On our last producer trip, I was particularly interested to visit York Creek Winery, for a couple reasons.
Principally, I have a lot of respect for and interest in the companies of Fritz Maytag, who in addition to owning York Creek also owns Anchor Brewing, Anchor Distilling, and Maytag Dairy Farms. All of these endeavors draw from true human craftsmanship, the history of both the area and the product, and a commitment to contribute to the community. Mr. Maytag also keeps popping up as a key figure in great books I’ve been reading — specifically, The History and Mystery of Zinfandel by David Darlington and Small Giants by Bo Burlingham.
Additionally, York Creek is both an urban winery and, in its unique way, an estate winery. All the grapes are grown on the York Creek estate in Napa Valley, but all the wine is made in downtown San Francisco, in a building across the street from Anchor Brewing. Since we work closely with San Diego’s urban winery, San Pasqual Winery, we thought it would be interesting to see another.
When we arrived at the winery, our winemaker/host Tom Holmes was running a little late, so Anchor Brewing’s head of marketing showed us around the brewery. Here’s John in front of one of the fermentation tanks.
Anchor’s flagship beer is Anchor Steam, a “steam” or “California Common” beer. It’s considered the only style of beer indigenous to the USA.
Historically, California Common beer is fermented with lager yeast — which is bred to work at low temperatures — but without refrigeration. Instead, the brewery uses a lager yeast which can handle slightly higher temperatures, and ferments the beer in these large, shallow, open tanks.
Because there is so much surface area, the heat from fermentation is released quickly. Also, this is a San Francisco style of beer, depending on the fact that it never really gets hot there! Of course, this being the modern world Anchor’s fermentation rooms are temperature controlled, though they are not kept very cold.
Anchor’s brewery is big, clean, and well-organized. They make only a few kinds of beer, many of which (like Anchor Steam) represent the first revival of a historical type of beer. For instance, my favorite of their beers — sadly unavailable in Southern California — is their “small beer”, which is a low-alcohol beer made from the second running of a mash. At around 3% ABV but with the full flavor of an all-malt bitter, it’s a great lunch beer.
Having enjoyed our tour of Anchor Brewing, it was time to cross the road to York Creek Winery. The winery facility is simple and nice, with a lot of these low-profile fermenters.
It’s a very straightforward operation. The grapes are harvested at the winery’s estate in Napa Valley and delivered to San Francisco, where they are pressed, fermented, and aged. The winery makes numerous types of wine and it looks to me as though they continue to explore what varietals will grow best in different areas of the property.
In keeping with the historical bent of the Anchor family, one interesting wine from York Creek is their MXB, which we have carried now for a little while. MXB stands for “mixed black”, and hearkens back to the early days of California wine when Italian immigrants would plant their vineyards with the mix of grapes they wanted to use in their table wine — in other words, a “field blend”. This kind of planting allows for a single-vineyard blend, which is of course totally unique now. York Creek’s MXB uses the historically accurate grapes for this type of wine, including Zinfandel, Petite Sirah and other blending grapes.
Tom toured us around the winemaking operation and the cask room, and of course we tasted quite a few of the wines. Unsurprisingly they were all excellent.
Right now we have York Creek’s MXB and their Petit Verdot, which is both interesting (a varietal rarely sold on its own) and delicious. In the coming months, we’ll rotate through some of the other wines from York Creek.
York Creek really represents a treasure — estate wines from a premier appellation, carefully grown and crafted, with an eye to history. What more could we ask for?
I’ve spied Small Beer very occasionally at BevMo. I recently picked up a sixer of their barleywine, Old Foghorn, and really like it. Their distillery makes good stuff too – Old Potrero FTW.