Wines & Vines

October 2014 Bottles and Labels Issue

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50 W i n e s & V i n e s O C T O B e R 2 0 1 4 F inished in June 2013, the new Presqu'ile Winery is several things at once. It's an impressive piece of architecture and design as well as a showcase of top-of- the-line winemaking equipment and the manifestation of the owners' vision of an estate winery. Yet it's also emblematic of the confidence the company's president, Matt Murphy, and his family have in the Santa Maria Valley as the best place to make Pinot Noir in the United States. "I prefer the style of wines that we get from Santa Maria Valley over anywhere else, and for my money I think it's the best place on the West Coast for Pinot," Murphy says. "I'm constantly being vigorously debated on that, but this is all about what we like and what we think we can make work, and this is where we think we can do that." Presqu'ile (press-KEEL) is located near the small town of Orcutt, Calif., a few miles south of the city of Santa Maria in Santa Barbara County on California's Central Coast. The name is Creole for "almost an island," or peninsula, and was also the name of a Murphy family retreat on the Gulf Coast that was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The Murphys' roots are in the South, where the family founded an oil company that grew into the extraction and explora- tion giant Murphy Oil Corp., which is based in El Dorado, Ark., but has opera- tions in oil and gas across the globe. The Murphys also have investments in for- estry and agriculture. Matt Murphy's father, R. Madison Mur- phy, is a director and former chairman of the corporation's board. Matt Murphy, however, took a slightly different path after graduating from the University of Colorado with a degree in cellular biology. Murphy says his parents always enjoyed wine at home, and he thinks that sparked his initial interest in wine that led to tak- ing an internship working in the vine- yards at Signorello Estate in Napa Valley in 2004. "That really kind of increased my interest in wine," he said. His parents also were investors in the small producer Ambullneo Vineyards in Lompoc, Calif., so in 2006 Murphy and his girlfriend (now wife) moved west from Colorado to dive into the wine industry. While doing the dirty and unglamorous work in the cellar at Ambullneo, Murphy met winemaker Dieter Cronje from South Africa. Spending more time in winemaking fur- ther convinced Murphy he wanted to make his career in wine, and it also helped him define a vision of a family- owned winery. "I worked three harvests with (Dieter), and I liked it enough to talk my parents into leaving that project and starting our own, which was always the goal, I think," he said. "The natural pro- gression of this was always going to be to build our own place." Choosing Santa Maria for Pinot Presqu'ile Winery uses low-intervention winemaking with high-concept design By Andrew Adams Highlights • This article looks at the construction and equipping of the new Presqu'ile Winery, which features a gravity system to make Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. • Winemaker Dieter Cronje is focused on expressing Santa Maria terroir with whole-cluster fermentation and a low- intervention style. • Contractors had to employ a unique process to drill a cave in the area's sandy soils. The crush pad at Presqu'ile Winery is located at the top of a hill, enabling the winemaking team to fill fermentors by gravity. G R A P E G R O W I N G W I N E M A K I N G TECHNICAL REVIEW

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