Founder H. William Harlan had floated the idea to winemaker Cory Empting in 2013 to recognise the vocation of vineyard workers in touch with soil and vine—origin of all great and good. It would be imperative to keep alive their intangible heritage across the generations to realise Harlan’s 200-year plan to establish a California ‘First Growth’. By the end of 2015, the programme was in place, and seven years on, the Vine Masters inhabit the slightly more than one-hectare blocks for which they are responsible.
“They always had the curiosity, but now it was so personal they couldn’t not know what happened to that year’s vintage,” Empting says. “This was my hope in the beginning, but I had no idea how quickly it would change. The programme was really designed to get the sense of ownership for the people, but also to acknowledge the nobility of the skills that they had learned. To some, a vineyard worker is a vineyard worker, but we’re talking about Vine Masters. These are people who have put in a lot of time to learn skills they’ve been able to demonstrate, and they are invited to work on a block for the rest of their lives. In a way, the block is their masterpiece, and it’s never really finished. It’s just done to the point that it’s done.”
In other words, art does not imitate life but creates it, always in the becoming. “The other thing was just to create a little bit more of an intimate relationship with each vine, but I don’t think I understood how much I would learn from the programme,” Empting says. “We’re at the very beginning of the amount of learning that we have to do.” Like the Vine Masters, Empting is responsible to his block of vines.
He draws no conclusions around what, when or how something should be done, so he can do the needful. “You have to be willing to say, what I’m experiencing now may be the new reality, right? I think it’s important not to just taste once or twice, but to be constantly tasting, observing and paying attention.”
Relationship
Empting discussed Robb Report’s questions with the Vine Masters, and their responses are uncanny for their shared experience of how a relationship has expanded their consciousness:
“I interviewed all of them, and it was every single one: every single one said, yeah, I talk to the vines, but I try to make sure no one’s watching. Each one, individually, admitted to this without me asking the question.
“You can’t explain it. You begin to develop a relationship, and you encourage, you console and you do things that you don’t want to explain. But it’s very natural, it doesn’t seem weird when you’re doing it.
“You’re being taught by and learning from the vine, but you’re also instructing it. A person sees things maybe the vine hasn’t seen yet, but the vine also has understandings that we don’t—yet. It’s a constant education on both sides.”
Ways of Seeing
Empting offers fresh perspective on the affinity of the Vine Masters for their individual vines, their blocks and the land, and the potential of committed relationships:
“What relationship do the Vine Masters have to the soil? I think the relationship is really with the vines, and the vine’s relationship is with everything.
“And the more we develop the intimacy of the relationship with the vine, the more we develop the intimacy of the relationship with the soil and everything else, because it’s a way through which we can learn. Every time you try to learn about the soil and you dig a hole, you change everything. So the vines and their cover crops are a way to see it.”
With rapt attention, the Vine Masters begin to erase the boundaries between themselves and the life unfolding around them. “When you get the Vine Masters in their blocks, they worry like parents, and they care so deeply about the plants that they start to observe everything around them and become so curious about everything else. And so it’s the conduit for the focus, the centre that allows them to dive deeper into the forest next door, the health of the plant, and what must be happening in the soil.
“You have to look at the native forest, what’s not being cultivated, to understand what the vineyard is doing. All the Vine Masters at Harlan have forest next to their blocks. They get to watch what’s next door.”
Unity
Empting is rigorous about testing data: “You can’t taste numbers,” he says. The aim is to meaningfully associate the data with the direct experience of the phenomena. Just as pivotal is the dialectical mode of learning, which embraces the practices of the indigenous people of California as well as those of eastern civilisations, whose reverence for life is in their celebration of it. He explains:
“To really transfer the knowledge about the place, the specific parcel, we need to not just have data. We need to have the stories, we need to have the anecdotes, and you need to pass on the culture. Each Vine Master has a valuable insight that we need to pass on. It’s another side of the ‘non-data that’s data’ that’s important.
“I look to the Native American tradition of harvest, celebration and key moments throughout the year where you have to realise your interdependence with the natural world. You have to find a way to keep those stories alive for each parcel. We can teach the skills, but to pass on the knowledge is the more important part.
