The 100% Varietal, 100% Single-Vineyard Strategy of Nickel & Nickel. Explained by Winemaker Joe Harden

Nickel & Nickel winery

by Andrew Chalk

Nickel & Nickel, the Far Niente brand, has a very interesting go-to-market strategy. Single varietal wines from single vineyards. Recently, Nickel & Nickel winemaker Joe Harden came through town and gave me the opportunity to interview him about this unusual approach prior to a tasting of their wines. 

MENTORSHIP 

Joe Harden

AC: You started at Robert Mondavi Winery under Geneviève Janssens. What rôle did she play in your professional development?

Joe Harden (JH): I have had coaches that can be really hard on you and I reacted very well to it and she, to this day, is my mentor, and one of my closest friends. She comes and tastes Nickel & Nickel, gives me feedback, honest feedback, which is sometimes hard to get from your peers. So she was really the one that got me my start and believed in me when most people wouldn't have, and threw me right into the fire as an intern. Then I was gonna leave and take a job up valley and she's like, no, we're gonna create a position, you need to stay here.

So I ended up staying there for seven harvests and was a Bordeaux winemaker there. So I was in charge of the To Kalon Vineyard and the Fumé Blanc and being a young, green winemaker. 

AC: What a baptism!

JH: Yes. It was like, you probably know my background, but I didn't have a straight line into winemaking. I grew up on a vineyard in Lodi. My dad farmed, since 1990, Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc and cherry trees and we used to sell to Robert Mondavi back in the day. Now we sell our fruit to Charles Krug. So all of our Lodi fruit goes to Napa wineries and when I got done playing professional basketball, I reached out to my dad and a couple other people and I was like, I'd really like to learn at Robert Mondavi because I went to Davis like Margaret and Robert had. I was in the first graduating class in the new winery there. My dad had known him and worked with him for many, many years because he was on the sales side of the business and what was a normal plan to be a three month internship turned into seven great years. 

Mondavi is such a temple for winemakers to come and see so much. As I've grown in my winemaking career, it's more focused on vineyards, which is why I'm at Nickel & Nickel now, but I got thrown right into the fire.

TERROIR AND TO KALON VINEYARD

I got to see so many unique, incredible things, worked on To Kolon which, again, is (still in my opinion) one of the greatest terroirs in the new world and it was just a great learning experience. And Geneviève was hard but fair, and demanding, but again, with my background, I really thrived in that. You can be hard on me and I'm gonna keep going, I'm gonna keep learning, I'm gonna keep asking questions. I just took it like a sponge.

AC: Like on a sports team. 

JH: Exactly, yeah, you have to perform, you have to show up, you have to work hard and if you did that with her, she really, I mean again, to this day, she's one of my closest winemaker friends and we meet all the time and she's been a great mentor of mine. 

AC: One story to lead into the next question: a friend of mine went to Davis and then he spent some time at a winery that was then called Freemark Abbey. He said that the best thing about Davis is it teaches you everything about making wine. The first thing you have to remember is, forget what you learned at Davis when you get out and start work. 

JH: A thousand percent.

AC: Because it's the laboratory method and as you said in some of your commentary, every terroir is going to be different. 

JH: Yeah, I learned everything by doing it. You go to school and that's where you find your passion but for me, I'm in the vineyard and in the cellar.

That's where I learned everything from the people who have been doing it for 30 years like Geneviève and people in the cellar and people in the vineyards who know the land. Again, you learn the Krebs cycle but to everyday knowledge, that's not applicable or they teach you to keep the wine sound in an academic sense. You have to hold your free sulfur at some crazy amount and it's like, no, it's not. You can't, you're gonna pickle your wine if you actually go and hold it at that level. So it's a give and take and it's a great learning experience but for me, it was you gotta go and do it. You gotta go and feel the soil and walk the vineyard and taste the fruit and I had a really great time. 

