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C.G. Di Arie
Chaim Gur-Arieh, owner and winemaker
Gur-Arieh’s professional background is considerable: Born in Istanbul, Turkey, he immigrated to Israel as a teenager. After serving in the Israel army, he enrolled in school in Israel and earned a B.S. degree in chemical engineering. From there, he attended the University of Illinois and received a masters and PhD. in food science with minors in chemical engineering and biochemistry. He worked for several companies including Quaker Oats, United Technology Center (an aerospace company in California), and Del Monte before founding his own company—Food Development Corporation (FDC). One of his most famous new products he invented for a client through FDC was the wine cooler. Gur-Arieh eventually merged FDC with California Brands Flavors, thus creating one of the biggest food flavor companies on the West Coast. After 25 years, he sold the company and followed his dream to create world-class wines.
We met with Gur-Arieh at his tasting room in Plymouth (his winery is in nearby Mt. Aukum, but closed to the public except for special events). At first we were going to conduct the interview in a seating area by their creek, but opted to enjoy the ambiance of the deck instead. Sporting his signature Australian cowboy hat, Gur-Arieh is very soft spoken and precise in choosing his words, thinking deeply before answering. He has a somewhat mischievous twinkle in his eye and is quick to smile, which he does often. An avid cyclist, Gur-Arieh is also a truly gracious host, sending us home with a bottle of his very best wine to enjoy when the book is finally released.
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Before you ever thought about getting involved in wine, you were
developing new foods. When I was a kid my favorite cereal was Cap’n
Crunch. How did you come up with it?
Things happen by serendipity most of the time. It wasn’t intended to be this way, but Quaker at the time had a cereal called “Life,” and it was infringing on a patent for “Chex.” Quaker has always been very conservative with products like oatmeal, puffed rice, puffed wheat, and Life was their first introduction into ready-to-eat breakfast cereal. It was a big setback for them, so they wanted to develop a different way of making Life. I was given the project and when [my result] turned out to be a very different than Life, they thought maybe we could make a children’s breakfast cereal instead. So it was sweetened more and that’s what happened.
So
you just started cooking different things to come up with it?
It was a different process. It was extruded, like a meat grinder (same cereal, different process, different look).
How
did you go from cereal making to winemaking?
When I was working on Cap’n Crunch, I thought I was going to spend all my life working on breakfast cereals. It was an exciting field to me, but then I didn’t like Chicago. I had a friend in California who said, “Why don’t you come out. I’ll help you get a job.” I got a job with an aerospace company in the late ‘60s. I was there a couple of years. We worked on life support in space. They had a different vision about what space ships were going to be. Things changed. I didn’t like the government contract business so I went to work for Del Monte.
There
you invented “pudding-in-a-cup,” correct?
Yes, puddings-in-a-cup, Jell-O cups, fruit cups, yogurt cups—the yogurt cups really never made it. When you’re doing those things and doing all the market testing and consumer testing, if you do everything right, maybe three to five percent make it.
Then
you went into the flavoring business?
No, I went into the consulting business. I had a company called Food Development Corporation and I did many products for other companies.
What
kind of products did you develop?
An exciting project, but not so glamorous, a man came to me, and he was putting battery acid in a bag—a bag in a box. When you bought a car battery, the acid was not in the battery. It used to be the retailers that sold car batteries got the acid in 55 gallon drums so they used that every time they sold a battery. This man had the idea of making a portion control bag. He also wanted to sell Del Monte ketchup in a bag-in-a-box, instead of a number-ten can. We developed that and sold it to McDonalds.
And
you had a hand in developing PowerBars?
Yes, (Brian) Maxwell and (his then girlfriend) Jennifer (Biddulph), they were in Berkeley, she was a student, and he ran marathons. And he thought it would be cool to have something to sustain himself while he was running a marathon. She was studying nutrition so they went to a professor of nutrition and said, “What do we put in it?” So then they came to me and I put it together.
When
did you start your flavor company?
When I worked on wine coolers with Franzia. I told them, look, instead of me charging you for developing these products, how about if I develop the flavors for you and you use my flavors. I had met a person who was a flavor chemist. He said, “You’re running after projects that have a beginning and an end, but if you sell a product then you have continuity.” I liked the idea. And we started it, but it took many years, about 18 years for branding, to be recognized.
What
was your favorite flavor that you created?
I made 5000 flavors. I could tell you my favorite wine? (laughing)
Okay,
what was your most unusual flavor?
