Jasmine Hirsch

“This is one reason why family wineries are so important. My father is 82, and he’s supporting, in all the ways, the planting of vineyards that he will not see the full potential of. This multi-generational commitment to viticulture, this multi-generational commitment to caring for the land—that’s why families are so important.” – Jasmine Hirsch

The Hirsch family are farmers, though it took decades for David Hirsch to realize after planting his first vines in 1980 that he's not farming grapes—he's farming soil. This epiphany came after a long evolutionary arc in an exceptionally rugged and sparsely populated region in the West Sonoma Coast. What used to be a redwood forest cleared for cultivation by early pioneers became a conventional vineyard and later a biodynamic farm under his stewardship.

In this week's episode, Jasmine Hirsch, the second generation farmer of Hirsch Vineyards and first-generation winemaker, joins Jamie Schwartz for a discussion over a glass of Hirsch Vineyards 'Bohan-Dillon' Pinot Noir. The longtime friends discuss her family's farming philosophy rooted in spirituality, the physical and mental impact of the region's dramatic terroir, and how she embraces the ephemeral nature of wine through the Japanese principle of mono no aware. 

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Transcript

Introduction

Jasmine Hirsch 0:03

This is one reason why family wineries are so important. My father is 82, and he's supporting, in all the ways, the planting of vineyards that he will not see the full potential of. This multi-generational commitment to viticulture, this multi-generational commitment to caring for the land—that's why families are so important.

Harmon Skurnik 0:26

Hey, this is Harmon Skurnik, and welcome to another episode of Skrunik Unfiltered, where we peel back the layers and get behind the scenes of our favorite wineries and winemakers and find out what makes them tick. And today, I have with me none other than Jamie Schwartz, who is our ambassador of all things American wine. And you recently sat down with Jasmine Hirsch, one of our favorite people in the wine business. And I don't know if you know this, but Hirsch Vineyards really has a connection to the history of the founding of this company, because one of the original six wineries in 1987 that we started this company with was Williams Selyem. And at the time, Williams Selyem was quite popular for Pinot Noir, but nobody else was. I mean, they were the only ones who could really sell Pinot Noir back then. There was quite a following. And we were really thrilled to have that in our repertoire. But one of the single vineyard bottlings that Williams Selyem produced was Hirsch Vineyard. In the early days, Hirsch Vineyard was just a vineyard; there was no winery. And David Hirsch, who's a New Yorker who moved out to California, purchased this land and planted these vines along the West Sonoma coast. It wasn't called that back then. But Bert Williams and Ed Selyem went up there and prized that terroir and purchased those grapes for many years before Hirsch started their own winery. And when they did, when we read about the fact that they were starting their own winery, we called immediately and landed this winery, and we've had it ever since the first vintage.

Jamie Schwartz 2:02

It's an incredible place. I've been lucky enough to go once, but I've traveled out to the far reaches of the West Sonoma coast a few times, and Jasmine and I spoke a lot about the place. It's magical and really has this "end of the earth" feel, being so close to the Pacific and kind of lost in timber coves. It's majestic. And I wish we could get more New York City wine lovers and and people everywhere out there because it is such an intense place.

Harmon Skurnik 2:29

Yeah, and it's so far from the mainstream of what we think of as Napa and Sonoma. It's another hour and a half, two hour drive to the ocean from, let's say, the city of Sonoma or Healdsburg, but it is a very special place for, especially for Pinot Noir. And they've proven that over the course of now, I think, 20 to 25 years of producing really great wine. And Jasmine has been at the helm now for what, about 10 years or more?

Jamie Schwartz 2:58

It's been an interesting evolution for her. You know, she went back to the family winery after actually living here in New York for some time, but she started working at the winery, traveling, doing sales, and eventually became general manager. And then it's around 2019 that she takes over winemaking. So although she's second generation ownership, she's the first Hirsch family member to make the wines.

Harmon Skurnik 3:22

Right, exactly. But she's been at the helm, being the general manager for quite a number of years before that. And now, yes, now she's not only responsible for the well-being of the winery and the vineyard, but also the wines themselves. And she's doing an amazing job.