ANALYTICAL VERSUS TASTE-DRIVEN APPROACHES TO PICK DATE

My first year at Mondavi, Geneviève and I were walking the vineyard in To Kolon. It was a Monastery block which is my favorite. Probably the most acclaimed block within To Kalon. It's right below the Carmelite Monastery on the hill there. It's arguably the top section of To Kalon and I'm walking the vineyard and I'm looking at analysis and I'm taking what I learned from Davis and I'm eating the fruit and tasting it and I'm like, hey, by all accounts, we should pick this. The brix  are here, the acid's here, it tastes great.

She's like, pull some more berries off and chew on the seeds and skins. Grind them up in your mouth and remember what that feels like. She's like, what kind of texture is it? I'm like, oh, it's drying, it's a little grippy. She's like, let's wait. 

AC: Chew on the seeds? I haven't done it, but is it really tannic? 

JH: Oh, crazy tannic. And To Kalon can be a very beautiful mix of elegant but big and structured tannin and so she's like, remember what you're tasting right now. We'll come back, this is on Friday. She's like, we'll come back on Monday. It was like 95 degrees. Let's come back Monday and let's taste it again. And so I'm tasting the fruit. She looked at me and she's like, let's pick tomorrow. And I was like, I think I would've picked three days ago because it had completely changed.

It had resolved in just that amount of time and that perfect temperature. I mean, there's so many things we're looking at during harvest, but it was a huge learning curve for me where it's like, forget all the numbers. Use them as a tool, but it's all about, because of her very classic Bordeaux training. She's like, it's all taste. It's taste, taste, taste. Use the numbers as a guide and I'm definitely, because I've worked and learned from her, I'm not the most technical winemaker.

Way more by feel, way more by textures and again, we use the analysis as a tool, but a lot of winemakers will make big decisions, 100%, on analysis. During fermentation, they'll run phenolics and be like, oh, the tannin and the total anthocyanins are here, press tomorrow, whereas I don't measure any of that. For me, it's like, what am I tasting? What am I feeling? And it's about repetition, but she really taught me about cap management and understanding extraction and knowing where the wine will land in three years once it hits the consumer's glass.

AC: That's one of the brilliant things about winemakers. They can extrapolate to what the consumer will find. 

JH: Yeah, my wife has come to the winery during harvest. She's like, how do you have a job? This doesn't taste good. I'm like, yeah, picture it in three years. That's what I'm looking towards. I'm looking at how it's tasting now, but it's really about which cooper am I gonna put it in after filtration or after fermentation? When are we gonna drain the press? There's so many factors, and that's the beautiful thing about wine, it's a million decisions to get you to the final point. Hopefully, you didn't mess anything up. 

THE EFFECT OF YIELD ON WINE QUALITY

AC: From what I read, your answers in some interviews were that terroir is prime in terms of explaining quality and wine differences. 

Let's say you've got one of your regular vineyards. You're very used to it, and so forth. And if you, in the experiments that you do in a specific year, suppose that you picked one plot with a certain yield, another plot with a smaller yield, another plot with a smaller yield still, then what's the relationship between yield and quality for a vineyard you really know? 

JH: That's a great point. I think it's a lot more complicated than just yield. It really comes back to the soil, and the composition of the soil, because I've had vineyards that are less than a ton per acre, and I don't necessarily like the quality of the wine. So some vineyards need to have a little bit more fruit on it. I mean, we're talking like three to four tons per acre, but it all comes back to the soil. It's not, in my opinion, it's definitely not, it sounds like a good sales pitch to say the tons per acre, and that's the quality of the wine, but there's vineyards that we've done one cluster per shoot, so we've dropped the production by 60%, and that doesn't always equate to higher quality wines.

Sometimes with the soil, if it's got heavier loam or gravelly, and again, if you go to like north of five tons per acre, then that's not what I'm talking about. It's all limited production, but a lot of times, take the economics side of it. Like if I have my own vineyard, and it's producing one ton an acre, and the fruit's amazing, I'm all in. But there's been many vineyards that I've worked with where we've…it's all about balance.