I made an alcoholic beverage that had a peanut
butter flavor.
You
say that your favorite part is blending the wines before bottling. Does
that go back to your flavoring days?
Actually, I’m very good at it. The blending is, one, to create a blend, the other is to improve the wine by adding a little bit of this and a little bit of that. There are some wines that are particularly suitable for blending. Zin maybe lacks color, it lacks structure. Petite Sirah has both, so it is a natural variety for blending into Zin.
Are
you growing your own grapes here?
I do, yes. I grow about 45 acres of grapes, most of
it I own, others I farm from neighbors. We have two acres here at the
tasting room. At the winery we have 209 acres, with 22 acres producing
and another eight acres planted. Next door we have another 11½ acres
that we lease and six that were planted last year.
What
do you grow primarily?
We have many varieties; Zin, Primitivo, Syrah, Petite Sirah, Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Barbera, Grenache, and Tempranillo.
Do
you process them here?
This isn’t our main winery. This is our tasting room.
Is
your main winery open to the public?
No, it’s not. It’s open by appointment. We open the winery one weekend a month for club members and my friends. Next year we are also going to include the public every other month, but with pay. Club members come free.
Tell
us about your wine club.
Every other month we have a club release. We have a line of wines we make only for the club; we call them the “gallery collection.” We release two bottles of wine every two months. Then we have a “by-the-case club” so people, rather than getting two bottles, they get a case. And we give them aggressive discounts. Club members get 20 percent off and for by-the-case [purchases], we give 30 percent off.
Not
that you’ve made mistakes, but do you have a favorite mistake, one that
maybe turned out really good?
It’s always like this. Most great discoveries come by mistakes. I try wild things. I blend wines from different regions. I cross the border and blend from different countries. I blend Tempranillo with Syrah. Tempranillo is a Spanish variety and Syrah is a French varietal. I make a blend called Sierra Legend, a blend of Syrah, Primitivo, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Cabernet Franc. Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc are Bordeaux varieties, Syrah is a Rhone variety, and Primitivo comes from Croatia.
How
do you price your wines?
Most of my wines are $25 to $30. The way I make wine it costs me a lot of money because I fuss around them. It’s very expensive to make a good bottle of wine without cutting corners. But it’s very difficult to sell these varieties in this region at this price. I’m not making Cabernet Sauvignon yet, but the region is not known for Cabernet Sauvignon. It’s difficult to sell a bottle of anything for $50.
Can
you talk about your new submerged cap fermentation tank?
Do you know how wine is made?
Generally, yes, but a short description of the process for some of our
readers would be helpful.
Red wine, you make it with the whole berry, the
whole grape. The crush, you de-stem, remove the grapes from the stem
then you crush the grapes and put them in a tank and add yeast and
fermentation starts. Fermentation is conversion of sugar into alcohol
and carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide lifts the skins to the surface of
the vessel. So a couple of days after fermentation begins you have all
the skins floating on top of the tank and the fermenting wine is
underneath. The skins have all of the flavor, the color, and the tannins
and so on. If you extract this, then the wine doesn’t have a lot of
flavor. One way to deal with this is to pump-over, to take wine from the
bottom and pour it over the top and irrigate the cap.
Another way is to punch-down. In a six-foot diameter tank [that’s] eight-feet high, the cap will be two feet thick. It’s a lot of skins. Twenty-five percent of this must—they call it “must”—is skins. When you punch down it is very aggressive. It will macerate the skin, it breaks seeds, and pumping over, the cap dries out and it creates cracks. So when you are pumping over, you really aren’t soaking the skins. The liquid goes through the path of least resistance. My way is to take the cap and push it into the wine. It’s a submerging device that I can move up and down and it just pushes the cap into the wine and holds it so the cap is always submerged inside the wine.
How
does that affect the flavors of your wines?
It’s not only one thing. There are always questions, how is your wine different from other wines? My wines aren’t aggressive; they are fully extracted, they are very concentrated, they are well-balanced, they aren’t highly alcoholic. I like elegance, I like subtly, I like gentleness. It’s not only this part of my wine making protocol that determines the profile of the wine, it’s other things that I do.
Are
you a perfectionist?
(Gur-Arieh laughs) Yes, I’m a perfectionist. I’m obsessed.
At
the end of a hard day, what do you have to drink?
(He laughs again.) I like beer. My wife likes a martini, but I like beer.