Label Honors Consultant’s Role in Developing California Chardonnay

ST. HELENA, Calif. — The label on the Chardonnay made by Freemark Abbey Winery hasn’t changed in two decades. Neither has the wine, and starting with the 1986 vintage, the reason for that is now on the bottle.

It is the name Brad Webb. When Freemark Abbey released its 20th Chardonnay a year ago, from the 1986 vintage, the bottle had a back label for the first time since the winery’s founding in 1967. It pays homage to Webb.

It was a rare and special tribute to the man known by so few wine lovers but a man so respected and loved within the industry.

“And don’t you forget to say he’s the nicest man who ever lived,” said Michele Hunter, president of a Santa Rosa public relations firm, who worked with Webb in her early years in the wine business.

The winery’s acknowledgement of Webb was unusual in that he is not an employee of the winery, but a consultant. (Of course, he is also a partner in the place, so he is not some one-day-a-month guy.)

Webb’s contribution to the wine industry spans three decades with Chardonnay. He’s made other wines, such as Pinot Noir and Cabernet and even late-harvest Rieslings that would make a German swoon, but it’s his touch with Chardonnay that will ever leave a grace mark on the California wine industry.

You don’t hear much about Freemark Abbey Chardonnay these days in the wine press. Perhaps some of the commentators don’t understand the wine, especially in the face of the massive brutes being fashioned these days partly from grape and partly from wood. Sometimes clumsiness is more engaging than craftsmanship.

The fact is, Freemark Abbey Chardonnay may be one of the last holdouts from an era (the 1960s) when Californians made Chardonnay that respected the grape and not the method. It was a time when wine was made that required a tad of patience as well an iota of introspection.

This is no wine to make a judgment about off one sniff and a fast, healthy slug; this is wine to ponder.

“You don’t mess around with Classic Coke, and we don’t mess around with Chardonnay,” said Ted Edwards, another Webb protege.

I met with Edwards and winery partner Chuck Carpy recently to chat about Chardonnay and Webb’s contribution to history. I mentioned, perhaps a bit bluntly, that Freemark’s Chardonnay gets so little press these days. Edwards just nodded and said, “They tend to be austere early on. It takes a year in the bottle for anyone to see what they’re gonna be.”

Carpy noted, “When they’re young, they’re compartmentalized. It takes four or five years for them to come around.”

The 1987 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay ($15) is that sort of wine. There is fruit, but it’s muted, a citrus-leaning kind. The oak too is restrained, and the dominant character is not overt fruit as much as delicacy and finesse. It’s a small wine with potential to grow in the bottle.

It is wine to pair with grilled fish or simple chicken dishes with no cream sauces or heavy spices. It is one of this state’s best attempts to make a wine that will go with oysters.

This reticence is no accident, and though Webb has thought about making the wine more fleshy and broad when it is young, he says that to do so would destroy the delicate qualities it needs for aging.

Webb is not alone in this belief. Others also make wine like this, but they too take a bit of heat when their wines are released by the crowd that wants an easy hit of sweetness, oak, alcohol, or all of the above.

Among the other wines made in this style, which if you haven’t guessed yet I prefer, are those from Keenan, Chappellet, Trefethen, St. Clement, Brander, Dry Creek, Merlion, Vichon, Iron Horse and Domaine Laurier, to name just 10. There are widely differing growing regions here, of course, but these properties are peopled by wine makers who hew to a leaner style that I go for.

Their wines are not easy to understand, even for experienced tasters. I realized this last week when chatting with Mary Ann Graf, one of the state’s top enologists and co-owner of Vinquiry, a wine analysis laboratory in Healdsburg.

Graf said she was home alone one recent evening and pulled a bottle of 1981 Keenan Chardonnay from her cellar, expecting a simple, tasty wine to quaff. “It was great,” she exclaimed, “and I had no one to share it with.”

She said that when the wine was younger, it was good but she never got the idea it was so sublime until just the other night. I told her I was writing about Webb and Freemark Abbey Chardonnay. She nodded with a grin.

Ralph Bradford Webb, 67, is the younger brother of A. Dinsmoor Webb, former chairman of the Department of Viticulture and Enology at the University of California at Davis, who is still active at the school at age 71.

The two Webbs have contributed greatly to the wine industry as a brother team, yet both wine makers have remained amazingly modest about their accomplishments. The older of the two, called Dinny by his friends, is better known in the academic community; Brad’s life has been at the winery level and in medical research. Neither man seeks publicity.

“His contract with the university did not permit him to consult (for wineries),” said Brad of his brother the other day. “So he wasn’t involved formally with any winery, but I saw him every month.” The two shared experiences and passed them along to the world.

