Valley Life 9
Anza couple bottles first batch of their locally produced wine!
By Laura and Steve Manseau
It’s the morning of January 12 and Dan and Mary Marlin are having the time of their lives.
After four years of planting, tending, harvesting, fermenting and racking their grapes, the Terwilliger couple is going to take a leap toward tasting the fruits of their labor. Today is the day they will bottle and label, for personal use, several cases of a Cabernet/Malbec blend labeled “BonneAnza.”
The Marlins are approaching this daunting enterprise with loving care and a soupcon of humility. Since this is the first bottling experience, they are leaving nothing to chance.
“We’ve put too much into these grapes for the last four years to screw this up ourselves,” Dan explains. “That’s why we have brought in a ringer.”
The ringer’s name is Ken Mapes and he’s had a rich and varied past in the industry. He is a Temecula-based wine maker who currently produces dessert offerings under the Mapes Cellars label. He has served for several years as a judge in both commercial and amateur winemaking competitions and one could say, without an ounce of disingenuousness, that he is a connoisseur. This reporter was tempted to burden him with the label “wine expert,” but Mapes has a self-effacing and razor sharp wit when it comes to being threatened with those kind of labels.
“You know what an expert is, don’t you?” he replies. “It’s someone who has made a ton of mistakes.” Mapes claims to have made many mistakes over the years, but from all appearances, this chemist by trade seems to have transformed them through intellectual alchemy into an encyclopedic knowledge of viticulture. It comes to the fore when he begins to teach the Marlins the bottling process.
There is nothing pedantic or snobby in the way that Mapes talks about making wine. He is pragmatic in his approach to the entire process, from planting and tending to affixing the label on the bottles. It is something he has done hundreds of times. He also possesses an essential trait of any winemaker:
patience. He demonstrates this as he fields a series of “Wine 101” questions from this reporter, as well as the more knowledge-based queries that come from Terry Ostahowski, another Terwilliger resident grape grower who has a grove of 400 plants at his Coyote Canyon
Dan and Mary Marlin. That’s Mary’s fitting artwork in the background!
vineyard. Terry is here to observe the process and fine tune his own bottling plans for later this year. We won’t document every question and answer in this article, but we would like to touch upon some key aspects of the home winemaking process. Keep in mind that growing grapes and making wine is a lot more complex than we will be able to relate here. Here are some highlights: TENDING GRAPES
“You need a pretty hearty grape in the Anza area because we can have cold weather into May or June that can affect the growth,” Dan Marlin explains to us.”We have had good luck with Malbec and Cabernet grapes– they are small and tough with a really intense flavor.” (cont. on page 16)
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