Embracing an unloved grape

Napa, California

SCOTT Kirkpatrick never cared much for petite sirah. He liked wine that went with food, and he regarded most wines made with the grape as too big, tannic and powerful to enjoy at the table.

So naturally, when he considered making his own wine after working for others in Napa Valley, he knew that he wanted to focus on petite sirah.

"I saw beautiful grapes, but I didn't like the wines," he said in September when I visited him at the utilitarian production facility he shares with another label in an industrial park near the Napa County Airport. "I wondered if it could be lighter and fresher, a wine I would like with energy and a lot of joy. And things kind of got out of hand after that."

Since 2016, when he and his wife, Allison Watkins, started Mountain Tides, a label dedicated to petite sirah, they have explored the grape's capacity for producing energetic wines that could both complement food and express the nuances of various California terroirs.

Their initial effort was simply 75 cases of petite sirah from a single vineyard in Clements Hills, a small appellation in southeastern Lodi. This year, if all goes well, they plan to make 8 to 10 different cuvées, 2,500 cases, all petite sirah.

The wines have included a half-dozen single vineyard expressions from various sites in Northern California; a blend of vineyards; a petite sirah produced by carbonic fermentation, a method often used in Beaujolais, and for easy-drinking natural wines; and a petite sirah rosé.

"A friend accused me of being an inch wide and a mile deep," Kirkpatrick said.

Most of the petite sirahs I've tasted have been sturdy and not particularly interesting. Older bottles can demonstrate the grape's ability to endure for years rather than evolve. I didn't see further potential for the grape.

But around two years ago I read an article by Elaine Chukan Brown, a California correspondent for the wine publication JancisRobinson.com, who noted a trend towards a lighter style of petite sirah. I was intrigued and finally found a bottle of Mountain Tides, one of the producers she cited, earlier this year.

The bottle I tried was the California blend of various sites. It was fresh and delicious, a far cry from the petite sirahs of memory. I've since found other petite sirahs I've enjoyed that likewise have strayed from the tannic and powerful style. Ridge makes a bright, spicy, lively petite sirah at its Lytton Estate in the Dry Creek Valley, and Cruse Wine Company has made a vivacious petite sirah from the Powicana Farm vineyard in Mendocino.

Petite sirah is practically an afterthought for these producers, who have other specialties. No producer that I know of has dedicated itself to the grape as Mountain Tides has. I was curious about what drew Kirkpatrick in.

His attraction to petite sirah, he said, was a little like his interest in comic books. He had always dismissed comics as irrelevant superhero stories. But then friends introduced him to the complex works of Art Spiegelman, Alison Bechdel and the Hernandez Brothers, among others.

"This medium could be used to tell an infinite amount of stories," he said. "It's just a medium that had been dominated by one type of story for decades.

"I think petite sirah is really similar. Somewhere in the past few decades, it seems to have taken on this singular persona of making muscular, aggressively concentrated, high-alcohol, almost-dessert wines." He wondered what would happen if the grape were farmed differently, with the goal of achieving ripeness at a lower sugar content, and made into wine with a lighter touch.

"It was never really about liking or not liking the variety," he said. "It was about finding a path that seemed untrodden and being really enchanted by the things I could learn about wine and winemaking if I dug into this variety that I didn't know much about."

Finding his own way has been a life goal for Kirkpatrick, who grew up in Midland, Michigan, in what he calls a traditional Baptist community. His father was a preacher, and wine and other alcoholic beverages, Kirkpatrick said, were taboo.

He left Michigan to seek his fortune as a singer-songwriter, landing in Louisville, Kentucky, where, like many would-be musicians, he got a job in a restaurant. He started to learn about wine, he said, to get bigger tips, but found wine had far more to offer. "I was blown away by the potential for storytelling. I found that really compelling." Soon finding himself more interested in wine than in restaurants or music, he decided to move to Napa Valley in 2013 with the notion of making his own wine.

While working at a custom-crush operation, where clients without their own facilities can use the space and equipment to make wine, he met Watkins, an artist and photographer. In 2016, their first vintage, they settled on the name Mountain Tides, focusing on the connection of earth and water and the movement between the two. NYTIMES