Pinot Noir From Oregon Returns Me to My Youth

Jon Landau, before he was Bruce Springsteen’s manager, wrote a mythic review of one of his shows that encapsulates an experience that I had recently with a bottle of Soter Pinot Noir from Oregon. Landau, a rock ‘n roll true believer, had come to find his spirit flagging, the new music of the early 1970s .perhaps too derivative, too devoid of the mystic and authentic energy that yanks the guts out. Until he saw Springsteen’s show in Harvard Square in 1974.

La Rochelle & Our Pinot Experiment

I used to love Pinot Noir, and used to be on the winemaking team that made a lot of them every year under our La Rochelle label. We had high hopes for the brand, and bought a lot of examples from all over California (fewer from Oregon) to taste alongside our own to see how we were progressing. Each new wine was exciting; every fermentation was a crucial lesson in winemaking thoughtfulness and technique in the early days. And I believed then that we were making some of the best Pinots in California

La Rochelle took the place of the Mirassou brand when my cousins sold the latter to Gallo in the early aughts. With the sale, the family brand, which was first marketed nationally in 1966 and which was one of the premier producers of wine through the early 80s, became a place holding tool for Gallo to off less-than-stellar wine.

La Rochelle was originally conceived as a vehicle for Monterey County wines, some from the vineyards my grandfather planted in the early 1960s, and it was not specific to any particular grape. I was approached by my cousins, my father’s first, and my second - the 5th generation of the family - to see if I was interested in acquiring the brand.

But in my own moments of greatest need, I never give up the search for sounds that can answer every impulse, consume all emotion, cleanse and purify -- all things that we have no right to expect from even the greatest works of art but which we can occasionally derive from them….But tonight there is someone I can write of the way I used to write, without reservations of any kind. Last Thursday, at the Harvard Square theatre, I saw my rock'n'roll past flash before my eyes. And I saw something else: I saw rock and roll future and its name is Bruce Springsteen. And on a night when I needed to feel young, he made me feel like I was hearing music for the very first time. - Jon Landau

I remember going down to San Jose to meet with Daniel and Peter Mirassou, to taste some wines, and to talk to Tom Stutz who was the winemaker. I spent considerable time tasting current and older vintages, venturing into the basement of the Heritage House, my great-grandparents’ house which had been turned into a small hospitality venue after they died, to find a few old bottles scattered around in moldering cardboard boxes.

Pinot Noir was just about to explode, evolving from a specialty variety in 2004, when all of this first happened, to a household grape that is made now by hundreds of wineries. October 2004 marked the release of Sideways, a fine movie that became this weird cultural touchstone for California wine. Somehow a desperate misanthrope’s adventures in the Pinot country of the Central Coast inspired wine drinkers to eschew more widely planted grapes for the “heartbreak” grape of Burgundy.