“The learning for me started a long time ago with Masanobu Fukuoka, reading One Straw Revolution, and Claude Bourguignon on rejuvenating the soil. And then we started reading about how the Native Peoples of the Americas managed the forest and the land. They didn’t see a difference between people and rocks and trees, and they didn’t have different pronouns for everybody. They were all seen as equal entities and regarded in the same way. In many ways, the Vine Master system operates that way, because you realise that you’re dependent on everything.
“It takes this love, or this connection, to amplify the things you could have seen every day but don’t notice until you realise how interconnected you are to everything else.”
Individuality
Fascinatingly, Empting observes that the individuality of a vine emerges from its relationship with land, at a certain location, each apparently with its own social circle and life path to fulfil.
“When you’re farming on the hillsides like we are at Harlan Estate in the western hills of Oakville, you’re really close to the mother rock, and slight variations cause each vine to be distinct. You have to be open to them being different, which ironically gives you more complexity in the wine than trying to get them to be the same.”
Finding Each Other
In the indigenous view, people exist in a profound relationship with their environment. Empting recalls an experience with one block under the care of a Vine Master.
“The block was always a bit rugged. It faced north, isolated on its own. The growth of the vines was always elegant but the wine we were making just never seemed to harmonise with what we were trying to do. We thought, oh, this is a block that’s powerful, and it’s brooding. But after a few years of the Vine Master being in that block, I started to realise that that block was more about softness and elegance.
“Looking at it backwards, it makes so much sense. The Vine Master, on the outside, is very quiet and looks like someone who doesn’t want to talk to you. But when you talk to him, he’s very kind, thoughtful and very gentle. There is some sort of relationship formed in that block. I can’t explain it. We talk about terroir, but we don’t talk a lot about the human energy of it.
“And with this Vine Master taking the block on, it really transformed my view of this place completely. The wine is so delicate, so gentle, and so detailed; it doesn’t have these other attributes that I used to think of. It really makes you wonder if the plants feel the attention of somebody, and if they found something in each other—because many of the Vine Masters, they pick their blocks.
“Probably the hardest thing for us to measure analytically is the sense of place that we feel when we’re at Harlan Estate, but almost everybody on the team has a sense of what it is.
“I think the Vine Masters are able to really focus on and meet the individual vine where they are. And if they can find harmony with that vine over time, that plot finds harmony with the blend, it seems.
“I maybe go too far, but I think Harlan Estate is more a spiritual feeling. It’s almost like a home: you’re grounded and comfortable. Every Vine Master in their own way has their own words to describe it, but it’s very much a similar feeling.
“It’s hard to explain. It’s like looking at the weave so close, but you have a confidence that it’s part of a greater design and a greater whole.”
Tasting notes: 2019, 2018, 2012, 2007 Harlan Estate
Something of a golden sweetness and light imbues these all-cabernet sauvignon wines, a savour of life rather than a sugar high. The 2007 is the third act of summer, after its point of satiety; complete, at rest, awaiting the next. It wears its immense stature lightly, in the classical balance and proportions of the Parthenon’s golden ratio.
More conventionally, one might recognise Harlan Estate by freshness, ripeness and concentration of fruit, and seamless tannins, as if managed by a master patissier—2012 is all these as well as an evolutionary point of turning.
The one that will make you wonder what you just felt is 2018. Its flavour is conveyed into your experience by a high-voltage current that barely flinches, let alone fluctuates, cleaving to the theoretical ideal for electric tension.
Perhaps more intriguing than its extraordinary exuberance is a sense of something happening in parallel with the realm of the obvious, where subtleties come into play.
Like a walk through the forest at twilight, there is a flurry of activity in vintage 2018 that lies at the periphery of one’s senses, of unknown possibilities.
The 2019: essence, energy and spirit are the constituents of temporal life, in the east. They find equanimity, already, here. The great finesse of the ‘there but not there’ molecular tannic structure—like fine Chinese teas—belies salubrious depths. Perhaps the upper octave of the handsome, prodigious, elemental 2018.