Jamie Schwartz 3:37

I think they're remarkable, and it's interesting to speak with her about changes she's made. There's been a great cast of characters making the Hirsch wines over the years, whether it's as Hirsch Vineyards or, to your point, Williams Selyem and other producers sourcing fruit from the site. I think Jasmine's really coming into her own as the winemaker, and I can't wait to see what's next.

Harmon Skurnik 3:57

Well, on that note, why don't we listen in to your discussion with Jasmine and see what we can find out?

Hirsch Vineyards 'Bohan-Dillon' Pinot Noir

Jamie Schwartz 4:03

Let's go.

Jasmine Hirsch 4:07

We've always taken a tremendous amount of pride in this wine. My father's model for this wine is the great Village wines of Europe. You know, wines that can deliver a place and a distinct identity and yet don't break the bank, and they don't need to be cellared. But they really should overdeliver, and we've really done everything we can to protect price on this wine. So, like everybody else, inflation's real. We've had to raise prices, but this is the the wine that we've raised the price the least. It's a way for more people to access what we're doing at Hirsch. We're really proud of this wine, and we take it pretty seriously.

Jamie Schwartz 4:45

For context, we're talking about the 2024 Bohan-Dillon from Hirsch. Jasmine, correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense is this vintage is unique in, is it the first time it's been entirely estate fruit?

Jasmine Hirsch 4:57

It's unique in that it is 100% from the Hirsch Vineyard this year, but most years it's a blend. This is the only wine for which we purchase fruit from some of our neighbors, particularly along Bohan Dillon Road, which is what the wine's named for. But this year it's 100% estate, so therefore 100% single vineyard Hirsch biodynamic. I was in Portugal years ago, and I'd asked if I could have an appointment to visit the Neipoort estate in the Douro Valley, and I didn't get any answer. I was traveling there with a friend of mine from the Czech Republic. She's not a wine person, but she loves to eat and drink, and so this was gonna be our one and only winery appointment because for the rest we were gonna do culture and things like that. So about two weeks later, I got an email back from Dirk Niepoort's office that yes, we would be happy to host you. So as the day approached, we went out to the winery and everything, and then they said, "Dirk would like to invite you back to his apartment in Porto. He's having a gathering, he and his girlfriend. It should be fun, casual, whatever." And I don't know if people know this, but besides being a winemaker and Port maker and owning all these wineries, he's also the importer of most of the best Burgundian domaines into Portugal. So, anyways, I get to his house, it's all these really cool, interesting people, not really many wine people; it was a really interesting, diverse crowd. And so he comes up to me and he says, "Here, try this wine and tell me what it is." And I'm thinking to myself, I'm tasting it, "It tastes like Hirsch." But I'm thinking, like, I don't want to be that asshole that thinks that it's Hirsch when it's like Roumier.

Jamie Schwartz 6:30

Yeah, sure.

Jasmine Hirsch 6:31

So finally I just say, "I think it's San Andreas." Turned out it was Bohan-Dillon.

Jamie Schwartz 6:37

Wow.

Jasmine Hirsch 6:37

He had received from his office, "Oh, this American winemaker, you know, winery person wants to come see you." And so he was at a retailer here in the city and he asked them, "Who is this?" And they were like, "Oh no, it's like a good producer." He brought a bottle because we don't sell wine in Portugal. He bought a bottle of Hirsch in New York, suitcased it back to Portugal just so he could fuck with me.

Jamie Schwartz 6:59

Amazing.

Culture and biodynamics

Jasmine Hirsch 6:59

And it was pretty astounding, pretty impressive.

Jamie Schwartz 7:01

The wine world is so full of people who want to be generous and want to share things. And you touched on culture just a moment ago and sort of excluded wine from that. And I would say wine is so integral to that. I think that's what keeps me coming back. I think all of the nuance, all of the culture, history, everything—our world is so fascinating, or the lens of the world through wine and food is so fascinating. What do you think of that? What do you think of wine culture right now? What do you think of California culture?

Jasmine Hirsch 7:34

Oh, that's such an interesting question. I think that we have to hold that as a real treasure, especially right now when the wine industry is under so much stress. And I think a lot of us are just focused on selling and surviving and our balance sheets and all that kind of thing. But you're right: we do need to remember to hold that treasure of wine and its intersection with—if we're lucky—in a way, every aspect of our lives. And some people may think that's crazy, right? Why would you want wine to be in every aspect? But it for me, it is in every aspect of my life because it's my family, it's where I live, it's the environment, right? Climate change! I think about climate change as a farmer, as a business owner, and of course as a citizen of the world. That's not culture, but it is this interconnectedness that if we are engaged with real wine, it is connected to every aspect of life in a lot of ways—family and history and the health of our planet.