It's all about like, I'd like to see his canopy, right, how much growth he has, because again, there's a certain number of leaves that need to support a certain amount of clusters on one shoot. 

VINE ROW ORIENTATION

AC: On that question, do you have a preference for east-west versus north-south rows? 

JH: So we're actually completely changing the philosophy, and again, it's depending on where in Napa you are, but we're usually like 30 degrees off north if we're future-proofing new plantings. 

So it was always northeast-southwest, so to speak, at least where I'm at, and like the western side of Oakville. So you get like the hottest part of the day where the sun is at the top, and you want it to be directly over the canopy. So in terms of future-proofing with heat suppression, all these things that we're now, water-resistant rootstocks, the right clone for the right soil, the row direction. 

TRELLISING

We're now doing cross-arms. Normally you just see vertical shoots in Napa. We've completely got away from that. We're actually adding a cross-arm and adding wires, so it's almost like a V. So you get this dappled light when it's at the height in the hottest part of the day. You get dappled light on the clusters, but they're shading. In certain vineyards, I've started the leaf on the other side where the row direction isn't perfect. We'll actually leaf on the afternoon side, which is counter to what people normally do. Like in our estate, so it's hard to answer, and it's way more, in my opinion, than just.row direction.

AC: So you have more leaf on the afternoon side? 

JH: Yeah, so we'll leaf the afternoon side on a certain vineyard because of its row direction, where we used to, when I came to Nickel & Nickel, they were saying, like, this wine, the knock on this wine is that it can be herbal, it can be pyrazine. Here's what we're doing, and I'm like, well, actually with how this row direction is and where it is at the hottest part of the sun, we need to leaf the afternoon side, not the morning side. It's getting longer in the morning, so the morning side's getting burned, and the afternoon side is green. So it's counter to what you think. 

AC: That's counterintuitive.

JH: Yeah, so at Nickel & Nickel, every vineyard, every block of every vineyard is different, and we have to treat everything separately, and it's not just about tons per acre. It's way more in-depth than that. 

CLONES

AC: Now, your vineyards are well-established. They're all probably prime age, but obviously there's some replanting. Do you see big differences, referring to Cabernet Sauvignon specifically, in clone choice? 

JH: Yeah.

AC: You do. And are you choosing clones differently from the way you did in the past, say, when you planted? You've been at Nickel & Nickel since 2018, but when they planted originally. 

JH: Yeah, for sure. Some of these new clones, like 169, 685, these clones are relatively new, and I think they're producing amazing, layered, concentrated Cabernet. You're seeing less of, like, clone four, clone seven.  Those were very widely planted, and so they're always, I mean, even Davis is helping tweak and make these clones where it's tiny clusters, it's tiny berries, but it's not like clone six, that's the winemakers clone, where I work with a lot of clone six, and it's berries like this [indicates small size], and the wines can be very tannic, and it doesn't yield a lot of crop, but it also, in one heat wave, it can go from not ripe to overripe, and so we're trying to always tweak the clones. 

ROOTSTOCK

And the rootstock plays a massive role in it, too, in terms of vigor, water resistance, and so it's super complicated and a little convoluted, but clone choice plays a massive role, and rootstock plays a massive role. 

AC: Would you say that clone importance is a view that is becoming more widespread?

JH: Yeah, you've probably always heard of clones in Pinot Noir, I think the clone selection in Pinot Noir is much more dramatic in shifting style, so you've kind of always heard about it in Pinot clones but in Cabernet, it's becoming, because I'm boots on the ground, it's been a wide topic since, for winemakers, because it does play a massive role, but if you go out to different regions, some growers say, you're crazy, like, it doesn't play a big difference, but if you and I, if you came to Napa, and we walked a clone six vineyard, and then we walked a clone seven vineyard, the clusters, the taste, everything's completely different, completely different, so it plays a massive role. 

