How Do You Make Great Wine?
Wine Club Miami's exclusive interview with Dominus Estate and Ulysses winemaker Tod Mostero answers one simple question
As Dominus Estate winemaker Tod Mostero finished pouring the last drops of his Ulysses 2018 Oakville Cabernet at James Suckling’s Great Wines of the World Miami, I waited by the booth to ask him a simple question:
How do you make such great wine?
Tod grabbed his bag and left the empty bottle of Ulysses on the table for passersby to see the orange label with Ulysses holding a bow & arrow, an ode to his 10-year journey home, fraught with terrifying obstacles and brushes with death.
“It’s a very good question,” Tod said as we walked out of the grand ballroom to a quieter spot in the lobby. “But first, I’d like to ask: What does great wine mean for you?”
My experiences with the great wines of the world came to mind: the unfolding layers of Grand Cru Burgundy, the depths of a gorgeously aged Pritchard Hill Cabernet or my first taste of a young Petrus, its flavors imprinted on my palate for hours after my last sip (fun fact: Dominus and Petrus share the same owner: the Mouiex family led by Christian Mouiex).
Following my response, Tod was able to create a masterful and detailed, yet very understandable, explanation of what makes GREAT WINE. The following is an excerpt from our conversation:
“I use three words to describe wines: the first is balance. Balance is a word that is used a lot so let’s define what it means. Oftentimes we think of balance as the balance between alcohol, acidity and tannins. When one of those elements is not out of balance, we’re in balance. But that’s a very simple, triangular balance, and there are thousands of components in wine. When those components, or compounds, come into harmony in such a way that it creates this spherical structure, it makes the wine feel like it disappears, like it floats, and that kind of balance is necessary for a wine to be lifting. When you taste it, the experience should be as if you are swallowing pure light. There is no physicality. It leaves room for everything because there’s not one thing that is in the way. So when it disappears, it allows you to experience everything and nothing all at once, and it is extraordinary.
Number two: complexity. Most people think of complexity as a lot of things meaning that the more stuff you have and the more aromas you can name, the more complexity you have. But that’s a very additive approach to complexity and I find that a little boring. A room stuffed with things doesn’t make the room interesting. I like to think of complexity as a way the story is told. For a great wine, it both quenches your thirst and it makes you thirsty. Every time you take a sip, you’re experiencing something new like walking down a path that takes you on to endless experiences of unveiling secrets. There’s so much there that you never find the end. It’s like an abyss of experience, all the universe in one thing. As soon as you start naming things or flavors, it’s probably not very complex. I find that when you can’t name anything, just like you mentioned earlier, when you can’t identify one thing, it’s actually pretty interesting because you’re asking, ‘whats going on over here?’
The third word is: purity. Purity is like a window through which you perceive a landscape that has to be absolutely crystalline and transparent because otherwise you’re distracted and you don’t perceive what’s beyond because you’re distracted by the veil that is blocking your view. Purity corresponds to lack of defects but also lack of things like oak. Oak is a veil. It blocks the experience which is the fruit and via the fruit, the land and the place where it comes from. Other examples of impurities could be Brettanomyces (considered a spoilage yeast) or dust on your grapes that get into the fermenter which impart something that is not an expression of the place. You have to be a perfect technician and super meticulous to make precise interventions. In terms of yeast, I think of it as a midwife. A midwife is there to deliver something and does not give any of its genetic profile to the end result. It’s just ‘do it well and get out of the way’, you’re not the mother. It’s a lesser influence. But it can be a source of deviation that can cause impurities.
There are a couple other words to talk about, such as personality, which shows up when those other things are in place. It is a natural expression that is absolutely unique, like a person you get to know that has its unique way of moving in the world. Personality in a wine is only interesting when it is a pure expression of the unique spirit of a place. You experience it when you walk a vineyard and feel the place, just like getting to know a person. And it’s only when that place is very interesting that it’s worth making a wine from.
The feeling comes from all of the physical things such as the soils, the physical manifestations that exist in that place and the way it’s been cared for. The vitality and life force that’s happening in that vineyard should be the life force that you are feeling in yourself. They should be in parallel. Humans are also a part of nature so the way we dance with nature and tend to the vineyards also becomes the spirit of the place.