Brad Webb was involved in one of the most important winery project’s in California history--the founding in 1956 of Hanzell by the late James Zellerbach, ambassador to Italy. Zellerbach loved French white Burgundy, Montrachet in particular, and he wanted Webb to use his 200-acre Sonoma Valley ranch as Burgundy West.

He also felt French oak, then unheard of in California, was the best thing to age wine in, and that revolutionized the aging of fine wine in the state.

The project was scary for Webb at first, he admits today.

“Well, I’m a Gallo graduate,” he said, referring to one of his first positions, as an enologist in Modesto. “I was from the Central Valley; I didn’t know anything about making quality wine, but I got a lot of help at Hanzell working with (Harold) Berg (former head of the UC Davis Enology School) and Andre Tchelistcheff and Louis Martini.”

Zellerbach died in 1963 before the project took hold, and despite having made some of the finest wines in the state’s history, Hanzell was closed. For the next 4 1/2 years, Webb used another of his degrees, in biochemistry, working as a researcher at Sonoma State Hospital looking for a cure to phenylketanuria, the inability of the body to metabolize an amino acid, often a serious problem with infants.

He went back to Hanzell when new owners reopened it and while there, in 1966, was summoned as a consultant to a group headed by Carpy, grower Laurie Wood and Jim Warren. They were starting a winery in the Napa Valley named Freemark Abbey. Within two years, Webb became a partner in the place and left Hanzell.

Soon after that, the winery hired Jerry Luper, a Fresno State graduate, and the Chardonnay projects begun at Hanzell were refined at Freemark.

One main reason the Freemark Abbey style has changed so little throughout the decades is that Webb doesn’t believe in exotic procedural things for his wines, and refuses to coax the wine through a second fermentation called the malolactic.

Malolactic fermentation (abbreviated ML by many), which converts a strong acid into a weak one, can give the wine a richer, smoother, more buttery component in both aroma and taste, but often at the expense of natural fruit character.

Webb had worked with ML at Hanzell and found some of the wines were stubborn; they resisted going through this second fermentation, and such a balky procedure was felt too much trouble.

“But also, while I was at Hanzell, I bought a group of high quality French wines and tested them and found that about half of them had gone through a malolactic.

“Then I had a good group of judges rate them, and we found no correlation between malolactic and quality. Also, the ambassador (Zellerbach) made this decision not to do it; we felt it was a waste of time and that we’d do just as well and have a more uniform product if we avoided it.”

He said that today, ML is more controlled by modern equipment and that if a wine lacks in fruit after ML, it may not have been done correctly; “Today it’s a matter of technology,” he says.

Throughout the years, in addition to helping train Luper (now at Freemark Abbey’s sister winery, Rutherford Hill, Webb also helped such brilliant wine makers as Bob Sessions at Hanzell, Andy Cutter at Duxoup and former Freemark Abbey wine maker Larry Langbehn.

He’s also worked as a consultant to Sonoma-Cutrer winery (the all-Chardonnay producer in the Russian River area of Sonoma County) and to Bill Mabry at Landmark, which is now moving from Windsor to Kenwood.

Other wine makers who have worked alongside Webb include Tom Rinaldi (now at Duckhorn), Kathy Corison (at Chappellet), Janet Pagano (formerly of Domaine Mumm and now general manager at the new Codorniu facility in southern Napa Valley), Hank Wetzel of Alexander Valley Vineyards, Tom Smith (now at the Hess Collection), and probably a dozen more. (Webb, asked about who he’s trained, said he couldn’t recall and he blamed what he called “my forgettory.”)

Moreover, he inspired Mike Richmond, who was then sales manager at Freemark Abbey, and Richmond (who generated the enthusiasm to make the famed 1973 Edelwein late-harvest Riesling) eventually moved on to become the driving force behind Acacia Winery in the southern Napa Valley.

Webb still pops in at Freemark Abbey and at Hanzell three days a week despite a case of Parkinson’s disease that limits what wines he can enjoy.

Two years ago Michigan wine collector Andy Lawlor staged a tasting at the Sonoma Mission Inn near Webb’s home. Many of the wine makers invited to the event had never met Webb, but two dozen wine makers paid $25 each to sit for a couple of hours with the man who, as they found out, means much more to the American wine industry than most ever knew when the evening started.

Wine of the Week: 1987 Hawk Crest Cabernet Sauvignon ($7.50)--Excellent fresh Cabernet aroma and a richer-than-expected fruit quality in the mouth make this wine both better than the ’86 Hawk Crest and an excellent value in today’s world of escalating Cabernet prices. This wine, second label of Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, will reward a year or two of cellaring, but it’s quite drinkable now.