Book Review: Tor Kenward's Reflections of a Vintner

I have the good fortune of being able to call Tor Kenward friend. I have shared golf carts with him on Florida courses, sat through multiple Tor-led tastings of his wines, dined with him in Napa Valley, hosted him on one of my Covid-era Instagram Live Chats, and walked the Beckstoffer To Kalon Vineyard with him and Andy Beckstoffer (along with a group of Orlando-area wine enthusiasts). 

I consider Tor a great story teller and a raconteur so it was with great anticipation that I awaited his telling of his Napa story. The book -- Reflections of a Vintner: Stories and Seasonal Wisdom from a Lifetime in Napa Valley -- arrived a week ago and I buried myself in it immediately. 

Tor arrived in Napa at one of the most consequential times in the history of American -- nay New World -- wines: a group of unheralded Napa Valley winemakers had just bested some of the greatest Burgundy and Bordeaux wines in the now-famous Judgment of Paris. While not dealt with as a whole, either temporally or thematically, the book indicates significant improvement/growth in Napa in the following areas from that period to today and delves into Tor's role along the way.

• Massive growth in the number of wineries resulting from an improved acceptance of Napa products in the broader marketplace
• Tolerance for outsiders -- Napa has gone from being a town where they preferred to not have the sun set on visitors to being a veritable Disneyland for adults
• Has grown from a single eating spot where the locals hung out to a destination spot for foodies. French Laundry, for example, is a Michelin Three Star establishment.
• Wine criticism focused on Napa wines. This had the impact of raising awareness of Napa wines among consumers as well as forcing wineries to up their game. Tor mentions the Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator, the New York Times, and, more recently, Anthony Galloni's Vinous. He is good friends with Jancis Robinson and is a fan of her work beyond the borders of Napa.
• Philanthropy -- the establishment and increasing importance of the Napa Wine Auction as a source of funds for area charities
• His own personal education - Tor came into Napa with limited practical wine knowledge and no formal wine education yet was able to acquire knowledge from international and local contacts and, buttressed by late-life UC Davis certification, was able to launch his own successful wine brand.
• All for one and one for all - winemakers in the valley have always been there for each other understanding that (i) a rising tide lifts all boats and (ii) I might be the one in need of help tomorrow.
• Preservation of Napa as an agricultural space -- Tor mentions efforts to keep developers at bay and Andy Beckstoffer's initiatives to ensure that his vineyards will never be anything but.

As described in the book, at the time of Tor's entry, and for some time thereafter, giants roamed the Valley: André Tchelistcheff (the Father of California wine); Robert Mondavi (led the way in the sales, distribution, and promotion of American wine while focusing on quality improvements); Mike Grgich (known for his world-beating Chardonnays out of Chateau Montelena; and Warren Winiarski (exceptional Cabernet Sauvignon's and wine as a culture), among others. And Tor walked among these giants, and supped with them, and learned the origin of their strengths, and applied those learnings first to his efforts at Beringer and then in his own enterprise.

Tor started out at Beringer Vineyards and, over the next 27 years, helped to build a wine company "known to collectors for its single-vineyard Cabernet Sauvignons and Chardonnays." Over those 27 years Tor developed a deep knowledge of Napa and European terroirs and winemaking practices. And it was this reservoir of knowledge that he tapped into when he retired from Beringer in 2001 to launch, along with his wife Susan, his own venture: TOR Kenward Family Wines.

But the book could quite easily have been named Reflections of a Vintner, Foodie, and Winelover because Tor, due to his role at Beringer (and Beringer being owned by Nestlé) gained access to the greatest wineries and winemakers of the Old World, tasting some of the worlds greatest wines and learning lessons along the way. In addition, he served on a number of boards of institutions whose goal were to advance the food culture within Napa Valley and, in those positions, met, and interacted with, the leading lights of the burgeoning food culture. He has played a key role in the founding and furtherance of the food scene that has now become a key part of the Napa experience.

So this is a telling of the most productive period of Napa Valley's history but it is not a sweeping tale. Rather, it is a close-in history, limiting itself mostly to events surrounding Tor and his interactions with the leading lights that he has interacted with over the two phases of his Napa life.

