One day, more than 20 years ago, a friend dragged me into a warehouse on Eighth St. East in Sonoma. Inside was the first high-tech bottling line I had ever seen. It ran 350 bottles per minute, so fast that you couldn't even tell which wine was being bottled until the line stopped. I was fascinated by the automated palletizers, the pneumatic soap lubes and the sheer speed of the machines.

I'd go back to my winery and sleepily sterilize my antiquated line, get everything ready for the crew and then spend the day with my tools close by trying to squeeze out a thousand or fifteen hundred cases in a day. Over time, I realized that every step of winemaking actually had equipment that could do the job quickly and efficiently. It was simply a matter of size and economy.

 When my editors asked that I do a roundtable on large-scale winemaking, I thought back to that high-speed bottling line. I wanted to hear how winemakers made millions of cases of wine each year. I wanted to hear about all the special equipment. Often large-scale wineries are criticized for making wine by formula or making "correct" wines that have no soul. Listening to these winemakers, it's clear that they are passionate as well as talented. I began by asking for a job description.

Nick Goldschmidt has been a corporate winemaker for 25 years. He recently retired from that to work on his own Goldschmidt brands. He still consults in five countries, makes wine in six countries and handles his own wines.

Dennis Martin is vice president/director of winemaking for Fetzer Vineyards. He's been there 23 years. He spent three years with Scott Labs before that and six years working with Heublein and United Vintners in Madera after college.

Antonio Treviño's first harvest was in 1995. He's the senior winemaker at Sonoma Wine Company and oversees all winery production for up to 50 clients, which adds up to about 2.5 million cases including 600,000 cases of their own brands: Mark West, Avalon and Rock Rabbit.

Describe your job.

Dennis: My job has evolved over the years. I used to be more involved in the day-to-day winemaking, wine blending stuff. Now it is more corporate, meetings and travel, but I still stay involved in all of the blend development, all the allocation of the inventory and final decisions on all of the blends that we make at Fetzer. I'm also responsible for the approximately 50 people in the winemaking department.

Nick: After 14 years as winemaker at Simi, I moved to Allied Domecq(subsequently Jim Beam). My role was overseeing all the winemaking and participating in all of the final blend decisions for all the products. We did 8 million cases in the U.S., 16 million total. I would oversee all of those wines that were coming into the U.S.

I would try to do two wineries a day. I would try and taste every morning between 9 and 12. I would have meetings in the afternoons. I oversaw the inventory and the inventory workout. Part of my job was to rank vineyards and wine quality. So, we'd give the vineyards a wine quality score, and we'd give the wines a wine quality score and see if they actually matched. We would score those wines at each winery; so if we were short of a wine at one winery and long on a wine at another, the winemakers all knew what the quality rating was, where the wine was from and whether or not there was another home for it within the organization.

Antonio: I describe my job as logistics. I'm the contact for our 50 clients. I take their winemaking instructions and their ideas and make sure that my team implements those to the client's specifications. For some, I am more hands-on, evaluating their wines and making sure that they meet their style.

On our branded side, I work with my boss as far as developing those wines. We do about 600,000 cases of our own wines. We don't own a single acre of vineyard. Our wines are all made from sourced fruit as well as bulk wine, so we have to evaluate all of the individual components and see how they fit into the specific style of our wines.

How do you maintain consistency when working with these huge lots?

Dennis: A lot of that is the work you do after the vintage in terms of tasting the entire inventory. We assign a quality grade to each component. We grade the wines so we are certain we allocate the appropriate proportion of each of those grades across every blend that we do during the vintage. It's important from a quality and style standpoint that our wines be consistent from vintage to vintage but also that every blend we do be consistent within the vintage. We give the quality score and then allocate the inventory across all of the blends so that the first blend we do at the beginning of the year is similar to the last one we do at the end of the year.

You have to identify the inventory early in the year so that you can protect it and grade it so that all of your best wine doesn't go into the first blend of the year and leave you stuck with lesser quality fruit at the end of the year.

Nick: We actually try to split the vineyards as much as we can. Like the Clos du Bois Chardonnay may involve six or seven bottlings depending on the vintage. We would make large tanks of a certain quality, certain vineyard and certain type. Those tanks will get split six or seven times to make sure the blends are perfectly equal because we never want to get caught with any inconsistencies.

Antonio: You want to take your inventory and spread it out over the four or five bottling blends you'll be doing that year. There's an advantage to that. I call it front-loading a blend. For example, we're releasing our Pinot Noir a lot earlier than in past years, so to maintain the stylistic integrity of that wine we may pull the portions of our various blends from newer oak barrels, realizing that the rest of the components will sit in oak a little longer. We try to gauge the oak consistency that age will give the blend at that last bottling, and we try to emulate that on the first bottling.

