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Nevada City Winery
Mark Foster, winemaker
Our interview with Mark Foster was one we were eagerly anticipating. We both love Nevada City and had talked with Foster in the past while tasting his wines in the tasting room. His easy-going nature, broad smile, and sense of humor will draw you in, and his modesty when it comes to his wine will make you want to learn more.
The day we met with him was clear and cold. Winter was definitely on its way. After meeting in their street-level tasting room, we headed downstairs to their winery. It was there we were greeted by Spencer, Mark’s dog. Spencer was sporting his favorite accessory—a tennis ball. Mark picked up the ball and threw it across the half-empty parking lot the winery shares with the historic Miners Foundry, with Spencer in hot pursuit. It should be noted that Mark, our friends Michele and Ken Cemo who joined us that day, and the two of us spent most of the interview outside, chucking the ball for Spencer, in between questions.
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Wow, your wine dog loves chasing that ball!
Yeah, he’ll fall asleep with a ball in his mouth.
You mentioned earlier that you buy your grapes from different
vineyards.
We get about 70 percent from within the county. Originally, all our grapes came from around the county. When I joined them (Nevada City Winery) I said, “I can make your wines immediately better if you let me go out of the county, or it’s going to take about five years just to get the vineyards up to par with the right clones, the right varieties.” Unanimously, the board said, “Stay in the county, fix the grapes.”
We wandered to the back of the winery and Mark explained:
This is the only industrial zone in all of Nevada City, right here.
This is where you unload your grapes?
Yes. The big flatbed trucks with the grapes roll in
and we unload our half-ton bins. We sort through all the grapes removing
all the bad grapes, rabbits, all the things that don’t belong in the
bins, then put them into the crusher. The crushed grapes immediately go
into tanks or these one-ton bins that we use for fermenting. We get a
lot better extraction and color and flavor if we use smaller bins rather
than tanks. We do punch-downs twice each day (quick
explanation: solids float to the top and form a cap—punch-downs push the
solids back into the liquid).
Is that your job or someone else’s?
[I did it] for about six years until last year, when I got a young woman. She was tall, about five-eleven, and had the strength. She would put on a “Gladiator” sound track and get up and start punching-down bins. Sometimes we’d have up to 22 bins and it could be a good workout. I don’t think her husband ever screwed with her. So now I have her father-in-law working for me.
We have about 450 barrels. As you could tell tasting the wines, we aren’t a big oaky winery; we want the oak to be kind of a picture frame around the picture and the picture is the fruit. So I don’t have to go out and buy all brand new barrels. I go to those wineries that do change barrels every year, and I get their old barrels for a quarter of the price.
How
many cases do you produce?
About 10,000 cases per year.
Did you go to school in Davis?
I have a masters in biology and zoology and a masters in industrial engineering. I came here because I wasn’t making any money as a biologist stuck out in the desert for six months at a time. A friend of mine said he was going up to work for Beringer and I said, “You can work for wineries?” I came up with her, looked around and liked the idea a lot, so I went to UC Davis and got a degree there. I worked for Smothers Brothers in Santa Cruz (where they first started before moving to Kenwood). My only instructions were, “This is the way we make our wines, don’t screw it up.”
What was the first wine you ever made?
A Pinot Noir.
Why did you choose that one?
It’s by far my favorite wine, the most complex, the most interesting, the toughest one to make. And being cocky and young, I thought I could make a great Pinot. And I, uh, discovered otherwise. It takes really good grapes and a lot of experience to make a great Pinot.
What do you think about the movie, Sideways? The movie called much attention to the Pinot Noir grape.
I think it was a great movie but it adversely
affected the [wine] industry. The owners here have wanted me to find
Pinot grapes for the last three years, but you can’t find them anywhere.
But Merlot (which was the popular
wine before the movie), you can’t give away Merlot now. It’s a great
wine. All those vineyards that have Merlot are now budding over or
[grape growers are] trying to figure out what to do with their grapes.
What do you think will be the next hot wine?
Everybody thought Syrah was going to be the next big boy. It didn’t make it. It did very well, and Sangiovese did very well, but they still don’t touch Zin or Cab.
Why do you think that is?
I think Americans aren’t as adventurous. They find a variety they generally like—and I can’t blame them—like Cabernet. You can try 300 different Cabs. But at the cost of wines now, it’s tough for people to go out and buy a $25 bottle of Sangiovese and not know what they are going to get. That’s the great thing about tasting rooms, they’re actually educational, the perfect way to try something new, and we push that idea wholeheartedly in our tasting room. If you don’t like it, you can dump it out and move on to the next one.
As a winemaker, what are some of the craziest or strangest
reactions or comments you’ve ever gotten from someone?
Hmmm, there are so many. We had made a very
successful Cabernet Franc a couple of years ago and a guy asked when the
next Cab Franc was coming out. I said that there won’t be one this year
because the birds ate the grapes in the vineyard. He said, “You can
make, just out of a vine or two, all this Cab Franc?” I said, “No, the
birds ate six tons of grapes, the whole vineyard.” His response: “Wow,
they must have been really fat birds.” Birds can wipe out a whole
vineyard in a week and a half.
How about the deer?
My best Cab Franc and Syrah vineyard was owned by an 80-year-old guy who had just put up a beautiful fence all the way around the vineyard. It was a tough year for water and food, and the deer were eating his grapes like crazy. They were never there when he walked into the vineyard in the morning; he couldn’t figure out how they were clearing this eight-foot fence. So one morning, he got up about 2 am and wandered out and sat there. Sure enough, about eight deer came swimming across his pond and he just sat there and watched them eat for a while.
Do you have any hobbies or collections outside the job?
I’m a mountaineer; climbed several times in the Alps, including the Matterhorn and Eiger. My wife and I have done month-long treks from one end of Switzerland to the other.
At the end of a long hard day, when you want to sit and relax,
what do you have to drink?
Actually, depends on the day, but if it’s a crush day, it’s a nice cold beer from Czechoslovakia, a pilsner.
Any big plans for the winery or you?
For the winery we’re trying some new grapes,
working on some Grenache. It turns out the Rhones are going to be really
wonderful up here. We just finished doing a Tempornia Rose. We did our
first Barbera last year, so we’re waiting for release very soon. The
winery is very open minded about allowing me to play.
How about for you, personally?
In June, I’m going to climb [Alaska’s] Denali (also known as Mount McKinley, Denali is approximately 20,320 feet high). My wife wants me to get that done before I get too old. She’ll be traveling around Alaska while I’m climbing with three friends.