On a recent Sunday, longtime East Bay friends Gordon Mauger and Chris Maxwell spent the afternoon hunkered down in Maxwell’s cramped Lafayette garage — a DIY crushpad — disgorging bottles of their homemade sparkling syrah.
The messy process, which involves uncapping the bottles and removing the sediment frozen after fermentation, is usually associated with the storied caves of a commercial winery, not a suburban garage off Mt. Diablo Boulevard.
“Whenever we make red wine, the driveway is stained for a week,” says Maxwell, squeezing his way between a wine fridge and oak barrel to reach his Livermore cab, chilling in a cabinet freezer.
Like Mauger, he has no formal training or commercial aspirations. Making wine is their hobby. So is drinking it with friends — and after doing it for 20 years, they’ve gotten pretty good, with the home wine competition medals to prove it. But that’s not why they have stuck with it for so long.
“We spend so many of our days constrained by work and life,” Maxwell says. “With this, you get so many opportunities for creativity. That’s what’s exciting.”
Home winemakers describe it as a passion that never gets old, an intellectual and gastronomic pursuit that requires a lot of clean up, but also yields many Christmas presents. The Bay Area is home to thousands of avid home winemakers who use kits and oak chips or go DIY, like Mauger and Maxwell, who get their malbec and viognier from Maxwell’s backyard vines and supplement with grapes from vineyards in Oakley, Sonoma, even Napa.
With harvest in full swing, home winemakers in this region are at a particular advantage, having access to surpluses of world-class fruit and so much variety, from Santa Cruz Mountains pinot noir to Lodi old-vine zinfandel. They find the grapes on Craigslist for as low as $1 a pound or work with brokers at retail shops such as Berkeley’s Oak Barrel Winecraft or San Jose’s Beer and Wine Makers of America.
Rich Mansfield, who has owned the San Jose business since 1990, contracts with five or six Northern California vineyards, schlepping just-pressed juice from as far away as the Russian River Valley or Sierra foothills to his shop on Brokaw Road. There, would-be winemakers show up in 15-minute slots for pick up, anxious to get their juice home before the wild yeasts begin to spontaneously ferment and cause potential off-aromas or flavors.
“I consult with everyone who comes through the door,” says Mansfield, who works with more than 100 home winemakers at any given time. “What kind of fruit they have, what kind of wine they want to make, the right yeast, everything.”
One year, when client Scott Shipman’s truck was in the shop, the home winemaker of 13 years was forced to use his Tesla to transport some prized Monterey sauvignon blanc back to Willow Glen. Only problem: The 25-gallon container wouldn’t fit in the trunk. So Shipman strapped it to the suedelike passenger seat, with the top sticking out of the sunroof. Using a hose, Mansfield helped pump the juice into the container and sent Shipman on his way.
In the middle of the slowest 10-mile drive back to Willow Glen, he heard a pop.
“I look over and the lid is now floating, and there’s sticky-sweet sauvignon blanc sloshing close to the top,” Shipman recalls. “So I’m re-pumping with one hand and trying not to accelerate or stop.”
The adventure was worth it. Not only did the sauvignon blanc yield an exceptional wine — one of the best vintages of Scotoni, the label Shipman uses for his wines — but the camaraderie among home winemakers who meet up at Mansfield’s every fall is something he looks forward to all year.
“We bring our bottles and share, so you’re often tasting the same wine (grapes), made by different people, which is amazing,” Shipman says. “You expect something like that in a farm community, but not in the middle of Silicon Valley.”
Cupertino’s Pen Li, who works in the semiconductor industry, enjoys the technical side of winemaking. He keeps a journal on every wine — and every measurement of brix and pH — he has made since his first batch, a 2012 merlot made from grapes he got from Mansfield. It was drinkable. Looking back at his notes, he says he might have skipped a few check points.
“To be a good winemaker, you need decades of experience,” says Li, who makes wine in the temperature-controlled crawl space next to his garage. “I’m still learning. There are ups and downs. Miscalculations. But winemaking is very forgiving, especially making red wines.”
He calls his cabernet, zinfandel and merlot “Mountain House,” the name his kids gave their hillside home when they were little. Now in his 10th vintage, Li is working with about 600 pounds of fruit annually, which yield around 210 bottles. He labels them with drawings made by his daughter, Katelyn, and takes them to parties where it turns out, a homemade bottle of wine is a terrific ice breaker.
“I make a lot of friends immediately,” Li says, laughing.
Kathleen Swanson and Michael MacWilliams embrace both the social and scientific sides of wine. Both have PhDs in civil and environmental engineering and “like to do a lot of chemistry,” says MacWilliams, who learned to make wine from an Italian buddy, who learned from his uncles.
“I was taught to start with the best grapes you can find and don’t mess it up,” he says.
They use mostly pinot noir, from coveted spots such as Sonoma’s Russian River Valley, because that’s what they love to drink, as well as unoaked chardonnay. The couple, who live on the west side of San Francisco, less than a mile from the beach, have been crafting wine in a corner of their garage since 2011. They’ve never made a wine for which they haven’t also picked the grapes.
“I think we’re very lucky to live here, close to these incredible vineyards,” MacWilliams says.
The fog and ocean breezes help keep their makeshift cellar naturally cool. Once the wines leave their French oak barrels, which the couple purchases direct from the cooperages for around $1,000 a pop, they go into the house.
“We have a closet underneath the staircase where we age the wines in bottle,” Swanson says.
They’ve been showing beautifully. Their friends like the wines so much, several served them at their weddings — in 2013 and 2015. Swanson and MacWilliams poured their wines at their own reception, too, in 2016. Since 2014, the couple has taken home gold, double gold and best in class medals at several home wine competitions.
That’s got Swanson thinking about making wine commercially someday — maybe in retirement.
“To go from grapes that have potential to be great wine and see if you meet or exceed that potential — that’s a pretty amazing part of the process,” she says.
Explore
Interested in a spot of winemaking of your own? San Jose’s Beer and Wine Makers of America sells fermenting equipment and grapes and is open Tuesday-Sunday at 755 E. Brokaw Road; http://beerandwinemakers.com. Find Berkeley’s Oak Barrel Winecraft at 1443 San Pablo Ave.; https://oakbarrel.com.
