Episode 3: Christina Turley

Introduction

Christina Turley: 0:02

It’s agriculture, right? Not agri-business. This is part of our cultural history and something worth preserving. Zinfandel is the backbone of the American wine industry. It was the first grape to be planted and to take off, truly, and the most widely-planted grape in California for almost a century, if not more. And the most important part is education, right? Getting as many people to understand and appreciate what these old vineyards have to offer, and to be able to taste the history in each of those is—it makes you feel small in the best way possible.

Harmon Skurnik: 1:05

Hey, this is Harmon Skurnik, and I am here with the inimitable Jamie Schwartz, who is the American Wine Specialist here at Skurnik Wines, and he recorded a phenomenal episode with Christina Turley, who is the second-generation proprietor of Turley Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. And it was quite an incredible conversation. What did you think?

Jamie Schwartz: 1:29

I mean, there’s so much to take away from Christina herself. She’s amazing. I think we really love to champion generational transitions and things in the wine world, and Christina is an amazing ambassador for Turley and American wine, because I think Turley, Zinfandel, old vines, all of these things we touched on are so important to the story of American wine, and Christina is an incredible ambassador for both her family’s brand and legacy but the broader California wine scene.

Harmon Skurnik: 1:52

Absolutely. And, you know, we have been representing Turley Wine Cellars from the inception of the very first vintage in 1993, when there were, I believe, three wines that were produced: two Zinfandels and a Petite Syrah.

Jamie Schwartz: 1:57

And we’re at, like, 40 now, I think? So they’ve really grown. It’s really remarkable.

Harmon Skurnik: 2:10

It is quite a popular brand. And, it’s really interesting to listen to her talk about the history of the brand and also the future, and I look forward to listening to it. We should tune in and listen right now. What do you think?

Jamie Schwartz: 2:15

Let’s go for it. Hi, everyone. I’m Jamie Schwartz, one of the American Portfolio Managers here at Skurnik Wines. I’m joined by my friend Christina Turley, second generation at Turley Wines and VP and director of sales. Christina, thank you so much for spending time with us today. I’d love if you could just take us through Turley. Give us an introduction for those who maybe aren’t super familiar with the wines.

Christina Turley: Sure, absolutely. And thanks so much for having me. I love being in the greatest city in the world.

Jamie Schwartz: That’s right.

About Turley and old vines

Christina Turley: So, Turley has been making wines since 1993. That was our first vintage. And we specialize primarily in what I would say are historic California wines. So, in particular, that means old-vine Zinfandel. We define an old vine as having to be a minimum of 50 years old. We work with, I think, now more old-vine vineyards than any other winery in the world. They are spread out all across California. We are based in the Napa Valley, but we work with vineyards all over the state. One of the beauties is that Zinfandel is one of the only grapes that can grow in all of these various microclimates, soil types, elevations, things like that, so it actually is one of the very best lenses through which to examine California terroir. We make about 30-something different Zinfandels and then a couple of other historic California wines, including some old-vine Petite Syrah, as well as a White Zin, a dry White Zin. Don’t worry, I know that’s a very triggering term for some people. Entire generations have huge fear around this wine, but I promise it’s very dry. You won’t shrivel up into a raisin if you drink it or get laughed out of town. We’ve been around since 1993. We farm everything organically, and in fact, we’re one of the longest certified organic properties in all of Napa Valley. We’re also entirely solar powered, and the vast majority of our vineyards are dry farmed, which is something we’re incredibly proud of. Not only is it better for the environment overall, but it produces a wine that is more true to its sense of place. [With irrigation,] only are you misrepresenting the rainfall, but [with dry-farming] the root systems go down much deeper and to various levels of the soil, so you might hit levels that you would never have hit otherwise, or find limestone, for example, like in the Kirchenmann Vineyard. There’s sand, and then six feet below that, there’s limestone. If that had been an irrigated vineyard, you would have never touched the limestone, and we all know how important that is for fine wines. So it’s something I’m incredibly proud of. I think one of the most unique things about Turley in general is, most wines from—no matter where they are from in the world—will be compared to their Old World counterparts, no matter how well you do. Burgundy has been making Pinot Noir for centuries, and you’re just never going to make Burgundy. You’re thousands of miles away. Ditto Bordeaux. Ditto every famous Old World wine. The difference with Zinfandel is, even though it is from some other place, like all things truly American, it came from somewhere else, we changed the name to something we can pronounce more easily, far fewer consonants in this case, and then made its fame and fortune in the States. With Zinfandel, the most famous, the criterion for Zinfandel is the California version, to the point where now you even see other wineries in other countries labeling their grapes as ‘Zinfandel’ instead of Primitivo, instead of Crljenak, for example. So, we get to be a part of defining what is Unique California, both wine growing and winemaking. We’re not looking to anyone other than our own histories as a state for inspiration and to make the best wines we possibly can.

Jamie Schwartz: Amazing. There’s a lot of different things that I kind of want to like, pull apart there, but something that we spoke about earlier today and I think we should dive into further is farming. You mentioned earlier, as the wineries transition from Ehren Jordan at the helm to Tegan, that farming has been one of the things that’s changed the most. Has Turley been certified organic since day one? What’s that evolution looked like?

