Segue Cellars

Segue Cellars
363 N. Ferndale
Mill Valley, California
USA 94941
Phone: (415) 389-1183
http://www.seguecellars.com

Contact: Stephen Yafa
Email: [email protected]

For three decades or more I’ve written about everything from a social history of cotton to a Hollywood screenplay about a steamy college romance. But I really didn’t know much about lust until I more or less fell head over heels into a tank of fermenting grape juice. I was interviewing a guy named Greg La Follette, one of the best Pinot Noir winemakers in our nation, if not our galaxy. While driving through winding back-country roads he pulled both hands off the steering wheel of his 300,000-mile Volvo station wagon so he could sketch the flow of phenols through a Pinot wine grape.

With great passion as we veered and swerved, Greg swore to me, "Nothing caresses your mouth. Steve, like Pinot Noir." He said it with such conviction it sounded like a religious vow. When I tasted his wine—feral, delightfully complex and unruly and pure and rambunctious and elegant and suave and brash all at once—I was hooked.

A home winemaker for many years, I'd been possessed by the notion for some time of making my own commercial Pinot Noir--the ultimate sensuous wine encounter, to me, when done exactly right--but I knew I needed to be in close proximity to a microbiologist with the soul of a poet. Pinot Noir is the world's most finicky, duplicitous grape. Passion matters; but nothing matters quite so much as knowing how to neutralize stinky yeast cells when the grape

When Greg signed on as my designated troubleshooter, I took the plunge. Researching my cotton book I’d immersed in a single subject for eighteen months—a new experience. Now I was eager to apply those same muscles to winemaking, so during the 2005 harvest I became a cellar rat-- a winery grunt who mucks out fermentation tanks, gases barrels and swabs floors--and a vineyard manager under the tutelage of Greg LaFollette.For months I went to bed picking moist grape skins out of my ears and nostrils. I tasted over 300 Pinots on their way to becoming wine. I knew what I wanted in the end product; now I was finding out how to get there. It was sloppy, exhausting work. It was the best of all fun.

Months later I sipped and spat from stacks of French oak barrels. Little did I know, going in, that every barrel cooper from Ermitage to Francoise Freres imparts a noticeably different character to the wine. Finally I got the marriage of dark fruit, bright flavors and lushness I was looking for. There were miles to go before I slept, but I could at least rest and pick those grape skins out of my ears with a sense that I was segueing toward a wine I’d be proud to call my own.

When my first release sold out in less than a month, I was inspired to forge ahead.

Winemaker: Stephen Yafa

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