How do you maintain vineyard varietal quality from year to year?

Dennis: All of the vineyards we own are farmed organically, and pretty much all that inventory goes into our Bonterra brand. From year to year we are always looking to improve quality through farming and cultural practices: crop management, leafing and exposure. That's a 300,000-case business now, and it represents the upper tier of what we do in terms of quality.

The core of our business is purchased fruit from all over California. It's working with approximately 250 different growers all over the state. I can't be out in the vineyards all the time, so we have grower relations people that support us. As much as we can, we try to control what they do in the vineyard. Some growers will work with you, and some won't. As opportunities present themselves you eliminate the growers that won't work with you and find new ones who will. You always want to work with quality people, people who have an approach to farming that is going to give us the very best quality we can get at the appropriate cost. In our end of the business, it is all about managing cost without compromising the perception of quality.

Nick:There's a saying in the business that it is very hard to find a fantastic vineyard manager and a fantastic site. You are more likely to find a fantastic manager in a weaker site or an average manager managing a strong site. It's all about the people. The last thing I want to do is have a grower talk about quality and care about quality until the grapes are in the back of a truck when he considers it's all over for him. It's all about communication and working with that grower and educating him until he becomes a member of our family and understands what we are trying to achieve.

I'm a big proponent that quality needs to improve every year while style needs to remain consistent--hence, the need to work with the same growers. You know, we're looking at price, quality, tons per acre, rootstock, soil and everything else that goes into it. Both of us choose whether we work together or not. I think it's all about building a family and a relationship and being consistent within that.

What are the advantages of being big?

Nick: If you are big, you can beat the distributor up.

Antonio: They can beat you back up, too. At $10.99 retail, they want the wine. Try to add 50 cents to the price and they'll fight back.

Nick: Tell me about it. Now that I am small, I'm getting it fed back to me.

Dennis: I think there is an advantage with being big, especially in our case where we are owned by a spirits company. That provides a lot of leverage with a distributor partner in terms of helping us with our wine brands.

I think the other advantage of being big from the winemaking side is that if you have problem wines, and we all do, the blends are so large that we have the ability to lose those problem wines through simple dilution. You still want to clean them up and do the best job you can, but they affect the overall picture in a minimal way.

Antonio: I can see that to a certain degree, but my theory is 1 percent of a 1,000-case blend or 1 percent of a 200,000-case blend is still 1 percent. Cleaning the wine up, prior to getting it into the blend, is the key. Large-scale is very similar to small-scale winemaking. We have to be vigilant and make sure every component is as good as it can be before going into that blend.

Nick: One great advantage is technology. We have access to reverse osmosis, cross-flow filtration and micro-ox. I get a much better price break on glass, cork and grapes, and on the distributor level, we have more people in the market working with us. Large wineries have barrel space, good bottling lines, the right pumps and in-line gas.

Antonio: Yeah, the right pump is essential, and gas is huge. And transfer lines. Having the right tank sizes is a great advantage. One challenge for a large winery is staff. You need to have that attention to detail throughout that whole employee chain, from the cellar worker to the lab staff to the bottling crew. The challenge is having the best employees you can get in all those positions and educating them to do things right. They need to understand what you are doing and realize that mistakes have more impact due to sheer quantity. When we are making five blends of the same wine over the course of a year, losing that attention to detail can be very costly.

What are the disadvantages of being big?

Nick: There are a lot of disadvantages. You've got a lot of people you have to manage. You know, someone doesn't put their hand up in time, and you have trouble. The main disadvantage is that everything has to fit into a square box. There is a lack of long-term strategic vision at the top that can see down to the roots. Large companies in touch with those roots or small wineries allow for adjustments and can drive the quality up. Large wineries just aren't as nimble.

Dennis: It's hard to get accurate forecasting for which varietals will be selling from our marketing people. A lot of times they are looking year to year when we should be looking several years out. It's really challenging to get accurate forecasting that far out. We try to find a balance between what they say they want to do and what we see them doing and then find some common ground in between that looks like we can make it work.

Antonio: At our winery, projections are made but can be adjusted every few months because the focus of our brand is to be able to react quickly to the market changes. We've been very successful at that over the last five years. We source from the bulk wine market to quickly expand or change our product lines. Short-term contracts enable us to be nimble.

How do you go about tasting and making your blends?