Christina Turley: Absolutely. So, yes, we’ve been certified organic since the beginning. In fact, my father owned Frog’s Leap prior to starting Turley. And Frog’s Leap was on the same property where Turley is today, and we were certified organic even in the Frog’s Leap days, so the original certification goes back to the 1980s, which is really an honor to be able to say that. And we organically farm all of the vineyards we work with that we don’t own, that other people live on those properties and walk through the vineyards, or they’re part of a community. For example, we work with the library vineyard, which is right behind the public library in downtown Saint Helena. This is very much a part of our small town’s community. Over 25 different grape varieties are planted to it. It’s a wonderful place to study ampelography. It’s very much a part of the community. People walk through it, they walk their dogs. There’s a daycare nearby. It just makes me feel so good to know that we’re doing things not just that are best for the environment, but also for the people that live nearby and then the people who eventually, hopefully drink the wines.

Jamie Schwartz: What is the breakdown of estate property to negociant fruit?

Christina Turley: I think it’s probably about 70% estate. There’s three categories: 1) you own the land, you farm it, you make the wine; 2) you have a long-term contract with somebody else, so someone else owns the land but we have, say, a 30-year lease, so we farm it and we and we make the wine. Between those two things, because you can technically call those both estate, that’s about 70% and the remaining 30% is purchased fruit from growers.

Jamie Schwartz: Okay. So it’s a pretty good position to be in. I feel like it works like having a lot of control, but then also some diversity and maybe hedging or something.

Christina Turley: I mean, it’s not something we did on purpose, but it has served us very, very well. Especially now that fire is kind of a season in California. When you have fires in one place, the whole state is not necessarily affected. Amador might be okay. Paso might be okay. Same thing, versus Howell mountain versus Sonoma, so it’s nice to have such a wide array of different regions to be working in.

Jamie Schwartz: It’s a wild time in California with said weather patterns. You brought up seismic activity. You know, I mean, California is this crazy and majestic and mystical place to me. Which is why I love to, to champion the wines. And I do think that, as you already touched on, Turley does such an amazing job of that in Zinfandel as a variety is a really great storyteller. You referenced your father, Larry, can you tell us a little bit more about him?

Christina Turley: Absolutely. How much time do you have?

Jamie Schwartz: We’re going to need a bunch, so let’s go. Buckle up.

Christina Turley: My father, Larry Turley, is originally from the South, born in Tennessee, grew up in Georgia, and he came to California in the 1970s. He bought the property where Turley is now in 1974. It was the second-oldest dwelling in all of Napa County. There’s a barn on the property, which is where the winery is today, and he found two ledgers in the attic of that barn. One detailed all the community dances that were held in the barn, so there’s a lot of really cool old Napa names in there. He said there were bullet holes in the ceiling from people kind of yucking it up and screaming, howdy! Yeehaw! Exactly. Shooting the place up. And then, the other ledger was for frogs legs being sold by the dozen to restaurants in San Francisco. This was actually a frog farm, so that’s sort of still our internal kind of nickname for the property. He was, by trade, an emergency room physician. He did it for, I think, over 20 years, which is about 15 years longer than anyone should work in emergency medicine. But I’m going to steal a joke from Tegan here, which is, the reason Larry loves old-vine vineyards as much as he does is because he spent 20 years in the ER, and now he thinks he can resuscitate anything.

Jamie Schwartz: Yes, and the proof is there. As you already said, old vines are integral to the story of Turley and I think American wine. Also, like you mentioned earlier, 50 years as your definition of an old vine—I don’t think any other region holds you to that. Old vines in Burgundy are 25 years? It’s pretty remarkable.

Christina Turley: Right. It’s a self-imposed rule, and it was imposed as part of the Historic Vineyard Society, of which we are members. Tegan is a founding member. And the aim of the Historic Vineyard Society has been to educate people about the importance and the cultural significance of these old wine vineyards. This is part of our cultural history as Americans. It’s a part we can really be proud of. You can actually trace immigration patterns in California through a lot of these old vineyard names. You see where the Germans settled in Lodi, the Italians settled on the coast, Sicilian and Portuguese people settled on the rivers. And there’s old-vine vineyards with their names on them in each of these regions. It’s a fun thing to be a part of. The history is one of my favorite things about it, the social history as well. It’s agriculture, right? Not agri-business. This is part of our cultural history and something worth preserving. So ideally we would be getting some kind of landmark or protection status for these old vine vineyards so that they can stay in the ground. Because financially speaking, it doesn’t make any sense. They’re very low yielding. These are varieties that don’t command anywhere near the pricing that Cabernet or Pinot Noir or really literally any other grape would, would command. And so it’s a very difficult thing to continue to maintain these vineyards, make wine from them and not sell it for $400 a bottle. Part of the reason that 50-year number was chosen specifically is because that’s what the government uses as the minimum to designate a landmark as “historic.” So we figured if we play by the same rules from the start, then at least we’re playing by the same rules.

Jamie Schwartz: And have you gotten any landmark status?

Christina Turley: Not yet. It’s a lot of work—paperwork, the general lobbying. And the most important part is education, right? Getting as many people to understand and appreciate what these old vineyards have to offer. And to me, that is one of the most important things that we’ve ever done at Turley. We work with nine vineyards that are still ungrafted, like on their original roots—the closest thing we’re ever going to have to what wine tasted like when it was made before we all existed. Pre-prohibition, even. And that is such a unique thing in the world. It’s so fun to celebrate that through this lens, and again, from different regions. There’s a vineyard, the Ueberroth Vineyard in Paso Robles is ungrafted. So is Evangelho in Contra Costa County. So is Judge Bell in Amador County. Three completely different parts of the state, and to be able to taste the history in each of those is—it makes you feel small in the best way possible.