Jamie Schwartz 8:27

I wish that these considerations were more front of mind for humanity, you know what I mean? As a student of wine, that led me in a lot of places, but it led me to studying our food systems and how broken they are. But I think wine's a really interesting lens, again, to champion biodynamic farming or regenerative farming and a great way to introduce these really important ways of life. And sometimes they go back, there's like a history component to it. But how did Hirsch get to where it is as far as the farming program and everything? Because that's been an evolution, and I think it ties into this conversation.

Farming philosophy and spirituality

Jasmine Hirsch 9:05

When my father first started at Hirsch in 1980, started planting vineyards, we farmed conventionally; we used Roundup. We started converting to biodynamic farming in 2011. And as of 2014, all of the vineyards, and we also have orchards and gardens, everything was under a biodynamic protocol as of 2014. You know, it's funny, when we started converting, we went to "biodynamic school" with our consultant, Dr. Andrew Lorand. And in the first session, he asked us, "Why is biodynamics important to all of you?" And you know, my father gave this like long intellectual answer, and I said... I don't remember what I said. And my stepmother said, "Well, we have grandchildren now." And that was all she said. But I think from my father, from a viticultural perspective, what attracted him to biodynamics was balance, helping the vines find their own natural balance so that the right thing happens at the right time, so that the vegetative impulse in the plant is declining as the reproductive ripening is increasing and all of that. But I have to say, since we converted and have really started to see the effects and the impacts of it, the place is so alive. Our ranch was a redwood forest for millions of years. It was clear-cut long before we got there. And then people attempted to live there and live from ranching sheep and cattle, but it's a very difficult place to ranch on account of the fact that it doesn't rain in the summer, like most of California. So it was really poor, and ecologically the land had not been well cared for. My father planted vineyards originally in 1980 as a way to have income from the land to restore it ecologically, to start replanting, to rebuild soil. And he got distracted for 20-something years by planting vineyards and farming and then trying to make all that work as a business. And the biodynamics has been a real return to the original purpose. There is no such thing as a biodynamic vineyard. It's the biodynamic farm. It's been a way for us to really think holistically about the whole place, and more than 90% of our land is left wild; it's honestly uncultivatable. It's so steep and so rugged, and there's just 72 acres of vineyard and a few acres of orchards and gardens that are non-commercial out of a thousand acres. You cannot just think about the vineyards when you think about caring for the land. You have to think about the whole thing. Biodynamics is a helpful framework for that.

Jamie Schwartz 11:38

My sense is that your father is philosophical or spiritual, even. And I love to hear that he's been able to get back to that with the transition into biodynamics. It's not like it just overnight converted to biodynamics. So, dive more into that.

Jasmine Hirsch 11:56

He's very philosophical and he's also a very spiritual person. He is a Buddhist and he was interested and attracted to that before he became a farmer. But I do think that becoming a Buddhist is a natural reaction to trying to farm in a place where you— and just to be a farmer generally in the face of climate change, I mean, you control nothing. You control so little, right? And that's been true always farming on the extreme Sonoma Coast. But some years ago, he said that he's no longer farming wine grapes, he's farming soil. And I think that that is a realization that a lot of very good farmers eventually come to. And I was speaking about this with some vegetable and fruit farmers in the Carolinas, and I said that to them, and they were like, "Exactly! That's totally..." you know. So I think it deepens it, and I have to say, I'm not dogmatic. I don't think everybody should be or needs to be biodynamic to be a good farmer. There's so many great ways to approach ecological care for your farm, your people, your plants, and the broader environment, and biodynamics is one of them. But these different systems of farming, what they do is they deepen our understanding of the interconnectedness of what we're doing. And realizing that, yes, we're farming wine grapes, of course, but what we're really doing is farming soil, and out of that comes these other things.

Jamie Schwartz 13:23

It's so important to me. I guess you probably don't know this, but I started a sustainability master's degree at Columbia, which I think is your father's alma mater. But I did that.

