(wind whooshing) - [Interviewee] Interestingly, to us, when we drilled 1,650 holes for Fait Accompli, we didn't hit one rock.

Museum, the bottom of very, we use that post hole digger to dig those.

At the bottom of every four-inch hole there's at least a six inch rock.

And that rock wall, is a, we were throwing them in a pile.

I said, hell, we're just gonna have to move that pile.

Let's just throw them in a straight line and call it a wall.

Like the Irish walls, the stone walls between Irish properties.

It took us twice as long as it probably should have because we'd get out there in the evening and it was a good time to have conversation.

And when you have a glass of wine in one hand you can only pick up one rock at a time.

So, one rock at a time we placed them in a straight line and made that little wall.

- [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown.

My job depends on AG.

Provided by, James G. Parker Insurance Associates, insuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years.

By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing AG financial services.

By Brandt, Professional Agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California.

Keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family-owned for over 50 years.

Proudly featuring Coleman products, dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(guitar plays) - [Erica] I can't say enough about the Madera Wine Trail.

First of all, it's a fantastic family of wineries that has a very unique set of wines.

- I've been a winemaker for 10 years.

I started when I was 21 and now I'm 31.

I went to Fresno State and got an Enology degree and I was the assistant wine maker there for about three years.

And then, this guy named Walt that owns Toca Madera came in search of somebody to be his wine maker here.

And so he found me and we teamed up and now I'm here making the wine, doing my thing.

- Madera, is actually an AVA.

You have, you know, Madera County.

So you can call them counties.

You can call it Fresno County, or California.

But you actually can call it Madera AVA.

It's Madera on the bottle and not Madera County.

Because it's its own AVA.

Typically it's, a difference of micro climate, soils.

You get the fun little elevation when you go up to like Westbrook and Idle Hour.

And even Fasi.

- [Ray] We studied long enough to know what varieties grow well at this elevation at 1400 feet.

And we make wines that are at least as good as the world's best in their class.

- Yeah.

You know, we've been here over 70 years.

Back in 1946, my father and my grandfather founded Ficklin Vineyards.

And it was in 1948 that my father, the first winemaker David, he started crushing grapes to start making Port.

We still have some of those 1948 Ports in our wine library.

- Well, you're at the Queens Inn and the Idle Hour Winery.

And Queen's Inn is a lodge.

And it also has a wine bar.

And the idle Hour Winery is.

- [Anna] We're actually at Idle Hour Winery and Kitchen now.

And we have for the last nine months been providing some food service as well.

So we're producing winery, boutique style.

We've been here for 13 years here at the winery, at the inn.

And we make up 15 different varieties pretty small production, about 2,500 cases total.

- Birdstone winery is located in Madera.

We are on Road 36 just off of Avenue Nine.

Nice location set far off of the road.

So it's quiet and kind of a step away.

- You know, the area we're in has been, I mean, for years and years and up to this day, right here we still from, from Modesto South district 13 and 14 we still produce more than 50% of the wine that's made in California.

We've kind of gotten a moniker over the years as being the jug wine area.

And that's one of the reasons that I got into the wine business.

'Cause I knew that if we grew the varietals that they're growing in other parts of the state and we produce them in the same way that they're produced in other parts of the state, that we can be very competitive and we can make some really nice wines.

- I think what makes the Madera Wine Trail unique is that we all have a different set of specialties.

As far as varietals go.

We don't just promote one particular variety.

We have Sarau and Tempranillo, Chardonnay.

Lots of different types of wines that we're all specializing in.

So I think that's a really important part and a key part as to what makes Madera Wine Trail unique.

- [Shayne] So you get a variety of different wines.

Like we've got wineries that are strictly dessert wines.

We've got wineries like us that do, you know, a mixture of dry red, white and rosy, and some dessert wine.

So, throughout the trail you can experience a lot of different things.

And that's what, that's the beauty of it.

And also with it being, you know a little bit smaller, tight-knit group, you get to hear it from the people that actually make the wine or the people that own the winery.

You're more in touch with the people that are, you know, on the front line dealing with making wine and growing grapes.

So, you know if you really want to get that personal experience that's something you can experience here because, we're still small and family-owned.

And that's kinda the way we operate.