Nick: As an executive winemaker, the most important thing is to get in there early. You don't want to be four weeks from bottling and have someone pass you a glass and say, "What do you think?" It's important to establish the "check-in points" that you need to have as a winemaker to give yourself the ability to sign off with confidence. Through that, you will also garner a lot of credence with the winemakers that are actually putting the thing together. After all, it's the winemaker whose name is on the line.

You have to have the check-in points and make sure that you are tasting these wines in a timely fashion and not scrapping at the last minute. Let's take a Chardonnay. You need to be in the vineyard, seeing what the quality is, determining early on how much malolactic you are going to do, how much stave wood, how much barrel wood, how long on lees you are going to want--because in an earlier vintage where you've got higher acids you might want more weight so you can keep the style consistent. You want to make sure the weight is consistent from vintage to vintage so the consumer's not going to go from loving a rich 2005 to hating a 2006 that's more acidic and lean.

As an executive winemaker, you get to see a more global view of the wine style. When you come in to do that tasting, you know what direction you are going to take. Before the year finishes, you can say, "We need to be a little higher on ML or a little lower on the wood." Maybe we need to push back the release date a bit because it is a leaner vintage. That would be my job to go back to marketing and sales and tell them to slow down the sales because we can't hit the release date. Basically, you just have to make the decisions well enough ahead that nobody else is going to get upset. I'll tell you what, you want to have a big conversation, go into sales and marketing when the '07 vintage of Chardonnay is going to be released and tell them you want to hold it off for two months.

Antonio: Yeah, it's about advance planning and spreadsheets. Timelines and being ahead of the game. You are right on that fact.

Dennis:Certainly there are hundreds of decisions to be made as the vintage progresses. During the vintage, you are making pre-blending decisions because the blends are so big and you have to keep creating space. While you are doing that, you have style and quality in your mind. You are putting like-quality lots together as you move wine out to storage from fermentation. It begins there.

Then after the vintage, you have to be with the wines early on. You have to understand from a quality standpoint what you are dealing with. You have to allocate that quality. You oversee that the rest of the year, clear up to and including all of the blended elements. The winemakers are responsible for the day-to-day management of those blends.

Nick: Like I say, being executive winemaker is a pretty shitty job. You've got nothing to do but lose. When I was a winemaker at Simi, it was a win, win, win. If the wines were great, I got all the credit. If the wines were bad, I'd blame bottling or vineyards or whoever the hell else was around. But the executive winemaker has no one to blame. The key part is building great teams, and I truly believe that I have worked with some of the finest viticulturists, winemakers and production personnel. I have learned so much from them.

Dennis: I feel good about that because I have good people and they have my back. They take a lot of pride in what we do. They want us to be successful. They want the company to be successful.

Antonio: From the cellar, all the way up, you've got to have key people in place. You can't be micro-managing. We are sort of paper winemakers. We have to let go, but we've replaced ourselves with key people that we can rely on. They know what we want and what the goals are. It's the same on the custom side; we know what the clients want, and we want our staff to provide it for them. Planning is essential. You can't shoot from the hip at 200,000 cases because you will shoot yourself in the foot.

What are the tricks of the trade to make large lots of wine better?

Nick: For me to answer that question you have to give me a glass of wine and tell me if it is going to sell for six bucks, 10 bucks or 100 bucks. Then I'll tell you how to improve it. It is such a global business now that my answer would be different for each country it is made in and each country it is to be sold in.

Antonio: One of the biggest tricks I have found is just potassium carbonate. My steps are that before I do anything with residual sugar, I see what potassium carbonate does. A lot of times it enhances the fruit, gives it that ripe, luscious berry in the mouth. From there I would look at fining, and then I would go to the residual sugar.

Dennis: Those would be finishing techniques, in addition to VA removal or alcohol removal, which we have the technology to do as well. I think it still depends on what style you are making. You probably can't afford to put a wine in barrels if it is selling for under $14, so you have to manage that wine from crushing the grapes with sawdust or chips or whatever and then finishing them with micro-oxygenation pre-malolactic and then micro-oxygenation post-malolactic on chips, on staves or maybe not. By using these techniques you can craft a really, really nice wine, one that would not taste as if it had never been in barrel.

Antonio: Oak adjuncts are fantastic. There are some great products out there that rival new barrels, especially when price is taken into account.

Nick: If it is a sub-$14 bottle of wine, I am a big proponent of using tannin, which improves middle mouth. There are so many common techniques in the trade that we use, but it's experience that tells us how and when to use them.

Dennis: I think you have to expect that everyone who is in our price-point is doing the same thing. We're all looking at the same opportunities of how to leverage these technologies to keep us at the appropriate cost without compromising the quality of the products we are making. Cost is a big part of it because we're in business to make money. It's a fact of life that we can't raise prices in the marketplace so all the pressure is on cost. You have to be vigilant and diligent about what you do in the vineyard and the winery to maximize efficiency.