Jasmine Hirsch 13:33

I don't know if he can call it that. He didn't graduate.

Jamie Schwartz 13:35

Ha! Oh well, I didn't finish this program either.

Jasmine Hirsch 13:37

So you're the same.

Jamie Schwartz 13:38

Exactly right. Well, the program wasn't giving me what I was hoping for. It's something I started in 2020 when the restaurant world shut down and my livelihood was affected. And it gave me a sense of purpose because wine gets romanticized so much, but it is an agricultural product at the end of the day. It happens to be one that can have a luxury price point that can be age-worthy the way that, you know, the shelf life of a strawberry is much shorter. But it ties into all these aspects of humanity, of culture, of life, of climate, all of these things. And I can't get over that. And I just hope more of us can get to this philosophical

Jasmine Hirsch 14:14

You want things to have greater meaning.

Jamie Schwartz 14:16

I do.

Jasmine Hirsch 14:16

And you love wine so you hope that you can find it through that. Yeah, I understand.

The extreme West Sonoma Coast

Jamie Schwartz 14:20

I've been like diving a lot into consciousness and stuff like that lately, and meditation and Buddhism are obviously like very heavily aligned. It's a path that many people can wind up on, and it's amazing to know that your father found himself there, coming from bustling New York City, and then making his way out to the reaches of the Pacific Coast and so on. And I just hope more people can understand how remarkable this place is. Like, it is the edge of the earth. It is serene and violent simultaneously. I am blown away by people going out there to farm or live off the land. And I wish people had a better understanding of what that all meant. I do think a bottle of wine is a really great way for people to get a snapshot of that, a taste of that. I think going there is the most important, but can you just set the stage for where we actually are in the world, rather than my rambling about it? Where is Hirsch Vineyards?

Jasmine Hirsch 15:18

Yeah. When you leave San Francisco and go over the Golden Gate Bridge, head north, eventually find Highway One out on the coast. You head through Sonoma County, which is vast, following the ocean. And just before you come to Mendocino County, you'll come to Hirsch Vineyards. So it's 1,600 feet above sea level, but less than three miles from the coast. It's a region called Fort Ross-Seaview AVA within the West Sonoma Coast AVA, and it's the highest altitude point on the coast. It sticks out into the ocean, so it catches all the rain. It's technically a temperate zone rainforest. And it's the middle of nowhere. It's very rugged, it's very remote. It is not wine country. Like I mentioned before, it was redwood country, timber country, then sheep and cattle, and now there are some vineyards there. And it's on the edge of the San Andreas Fault. The coast of California is young, geologically speaking. There's energy that comes from that. Like you said, violence and also serenity. We get 80 inches of rain on average a year. We just got five inches in less than 24 hours, which is not a record, but everybody that works there still came to work. The people that work there are also incredibly resilient and real persevering people, in a sense, like modern pioneering people. I'm, very, very lucky to work with people like that. The place attracts that kind of person. And it attracts people that think that they want to work there, but don't. It's not for them. And we make our wine there, which is pretty unusual. There's quite a few vineyards around us now, but there's only two wineries in our region because it's an incredibly difficult place to make wine. And I think there's something about, of course, how dramatic the climate is, how shallow and difficult the soils, the light intensity, the rain, but then you add on how difficult it is to do anything there. Live, work, make wine. I think that all of that contributes to the wines.

Jamie Schwartz 17:20

My first time going out to the West Sonoma Coast, I hadn't driven a car in maybe a year, and I was white-knuckled. I was clutching the wheel, no cell service. It was a really intense trip. And then you get out to Hirsch, and you go down roads that maybe don't have a name and are not even paved, and you are in a remote place. People live off the grid in this area. It's not the rolling hills of Burgundy or the Russian River Valley. It is intense, and I just don't think that can be stated enough. It speaks to the intensity of the wines, the intensity of the character of someone who asked the gumption to go out there. I was reading something on the Hirsch website about some of your dad's interactions with the Charles family, and for them to have gone out in the 1850s, it's remarkable that people have been farming this area for so long. We need to get more people there. I think I'm trying to segue into Farm Camp and how happy I am that you all have been taking sommeliers from around the country out to the West Sonoma Coast to understand. What can someone expect for their first visit, whether it's to Hirsch or the appellation as a whole.