(upbeat music) - We're in Eastern Madera County.

And this year of foothills, near Bass Lake and the Hamlet of O'Neill's.

We make wine only from grapes grown in Madera County.

We don't have to do that I choose to and the grapes I get from our own vineyards here at Westbrook Wine Farm and the other growers of quality and conscience.

I can't buy better grapes at any price anywhere else.

The grand idea was to make one wine only.

And that wine would be a co-fermented red Bordeaux blend.

Instead of growing six Bordeaux varieties and making six separate wines and then blending them in the lab and transferring that to the winery and having your wine be the same every year, we co-ferment, we harvest all six varieties for Fait Accompli, one of our estate wines.

On the same day and we crush them into a common fermentor.

So there there's a symbiosis that happens when you co-ferment grapes, that never happens when you blend separate finished products.

There are a lot of good blended wines out there don't get me wrong but, the complexity of co-fermentation.

The end product isn't a thing like the parts.

- [Peter] Yeah, we'd get home, get home from school and we'd go to work.

So, we always loved hosing down the equipment.

And during crush season, there was plenty of work to do.

Growing up here, I got into a lot, lots of trouble occasionally.

And probably got fired by my father more times than I could remember.

But, you know, we're, here we are in the next generation of that legacy.

Port wines are sweet and they're left sweet with intention.

So a Cabernet, you know, we're looking for the same maturity you know, optimum flavors that you would in any premium quality grape.

And bring those grapes forward.

But instead of allowing the yeast in a sense to ferment and metabolize all the sugar that's in that grape from producing a dry, tasting table wine, we stopped the fermentation and the traditional methods that the Portuguese have used for many, many years.

By adding a great brandy.

The age 10-year Tawny Port from the Solera, which was started in 1984 so a 10-year, is a minimum age.

So the youngest one in this blend is a full 10 years in a barrel.

But, the oldest ones are, what is that?

36 years in the barrel.

So it competes more with a 15 and 20 year Tawny set of Portugal.

So we have Tawny Ports that have been in the barrel.

Tawny describes nothing more than the, than the wine, the color that the wine acquires with the additional barrel age.

And so we've got 10, 15, 20, 25 and 30 year barrel aged Tawny's in our cellar behind me.

- We built the winery for passive cooling in that it's excavated 15 feet underground in the rear.

And walls are 12 inches thick.

The whole building has been wrapped in foil for reflectivity.

We have passive underground air recirculation system which gives us the thermal transfer of about 65 degree air with no energy use because they're solar powered.

Lot of thought I had plenty of time to think about it.

It being 56 years in this business already.

Yeah, we were fortunate.

We were awarded 92 points in editor's choice in Wine Enthusiast Magazine over the big dogs.

Yeah.

- [Bar reveler] Congratulations.

(upbeat music) - [Interviewer] So you're just by yourself out here when it comes to the wine-making, you don't employ anybody.

Nobody helps you.

- We'll bring in a crew for harvest and, my dear sweet wife and partner, Tammy, helps a great deal.

But this whole place is designed to work like I said, with, one and a half people.

Well, let's see it's neon to the end of July.

And grapes go through two stages of ripening.

First stage is, cellular division.

Where the grapes are still green and hard and not sweet.

And after the summer solstice, which was, I guess June 22nd, this year, they stopped with cellular division.

There's a hormone that kicks in the root system develops.

And it's now cellular enlargement.

So they start to soften, they'll color up and they'll start developing sugar.

So right now we're in the second stage.

And it being July and we're having consistent 90 degree temperatures.

We do a little irrigation to keep the plants alive.

But we don't ever wanna over-irrigate.

Because, all that does is produce more foliage.

And I don't make wine out of leaves.

(soft music) - [Peter] Well, of course, you know we're in technically technologically modern times.

And so we're using spreadsheets and databases to track inventory and what moves in and what's out.

What's in each bin.

Each bin has a number.

But, back in the day before we had computers, my father used to track inventory with these bin cards.

And so here this bin, used to have and I think I can't read the date but I think that was in 1949 that it had a 1950 Turriga.

And it had 896 bottles in it you see.

So these bin cards, are a little bit of part of that history.

This had lot number 28 of the old vine Tinda in it.

