Over the weekend in Paso Robles, the Eberle Winery team walked off with the Peoples’ Choice trophy at the 15th annual Winemakers’ Cookoff, staged at the fairgrounds in the prominent wine-growing community along California’s vast Central Coast.
The event, put on by the Paso Robles Rotary, raises money for college scholarships for worthy Paso Robles high school seniors. The founding father of the cook-off, in which competing winery teams are charged with dreaming up and executing a winning dish on the grill, was none other than Gary Eberle of the Eberle Winery, and the Winemakers’ Cookoff is but one more example of the gift of Gary.
That gift is vision. Since its inception, the Winemakers’ Cookoff has given away more than $400,000 toward college scholarships. It routinely attracts an enthusiastic crowd of 1,000 or more and is seen as an unqualified success.
So, too, the Eberle adventure in Paso Robles has been an unqualified success. Any reasonable person would put it down to Eberle’s extraordinary vision. A native of Pittsburgh, Eberle had been a star football player at Penn State, where he did his undergrad work in the sciences. While working on his Ph.D at Louisiana State University, he fell in love with food and wine.
That led him on a lifetime detour, first to the University of California, Davis where he picked up a second Ph.D., this time in enology, then on to Paso Robles, where he founded the Estrella River Winery in 1973. Paso Robles at that time was something of a second-class citizen in the California wine industry. It was widely considered too hot and too remote, and most of the wine grapes grown in the region found their way into better wines as blenders, or jug wines.
Eberle planted the fashionable grapes of the day, cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay, but he also introduced syrah to the Paso Robles landscape for the first time. Syrah, we now know, thrives in the region and has helped make the area a shining star for those passionate about the so-called "Rhone" grape varieties such as syrah, viognier, grenache, marsanne and roussanne, which are prominent in France’s Rhone Valley.
What we also know now, which no one understood or believed at the time of Eberle’s arrival, is that Paso Robles is ideal for wine grapes. The days are warm, so the grapes have every opportunity to ripen perfectly, and the nights are cool, a key factor in the freshness and structure of wines from the Paso area.
Yet the success of the Rhone grape varieties in Paso Robles has hardly dampened Eberle’s enthusiasm for his original conclusion that cabernet sauvignon and chardonnay would do well in Paso Robles. He planted plenty of both at the Eberle Winery (Estrella River was sold and remains today a "brand" rather than a small family-run winery) before it opened its doors along dusty Highway 46 in Paso in 1979.
"I would put up Paso Robles cabernet against Napa Valley cabernet any day," Eberle says with a bit of bravado that is inspired as much by his ire at a certain wine critic as it is his own experience.
The longtime critic for a major wine publication, who shall remain nameless, once doubted the potential longevity of an early Eberle cab.
"He said the Eberle cabernet sauvignon is nice, but it’s too fruity, it will never last," Eberle recalled last week.
And with that Eberle retrieved a 1979 Estrella River Cabernet and a 1980 Eberle Winery Cabernet from the cellar. Both wines had good color and enticing aromas of leather, cigar box and spice. Though the primary fruits were nothing more than a memory, hints of dark fruit remained, and the tannins were sweet and smooth. Both wines were in excellent condition for their age and well worth exploring over a meal of tri-tip steak from a smoky barbecue.
"I don’t know whether it’s the cool nights or the soils or the clones or whatever, but these older Paso cabs seem to hold their color and structure forever," said Eberle as he savored the 1980. "Not bad for a Paso cab more than 30 years old."
Indeed, it could well be that winemaker Gary Eberle’s greatest gift to Paso Robles has been the gift of cab.
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