Long-term experimentation with single-vineyard wines

Jasmine Hirsch 18:40

I think this is true of probably not every wine region, but a lot of wine regions, that when you finally go— I remember the first time I went to the Rheingau, and you're standing on one side of the river, and you look across the river, and there's no vineyards whatsoever, and you're like, Oh, because that side of the river is in shadow at nine o'clock at night when there is, at this northern latitude, there's still sunlight on the other side, and they need that to get ripe. At least historically they did. Who knows with climate change. But I thought, a wine region becomes alive when you see it. And we are a mountain wine region. We talk a lot about valley floor and mountain when we talk about Napa, but people don't think about that necessarily when they talk about Sonoma. And within Sonoma County, there are mountain regions. There's Sonoma Mountain and there's Fort Ross-Seaview, and it is a totally different world. So, when you come there, you'll really feel that. It can be 60ºF (16ºC), but you'll still get a sunburn because of the light intensity at that elevation. You'll feel the wind coming off the ocean, you'll see the fog rolling in, rolling out. I mean, you're like, "Oh, I get it. This is why the wines taste the way they do." 

Jamie Schwartz 19:50

I'm sure that impacts the wines in a range of ways, but tannin is something that we don't tend to talk about with Pinot Noir, but we do talk about with Hirsch. Is that the only way or what else?

Jasmine Hirsch 20:00

I think that the tannin, even before we started making our own wines—we've only been making our own wines for a little bit over 20 years, but we've sold grapes and grown grapes for 45+ years now. So, even before we made our own wines, if you were to ask my father, David Hirsch, what does Hirsch Pinot taste like? We were selling to all these different winemakers with different picking times and different philosophies of winemaking, different styles. And he would always say "It's the tannin." There's structure in these wines. And that is a thousand percent true. Of course, we have vintages that are more tannic and some that are less. But I would also say that because of the light intensity combined with the coolness, we're ripening more with light than with heat. And that can really impart a lot of intensity to the wines, yet they still are elegant, fresh, moderate alcohol, high acid. And that's something that I treasure in our wines because I love the intensity of the fruit. Because they're delicious, but they still have shape. They're still focused, they're still pure.

Jamie Schwartz 20:57

We have the Bohan-Dillon here, and my sense is this is lighter or fresher, maybe more approachable than some of the vineyard designates from the property. We've been talking a lot about just like drinkability of wine or things outside of the noble varieties. Is there any experimentation going on at Hirsch? Is there anything, whether it's just a lighter style of Pinot or other varieties? What's going on as your tastes and curiosities in the wine world evolve?

Jasmine Hirsch 21:29

I am a reluctant winemaker. I never wanted to be a winemaker. I think one of the things that's really impressive and fun about my friends that are winemakers that wanted to become winemakers is they are drawn to experimentation in the cellar. We're pretty conservative in the winemaking. Where we experiment, where we're trying new things, is in the vineyard. That's always where we've been focused. That's always been our bias. We are farmers first. But I also think with the vineyard, a lot of our vines getting older, we have a lot of disease at Hirsch, and of course, climate change, focusing your experimentation in the vineyard, I think is prudent as well as where our interest lies. So we are trying new things in the vineyard, different ways of canopy management, but also we're planting three new rootstocks. We're starting to enter a stage of needed replanting of certain selected parcels, so we're trialing, using that as an opportunity to try new rootstocks. And also we will be planting Syrah, which is a passion for me, but more about embracing the idea that maybe at some point, hopefully not in my lifetime, but at some point Hirsch might not be a Pinot Noir vineyard. We have to be open to those kinds of possibilities. Viticulture is not an experiment with a short timeline. We'll plant the rootstock this year and then graft hopefully next year or the year after, depending on how the rootstock grows. But yeah, 10-, 20-year experiment.

Jamie Schwartz 22:56

My lens as a salesperson is current release and repeat every year. And for simultaneously, this to be a business where 20-year experimental vineyard plantings are part of the same thought process, or generations or things past our lifetime. It's one of the things that is so remarkable about wine, but we don't know what the future has in store.