Jamie Schwartz: Amazing. I was having a conversation with Harmon Skurnik the other day, and we were talking about the cyclical nature of wine. We were talking about Zinfandel, and obviously the wine market’s in a tough phase right now. And last year I was visiting Lodi with Tegan, and it was after harvest, and we saw a number of unpicked vineyards and also vineyards that had gotten ripped up. And I bring it up because Harmon and I were commiserating about how sad it’ll be that all of a sudden, everyone will finally catch on to heritage varieties and old-vine vineyards as they go away—

Christina Turley: And it’ll be too late.

Jamie Schwartz: And so, I hope that you’re able to get some of those landmark protections or at the very least, continue to keep them viable through the lens of Turley. I just want to say that’s so important, and I’m so thankful to be able to play a part in the mission of sharing these things.

Christina Turley: And if you’re looking for a way to support us, the best way to do that is truly just buy the wines, because as long as there’s a market for this, then we can continue to make them. And that’s the most important thing. So, start a collection, start an old-vine collection.

Jamie Schwartz: Buy some wines. Throw a party.

Zinfandel is the Dolly Parton of wine

Christina Turley: Exactly. I was lucky enough to sit in on a talk that Jancis Robinson and some other members of her team made, and this young woman tasked with what’s up with “young people” and “why don’t they drink enough?” And I know it’s like a sexy headline, but she made the most salient point I’ve heard so far about this conversation, which is, it’s not really a matter of consumption— it’s a matter of context. 25 years ago, we spent nine hours a week engaging with digital media, and that included the time you spent on your computer at work. And we spent seven hours a week with our friends. Today we spend nine hours a day on digital media and maybe two hours a week with friends. So what I see is, our responsibility is to create more opportunities to socialize. Spend more time with your friends, and wine will be there as part of it. Let’s throw some parties.

Jamie Schwartz: We’re always going to show up with good juice.

Christina Turley: There you go. I’ve even got a playlist now. Did I tell you about my Zinfandolly thing?

Jamie Schwartz: Oh yes you did. But let’s talk about it more.

Christina Turley: So I finally put pen to paper. I’d been having this idea for years, since I listened to this fantastic podcast called Dolly Parton’s America. It really, really hit a nerve for me. And so I kept seeing and hearing all these parallels in my own mind about Dolly Parton is to American music as Zinfandel is to American wine, and how for many years she was totally written off and considered flashy, cheap, right? “Takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” What’s her other best line? Oh, Tegan pointed this one out. Someone asked her how she feels about dumb blonde jokes, and she said, “You know, I don’t mind them. I know I’m not dumb. I also know I’m not blonde.” So she’s this very vivacious, very forward, very out there person and dismissed for that, considered kind of cheap and popular with women and that sort of a thing. What else does that remind you of? White Zin, right? What’s a more Dolly Parton-esque wine than this? Considered to be popular with women and therefore looked down upon for all of these various reasons. But, with some time and some perspective, we realized Dolly Parton is one of the most prolific singer-songwriters in history. She’s written over 3,000 songs, recorded—I don’t even remember—hundreds of albums, I believe? She’s on hundreds of people’s albums, written some of the most bestselling—“I Will Always Love You” is a Dolly Parton song. The fact that she’s that pervasive in our culture without us even totally being aware of it, and now she’s getting her flowers—one of Times 100 Most Influential People, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—you name it, she’s on there. And I see a lot of parallels with Zinfandel. Zinfandel is the backbone of the American wine industry. It was the first grape to be planted and to take off, truly, and considered to be making the very finest wines of California within the first decade of it being planted there, the most widely planted grape in California for almost a century, if not more, and the largest winery in the world, E & J Gallo, built that on hardy Burgundy, which is a Zinfandel-based blend wine. Zinfandel actually kept us going even during Prohibition. Think about how many pre-Prohibition vineyards we still work with at Turley. The reason that those are still in the ground is because you could ship these concentrated blocks of grapes, cross country on the railroads, and sometimes they’d come with packets of yeast and instructions not to mix the two during Prohibition. And in fact, the other reason we still have these old vines in vineyards is thanks to the popularity of White Zin. If it wasn’t for that—because this was popular at the same time that Cabernet is gaining popularity, Merlot, Chardonnay, etc.—all of which are much more expensive wines. You can charge a lot more money for that fruit, sometimes ten times as much. But if you already had Zinfandel vines, White Zin was so popular that it made financial sense to keep those vines in the ground and sell them to make White Zin. So that’s another reason we still have all of these old-vine vineyards to this day. So you will hear no hate from me on the White Zin train. But anyways, Dolly Parton is so quintessentially American as well, right? Her sound is the sound of the American South. But we also know that that’s a sound that comes from so many other places as well, that there’s so many influences to that. The banjo, I think originally it was an African instrument or some sort of take on that, etc. And this music is something that is beautiful to listen to. It is deeply enjoyable from the get go. There’s nothing wrong with these songs being popular. Look at “9 to 5.” Look at “Jolene.” These songs are popular, they’re fun, but they’re also incredible stories. There’s history in them. She’s a storyteller first and foremost, and I see similar things in Zinfandel as well. This is a truly American story, right? Came from somewhere else, made its fame and fortune in the States, and that the most popular version of this wine is the American version is the California version is also something that’s super unique. My hope is also that Zinfandel will be recognized for the contribution that it’s made to this country, to all of us having jobs today. If it weren’t for Zinfandel, I don’t know that we would have such a burgeoning wine business as we do, especially considering we’re still dealing with Prohibition in many other states, the laws that were put in place at that time as a result of that, that we still deal with to this day from a shipping perspective, a consumption perspective, a selling perspective, those are all still in play. We’re a very young winemaking culture. But I think that there’s a lot of history there to be proud of nonetheless. And I did make a playlist for you. It’s called Zinfandolly on Spotify, and it’s in a specific order.