WORKING WITH MULTIPLE VINEYARDS

AC: How many Cabernet Sauvignon expressions do you make?

JH: So at Nickel & Nickel, we make, in a given year, not everything always, because it's single vineyards, not everything always makes it to the finish line, not every vineyard makes it, but anywhere from 17 to 20 single vineyard Cabernets.

AC: That's fine, okay, so you've got all those, now, you've probably heard what a Venn diagram is. 

JH: Yeah. 

AC: Normally it's two things, how much two entities, like this vineyard and that vineyard, have in common, or something, and that something might be, for example, cherry flavor, or it could be something more scientific, and so forth. Not something that you can change, like acid, but something that's intrinsic to that terroir. So, if you had a multi-dimensional Venn diagram of all your vineyards in Napa then how much of what is in any one of them is in all 20 of those? 

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chatGPT's List of Cabernet Sauvignon Vineyards Used by Nickel & Nickel

List the cabernet sauvignon vineyards used by nickel & nickel?

ChatGPT said:

Here are the single‑vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon sites that Nickel & Nickel currently works with across Napa Valley, drawn from their portfolio highlights: 

🍇 Calistoga

• Kenefick Ranch

🏔️ Howell Mountain

• Beatty Ranch

🍷 Oak Knoll District

• Vaca Vista Vineyard

🌿 Oakville

• Air Show Vineyard

• Martin Stelling Vineyard

• John C. Sullenger Vineyard

• Branding Iron Vineyard

🌾 Rutherford

• Quicksilver Vineyard

• Quarry Vineyard

• C.C. Ranch

• DeCarle Vineyard

🏞️ St. Helena

• Hayne Vineyard

• Dragonfly Vineyard

• Silver Seeker Vineyard

🌄 Stags Leap District

• Copper Streak Vineyard

🏙️ Yountville

• State Ranch

🌍 General Napa Valley (non‑AVA specific)

• Element 28 (bulk Napa Valley)

• Bear Track Vineyard

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TREAT EVERY VINEYARD DIFFERENTLY, AND VINIFY THEM SEPARATELY

JH: Yeah, that's a pretty complicated question, and it depends on the level of interest and or nerd, when we're sitting down and tasting, you'll have a chance to taste, I believe, nine or 11 different Cabernets today. And I'd like to get your opinion after you taste it, but for me, as a total wine nerd, I think they all have an underlying trait of a little bit of structure, but again, when I moved to Nickel & Nickel, my philosophy was not necessarily to treat them all the same in the cellar, it was actually the opposite. It was to treat every vineyard differently. I want them to have different chemistries, I want them to have different levels of phenolics, different levels of tannin. Some people who make single vineyards say, I want the vineyard to shine, so I'm gonna treat these all the same, they're gonna be on skins the same amount of days, they're gonna get extracted the same amount, the chemistry should be the same, I'm gonna pick them at the same brix and pH, and I totally disagree with that philosophy, I understand where they're going with it, but in my opinion, the chemistry, the flavor profile of Howell Mountain should be night and day from our Vaca Vista Vineyard, which is in Oak Knoll. Completely different growing areas, completely different soils, completely different phenolic compounds, like the mountain fruit just naturally has more tannin.

No matter how much you want to extract Oak Knoll, that's gonna be softer, it's gonna be more like 1980 Napa Valley Cab, because it's much cooler there. And so you'll find an underlying quote-unquote ‘style’. Because I like to make wines that have freshness, I think, across the board, like I like wines that are naturally fresh and vibrant, but Cabernet needs to have some boldness, needs to have some structure, needs to have tannin, but it needs to be polished, it can't be too grippy. And so we treat all vineyards differently, and I think they all taste very different, even though it's the same winemaker, same vintage, same philosophy, same winery. But that's the beautiful thing about Nickel & Nickel, it's really a walk through Napa Valley, and I've never done a wine dinner where the tasters’ consensus was for the same wine, the same vineyard.