2022 was a year we had such heat in Napa, that we decided not to produce any wine for the 2022 vintage, which is a big deal. We lost our crop. That was such a shock for somebody whose life revolves around making wine. I experienced the death of this fruit that was so beautiful, lively and vibrant. It went from that to dead. The fruit was burned and killed on the vine.
In 2023, what became very important to me is that sense of vitality that can only come from vines that are growing in harmony with the place and when the climatic conditions are stable enough to allow you to produce wine that has an energy force . That’s an added element that is so important.
So, how do you get wines that are balanced, complex, and pure?
Balanced wines can only come from balanced grapes. Balanced grapes can only come from balanced vines. There’s nothing a winemaker can do once the grapes are picked to add a balance that is not already there. We can’t obtain the balance that I’m talking about: this spherical, floating, balance if it doesn’t already exist in the berries.
So how do grapes get balanced? It’s from vines that are balanced. Vines are only balanced when they’re in perfect harmony and connected to the site, and they can only be connected to the site if they’re, in my opinion, dry-farmed and have deep roots and are so connected to the place that they have this capacity to remain stable, just like a person can if they have structure, focus and take care of themselves. They’re able to withstand all of the different challenges in life. I didn’t always know this from experience, but now I do because I’ve seen vines that have gone from young to older, and as they get older they get more stable and anchored and able to withstand more difficult climatic conditions.
The personality of wine comes not only from the place but the spirit of the vintage and the different subtleties of that year. When those are expressed, that makes the personality of a wine so much more interesting. A wine across the vintages when it comes from a great vineyard and producer should always be pure, balanced and complex, but the personality will change slightly based on the climatic conditions.
Complexity comes from a lot of different things, and is possibly the most important part. Let’s take a fruit as an example: blueberry. How many perfectly ripe blueberries have you had in your life? I’ve had very few but I remember the ones that were and what happens when they’re ripe and incredible is you pop them in your mouth and they burst with flavor that quenches your thirst, exploding into all types of things, a rainbow of different flavors that goes way beyond blueberries. It’s floral, its violet, sometimes earthy, and you taste this whole universe that takes you down a path that kind of lingers. And then it leaves. You go along your day and then lick your lips and the rollercoaster starts all over again. That’s true complexity. That comes from harvesting at the proper time. Some people will say complexity comes from adding a lot of different types of ripeness, varieties or oak. That doesn’t give you complexity. That gives you a lot of stuff. And a lot of stuff is boring to me.
You can find a whole universe in one blueberry, or one grape berry, when it is ripe. But you have to pick it exactly at that moment. It arrives at a moment that I love to think of like ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ when the sun’s ray aligns and everything happens at once (see clip below). That’s what happens when you get perfectly ripe berries.
Knowing when to pick is hard but it is obvious. If you’re present and you’re tasting, you can’t miss it. You have to clear out all of the noise through sorting to get rid of under ripe and overripe berries and leaves and stems. Some people say ‘no, that [under ripe and overripe berries] adds complexity’. I think that deteriorates complexity because if the whole universe that you want is in that perfectly ripe berry, all you want is perfectly ripe berries, not the rest. Blurring is the perfect description of what happens. It makes the wine fuzzy. Instead of the crystalline complexity that’s fascinating, you start getting this ‘soupy’ thing thats’ not interesting.
When you know what you want, it’s very clear when you are deviating.
In the end, the most important decision of a winemaker is: choose your site well. The site has to be capable of greatness. If it’s not, you’ll never make great wine. Observe. Christian [Mouiex] said something when he started Dominus: “It’ll take me 20 years to make a great wine from this site.”
Why?
It takes a lot of observation and you have to adapt your viticulture to the site and you have to adapt every year to what’s going on during the vintage. You have to listen.”
About Tod Mostero
Director of Viticulture and Winemaking, the French connection runs strong through Mostero, who studied in Bordeaux and trained at Château Haut-Brion, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and Établissements Jean-Pierre Moueix. He worked with Baron Philippe de Rothschild in the Languedoc and at Almaviva in Chile before returning to his native California to join Dominus Estate in 2007.