As the warm fall sun sets over the California Central Valley, fifteen-year-old John Marion III and his father pack up for the drive home to the East Bay. They’re carrying a load of grapes, and the interior of the car is filled with the scent of musty-sweet harvested fruit. Though most of the supply will go toward the production of his father’s wine, this year Marion has crates of his own, which he paid for by promising the grape grower half the bottles of wine made from the fruit. As soon as they arrive home—a one-hundred-year-old Victorian house in downtown Livermore—the lean-framed, lanky Marion runs to his room to study, not for a test but to decide what strain of yeast he’ll use for the wine’s fermentation.

Over the next few weeks he works with his dad, who began making wine in the backyard when Marion was nine years old. He also collaborates with a family friend, Cedar Mountain Winery-owner Earl Ault, who allows the family to use his winery’s space and equipment since the Marion’s small business expanded. Marion uses his new driver’s license and his time before and after school to drive through Livermore’s backroads to Cedar Mountain where he ferments the crushed grapes, beginning the process for a deep Sangiovese. He dislikes the taste of wine and guides its growth by smell alone, picking up scents of berry, black cherry, and violet. It’s a skill he honed and learned to love as a child living among barrels of wine.
Throughout the next two years the red wine ages, and a few months before his high school graduation it’s ready to bottle. With computer-made labels and a glue stick, a proud Marion brands his twenty-two cases of wine “John Evans”—his first and middle name.

“There are certain wines that stick in your mind. The things you care about, you remember,” the now twenty-four-year-old Marion says, reminiscing. He’s standing behind a wooden bar at the Big White House winery, named after his family’s home, where he is co-owner and winemaker with his father. He officially began his own boutique label at the winery in 2004, sticking with the John Evans name. Behind him, large windows look out onto acres of vineyards and other small wineries dotting the Livermore hills.

The back of the barn-like winery is stacked to its exposed beams with purple-stained wooden barrels, filling the room with the smell of French Oak and grapes. A small hotplate is running in one corner, warming the red and gold wax Marion uses to decorate his bottles. As rain strikes the metal roof and a playlist featuring The Shins and Imogen Heap shuffles in the background, Marion reaches for a bottle of Pinot Noir, his thin-framed glasses and spiky brown hair contrasting with the gray sky outside.

“My family on both sides, forever, has been do-it-yourselfers,” he explains, smiling. “This is a great job—get-your-hands-dirty kind of work.”

The Livermore Valley, just forty-five miles east of San Francisco and home to over forty wineries, is a burgeoning wine country and Marion is happy to contribute to its reputation. The Big White House produced about fifteen-hundred cases of wine last year, making the winery incredibly small in comparison to others who call the Valley home. Four additional wines are typically released each year under the John Evans label, though he only makes about one-hundred and twenty cases. And working at a small, family-owned winery has its benefits.

“Taking orders from someone else would be hard for me,” Marion explains. “I like being able to experiment. If I screw up, I pay the price, and if it goes great, I reap the benefits. That’s part of the fun for me—being able to do things a little differently.”

And the developing Livermore Valley nurtures this sort of mentality. Though the Valley has been home to winemakers for over a century, its establishments have been climbing into the larger fold of California wineries only within the last few decades. While Napa and Sonoma Counties seemed to rush the scene in the 1960s with award-winning California flavors, the Livermore Valley has been a little slower in gaining a name. Perhaps it has to do with Livermore’s past as a cowboy and rodeo town, its laidback and country attitude. Or maybe it’s the less competitive and more neighborly edge the winemakers and winery owners bring to the tasting table.

“Here, in Livermore, you find a lot more people who are down to earth,” says twenty-eight-year-old Chris Graves, winemaker for Ruby Hills Winery. “For people who just want to tour, to accustom themselves to wine country, Livermore welcomes people with open arms.”

That attitude translates easily to the consumer. Where many of the wineries in Napa and Sonoma now charge for wine tasting, most of the Livermore Valley wineries offer theirs for free, and it’s not uncommon to see the winemakers themselves pouring in the tasting room. As a neighbor to many Bay Area towns, the Livermore Valley appears to be a great alternative to the crowded wine countries in the north.