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And so we treat all vineyards differently, and I think they all taste very different, even though it's the same winemaker, same vintage, same philosophy, same winery. But that's the beautiful thing about Nickel & Nickel, it's really a walk through Napa Valley, and I've never done a wine dinner where the tasters' consensus was for the same wine, the same vineyard.

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And so it's really cool for me, I can figure out your palate really quickly by which wine you'll gravitate towards. So I think they're all different, to answer your question, they're all different, they have the underlying philosophy of quality over everything, but in terms of aromatics, and structure, and tannin, in my opinion, and we're talking about minute details, but in my opinion, they're all very different and interesting in their own way, which is why we don't blend them, which is why we don't have a reserve and then a base blend. 

AC: I was gonna ask you that, too!

JH: Yeah, so for me, coming from Robert Mondavi, where obviously we had the To Kalon Vineyard, and we had all five Bordeaux varieties, it was a great place to go learn and understand what blending is. With Petit Bordeaux, if you go more than a half a percent, it can completely shift a blend. It's wild to think about, but literally, bench chop, drop, will completely shift the entire profile of the wine.

So it was really great to understand the basics of blending and understand making a wine kind of after harvest, right? You've gone through everything, then you can evaluate, and then you can really get in the lab and tweak. For me, now, it's all about everything before harvest. I'm in the vineyards all the time. I'm making tiny decisions that really affect the profile. 

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…so for me, coming from Robert Mondavi...it was really great to understand the basics of blending and understand making a wine kind of after harvest, right? You've gone through everything, then you can evaluate, and then you can really get in the lab and tweak. For me, now, it's all about everything before harvest. I'm in the vineyards all the time. I'm making tiny decisions that really affect the profile. 

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AC: So when you've got a vineyard, you harvest and keep separate the different lots within the vineyard? 

JH: Yeah. 

AC: And then you ferment them separately? 

JH: Yeah, and that's our only time afterwards to blend within the vineyard with different clones and different rootstocks within the vineyard. And that's like maybe eight of our vineyards have enough to do that. The other eight are one pick, one shot, one tank, one barrel selection, and that's it. So it's like we can play around with some of the larger vineyards.

Our estate is 30 acres. So I can pick that over a few weeks and kind of have some blending tools and ferment them differently, punch downs versus pump overs, and then kind of create a really balanced wine that way. But again, 100% varietal, 100% single vineyard.

So it's a very limited toolbox for me, and I think that's beautiful. Every winemaker will sit in front of you and say, I want to make a wine that has a sense of place, terroir-driven, but they're driving three hours, they're adding all these other varieties, and they're making it after the fact, whereas me, it's all my work's done up front. Then once it's in barrel my job is pretty much done because that is the vineyard that we will bottle by itself.

BARREL SELECTION

AC: When you choose barrels, do they differ across vineyards? 

JH: Yes, yes. So me and my assistant winemaker, Phil Holbrook, once we're ready to drain and press, we'll press it, it'll be off skins, we'll taste it and say, okay, what can we do here? Are there any holes? Is it a little too much dried herb aromatically? Should we put it with a more aromatic barrel? Or is it a little bit of a donut? Do we need to bring some layers? And so every single pick, even within the vineyard, every single pick and fermentation is really thought of like, here's our last chance. This is literally the last chance to make this wine better. And so that's the big decision: which cooper, which toast. That's our spice rack, so to speak. But that's the last chance where we can try and make the most complete balanced wine.

ON BEING OWNED BY PRIVATE EQUITY

AC: Switching subjects, since you arrived in 2018, Nickel & Nickel has been owned by a private equity company. And unfortunately, you weren't there before they took over. I wondered how big the changes have been as a result of being acquired by private equity? 

JH: So that was my first question, coming from a massive corporation [Constellation, the owners of the Robert Mondavi brand]. And so when I left and joined this team, my first question was: what is the growth here? What's the plan here? This is private equity, or half of it's private equity. I've worked for a big corporation before. I don't wanna’ be a corporate winemaker. I don't have any desire to do that. I'm leaving this to become more focused, more direct. 