We're well beyond that these days.

But, yeah, so any removals and things for bottling, for sales were tracked on these cards.

You know, we're standing in the adobe building that was constructed in 1947.

The first building here at the winery that went in when we originally started.

And these Oak oval casks these 600 gallon containers were, hand-made in San Francisco about 1880.

So a lot of Coopers like this dried out during Prohibition but these were these made it through somehow.

Maybe some Sacramento wine or deep inside a speakeasy somewhere.

But, this is all part of the Port aging process.

And, these containers are still in use today as we, we slowly age the material of the wines, allow them to rest and those flavors come together.

Well, you know, we've been here for, quite a number of years.

And back in, the '80s, established the Madera AVA.

And federally recognized Viticultural Area based on the climate, the soils, the conditions and all other things included.

There was a collaboration of wineries back in about 2000, 2001.

Where several of the other wineries came together and decided to collaborate, to join together, to promote this area.

And so there's been a few that have been added and a few that have gone.

But, we remain of course one of the founding members of the Madera Wine Trail.

And it's been great to see people come through and recognize what they have in their own backyard here.

- These two are 500.

These two rows are 3000 gallons.

This row over here is 4,000 gallons.

And then this row at the end are 6000 gallons.

So these are the next size up from the big tank out front.

(soft music) The variety we do the most is Alicante Bouschet.

And I like to say it's, should be Italian, but it's actually French.

And what they did is Alicante groups actually have red meat and red juice.

So if you were to Cabernet and you were to squeeze the grapes, it would be like an opaque pink color.

But if you were to take Alicante grapes and do the same thing, it would almost look like a boiled beet.

So be this beautiful kinda pinkish deep color.

The one thing that I like about here compared to other wineries is, I have a lot of volume that I work through.

I could be more, what do you call it?

I can have more fun with the wine.

So, we bring in, you know hundreds of tons of Alicante.

And I don't have to ferment them all the same.

I can use different yeast strains.

I can use different temperatures.

I can press at different rates.

And then what you do is you're creating all these different pieces of, you know the bigger puzzle.

When you put them all together you get this beautiful complex wine.

And then the smaller you get, you know, the harder that becomes because then you're down to barrels.

But because I've got, you know, a greater variety or greater volume of wine to work with, so that if I do an oops, it's a small oops, I could just blend it away.

- [Ray] It was a bonehead move to leave these trees in the vineyard.

But we live here and we like looking at them.

So, we didn't take out any of the Oak trees.

And we just planted under them.

Those that grow in the shade, will have fewer grapes.

There are other things.

The Oak trees of course compete with the vines for water.

The shade and birds don't land on the ground or fly over and spot a grape.

They roost.

And they come down out of the trees.

So we do have a bird problem by leaving the Oaks in the vineyard.

But, again, again, that's what we prefer.

So that's why they're here.

I looked for 10 years for where we are today.

And you make your Ben Franklin list for all the things you want on one side and all the things you don't want.

And where Westbrook Wine Farm is, is the closest to matching up with that Ben Franklin list that I made.

We needed this elevation.

Because we're below the snow line and above the fog.

Consequently, we have more sun days, two words.

Because we're closer to the sun we don't have the particular, we don't have the fog.

We have more sunlight on the dormant buds during the winter.

And it is that sunlight on those buds that determine next year's fruitfulness of the vines.

So we got the elevation we wanted.

We look for a place that had what we call organically challenged soils.

Because the only organic matter up here are pine needles and Oak leaves.

And they're fairly high acid.

And vines struggle in high acid soils.

Good.

Because everything you wanna do to a table grape that are not sellable or saleable if you aren't cosmetically perfect.

You don't wanna do to a wine grape, you know, over-fertilization, over-irrigation makes, technologically perfect wine, but boring, the mediocre wine.

And so our vines struggle.

They've been dying since the day we planted them.

Which was 20 years ago.

We're giving them a little bit of irrigation today with subterranean drip irrigation.

Each vine will get about nine gallons today.

This is the museum vineyard.

- [Peter] Lee you know, the history that is here.

You know, a lot of the equipment that my father purchased was used when in the construction and during the early years.

To get started to making Ports here.

