our own sky track
down to the warehouse
and were cherry-picking barrels
out of there for two weeks.
It was quite an adventure.
And we managed to do that
without killing anybody.
And as a result of that, I have developed,
we keep all our barrels on
these two barrel pallets,
and I devised a system
where our barrels are
not going to fall again.
We designed a little clamp
that clamps each barrel to the pallet,
and they cannot move independent
of the two barrel pallet.
And a barrel falling from that height
on a worker would kill them,
so I'm doing it for two reasons,
I don't want my barrels to kill anybody,
and I don't wanna lose my wine.
That's our 2017 Tribidrag,
a.k.a. Zinfandel.
And we're gonna do a little
quick taste sample of that,
get a CEO approval.
- She named her Zinfandel Tribidrag
after its Croatian origin.
Tribidrag is the most pronounceable
Croatian word for Zinfandel.
- It's a little bit young,
obviously it's not bottled yet.
- I don't like young wine,
so it's hard for me to barrel taste.
- Lagier Meredith was very fortunate
to have our fruit all
picked before the fires hit,
and the wine's very concentrated,
and it's gonna get bottled next month.
(somber piano music)
We were relatively unaffected
as far as our wine making.
Our property, that's a
whole different story.
(helicopter whirring)
- You know, I'd like to
compare the two events,
because I think they were both disasters,
and yet I think we experienced
them so differently,
the earthquake was a huge shock,
woke us up, we lost some wine,
it took a lot of work to clean up,
but at our own property, there
was hardly any damage at all,
so our day-to-day life at home
was not really affected that much,
and our sleep was disturbed
for maybe a month, right?
- Something like that.
- It was maybe a month,
when we would lie awake
in the middle of the night
waiting for a shake.
But with the fire in 2017,
what a vastly different experience.
In that event, our wine
was pretty much untouched,
but our property was completely burned,
and that forest burned entirely around us,
the fire encircled us.
And we lost some vines, and
we lost some water tanks,
and you know, we lost a few things.
But that now, it's what, 18 months later,
and we still can't sleep.
We still can't sleep.
That was such a much larger trauma.
- It burned two of our
two closest neighbors,
and bear in mind our closest neighbors
are a half-mile away each,
but we share a common driveway with them,
so you know, they're off the hill,
and probably don't have
much of a chance to rebuild,
so it's left Carole and I
kind of by ourselves up there,
and it has a different
feel now than it used to.
We used to feel like
we had a neighborhood,
and now we're just kind of alone up there.
(pensive piano music)
- Okay.
- Okay, this is our 2017 Tribidrag.
It's a barrel sample.
- Oops.
- That was good.
- You should lick the bottle, too.
- No, I'm not licking the bottle.
- It's a good one.
(glasses clink)
- Ooh, brambly, with a little pepper
and a little cinnamon.
- And it's young.
- And it's very young.
But probably 80% of
Napa's grapes were picked
prior to the fire.
Sadly, some of the best Cabernet
was still out on the vine in 2017.
- 'Cause Cabernet is a
late-ripening variety,
so it's always the last
to be picked around here.
- We're gonna take you over
and show you a little fire damage.
- We got off light, but
it's traumatic for us,
but light compared to what
some other people went through.
You know, we were preparing for fire,
we've been preparing for
fire for 30 plus years,
and you think you're ready, but boy,
then when it happens, you
don't know how it's gonna feel
until you go through it.
- We're gonna go down
through the row here,
let's go down through the trail.
- You clear what's
called defensible space,
which means that you clear
a lot of the undergrowth
away from your house,
so that if a fire gets into the forest,
it doesn't have a way to
get up into the canopy
and get more destructive.
- Which is why you can see a
lot of the canopy remains here.
- But except right here,
a lot of it doesn't too.
- Yeah.
This was the area that was
the hottest during the fire.
- So we've got more damage here
than in most places around us.
We were completely encircled by the fire.
But it was probably the worst right here,
'cause I think this is
where it was the hottest.
- This slope falls off to the west,
and it's fairly steep,
so I think there was
a chimney effect here.
And it burned a lot of
the vines along here,
you can see, we left some of these vines,
hoping they might come back.
- Some did and some didn't.
- Some did, it's kinda weird.
- And you can see there's
a lot I'll be removing.
- We've already removed some of the vines
that we were pretty sure were dead,
and we gave the others
a chance to show us,
and they showed us, they really are dead.
- And you can see there's
a large Doug Fir out there
that kinda got fried,
and there were several Doug
Firs along this fence line
that got fried, and we just dropped them.
- The grape vines themselves
have a really high moisture content,
and so they don't burn easily.
The reason that we do
have vineyard damage here
is not because of flame contact,
the flames never got up here,
it's because the fire was so
hot in this adjacent forest
that it was radiant heat.
So this was radiant heat damage,
not actual flame contact.
And I didn't understand that distinction,
until we went through a fire.
- First of all, the vineyard
makes a natural fire break,
because every summer you
mow all of the grass,
and you weed eat around the vines,
so you basically are removing the fuel.
- So Steve and I, more than
just about anybody else we know,
were prepared for a fire,
but that still doesn't mean
that you can't stop it.
- What are we doing now?
We're kind of redoubling our efforts.
My feeling is there is no
distance that is too far
to have that fuel break from your house.
We're extending it hundreds
and hundreds of feet
in all directions around our house.
(peaceful music)
- Well, there's an amount
of uncertainty in farming.
This is just one more thing.
- There's an amount of
uncertainty in life.
And when you farm, that
uncertainty is there all the time,
starting with the weather,
and then so many other
things are uncertain.
- Steve and I are both
really rational people,
we're never superstitious about anything,
we never say, oh, this is a sign,
that, you know, somebody
doesn't want us here.
No, we understand that weather varies,
we understand that we're
close to earthquake faults,
we understand that the
climate is changing,
and that dramatic weather
events, including fire,
are becoming more and
more frequent occurrence,
it used to be that
there would be big fires every few years,
now there are big fires every year,
and that's just the way it is.
You know, the world has never stood still,
it's always been a changing place.
And it's just that we're
experiencing some of those changes,
and we're going with the flow.
We're in it for the long term.
That fire hasn't scared us off.
A few months after the fire,
Steve was walking out in the forest,
and there's this gun on the ground.
And we think it had probably
been there all along,
but it had been covered
up with leaf litter,
and so we could never see it,
so Steve picked it up, and it
still has its serial number,
we know some FBI agents,
but it turned out it was too old
for their computerized records,
so they would have to go to paper records,
and unfortunately, this was
really not an active case
that they could justify spending time on.
So they told us that we were then free
to make up any story we
wanted to about this gun.
So we know it was probably
made in the 1950s,
it's called a Ruger single-shot,
we like to think that maybe
it was the Zodiac killer,
or you know, some infamous criminal
had tried to escape through these woods
and had tossed it out.
So we like the Zodiac killer story,
and I think we'll stick to that one.
(wine glasses clink)