Jasmine Hirsch 23:20

This is one reason why family wineries are so important. My father is 82, and he's supporting, in all the ways, the planting of vineyards that he will not see the full potential of. And that is this multi-generational commitment to viticulture, this multi-generational commitment to caring for the land. That's why families are so important. Because if it's a corporation, they're looking at what's the term of productivity of the vineyard and then tear it out, replant it. What's going to be the hot new thing? I'm glad you're focused on our current releases. That's important to us. That helps us keep going. But one of our current releases is a wine called West Ridge, which you know well. That vineyard is more than 30 years old. It has a tremendous amount of leaf roll virus. It's a beautiful massal selection vineyard, but it also has virus. I do not know at what point that vineyard will stop being able to get ripe. We struggle to get it to 12.5% ABV if we're lucky. And at some point it'll get to 11.5%, so I'm thinking, "Alright, it's a three-acre vineyard. Should we tear out half of it and replant it now?" Because we don't know when the vineyard might crash.

Jamie Schwartz 24:26

11.5% Pinots are gonna be so in, though.

Jasmine Hirsch 24:30

Ha! There's a limit. It's so funny. One year during the five-year drought, our vineyard that has a lot of phylloxera at East Ridge was 11.5%. And I poured it for Dan Brown from Costa Brown. We were at an event together, and he said, "Could you get it any lower?" He thought we were kind of doing it on purpose, but no, we couldn't get it any riper. It was so stressed, the poor vines. No, I think there is a limit at which that's just not ripe anymore. So, but my point being, if I want to keep making West Ridge and have an uninterrupted release schedule for that wine, do I need to think about tearing out half the vineyard while it's still producing delicious wine? I mean, it crops like one ton to the acre. So it's not like I wouldn't say it's a financially super successful wine, but we love it. It's so precious and beautiful to us. But yeah, we have to be thinking about that.

Jamie Schwartz 25:25

Let's carry on with this. So that's one of the original vineyard designates at Hirsch. We've also just, for the first time, released the Maritime Vineyard bottling, which is a newer vineyard designate from Hirsch. Are you seeing the evolution of the property as a whole and that areas that maybe weren't ready for a vineyard designate maybe are starting to become that way? Is that how the vineyard the property's evolving?

Jasmine Hirsch 25:51

With the exception of a couple very small replants, our youngest vines are more than 20 years old, so we know what's what amongst the mature vineyards. We are replanting some very good terroirs that had phylloxera primarily, so we have an anticipation that they're gonna be even better than they were because now they're going to be healthier, but the spot that they're planted has had a great history of producing interesting and compelling wine. We are developing a completely new five acres, and so that will be more of a discovery point for us. The Maritime was a part of the vineyard that was planted in the early 1990s by my dad, and then it succumbed almost immediately to phylloxera. It was planted on AXR, which was very popular at the time. Then he replanted it less than 10 years later. We've just been waiting it for it to come into maturity. It's a larger part of the vineyard, and some parts of it are not interesting at all, and some parts of it are fascinating, and that's taken us a few years to figure out what part of the Maritime— it all has the same microclimate, but there's some variability in the soil, so, finding those interesting parcels, and that's why we've only just started to make that. We started making that wine in 2017, but in tiny, tiny quantities. And I think now not only are we making a little bit more of it, 300, 400 cases, but we are making a better Maritime than we were right at the beginning.

Jamie Schwartz 27:18

You mentioned the new five-acre parcel in relation to the the whole property. Are you going closer to the coast? Are you going further away, north, south, east, west? Where is it?

Jasmine Hirsch 27:30

The only plantable parts are the ridgetops, so it's the ridge that's kind of the back of the Maritime, parallel to the East Ridge. It's gonna be very interesting to see what it's like climatically because there's a gap where I think we're gonna get a lot of wind and a lot of fog. Even though it is on the east side of the property and it's east facing, you can't see the ocean from over there, but there is this big gap, so I think it's gonna end up being a windy, foggy spot. But the soils are not the same as anywhere else at Hirsch. Being so close to the San Andreas Fault, variability in the soil is dramatic. It's really completely new for us.

Jamie Schwartz 28:08

What is the soil type?

Jasmine Hirsch 28:10

So it's variegated. So there's some parts that have a deeper, richer clay loam mix, which is maybe not going to be the most interesting part. But then we also have some that look similar to the Raschen Ridge, like a decomposed sandstone, but it's more reddish. It's going to be interesting to see what we produce out of there. We'll know in 5, 10 years.

