The Tasting Panel magazine

December 2014

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52  /  the tasting panel  / december 2014 IN THE BIZ Around this time Al's son, Scott Scheid, was working on Wall Street as an options trader. "I'm not a viticulturist or enologist," says Scott, who returned to California after four years in New York to assist Al with the buyout. "Neither of us are. We joke now because we're finally allowed to go in the vineyards and the cellar . . . so long as we don't touch anything." From 1986 to 1991, the father-son team helmed Scheid Vineyards until Al's daughter, Heidi Scheid, was pre- paring to take maternity leave from the valuation department at Ernst & Young. "We needed her help right about then," says Scott. "Long story short, she never went back." And that, he says, is when Scheid Vineyards truly became a family business. Today, Scheid sells grapes and con- tracts wine with about 50 wineries, with Al, Scott, Heidi and COO Kurt Gollnick, at the helm—a quartet that Al long ago dubbed the "Gang of Four." Luxury-Level Winemaking on a Large Scale In the late 1990s, as Scheid was wrapping up several 30-year grape contracts without any new long-term agreements on the horizon, the Gang of Four determined that the company's next pursuit would be bulk wine and custom crush. For years, the company had used up to seven other wineries across the state to make clients' wines. But finally, says Scott, it became clear that Scheid needed its own facility. "We put 25,000 miles on trucks in two months trying to keep track of all our winemaking, from Livermore to Paso Robles. It was getting insane." The new winery broke ground in 2005 with a mission to facilitate what the Scheids call "luxury-level winemak- ing on a large scale." Presses on rails between tanks, one-person mechanized punch-downs and tanks that hold the precise volume of a truckload of grapes are details that maximize efficiency so well that Scheid's 100,000-square-foot, 32,000-ton-capacity winemaking facility only requires 11 full-time year round cellar professionals to operate it, and an additional 30 seasonal workers during the fall harvest. A Wine of Their Own Despite 20 years in wine, the Scheids didn't experiment with making their own until 1989, a Cabernet Sauvignon. Production and demand steadily grew, however, to necessitate the opening of their Greenfield tasting room in 1997, followed by a second in nearby Carmel. Today, Director of Winemaking Dave Nagengast and his team of winemakers use less than 20 percent of Scheid's crop to make wine for several proprietary labels, including broad- market District 7 Wines; Metz Road, a vineyard-designated program of each vintage's best Chardonnay and Pinot Noir blocks; and Scheid Vineyards, whose estate and reserve programs identify the best lots from 4,000 acres of vines and 36 varieties planted across 70 miles of Monterey County—an enor- mous variety even before considering the impact of four sub-appellations and myriad clones. A Voice for Growers With their recent expansion into private labels, the Scheids now call their business a "three-legged stool" held up by grape-growing, custom crush and branded goods. But advo- cacy—for both wine grape growers and Monterey as a region—is something of an unnamed fourth leg. When Al was approached in the early '70s by fellow growers feeling underrepresented in Sacramento, the California Association of Winegrape Growers (CAWG) was born. "There's always been conflict between winer- ies and grape growers," says Scott. "The wineries want a low price and the growers want a high price. That conflict's built right in." Though the Scheid by the Numbers Custom crush: 20 winery clients Grape sales: 20 wineries Contract wine sales: 30 wineries Bulk wine sales: 40–50 wineries annually Total acreage under vines: 4,000 acres Number of estate vineyards: 10 (all in Monterey County) Span between vineyards: 70 miles, north to south Number of AVAs represented: 4 (Monterey, Arroyo Seco, San Lucas and Hames Valley) Director of Winemaking Dave Nagengast.

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