Jamie Schwartz: Yes. I cannot wait to do one to run it down.

Christina Turley: But let’s throw the Dolly Parton party and the whole point is to come hang out with your friends. And if you want to hear about the wines, I’ll tell you about them. If not, just have a great time and enjoy.

Tegan Passalacqua

Jamie Schwartz: I think there is a future event at Skurnik headquarters with that exact theme. Pivoting to the lens of Tegan. You just talked about what an iconoclast Dolly Parton is and the history and pre-prohibition aspects of Zinfandel and heritage finds. Tegan is not only the winemaker for Turley, but he’s quite a historian at this point as well. Can you tell us more about Tegan?

Christina Turley: My pleasure. Tegan Passalacqua has been with us for 22 years now at Turley, and he started with us in the vineyard, which is wonderful. You really couldn’t have designed a better organic career path than he ended up having with us Turley. He came up under Ehren Jordan, who was making the wines at the time, worked primarily in the vineyard, very organically and gradually took on more and more of the winemaking responsibilities. And he is deeply, deeply knowledgeable. I think at this point, because we work with so many different old-vine vineyards in varieties of climates, soils, elevations, etc., I do think that Tegan is likely one of the most knowledgeable people about old-vine vineyards in the world. He’s also worked with Eben Sadie in the Swartland. He’s worked with Alain Graillot in Crozes-Hermitage, and he reads voraciously, collects vintage books about viticulture. If you want to hear about how they were growing grapes in South Africa in the 1800s, he has three books on that. I’m not exaggerating. And he reads all of them and he absorbs it. He actually studied to be a social worker, which I think is one of the coolest things we could possibly have on our team. My dad’s eminently proud that there’s no formal wine training there. No bad habits, right? He is just a veritable viticultural vade mecum. Like a handbook of information when it comes to this kind of stuff. And he’s deeply engaging. He’s someone who’s as comfortable talking to somebody in jeans as they are in a tux, kind of a thing. And we have a wide variety of people that we work with as growers. You have people who are third generation farmers and people who are the former ambassador to Switzerland, all people that Tegan can convince to farm organically for us, can convince them to drop fruit if we ask them to. And these are wonderful contracts that in many cases are handshakes still to this day. And that’s something that comes from people, from being able to trust in people, trust that they have your best interest at heart, that we have their best interest at heart, that we’re not going to do them wrong. Turley always pays early and gets paid early. At this point, I absolutely revere Tegan with how much information he has, how talented he is. I was reading one of Antonio Galloni’s write ups about him not too long ago, and it said, “What a pleasure it was to taste wines made by somebody put on this earth to do one thing.” Can you imagine someone saying that about you? That’s just an incredible thing. And I can’t believe that I get to work with this person. He’s very humble and he’s going to be very embarrassed by this entire conversation. I’m really looking forward to it, actually. I can see him blush right now. It’s a fun thing to be able to work with someone who’s that smart, that talented, and that humble about it.

Jamie Schwartz: I think his enthusiasm is infectious. He has this way of telling you—the history and these things just kind of come up naturally, and it can be in the middle of a conversation about baseball. We can just be on a meandering talk and he’ll just drop some crazy nugget there that is mind-blowing. And as Antonio said, he’s so clearly gifted and in a perfect position. But I love that on top of that, he’s so curious and he’s insatiable. He loves wine. He absolutely. He loves studying about it. He loves knowing about it. I hope he still loves making it as well. That’s, a tough part of the gig, especially with the amount of ground that you all cover. Can we talk more about that? Let’s talk about some actual vineyards. We’ve got a bottle of Old Vines here in front of us. Let’s talk about some of the many vineyards and bottlings.

