At the helm of a hospitality business, I strive to engage as best I can with the interests and curiosities of my customers. This is driven by basic commercial reasoning as well as an underlying desire to be a fundamentally polite person. In the course of engaging with Noble Hill’s varied and geographically dispersed customers I find that one question regularly dominates the conversation: that of who is the winemaker at Noble Hill, whether I am said winemaker, and what qualifies me to take this title. I have to say that I am very uneasy with this question and the required response. I wish to argue for wines to be enjoyed, viewed, and judged independently from the personalities involved in their production. I wish to argue for an end to ego in winemaking.
Perhaps the personalities involved in growth and production of a wine leave an indelible imprint on the respective character of the resulting product. This would seem to fall within the broad purview of terroir. While one could argue that this is reason enough to accept the winemaker as the central figure within the narrative of a wine, I assert that the number of individuals involved in the success of a modern winery, even at the smallest scale, requires the intense cooperation and contribution of a host of people who cannot be accurately identified as a winemaker. Every time I respond to a customer’s question whether I am the winemaker for Noble Hill in the affirmative I am met with two distinct responses: firstly from the customer, a marked increase in deference, respect, and appreciation for the wines; and secondly, within myself, self-consciousness for taking credit for something which is fundamentally a team effort and which could not have been achieved without the hard work and dedication of my colleagues and subordinates. Each vineyard worker who carefully plucked a leaf from the canopy of our Merlot vineyard to slightly increase sun exposure on the bunches surely has as much of a role in the finished product as I or anyone else who took responsibility for it during its multi-year lifetime.
One of my company’s founding principles is humility. Even I cannot take credit for the distillation of this particular value into an immutable precept for my business; I lifted this particular company value directly from my previous employer Katzenbach Partners LLC. Jon Katzenbach, founder of the eponymous firm, argued forcefully and convincingly that pride matters more than money as a motivator, and that pride in the workplace and the job done requires concomitant humility in one’s own contribution. I have embraced this logic throughly in my career, and I require humility from my staff at every level. Humility means accepting that we need help from one another, admitting to mistakes, agreeing that we have room to learn, and seeing oneself as part of a larger whole.
Humility, then, precludes the winemaker him or herself from being identified as the core character of a fine wine, and if you accept that humility is a laudable trait and value to have, why does the market continue to demand celebrity winemakers, outsized personalities, and a relentless focus on "who makes the wine"? Certainly celebrity is alluring, entertaining, and commercially successful. People identify with big and outgoing personalities more easily than with abstract concepts like humility or terroir, and of course it is necessary to point to someone when asked "who is in charge" at any winery that wishes to avoid total chaos.
Fundamentally, though, through writing this brief note, I realise that I am arguing for nothing more simple and nothing more revolutionary than the same thing fought for by many already and one of the maxims that all winemakers worth their salt will agree to without a moment’s hesitation: respect your terroir. As winemakers, it is our job to understand, respect, and artfully reflect our terroir in the wines we make. The only shocking thing about this conclusion is how often it is ignored or seconded to the commercial aims of a brand or company.
I argue that by approaching wines by asking "how does this wine reflect its terroir?" before "who is its winemaker?" we will gain more in terms of knowledge and pleasure.