And one example is this block and tackle that sold, Navy surplus that he purchased.

I think crayon is still on it for $17 and 15 cents.

You know its been hanging here.

It was used in the construction of the winery.

But it's been hanging here ever since I could reach up and touch it.

And it's just a little momentum of where we started and how we got where we are.

Well, the wines that we produce here my father pioneered the flavors and the solera system that the old vine Tinda Port are still drawn out.

I think we still, massage and offer us a premium, quality Port wine.

And that dates back to the first wines he made in 1948.

And that wine, that old vine Tinda Port is the most highly awarded Port made in the United States.

(soft music) - One thing that we try to promote is that when you leave your politics at the door when you come into the wine tasting room, and I mean, that's not hard to do people enjoy wine.

People enjoy socializing, which we're, we're learning a new appreciation for socializing now.

The California Wine Growers Association has been pushing for almost 20 years now.

What they call sustainability and the tenants of that are you know, part of it is stewardship and being able to get along with your neighbors especially in an urban environment.

We can talk about differences that farmers have versus city people.

But I mean, we're less than 1% of the population now.

So it's really kind of a moot point.

I don't, I mean, you know, where we take, but I mean we do have to learn to get along with our neighbors.

And then in the most regulated agricultural economy in the world, is California.

I mean, we have regulations that other countries and other States just, they just, they shake their head when you explain to them what we have to do to to be a farmer here in California.

If I were to bring my great grandfather back, you know, from the 1920s and explain to him what you would have to do to farm today versus what he had to do back then he would turn his head and go back to the old country.

- They say it, they, who's they?

It is said, that, wine has furthered civilization.

Wine in moderation, wine is a food.

Distilled spirits and other concocted alcoholic beverages are not.

I mean wine, grapes make themselves into wine.

If you leave them on the vine, the skins will be pierced.

The yeast will make it into alcohol.

The alcohol then is attacked by the acinetobacteria that's out there.

And the, you'll smell the sour rot throughout a vineyard if you leave grapes on the vine.

So, it's a natural process.

It doesn't need man, to work it so.

It's food.

It belongs with food.

Except the red Bordeaux with chocolate I just can't take that.

- [Erica] Fasi Estate Winery is the American dream story.

Ralph and Yvonne Fasi came here to America over 35 years ago to visit Yosemite National Park.

Once they were here in the park they were unfortunately involved in a really bad car accident.

And they were kind of forced to hang out in the Valley for a little while while they were recuperating.

And they ended up falling in love with our AG land here and decided to move from Switzerland to California.

And they had $2,000 in their pocket.

They started with next to nothing.

Ralph became an entrepreneur of many different types of businesses over the year, but years but always with an empasis on farming and agriculture.

And always in the back of his mind he wanted to have something to do in the wine industry.

And so in 2012, when this property went on the market, they purchased Fazi Estate Winery, made it into what it is today.

And we couldn't be more excited to see his dream.

Really the epidemy of an American dream come to fruiton and come to reality right here in Madera County.

- The future of agriculture to me is, the only competition for bigness, which comes under attack.

Is a whole bunch of littleness, the word is used that boutique, I'm not real fond of that.

It's kind of a hackneyed word.

But, craft beers, craft wines, craft distilled beverages.

This is the future.

You see the canes have started to lignify they're nice and tanned.

We call up copper colored.

Creative individuals, are the future of this agriculture in California.

(soft music) - [Narrator] Production funding for American Grown.

My job depends on AG.

Provided by, James G. Parker Insurance Associates, ensuring and protecting agribusiness for over 40 years, By Gar Bennett, the growing experts in water, irrigation, nutrition and crop care advice and products.

We help growers feed the world.

By Golden State Farm Credit, building relationships with rural America, by providing AG financial services.

By Brandt, Professional Agriculture.

Proudly supporting the heroes that work hard to feed a hungry world every day.

By Unwired Broadband, today's internet for rural Central California.

Keeping Valley agriculture connected since 2003.

By Hodges Electric, proudly serving the Central Valley since 1979.

And by Valley Air Conditioning and Repair, family-owned for over 50 years.

Proudly featuring Coleman products.

Dedicated to supporting agriculture and the families to grow our nation's food.

(computer bangs) (dramatic music)