And the beautiful thing about Nickel & Nickel is no one wants 45 single vineyards. That's too much. It's too much for me. It's too much for the consumer. They can't wrap their heads around that. Twenty is a lot, right? And so we're kind of handcuffed in the perfect way, as a winemaker, because you can't get more of a Sulllenger [the John C. Sullenger Vineyard]. You can't get more DeCarle [DeCarle  Vineyard]. Like that vineyard is it. We get the vintage variation, but there's really no growth plan. Nature fixes it. Nature fixes it. And again, you can't go, in my opinion, you can't go past 18 to 20 single vineyard cuvées or it just gets lost in translation. It gets too convoluted. And so for me, being at Nickel & Nickel, it's the perfect spot where my winery's full, which is great. They like that I'm making a diverse range of terroir-driven single vineyard wines. And nobody wants more than that. And so for me, they literally leave me alone. It's like, what do you need? And I need a lot of tools to make single vineyards. So I was set up with a winery that I walked through the first day and was like, this is the Bentley of tanks. This is all automatic pump overs. And coming from Mondavi, which was big, we didn't have warm glycol, which is crazy. So we couldn't warm up a fermenter. And so coming here, it was like, wow, I have all the tools I need. We were the first really to try an optical sorter.

AC: You just answered a lot of my questions. 

JH: Yeah, we were really the first to really go for it. But then that was before my time. But I didn't have an optical sorter at Mondavi. So I have all these tools to make, because it's hard. In tough vintages, single vineyards are very hard, right? I have all the tools to help me get these wines to the finish line.

And so like in 2022 it was a warm year. We had a heat wave that hit right at Labor Day and it really flipped the harvest on its head. And that gave me more gray hair, but because we're set up and we can have someone filtering or sorting clusters, and then I can really slow the line down and individually berry sort and say, these are too dimpled, or the backside is too transparent, it's too translucent. The backside didn't get ripe, but the front side is pretty ripe. So we could slow down. We sorted out like 30% of the vintage on our crush line, because again, we can't at the end be like, whoo, let's throw some Merlot in and we need some more fresh air max, let's throw in a little Cab Franc.

For me, it's like, no, again, up front, this is where we do all of our work. And my job is to stand behind every wine that we bottle. And in some vintages, again, we don't always make every wine.

It has to be to our quality standards. And that's why it's been great, because the private equity will be like, okay, if you don't stand behind this wine, let's sell it to somebody [in the wholesale bulk wine market]. You don't have to bottle. So, like DeCarle, we skipped two vintages of it. The wine just wasn't where I thought it should be. And in 2020, we made four single vineyards out of 20.

So I've had the utmost support. And again, because I'm handcuffed, it lets me be more free because they're not like, okay, tweak the blend more and do it. It's like, okay, taste this, should we bottle it? And my answer is like, maybe not. Maybe we shouldn't. Maybe this year we skipped this vineyard. And again, it's full transparency. 

MAKING WINE IN THE VINEYARD

A lot of winemakers have a big curtain that they have a toolbox and they can kind of make tweaks and additions and have a more complete or more balanced wine in their vision of the style. Whereas here, it's like, this was the vintage. This is our best representation of the vintage. And hopefully, within these 20 vineyards, you have a couple that you really like, right? Depending on what kind of style, what kind of palate you have. And so whether you're a Master Somm. and the biggest wine geek or you've never been to Napa, you can come to Nickel & Nickel & walk through Napa Valley. You can taste what Howell Mountain tastes like in 2022. You can go then move south into Rutherford and then you can go into Oakville. And you can really see what, in my opinion, would have normally been blended and understand the vintage. But no, this is like, there's no curtain. This was the vintage. This is our best interpretation of the vintage. This is our tireless effort.

AC: Interesting model of making wine. 