Exploring California’s history and geography through old vines

Christina Turley: Old Vines is a perfect door to go down and enter this conversation into. This is a wine we’ve made since the 1990s. Anything to qualify for this wine has to be a minimum of 50 years old. The average age of a vine in this is more like 80 years old. So the vineyards that go into Old Vines were planted anywhere between the 1890s and the 1960s. This comes from a very diverse array of sites; different soils, elevations, microclimates, etc. What we are aiming for is, this is what old-vine Zinfandel looks like in California. Not one region in particular, but a true picture of the entire state. We make another wine called Juvenile, which are the young vine plants in these old-vine vineyards. That, I see as the baseline for Zinfandel in California, in the hands of Turley. This is that extra step above. This is what old vines can do, and here’s the difference between the two. Another fun thing about old-vine Vineyards is they are always diverse within themselves. Never are these vineyards planted to 100% Zinfandel. No one was doing DNA testing when they were putting these in the ground as pioneers in California, in a log cabin kind of situation with horses. In fact, you can actually see which farming practices are very common in the way that these old vineyards are spaced because they didn’t have multiple plows. They had one plow for the apple orchard, and they used the same thing in the vines, and that’s why they’re planted so far apart. It’s real scientific stuff. So anyways, sometimes they’re planted as a true hodgepodge field blend of a variety of different things, kind of all intermixed. Other times you can tell it is purposeful, so it’ll be majority Zinfandel and then there will be a row of, say, Carignan, Grenache, Cinsault. Mission is another common one that you’ll see. Mourvèdre, or as Tegan likes to call it, Mataro. But you’ll see truly anything. We have 110-year-old Palomino vines in one of our Zinfandel vineyards. We have 125-year-old Trousseau Noir in our top wine, that’s the Hayne Vineyard in Napa Valley. So, yes, for all the cool kid somms out there, we’ve got Trousseau in Napa Valley that’s been there since before Prohibition.

Jamie Schwartz: Not as a varietally-bottled wine. Don’t freak out, everybody.

Christina Turley: Correct. That would be my dream. Jura wines. But the Old Vines is, I think, a very good lens through which to discover what that means and what these can do.

Jamie Schwartz: This is crazy, though. Why are those things all here? How did they get here?

Christina Turley: A lot of things came actually alongside the gold rush. That was the biggest influx of immigrants into California, as they were called then, the Argonauts. So actually, to this day, some of the oldest remaining vineyards in California are in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the gold rush took place. The majority, the largest collection of old wine vineyards, are in Lodi, and that was the next closest place to the foothills. And that was what was between the foothills and San Francisco. So you do see a lot of these vineyards that are essentially from, you know, shortly not too long after the gold rush or probably still during it, I mean, from the 1860s to 1880s are the oldest plantings that I think still exist. And it’s wonderful to have that kind of history and to be able to taste wine from a plant that was put in the ground many generations ago. There are not many things we can do that with. I think olive oil is probably, maybe one of the only other ones where you’re talking about plants that are 100, 200 years old in some cases. But the fact that we get to drink wines like this from plants, when I think of what the world looked like, what California looked like—I was watching a Western with my husband not that long ago that was set in 1890. And you just see these homesteads and how deeply, deeply rustic, how there was nobody there. Just swaths, huge swaths of open land and that was five years after the Ueberroth vineyard was planted? That was five years after the Bechtold Cinsault Vineyard was planted. That’s crazy. It’s such a wonderful thing to be able to experience.

Jamie Schwartz: I have to assume that small establishments were set up, as communities started to form in those areas, that vines went in the ground not shortly after. And so these are the lasting relics. I can’t imagine a lot of the structures are still there. Some of them maybe, but maybe more rare than all the old vineyards.

Christina Turley: Exactly. We’re very young as a country, and in particular, California. And you’re absolutely right. There are very few structures, if any, that survive from this time. You look at one of the things that affected the wine business, in addition to Prohibition, was the earthquake and subsequent fire in San Francisco in 1906. Not only did we lose so many structures, we lost the entire warehouse for what was the biggest wine production in the state, lost all of its contents and everything. But vineyards. You want to talk about vineyards in different places?

Jamie Schwartz: I think you’ve touched on this already, but let me ask you a question. The estate is in Saint Helena. You’re practically at Calistoga, in the northern part of Napa Valley. But then you also touched on, like, Ueberroth and other vineyards in Paso. So what is that distance, ultimately?

Christina Turley: About 4.5 hours from Napa.

Jamie Schwartz: 4.5 hours. I mean, that’s like going from New York down to past DC.

Christina Turley: I know. It’s always a trip for me to think about the East Coast. You could drive for that long and hit several different states. And in California you can drive for 13 hours and still be in the same place. I like to put it in perspective of, I was in the UK recently, and from the northernmost point of the UK to the southernmost point, I think it is, I want to say 486km, maybe something like that. And California, just California from the northernmost to the southernmost is 1500 kilometers. So just one state. Big state. There’s a lot of different soil types. There’s a wide array of topography that makes it so unique and makes it possible that you can grow so many different things. We also have a lot of seismic activity in California, which is how you find all these different soil types, like uplifted seabed and volcanics and limestone and sand, all one right on top of the other. So Zinfandel, being as dynamic and adaptive as it is, it grows in all of these regions across the state. And I think if you’re putting together a portfolio of what this grape looks like, it is best served by having a diverse array of sites that you work with. So we started in Napa Valley. The vast majority of our wines are made from sort of the North Coast region—Napa, Sonoma, Lodi—but we bought the Pesenti vineyard in 2000, I believe. And so we have several vineyards now that we work with in Paso. We have a tasting room and a winery there so we can work with everything right on site. And that is such a fun one to see because it’s so different. The soil types there are this really calcareous, bright, white chalk, it can be very hot during the day. 110ºF is a normal temperature for days on end in the summer. However, it’ll easily drop down to 45-50ºF at night. It’s cold and it’ll stay that cool well through the first part of the day, with all the fog coming in from the Pacific. So what that means is, we will start our harvest generally around the first week of August or so, usually in Contra Costa County, which is the East Bay of San Francisco. That starts in August and we finish in October in Paso Robles, so our harvest will touch three months with all the variety of regions we work with. We go as far north as Mendocino. I think from San Luis Obispo to Mendocino is something like 300, 400 miles in total. And then we work with vineyards right along the Sonoma Coast, and then all the way up into the Sierra Nevada mountains, so you’re really looking at such a huge, vast, varied collection of sites. And not only does Zinfandel grow in all of them, it is deeply expressive of each of these sites. We make all of the single vineyard Zins exactly the same way. They’re all indigenous yeast fermentations only. They all are 80% used, 20% new, 80% French, 20% American Oak. The only difference you’re getting in these wines is the site, and they are wildly different from each other. I think one of the beauties is, there should be wines that you like more than others, because they are so different from each other, even though they’re all Zinfandel and they’re all in the hands of Turley. So it’s a fun thing. It’s hard, you know, you do have to say goodbye occasionally because again, from a financial standpoint, we don’t own all the vineyards that we work with. So inheritance is a challenging part of that too. And sometimes you have to sell it in order to pay the taxes. It’s not as well built to carry on family businesses the same way that they have these centuries-old wineries where everything’s paid off. We are still very much paying mortgages on all of the land that we are working with. And so it’s just a much more unwieldy, challenging thing to navigate. We had this incredible vineyard called Salvador that was planted in 1896, still un-grafted on its own roots in sand in Contra Costa. But the owners sold it for housing. Hard to blame them, but again, that’s a huge part of our history that we lost, that you can’t get back. You can’t plant a 130-year-old vineyard.