Part of the Valley’s allure is its rich history in winemaking. In 1889, Livermore Valley wines won America’s first Gold Medal at the Paris Exposition. And Concannon Vineyard, which has had grapes planted here since 1883, produced the world’s first Petite Sirah in 1961. It doesn’t hurt that Livermore’s downtown recently underwent a major renovation, allowing for the opening of a handful of new restaurants and bars, a performing arts theatre, and boutiques that attract a younger crowd. Winemakers like Marion and Graves appreciate this sort of change. As new businesses blossom and new winemakers begin work in the Valley, the atmosphere inevitably shifts.

Ruby Hill Winery in Pleasanton, still within the Livermore Valley, opened to the public this February. Within a year Graves will buy in as a partner of the winery, making him part-owner in addition to winemaker. He believes that young winemakers, as well as consumers, bring something beneficial to the industry.
“I think there’s definitely a need for a younger crowd here,” says Graves. “It’s exciting. It builds more interest. The thing about young winemakers is that they’re open to trying new things.”

Unlike Marion, who did not go to school for winemaking, Graves graduated from UC Davis with a degree in viticulture and enology—grape growing and the chemistry of wine. Graves grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills, a small hotspot for winemaking, and became interested in the program when his father planted wine grapes in the backyard and let him routinely taste wine as a teenager. His family had no experience with winemaking, so getting a degree gave him the background he needed. He knew he wanted to make wine at sixteen but didn’t get his hands dirty until he was twenty when he made his first vintage—a 2001 Cabernet Sauvignon he fermented in a trash can.

“I’m living my dream,” Graves says. “The trend is switching more towards a lot of young people going into these programs, because, in general, more young people are becoming aware of wine. It’s very exciting.”
Graves met his wife at school, and when he graduated and began looking for an internship she encouraged him to try her hometown of Livermore. The direction he gained from his classes gave Graves the talents he needed to entice the Valley’s top winemakers. He began interning for Wente Vineyards, California’s oldest family-operated, continuously-run winery. He worked under Karl Wente, now his close friend. When he finished, he took the winemaking position at the relatively small Ruby Hills.

Last fall marked the first year Graves harvested the winery’s own fruit, and he fermented seventy-five-thousand tons of grapes. Graves would like to keep the winery in the three-hundred to three-hundred-fifty barrel range, or around eight-thousand cases.

“I don’t want to get too big,” he laughs. “I want to have more of a hands-on relationship with the wine. Working for a small winery, it’s more personal in that respect.”

This year Wente Vineyards celebrates its 125-year anniversary, a goal accomplished by the winery’s ambition to remain open during prohibition—an endurance Napa lacked—by selling wine to the Catholic Church. Thirty-year-old Karl Wente is a fifth-generation winemaker at Wente Vineyards and takes his job to heart. He, too, received a masters degree in viticulture and enology from UC Davis, something he felt was important to give him the credibility he needed in the large family trade.

“To learn the family business was overwhelming at first, but now getting to make this many wines is exciting,” Wente says of his job at the three-thousand-case-a-year winery. “The cool part of growing and making as many varietals as we do is that we always have new wines coming out.”

Wente also picked up a passion for music while at school. He plays guitar, Graves plays bass, and the two get together with friends once a week for jam sessions. This morning, Wente is paying a visit to Graves at the Ruby Hill barrel room, a converted, insulated barn housing the oak barrels of aging Ruby Hill wine. The entrance is guarded by winding rows of young vineyards and rustic barrels warming in the sun.

Inside the structure, Graves guides Wente from barrel to barrel, doling out tastings of his favorites with a glass medicine dropper-like contraption. First Barbera, then Pinot Noir, a little Cabernet, followed by Port. Each varietal has a different color, from bright cherry red to deep purple, and the men aerate every taste, discussing the flavor characteristics, the texture, and the body of each wine. Many of the barrels are young, but Wente and Graves know how each will turn out—if a close eye is kept on them through each stage of aging.