Which closure is best when you are responsible for millions of cases?

Nick: It's all about consumer marketability. I'm not saying a screw cap is the answer because you still have a problem with the internal seal. To be perfectly frank about this, the problems with a cork are TBA, TCA, rate of oxidation and cork flavor. The problem with a screw cap is...(laughter).

The higher the quality cork you buy, the higher the chance of TCA because they have to sort through a higher number of corks to get the higher quality. When you do that, you can actually increase the chance of TCA in a batch. I think one plus one, and aggregate corks have their own intrinsic issues. The alternative to that is having the grain run up and down through the disc instead of running across, but that is too expensive to produce. Your other option is synthetic cork. I like that because you get rid of the cork flavor and the TCA and TBA, but you do not get rid of the random oxidation. I am still looking to the future for that perfect closure. For now, it's screw caps--from a winemaker's point of view.

Dennis: I think Nick covered this pretty thoroughly, but I will say we made a choice three or four years ago to go from one plus one to synthetic on our everyday brands, our core business. Our marketing people aren't comfortable going into the marketplace with 100 percent screw cap right now.

It's still a conflict, in this country, of growing up with the old jug wines. The stigma associated with jug wines and the quality image of those wines prevent us from committing ourselves to the screw cap. We're doing it gradually, and that's where I want to go. I totally agree with Nick. I think it is the best available closure and causes the least number of problems. I hate cork taint.

Antonio: I'm more on the winemaking side of things. I've got a whole separate department that makes those decisions, so I don't really know about closures. I've always seen cork as more environmental a product than screw caps. The cork companies have really improved their quality. They have a long way to go, but screw caps are good, too. It's coming.

What are the issues with bottling in large-scale wineries?

Antonio: In one day you can screw up a lot of wine. Quality control, especially monitoring things while the bottling line is running, is very important.

Nick: I think O₂ pick up is a big thing. Smaller, slower lines generally give more O₂ pickup. We usually choose to bottle our better quality wines on the faster lines.

Dennis: We have two separate operations: winemaking production and bottling production. We do a pre-bottle check on the chemistry and stability of the wine, and then we hand it off to them and they have set guidelines that they follow in terms of sulfur additions and DO. We use cross-flow on everything in pre-bottling, which solves so many problems. We rely on those people to honor the protocol and integrity of the wines we send over there. We really don't have very many problems.

Can large-scale wineries make a great bottle of wine?

Unanimous: Absolutely!

Dennis: It starts with the vineyard. You need great grapes. Then you have to manage those grapes inside a large winery so you get the most out of them. We use a lot of small winery techniques in these instances. The challenge in a large winery is keeping up with these small premium lots, given all the other stuff you have going on. Once the wine gets into barrel, you may not give it the same kind of attention you could if it was a tiny place.

Nick: You can cherry-pick the vineyard and lots. The problem is finding time while you are making a million cases of one Chardonnay to pay proper attention to a 3,000-case lot of reserve Chardonnay. A large-scale winery is better equipped to maintain the style of premium wines in poorer vintages. Small wineries have to decrease quantity or volume to maintain quality and style. Large-scale wineries can just broaden their resources.

Another secret to great wine: forget cork. I've had 20-year-old wine bottled under screw cap, which is phenomenal. That certainly dispels the myth that screw caps are a detriment to long-term quality. I would argue that flat out.

Antonio: I've got client wineries producing wines that sell for $40 and up. Many of them get very high scores and awards. On the lower end of the scale, our clients are winning best buy recognition. That's where I think employee education and attention to detail are crucial. We can make great wines at all price ranges.

If you make millions of cases of wine, work for multiple clients, travel to different grape-growing countries and work two harvests a year, then you tend to know something about winemaking. Sitting at the table, listening to these guys talk was educational as well as a revelation.

Large-scale winemakers know how to make wine. Every detail of grape-growing, fermentation, new products, technology, new equipment and even closures is second nature for them. They are educated, experienced and current on everything that has to do with winemaking.

Working in a corporate environment also requires a special degree of organization, planning and a sense of self-preservation. Working with tasting panels, marketing research, individual winemakers and dozens of employees demands competence, personality and drive. Making wine is hard enough, but making millions of cases with a continual eye to the bottom line requires a dedication and intelligence that is hard to fathom.

Once again, it just shows that there are as many different ways to make wine as there are winemakers to make it. Large-scale winemaking provides millions of cases of really good wines at prices most people can afford. That's got to be a good thing. wbm