What sets Turley apart

Christina Turley: People want to feel like they are a part of something that is ultimately owned by real people and a part of real people, rather than just a brand that’s part of a larger conglomerate, for example. We’re still family owned. And that’s obviously a very important thing to me, but it’s also important to a lot of people. I think the organic farming is a huge part of it. Again, something we’re super, super proud of and that we did not because it was trendy, but truly just because that’s what my dad wanted to do. He grew up on an organically-farmed tobacco farm, which—I’m not really sure the point of farming organic tobacco, but why not? It was just the right thing to do for him. Not because it was cool necessarily. And so that’s another thing. The dry farming. We’re all solar-powered actually also at the winery, which I think is really cool. And then another part of it is definitely the people. Larry is a hugely charismatic, big personality, a very easy person to want to follow and look up to and emulate. And he’s also really big into education. Education was extremely important for me and my three sisters, but he also, along with his wife Suzanne, have put together a program. For any employee at Turley, if their kid wants to go to college, we help give them a scholarship. And it’s already put several people through school, and it’s maybe the proudest thing I can look at. I can’t really think about it without crying. But it’s another just layer of that. Because wine is as much about the people as it is about the land and the rest of that. And so that’s another big part of it. But I think truly, what the niche is for us is this historic California and focusing on old-vine vineyards, but particularly of Zinfandel, an otherwise somewhat unsung grape variety, and one that is, I think, widely undervalued. It’s something that I think is a great option. It is also widely appealing to a large number of people. This is why you see these wines around the table, particularly around the holidays and that kind of a thing. I joke that it not only does it pair well with food, it pairs well with family—and all that comes along with that.

Jamie Schwartz: As someone who’s not from a second-generation wine family—I mean, my mom and I share a love for wine consumption, but—it is just that, right? We love wine, it brings people together, helps round hard edges. So it’s so important and so integral. Yeah, I love that. Will you tell us more about you?

Christina’s journey from NYC to Napa

Christina Turley: Sure. I started my wine journey certainly at Turley as a kid, working alongside my dad occasionally in the summers. But as a kid, that is very, very boring work. It is hard, physical, boring labor. You’re not allowed to do anything other than clean. And so my job consisted of eight hours a day washing racks and barrels and the floor and the walls with a power washer, where if you point that thing at your foot, you might lose a toe. And it’s lonely and it’s very hard work. And I never slept better in my life. But, that was my first picture of wine, truly. And so when they said, what do you want to do? I said, anything but that.

Jamie Schwartz: Well, yeah. You didn’t get to taste the goods. Maybe a little bit?