While the fermentation of the wine only lasts a few weeks up to a month, the aging takes years. Some red wines can age in the barrels for up to four years, borrowing flavors and aromas from the oak in which they are stored. Temperature, oxygen exposure, and humidity are important and must be kept as constant as possible. But it’s a game winemakers tend to enjoy.

“It’s that combination of art and science,” Graves says. His white T-shirt is stained deep red from his work earlier that morning. “There aren’t many fields out there where you have to hone in on such different levels....It’s a complex process that you never really master—you only learn more. You can never get complacent. But we’re producing something that enhances people’s lives, and there aren’t too many jobs out there that will let me do that.”

“The two of us have the best job ever,” Wente adds, going on to describe both himself and Graves as flavor junkies. Wente, wearing cowboy boots and a wool beanie in the cool morning breeze, towers over Graves, who is not by any means small in stature. “I really just fell in love with winemaking at school.” Wente says. “I’m so lucky that I’m into this.”

The two meander through the barrels, sharing new stories and reminiscing about their recent pasts, like cleaning out the bladder press—a large, metal cylinder that is first filled with harvested grapes and then inflated with a rubber bladder to gently squeeze out the juice—when it’s filled with bees, or how painfully tedious winemaking can be at times.
“Winemaking is like cleaning the dishes over and over,” Wente explains. “You finish one task, and you have to clean up. You move something, and you have to clean up. See this pile here?” He laughs, pointing to a few beakers, a clear tube, and a bucket in the Ruby Hill barrel room. “This is Chris’ ‘to wash’ pile. But we have the best product afterwards.”

Though the evolving Livermore Valley is still small in comparison to other appellations—winemaking jargon for grape-growing regions—Graves and Wente are optimistic about its future.

“Monterey [County] has fifty-thousand acres of vineyards, and we’ll never be like that. We’ll never have more than five thousand,” Wente explains. “But for an appellation with forty wineries producing great stuff, we’re a great place to be. We’re a great community.”

With warm weather and sunshine fast approaching, wineries across the Valley are gearing up for their Spring Releases. While some wineries, such as Wente, release their wines continuously throughout the year, smaller establishments like the Big White House only schedule releases for a few times a year. Spring is a favorite.

On a recent Monday afternoon, John Marion III, his father, and some family friends gather in the Big White House tasting room. They’re setting up to bottle a 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon for the Big White House’s April release. The five-hundred-pound barrel of wine is lifted into the back of a pick-up truck, and a long opaque hose is positioned to run from the stained opening at the top of the barrel to a metal trough lined with tubes and green bottles. It’s a basic siphon system, and air pressure will gently push the wine from the full barrel into the empty bottles.

The production line of four men works quickly and silently. Empty bottles are lined up, filled, and wiped clean all in one fluid motion as the berry scent of wine is carried to every corner of the room by the gentle breeze coming through the giant barn doors. Marion stands waiting at the corker, a lever-type machine that squeezes the soaked corks into the tiny tops of the bottles, and finishes each batch. Small splashes of bright burgundy fill the cracks of the concrete floor and cover the equipment with a thin layer of wine. After an hour, twenty-six cases, twelve bottles each, are ready for labeling, foiling, and selling. It’s the nearly finished product of four years’ work.

“It’s exciting to finish a wine, but it’ll be really nice to finally have some money in our bank accounts again,” Marion laughs. His dad has a slightly more paternal view of their latest project.

“If we’ve done everything up to this point, it’s nice to put it in a bottle and know we can’t screw it up too much from here,” the elder Marion smiles. “It’s like putting your babies to bed.”

Despite size differences, product variations, and a little healthy competition, the winemakers and winery owners who belong to the Valley can agree on one thing—Livermore Valley wineries have something— whether it’s wine, history, or a little community—to offer the new generation of wine enthusiasts.
“There’s a passion here,” says Graves. “Livermore should be a destination. It’s just over the hill [from San Francisco], it’s fun, it’s cheap, and you’re more welcomed. People really need to know that the Valley is a great place to be.”