Jamie Schwartz 28:29

Yeah, I mean, we can run this back then. Yes. Um, hopefully have a great lunch at Borgo.

Jasmine Hirsch 28:34

Same as the Syrah. 10 years from now, we can talk about the Syrah.

Jamie Schwartz 28:37

With how fast-paced life is, it's crazy to me that you can be involved in the fast-paced capitalist portions of the wine world and yet be making these decisions that are literally decades in the making. I mean, it's one of the fascinating parts of this industry that I can't fully wrap my head around, because I'm not making those sorts of decisions, but I'm eager to see the results. Is there anything else you're maybe not fully committed to but might be happening? Is there anything that's been totally panned because you're like, this isn't viable and we're not gonna do it? What other experiments can we look forward to, or maybe didn't make the cut?

Jasmine Hirsch 29:13

Well, unfortunately, we tried own-rooted and that did not work. Those are two of the acres that we tore out after harvest this year. That was disappointing. That's, like, a seven-year experiment that you just have to start over. And what happened was not phylloxera, it turned out to be nematodes attacking those vines. We've had to learn a lot about nematodes. And when we started farming there, there were no vineyards there. It was totally virgin land from a vineyard perspective, so there were no nematodes. And now, because we've been farming there for 45 years, now there are nematodes. And they're not a problem for mature vineyards, but they're a problem for baby vines, which we're gonna be having more of over the years. So we've had to learn what that means in terms of quarantining and sanitization. And also it's been the entry point for trying new rootstocks. And in talking to people who know more about this than we do, it's probably the future for a lot of Sonoma County. A lot of Sonoma is first-time vineyards, and as we move into the second generation of vineyards, we're gonna see the need for more nematode-resistant rootstocks. This problem of discovering that giant hole that was growing in the middle of our own-rooted vines was this opportunity.

Jamie Schwartz 30:31

What is a nematode?

Jasmine Hirsch 30:33

Such a great question. It's something that attacks the roots and eats the roots, particularly for young vines. It can really prevent the vine from ever developing a root structure. And then it can't take nutrients and water from the soil, so it just dies. It's been this great opportunity to learn about something new. The other thing that we experimented with was no-till farming. We went 100% no-till. We've had to pull back. We have some vineyards that remain no-till because they just don't need that, and other vineyards where we had to start tilling again. I think it's a great lesson in, it's not all or nothing; there's a middle path.

Jamie Schwartz 31:13

I love the story of how you were grape growers first and then became producers, and having a winery on site also is all in the pursuit of understanding your property better and also having more control over things, whereas you're selling your fruit to someone else to toy with. What have been some of the greatest learnings in that pursuit and process?

Perfection and mono no aware

Jasmine Hirsch 31:38

I think that there are vineyards that are obviously great vineyards from the farmer's perspective and in the winery as well. But there are vineyards where there's a mismatch there. From the farmer's perspective, it's difficult, it doesn't look that great, but then it can make extraordinary wine. And vice versa is true as well. Becoming winemakers has made us better farmers; it's helped us to understand our site better. And, to use a biodynamic or ecological idea, wines are bioindicators. They can show us that something's wrong. In the case of that vineyard that had nematodes, it was obvious. It was just total dieback in the middle of the vineyard. It just grew bigger and bigger. So it was obvious. But also, it was interesting. Even the vines that were not visually having an issue, that was taking them forever to get ripe. I've had vineyards in my head forever, like this is a great vineyard, and I have given it my utmost, both with the farming and with the winemaking, and they still don't produce great wine. And so you just sort of say, "Okay, well, where does that idea, that bias come from?" The wines keep you honest, I think.

Jamie Schwartz 32:52

You don't go out to the far reaches of the Sonoma Coast, the West Sonoma Coast, without a certain pursuit of excellence or perhaps even perfection. But is there such a thing as a perfect wine or a perfect vintage, perfect site, whatever that may be?