Christina Turley: Not when you’re 15. No, my dad did start us on a little bit of wine with dinner at home. And I think that was also a really smart move because it didn’t—it wasn’t this, no-no kind of a thing. It was celebrated. It was just a part of the meal. And so that made things, I think, probably a lot easier on me when I went away to boarding school and went to college. But I did come to college here in New York City, and that was, to me, the only place that I wanted to go. I started out studying theater at Tisch at NYU. I only lasted about a semester before I realized that is not actually what I want to do for the rest of my life. And then I transferred up to Barnard on the Upper West Side and changed my major to art history, or as my dad liked to call it, “the second least employable major.” Theater was the first. So I worked in restaurants while I was in college. My first job was at Tabla, the former restaurant at the bottom of the Credit Suisse First Boston building on Madison Square Park. And then I worked at Gramercy Tavern after that as a hostess— these were both as hostesses, which I loved. Both experiences I treasure so much to this day. I had a great time, even though I was the closing host four nights in a row at Gramercy Tavern. Wouldn’t change it for the world. Truly the hospitality side of things. And that’s where I saw wine from a completely different angle. I saw the storytelling part of it. I saw people’s eyes lighting up. I saw even just on the sales side of it, from the service perspective, and how much fun these people were having serving it. They’re not even the ones drinking it and they were enjoying this entire process! And that deeply appealed to me. I think even similarly to art history, the way that a painting is a snapshot of a current moment in time, it tells you more than just what the painting itself is of— it tells you what was important at that moment to that culture, the materials used to tell a story as well. I see similar things in wines, particularly wines that are made of places like Burgundy or like Turley that are also snapshots of that particular year. What’s important in that year? What style comes forward as a result of that? And so that made a very big impression on me. I still got a job at an art gallery because, mostly to prove my dad wrong and prove to him that I could get a job with my degree. And it was super fun. I really enjoyed it. Was Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea. Incredible, incredible portfolio of artists. My dad never quite got it. It’s primarily contemporary art. And so he’d come to visit and I’d be in a 22,000 square foot gallery with three tiny sculptures in it, and collectively, they’d be worth something insane, like $19 million. And he was so unimpressed and just so underwhelmed by the whole thing. And I found myself reading the food and wine section of the New York Times, not the art section. I was reading Bon Appetit and not Artforum. And I came across this—I think it’s Oscar Wilde—quote, “It’s what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you become when you can’t help it.” And I saw that and I went, well, crap. I guess I’m going back to restaurants. So I called my dad, told him I’m going to go be a server this time now. And he said, “Oh, finally. A real job.” Got to hand it to Larry. So then I went and worked at L’atelier De Joël Robuchon, which was in the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown. And then one day I took my dad out to dinner after the Skurnik tasting here, to a restaurant I thought he’d really dig the food, which was Momofuku Ssäm Bar in the very early days. And we went, we had a great meal. And Cory Lane, who was the manager, who’s still a friend to this day, sat down at the table with us, which was very, new to me, coming from a fine dining background. And then not only that, but he served us. He picked Riesling to go with our pork and our bo ssäm, all of these very meat-forward dishes that, in my very limited capacity, I thought were red wine only. I thought it was illegal to serve white wines with this kind of food! And it just completely opened my eyes to what pairings could be, a whole other universe of what wine could be. And I said, that’s it. Also, to a certain extent, I was a little bit sick of people assuming I was some sort of wunderkind and knew everything, like the difference between Barbera and Barbaresco. I remember a server asking me that at Gramercy Tavern, and me being extremely embarrassed because I’d never heard of either. So I decided to get serious about wine and apply for a job there. I wrote a thank you note to the restaurant, and then basically stalked them until they finally hired me. I eventually became the sommelier and then beverage director for the entire restaurant group. I worked primarily at Ko, which was the two-Michelin star tasting menu place. Twelve seats. I worked nine shifts a week. It was phenomenal. Wouldn’t trade it for the world. Never saw the inside of my apartment. We made jokes that we lived at the restaurant and people believed us because it was so hard to get into. I think one chef was like, “Oh, we all kind of share. There’s two cots downstairs and we all just sort of rotate through them. Last week, Dave let us go to the park!” It was such a fun, super zeitgeisty time to be working there. And what I appreciated so much and still appreciate to this day is we were all so young, and Dave Chang took a chance on all of us. I think I was 23 when he hired me. I know one of the chefs was like 19, and he would always say, “I’d rather you have no bad habits. I can teach you the skills that you need to know. All I need from you is the energy and the ethic.” And that was so appealing to me, to be given responsibility like that at that young of an age. And it came with a lot of work. But that was such a fun time. And so coming to wine from that, that direction really is what got me deeply embedded in it. And I bought Turley. I was, I think, the first account in Manhattan to buy the Cinsault from the 2008 vintage, probably, for Momofuku Ko. I remember I was sitting at Terroir, the wine bar in the East Village where I would go almost every single night after service, and I realized there that I had never actually tasted White Zinfandel before. Here was this bestselling category for decades, I think, in this country, and how had I gotten to this point as a certified sommelier and I’d never tasted this hugely important American wine? And then I also realized, how dare I have such a strong opinion about a wine I’ve never even tasted. I was studying American wines at the time, like grapes that are native to North America, and thinking, what a shame it is that you have to do so many manipulative things to these grapes to get them to be even remotely palatable. And I thought, well, you actually don’t have to make do that with Zinfandel. Yes, this wine is made as a sweet wine, but you don’t have to do that to make it palatable. It’s just what took off, right? The very first vintages of Sutter Homes White Zin were dry wines. It wasn’t until they got a stuck fermentation and bottled it anyways that the White Zin that we know and recognized was born! So I called up my dad. I thought, why don’t we make a White Zin but make it true, you know, Provençal in style? Picked early, no saignée—make it really fine and elegant in style and reclaim this term. I had this whole beautiful, passionate idea. You can imagine—it’s like midnight in New York. I’m sitting at the bar calling my dad, and his response was a very profanity-laden, when pigs fly, don’t bother ever coming home, I don’t want to see you anymore. But eventually I did come back to work for the winery, and I could be more annoying on a daily basis. And so he finally gave in. And that’s how the Turley Rosé was born. But that was the beginning of my journey in deciding to come back to work for Turley. One of the other things was, I had a lot of sommelier friends at the time, and I did not see a lot of Turley on their lists. I was studying wine lists from all over the world, wanting to emulate other Michelin-starred restaurants and have a list that was on par with these, and these lists had wines from all over the world, but not a single Zinfandel was on them. So it seemed very clear from the start what my mission would be. And that was to bring Turley to as many tables as possible. These Michelin-starred places all over the world, Japan and France in particular, were my two white whales, in terms of, those were the places that most strongly influenced Momofuku and therefore me, and places I held in such esteemed regard in my own head for their cuisine and their attention to detail, the ingredients and things like that. So I’m very happy to say that I’ve opened both markets for Turley. You can now find Turley in Burgundy and in Tokyo, and several other countries as well. I really saw that as a mission, not just for Turley, really, actually more for Zinfandel and for California wine in particular. Because this is something—the way that those wines are sold in France is because it’s not something they’ve already been doing better for centuries. They don’t already have this in their back pocket. This is something completely different that’s completely unique. That is only possible from that one place in the world. And it’s possible because it’s been doing it longer than any other grape variety has. That’s been a real point of pride and joy to bring those wines to these far flung places around the world.