JH: Yeah, it's remarkable. It's incredibly challenging. There's an attention to detail and a focus that, again, you can't miss things in the vineyard. You can't miss a leaf pass. You can't miss a fruit drop pass because these are gonna stand alone. And so, again, it's all done up front. And again, I'm not very technical. I don't wanna sit there and work on these trials. And we don't find, we don't do any of that stuff. The vineyard needs to shine. Not the winemaker, not his philosophy and style, but each individual vineyard is gonna have its own nuances. And that's my interpretation of that vineyard. And you'll see that consistently throughout the vintages, but they're gonna all be very different because we really show the vintage variation. 

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The vineyard needs to shine. Not the winemaker, not his philosophy and style, but each individual vineyard is gonna have its own nuances

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AC: You partly answered this. You took a decision not to have a reserve that represents some sort of, as Geneviève would put together, a To Kelon specific. Is that something you'd like to change in certain years because you sort of see strengths? I mean a winery, a winemaker-led winery, is a skunkworks and you do lots of experiments. You must blend this stuff just from personal curiosity. 

JH: No, after the harvest is over and we've evaluated the wines, and some of them, even within a block, like maybe this younger vine, younger vine age, just not, it's really affecting the overall single vineyard blend. That's where we really tincture and try and figure out like, is there a way to use some of the younger vines or none of it or all of it? So that's where me and my assistant winemaker will go through and evaluate our blending techniques of like, how much of this can we use? And then that wine can go somewhere else.

So there's no [cross-vineyard] blending at Nickel & Nickel. We've only had one cellar mistake (before my time). We called it Lightning Strike where, during fermentation, someone accidentally hooked up from the bottom and pumped over to another tank and it was Stelling [Martin Stelling Vineyard] and a Syrah that we made, which is a huge, huge mistake. So we bottled our only blend. I can't remember the vintage. It was our one mistake. We thought it was interesting. The wine actually was very interesting and good. But no, we are true to single vineyards and if it doesn't make our portfolio, we then will look for a buyer. 

AC: What about if somebody said, we're going to buy this new vineyard. It's a 60% Cabernet, but there's also the other four Bordeaux varieties in it. What would you think about that? 

JH: No, no, we are 100% single vineyard, 100% varietal wine. So purest in that form, and I think once you start having a couple that are a blend of, even within the vineyard, a blend of different, like I've looked at vineyards like I want this vineyard and the grower is like yeah but I have a have an acre and a half of Cap Franc, then I will talk to Far Niente or I'll talk to Bella Union and say do you want this Cabernet Franc, because I am just going straight for the cab. Bethany and Gil Nickel were pioneers in having that vintage and I think we lose our focus if we start diverting and having some of the wines have other varietals in it. So no, we are strict and purest in that here's our mission, here's our goal. And people think of Napa Valley and think every vineyard is great! There's a lot of not good vineyards in Napa Valley, and my job is to steer away from those and find the really unique sites that are really special, that can be highlighted as single vineyards, and I have no interest in working in the high production vineyards at all. 

WHY NOT RELEASE WHEN READY TO DRINK?

AC: Okay. Switching gears. When you release a wine you're gonna say “This is ageable.” When you say that, you're not saying it'll survive, you're saying it will get better and reach some kind of subjective peak. Every winemaker has it, and the winemaker for a winery like yours, you're highly respected, club members will read the material you send them. At that point, you have none left to sell. Have you ever considered doing the following: having two releases of that wine, the conventional one you have now, and then a later one designated the ‘winemaker’s preferred’, or ‘winemaker ready’ release. Something like ready to drink.

JH: They actually do that at Far Niente, Nickel & Nickel is already so complicated, being single vineyard, that it's too much for us to add another layer to back vintage releases, but Far Niente does a cave collection, where they do exactly that. They say, hey, we've released this wine, we've set aside this much wine, we're gonna release it seven years later, eight years later, whatever that is, so it's an investment that is really interesting, and the consumer really appreciates it, and so within our family we do do that, but my life at Nickel & Nickel, it's like too much to manage multiple releases, so we do do that, but I mean, we used to offer futures as well, and it just got to be way too complicated, and we're a team of six at Nickel & Nickel. 

