Have you ever had this really great idea, but your boss, or your spouse, or the investment capitalist bankrolling your new business says, “Nah, won’t work, don’t think so. Forget about it.”
Yet you know in your bones that it’s a really great idea – so you do it anyway. But S-e-c-r-e-t-l-y! Then comes the day that an opportunity presents itself, and you have this big reveal of your really great idea, and everyone says, “Wow, that really was a great idea.”
The wine world has a couple of those surprise moments. In fact, you might have heard about the most famous incident, the one involving Penfolds Grange, or “Grange Hermitage,” as it was called at the time. Winemaker Max Schubert began making the Australian Shiraz for Penfolds in 1951 on an experimental basis, then the company launched it with the 1952 harvest. The wine flopped with the critics and the consumers, so Penfold’s told Schubert in 1957 to quit making it.
He did – or so the bosses thought. Secretly, he didn’t, making the 1957, 1958 and 1959 vintages and squirreling them away where management wouldn’t see them. When everyone discovered his wines simply needed time in the bottle to come around, they pronounced them fantastic. In 1960, management quickly told Schubert to begin making the wine again, not knowing he had never stopped.
About 30 years ago, something similarly happened with Paul Hobbs, Nicolas Catena and Mendoza Malbec. Today, Hobbs is one of our most revered winegrowers, not only in the U.S., but in the world. He makes his own wines from vineyards he owns in Sonoma, Napa Valley, Mendoza, Cahors in France, Galicia in Spain, somewhere in Armenia and in the Finger Lakes of his native upstate New York. Hobbs wines have been scored 100 points on multiple occasions. He also has his own importing company, and only heaven knows what he does in his spare time.
Hobbs got started in the wine business in the late 1970s just out of the U.C. Davis wine program as part of Robert Mondavi’s Opus One launch team. Yet, a few years later when he went on a road trip to South America with a couple of university buddies, he was still largely unknown and still making wines for other people in California.
I had heard parts of this story before, but Hobbs retold it in its entirety at a recent Zoom presentation and tasting of his Viña Cobos wines. It began, he said, in 1988 when a friend from Chile invited him to visit vineyards in that country, which was already fairly well known for its Cabernets. Hobbs decided to invite another college pal, one whose family owned a winery in Argentina – perhaps not a great idea as the two counties had few years earlier almost gone to war over a border dispute and still weren’t on good terms.
“And so, my inviting an Argentine was tantamount to kind of like, well, some of the current upheavals we have going on around the world,” Hobbs recounted. “I was finally disinvited from Chile after three or four days of visiting wineries there, and ended up in Argentina” with his friend, the younger brother of Nicolas Catena. At that time the Catena family owned a winery, Esmeralda, that – according to Hobbs – basically turned out “undrinkable wines.”
“I really didn’t want to go there, given its reputation as a plonk producer,” he said. “Most pundits at the time felt that there was very little chance that Argentina could ever produce good wine.” But Hobbs became more interested when he saw the Catena vineyard in the lofty Luján de Cuyo region.
“What I liked in particular was how gravelly the soils were. And so I found that sort of perplexing. Why was Argentina making such poor quality wine, as was reported, and yet they had fairly tight-spaced planting, much tighter than Chile and more in the European style? So there are a number of things that sort of raised my antennae.” The grapes being grown were Malbec, a variety he had heard about but had never worked with.
It was arranged for Hobbs to fly to Buenos Aires, where Nicolas Catena lived at the time. “He wanted to make wines of international quality, and I wanted to start my own winery,” Hobbs said. “I’d been working at Mondavi and also at Simi for a number of years, and so, I was in my mid-30s and wanting to start my own career. He helped me launch Paul Hobbs winery in 1991, and I built his program for him.”
While the two did not agree on everything, Hobbs was able to help Catena dramatically raise the quality of his wines. By 1993, they were ready to launch into the lucrative American market with Catena Chardonnay. The American importer, Billington, was owned by Alfredo Bartholomaus, a gregarious Chilean by birth, who flew a group of journalists down to Mendoza to taste the wine and witness a blending session.
“We made the Chardonnay blend [for the writers to taste], and they were quite favorable about it,” Hobbs said. “And so when all that kind of went well, I could see that Nicolas was in a good spot. I said, ‘Hey, listen. I have one more thing…in the back of the winery.’ I hadn’t really told Nicolas about this because he had told me not to waste my time working on Malbec when I tried to get him to help finance some experimentation with the grape and pay for some barrels. He said, ‘No, the French hadn’t replanted Malbec after phylloxera in the mid-1870s, and that just proves the variety is not a noble one.’”
But while the cat was away in Buenos Aires, Hobbs and his mice had been playing back in Mendoza.
One colleague worked with Hobbs to reconfigure the Malbec vineyard to make better fruit, and another vendor provided 10 oak barrels, which, by the time the American writers arrived, were filled with the hidden experimental Malbec. “I took these five journalists back to a corner of the winery where I tasted them on the Malbec from 1992 that I had made. So it was still in barrel, still young.” The writers were so impressed by the young Malbec that one of them, Tom Stockley, an influential wine writer from Seattle, wrote a story on his return to the U.S. titled, “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”
“He said the real gem and the real secret for Argentina in the future is Malbec,” Hobbs remembered. “That put Nicolas in a quandary, because Billington always wanted a red wine, and Nicholas wanted to do Cabernet – but we hadn’t prepared any Cabernet, either.
“So basically, a lot of pressure was put on Nicholas to make Malbec. Well, I didn’t want to risk the name ‘Catena,’ so we launched [in 1994] a brand that I named ‘Alamos’ after the Alamos tree,” he said. “And that was the beginning, you might say, or the genesis” of Malbec becoming the flagship wine of Argentina – a great story of hidden value.
Now, if you’ve ever been to dinner with a group of friends and, after the fifth bottle of wine, the husband decides to tell everyone that he has just purchased a racehorse or a case of Petrus or a vacation home in Costa Rica and it’s the first time his astonished wife has heard about, then you know the moral of the story:
If you’re crazy enough to launch a secret project, perhaps one you’ve been forbidden to do, then you better find the perfect time to make the reveal.