This episode was originally recorded on Wednesday, October 4, 2017. There is no new show today due to unforseen circumstances. California Wine Country will be back live next week, Wed. October 11. In this episode, Ed and Adam Sbragia from Sbragia Family Vineyards and Mark Tchelistcheff join Steve Jaxon, co-host Dan Berger, Tom Simoneau and Barry Herbst. Ed and Adam Sbragia were scheduled today, but they will be back in two weeks on March 4, 2020. 

Ed Sbragia of Sbragia Family Vineyards is introduced, with his son Adam. Ed was the winemaker at Beringer Winery for a long time but now he has started his own family winery.

Mark Tchelistcheff is the grand nephew of the great André Tchelistcheff, widely known as the godfather of wine in California. He has produced a documentary film about his great uncle, called André, The Voice of Wine, which will debut at the Mill Valley Film Festival next week (in October 2017, as this show was recorded).

André Tchelistcheff was 92 years old when he died in 1994. Steve says that over the 8 years of this show, no name has been dropped more than André’s. Mark’s film permiered at the Berlinale, the Berlin International Film Festival, which is one of the three great international film festivals. Out of 600 films that were entered, it was one of 5 that had a gala reception and they brought California wine in for the event.

Steve asks Ed about working for Beringer. He was at Beringer for 32 years, from 1976 to 2008. He started making Sbragia Family wines at in 2001 with their first releases in 2004. Adam first started working at Beringer in 2001 and then followed his father, learning how to make Chardonnay and Cab with his father.

Tom says that after fermentation, he likes to extract every bit of flavor from the wines. They are tasting a 1991 Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, in a magnum. Tom says it is concentrated and balanced and that this is an example of how long these wines can live. This one is 26 years old and still needs more time. They even age slower in a magnum, as Adam explains surface area to volume ratio. Dan says what is impressive in this wine is the level of fruit. He remembers that it was a good vintage. 1990 and 1991 were back-to-back excellent vintages. This one really shows that. Dan reminds us that in those days that wine would not get released until 1995, as they were on a four-year release cycle. Today wines get released after 2 and a half years. Ed says that most of the vineyards for this wine were from high in the hills, where the vines had to struggle and then produced very intense wines.

Dan says that despite it being 26 years old, it is still a baby and will still age well from this point. That’s why Steve calls him Dan “Lay it Down” Berger, the most patient wine collector in the world.

Steve reads that André Tchelistcheff was America’s most influential post-prohibition winemaker. Mark mentions the different spellings and pronunciations of the name, in different languages and countries where he lived, but that when he worked with Ralph Fiennes on the narration, they settled on the Russian pronunciation, “chel-LEEST-cheff” more or less. Mark describes going to live in Russia to get André’s “terroir” and how he worked with a top Russian composer and orchestra for the music. He even found the original 1925 Cadillac in which George de la Tour drove André drove over the Golden Gate Bridge in 1938 when he first arrived here.

It took him ten years to produce the movie, with financing from different sources, in cluding some important winemakers who are in the film and who were touched by André. He hopes that his spirit of sharing comes through in the movie. He got production funding from some important wine makers and he was able to spend time with people, with the winemakers who made the wine, to remember André.