AC: On the winemaking side? 

JH: Yeah, cellar, so it's me, my assistant winemaker, and then I have a four-man cellar team, so we're a tiny crew, and it's just like pick-and-choose your battles.

AC: Okay, got it, I completely understand. I think it's amazing you handle the number you do. 

ROBOTS

Robotization: In 2026 Elon Musk is going to have, if you go into that Fremont Tesla factory, or the one here in Austin, you're gonna see things that look like humans, but they're actually what are called humanoid robots. A robot could be like the vacuum cleaner I have, it's a rotary floor-dweller, but humanoid means it looks like a human, and it does human tasks. Things that'll be done on assembly lines. Obviously, the assembly line analogy in the wine world is picking, and you've got so many labor problems that are wrapped up in all kinds of issues that are outside your control. Now how big do you see humanoid robots becoming? This is like a question about the future.

JH: Yeah, I mean it's a great question, and I think it's kind of the Wild West, and I think everything about what I believe in is exploring and trying new things, and you know 10 years ago no one was optically sorted, you had 15 people looking at clusters and they were individually cluster sorting, now I only have two, mainly removing any kind of MOG, and I have this machine that's a thousand percent more efficient, more effective, faster, all these things, and so labor is a massive, massive issue, and it seems to be getting harder and harder each year, so the more we can mechanize how we can get to the highest quality, I think we're all, like even the Monarch tractor, right, it's a self-driving tractor, can't legally self-drive yet, but the technology is getting there, where like the Monarch is a beautiful thing with no emissions, like it's a lighter tractor, you know, there's lots of questions,  and so I think it's really exciting. Again, there's certain things that need to be done by hand, and need to be done by someone that's highly skilled and trained. With that being said, I use AI, and it's making me a better writer, because I wasn't great before, and it's opening my mind to, you know, different phrases and how to word things differently, and so I'm all in for trying new things, I think it's really exciting. 

AI

AC: Yeah, on AI, I was going to ask you, are you using AI in your work, and if so, how has it come in so far? 

JH: I'm sure our marketing team is using it a lot, I use it a little bit in terms of like, I have to give all Cabernet 2022 single vineyards unique wine descriptions, and I'm not the most sexy wine descriptor writer. So what I'll do is sit and smell and say just bullet points, like doom, doom, doom, and then it writes a very pretty wine description, so that's helped me a little bit, but in terms of like, day to day, I don't use it. Our stuff is so physical and artistic that I haven't had a chance to use it, but I use it way more on understanding, you know, not outside of Nickel & Nickel, but understanding cost of goods, the business side of things, and you know, it's just given me a lot of guidance on certain things that would have been really hard for me to sit down and figure out without some kind of economics degree. 

AC: Okay, understood. 

One last question, and again, it's outside the winemaking area: How big is, what I call, the fake wine problem in the secondary market for an expensive wine like Nickel & Nickel? You're a prime target. You're expensive, so people are going to collect. As soon as people collect, the Rudy Kurniawan’s of the world move in, and I've heard that that's becoming a serious problem. Is it, are you having to deal with it, with your members calling up and asking about authenticity? 

JH: I haven't seen that with Nickel & Nickel, but I have heard about that with like Opus One, and like how they're starting to put some kind of thing underneath the label that I can track and see what happens, but I think we're not to that level of cult status, but I do think it's probably a crazy issue for the DRC's of the world, and these crazy, crazy thousands of dollars a bottle, and I think it's a shame, and I think there's going to be a lot of new technology where you can't get away with it anymore. 

AC: They're hoping so. 

JH: I hope so, but I haven't personally seen that with Nickel & Nickel, but it's scary. 

AC:Joe, thank you so much for your time and I look forward to tasting your wine.