The perfect bottle

Jamie Schwartz: As you now work for the family winery and you live and breathe Zinfandel, is there an example of a perfect wine? Is that something that you all can accomplish? Is that something that you brought to Japan, the perfect bottle of Zinfandel to open that market?

Christina Turley: That’s a great question. It’s so subjective. It’s so dependent on the person tasting it. What is perfect to them? Take Japan, for example. They prefer aged wines. So even though I have current release things, I generally send them older wines because that’s what they value. That’s what is more perfect to them. I think one of the things I appreciate, same with art and with wine, is, wine, like life, it’s never unfinished. If you don’t enjoy the journey, you’re not going to enjoy any of it, right? And so wine being a snapshot of a culture and a place and the people that touched it in a certain moment in time—I think my definition of perfection actually comes from the show, the Nickelodeon show The Adventures of Pete & Pete that was on in the ’90s that starred Iggy Pop. We forget that, but Iggy Pop was the neighbor in that show. Very forward thinking show. And on Pete & Pete, little Pete has a competition with, I think it was the underwear approver. I forget his name. Anyways, they had to do things perfectly, on what is perfect. And there were several different trials they had. One was carrying a full ice cube tray of water to the freezer without spilling and the last task was eating barbecue. The underwear inspector, by the time he’s finished eating the barbecue, all the bones are picked clean, the plate is immaculate. They offer him a napkin, a wet wipe, and he kind of looks and he says, no, I don’t need it. Meanwhile, Little Pete is just covered. He’s covered in sauce. Everything’s a mess. They offer him a wet wipe and he says, yes, of course, absolutely. He wins that competition because that is the correct way to eat barbecue.

Jamie Schwartz: Hell yeah.

Christina Turley: So that is exactly my idea of what is perfect. A perfect way of doing something isn’t always the clean way of doing it. It isn’t always a precise thing. The perfect way of doing it is enjoyment, first and foremost, and then everything that goes along with that can be messy and that might also be perfect. You want people to enjoy their life as much as possible and be able to find the tools through which they’re going to do that. But what you want to do is give people context and tell them the story, because wine is such a mercurial, it can be very elitist or just a mystery. It’s a mystery to many, many people—myself, still to this day, wine is such a mystery. And the more tools you can give people to connect with some aspect of it, the more they’re going to enjoy that. But that’s also not necessary. Truly the most important thing is, is it delicious? Do you enjoy drinking it? That’s the most important thing, not what it says on the label, not what type of dog the vineyard owner has. All of that stuff is ancillary. The most important thing is just what’s in the glass. And do you like it or not? Is it fun?

Jamie Schwartz: Is it delicious? Do you like it? Maybe great company, even if it’s just your own company. You know what I mean?

Christina Turley: That was actually David Chang’s most used question. Any time tasting new dishes that anyone put up in front of him in any of the Momofukus. The first question was, “Is it delicious?” It seems like a no brainer to us, that seems very obvious, but you look at some restaurants and you look at some wine and you have to ask yourself, “Yeah, well, is it delicious?” I’ve had quite a few wines that are very zeitgeisty that I would say are not delicious. And isn’t that sort of the first, most important point? You’re like, yes, this is very intellectual. Yes, I understand the story and the purpose behind this, but I don’t want to eat it. It tastes like the inside of an ashtray or I don’t want to drink it. It tastes like rotten kombucha, you know, kind of a thing. So don’t forget about deliciousness.

Jamie Schwartz: That’s number one. Do you have any closing thoughts? Any last things you want to share about Turley? Yourself?

Christina Turley: We need to spend more time with our friends. Absolutely. I think I’m feeling it myself right now. With everything going on in the world—wine world and world in general—that spending time with your friends, your family, people that you love to be around, whoever that is, and hopefully sharing some wine in the process. And whenever people send me stories and pictures of wine on a table that they had, that they drank when they got engaged or had on their anniversary and what they ate with it—send me more, please! It never gets old. I love the dogs. A lot of people have named their dogs Turley, but I’m sorry, this one guy wins because he named his daughter Turley.

Jamie Schwartz: Wow. Amazing.

Christina Turley: So he wins. I know. But send me all that stuff! Because truly, I feel such an honor to feel like some small thing that I got to touch in some tiny way is now a part of this moment, a part of this table, a part of this meal being shared by these people in this moment of joy. And that is such a privilege that I will never get tired of.

Jamie Schwartz: Well, cheers to that. Thank you.

Christina Turley: Cheers. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.