While I enjoyed the context and content of Tor's Napa history, there were a few areas of dissonance. Tor tells the tale of doing some writing on his website during the pandemic and those writings being some of the source material for the book. That becomes evident in the fact that there is no journey in the book, no sense of traversing history. Further, there is duplication of themes and anecdotes which should have been edited out to make it less obvious that the book is a compendium of past writings. An attempt has been made to stitch the chapters together by having each headed with a winemaker's activity during the course of a calendar month. This material would have been more valuable if curated in a single spot because, as it stands, it generally has no relationship to the remainder of the chapter.

The book is relatively thin and there is some filler in the form of quotes (in oversize type0 and info boxes. In my view these do not add to the book and I found slightly distracting. The book contains quite a few pictures and I found those very interesting in that they showed Tor over the years plus they captured visuals of the major players along the way.

A definite read if you are a lover of Tor, Tor wines, and Napa history.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme

California wines of the 70s-80s versus wines of the 90s: Robert Parker in a Foreword of Tor Kenward's Reflections of a Vintner

I recently got my hands on a copy of Tor Kenward's Reflections of a Vintner and was stopped dead in my tracks by its two (count them, two) Forewords by wine and food industry stalwarts Robert M. Parker, Jr., and Thomas Keller. Parker's Foreword, comparing California wines of the 70s and 80s to the wines of the 90s, and identifying the root cause(s) of the departure, was especially intriguing and launched me down an investigatory rabbit hole. 

Parker's basic thesis was that California wines of the 90s were far superior to the wines of the 70s and 80s largely because of the region's response to the phylloxera infestation of the 1980s. Parker's view of the greatness of the wines of the 90s is not universally accepted so, herein, I will explore his thesis and selected competing views.

The chart below illustrates Parker's perspective on the wines of the 70s and 80s.

Parker was not alone in this assessment. According to Greg Byrne (Wine surges in popularity ..., Santa Fe New Mexican, 7/15/09), in the 1970s and 1980s, many Napa wineries picked too early in an attempt to emulate the wines of Bordeaux.  The standard practice was to harvest grapes based on sugar ripeness -- pick at 23.6 degrees Brix in order to yield 12.6% alcohol in the fermented wine.  This path, according to Byrne, was littered with overly tannic, underripe, harsh wines.

The wines of the 90s, according to Parker, were the cat's meow, due, in large part, to producer-responses to the mid-80s Phylloxera epidemic.

Parker's views, as regards the wines of the 90s, were not universally held. According to Byrne, the lack of rain in Napa in September and October allowed for much longer hang time and phenolically ripe fruit. It also brought along, however, higher sugar levels, lower acidity, darker color, and richer flavors.  By marrying this style of wine with young oak, the Napa winemaker was now promoting power and exuberance over elegance and finesse.  Byrne feels that too many winemakers went too far down this path.

While Byrne saw viticultural practices, as it related to phenolic ripeness, as the Napa problem, Gilman (California Classicism, The World of Fine Wine, Issue 35, 2012) saw the problem as the industry's pursuit of cellar-based technology solutions aimed at closing the "Bordeaux gap."  In addition, phylloxera had caused widespread replantings in the 1990s and cellar manipulation was used to paper over resulting problems such as young juice in the mix, improperly sited vines, and the pursuit of high yields by the growers in order to meet high demand.

Adding fire to the flame was Robert Parker himself assigning high scores to these wines and an unquestioning public snapping up the wines at every turn, based exclusively on these scores. This created a vicious cycle with existing wineries adjusting their wines in pursuit of points and new entrants applying the formula from day one.

The industry seemed to be in a "bad place" by the end of the 1990s.  Gilman has characterized that place: high-alcohol wines made from late-picked fruit, vinified with residual sugar, sprinkled with winemaking additives, and matured in expensive new oak. "Phenolic ripeness became the mantra behind which this was all concealed."  Alcohol levels had gotten so high that a number of post-fermentation mechanisms were created for mitigation purposes; likewise, technical solutions were employed to address acid deficiency.

I think Parker would have been better served by focusing on Tor's contribution to the lore and accomplishments of Napa than reminding us of the trauma of the time for balanced-wine adherents.

©Wine -- Mise en abyme