Jasmine Hirsch 33:05

Oh, I have so many answers. I don't think perfection is very interesting when it comes to wine. One time when I was not working in wine yet, I was working at JP Morgan at 51st and Park, and I was a little baby analyst. I was slaving away at like nine o'clock at night on some dumb PowerPoint presentation that my boss had made me do. And a wine collector friend called me and said, "Oh, you should come over." They were at some restaurant on the west side. "We're drinking 55 Cheval Blanc." And I said, "I'm not gonna come across town for a white wine." I had no idea what Cheval Blanc was. And he's like, "If you think Cheval Blanc is a white wine, you should get your little butt over here." I grew up with a father that drank Burgundy and a lot of Italian wine and Spanish wine. My dad really never drank Bordeaux. I tasted that wine and I thought, Oh, I understand why people drink Bordeaux.

Jamie Schwartz 33:57

So you went.

Jasmine Hirsch 33:58

Oh yeah. And I was like, I understand why people drink Bordeaux. This this is a perfect wine. But I think with Pinot, and I don't know, I shouldn't say anything more about Cabernet because I don't have any experience with it, but I very much want to make wines that are correct, clean, stable, and fit within a kind of classical idea of Pinot Noir, right? But inside that container, which one could say is sort of "perfect" or whatever, that's the hope. It should be. Inside that container, there has to be room for the wine to be itself, for the terroir to be itself, whether it wants to be shy or angry or wild or kinetic, self-confident. Because Pinot Noirs that are perfect are totally boring. Pinot Noir is fascinating when it expresses place, and sometimes that's not perfect. And that's, I think, where the interest can come from and where the connection— Why do you love one Cru versus another? And it's different for the other person. And if they were all perfect, I feel like that means they'd all be the same, which is death. Variety is essential to life, and it's also what keeps us captivated about wine. So if everything was the same, it truly would be death. Some Darwin shit right there.

Jamie Schwartz 35:20

I don't even know what to say.

Jasmine Hirsch 35:22

Give me that empty glass.

Jamie Schwartz 35:23

Yes, thank you.

Jasmine Hirsch 35:24

I hate empty glasses.

Jamie Schwartz 35:25

Thank you.

Jasmine Hirsch 35:26

I will say one other thing about perfection. There's this wonderful concept in Japanese aesthetics called "mono no aware." I majored in Japanese studies, which is, of course, nothing to do with wine, but it was what I was interested in when I was that age. So mono no aware is this idea that things are more beautiful when you can see that they're passing.

Jamie Schwartz 35:45

Oh wow.

Jasmine Hirsch 35:46

A cherry blossom tree that's starting to lose its petals is more beautiful than a cherry blossom tree that's at its perfect peak. Obviously with this idea of mono no aware, the beauty of things passing, we don't want to be drinking wines when they're past their peak, but more this idea of— Eric Asimov wrote an amazing article about René Engel. I think he had been invited to a René Engel dinner years and years ago, and of course the domaine was going away. And he said something about the poignancy of drinking wines, that this is it. This is all that's left. And people always say, "Oh, I don't know when to open that bottle." It's like, this is the moment! Do it now! And this idea that this is the last bottle, there's something so beautiful in that, and that having to let go, as well. And I remember once being at Becky Wasserman's house in Burgundy, and she sent her son to go get another bottle from the cellar, and he came out and it had no label. And she and her husband and her son, they sort of speculated for a little while, like, what might the wine be? And Alan Meadows was there, playing the blind tasting, and I was just sitting there, like, I have no idea. And they're like, "Oh, it's from that section of the cellar that was filled in the 1970s," or whatever and then they said, "Oh, who cares?" And they talked about it for like, five minutes, and then they were like, "Who cares what the wine is? It's delicious." And I just think that that letting go and that openness is so important to the enjoyment of life and wine. You would say, "Oh, it's not a perfect moment because I didn't get a photo for Instagram and I don't know what the wine was, and I can't remember it, and I can't put it in my study guide," or whatever. But it's like, no, it's the moment. And you remember that more than if you took a photo.

Handling the pressure of the family legacy

Jamie Schwartz 37:26

As a sommelier, it's something I would be asked often. People would be like, "When should I drink this from my cellar?" And it's like, this is such a personal question. I suppose at this point for me, I'd rather catch something on the way up and catch it early rather than on the decline. But it sort of depends on where are we overall on that arc? And so many other factors come into play. Some of my most memorable bottles of wine, I don't even know if the people I was enjoying them with had the same experience. It's like one of the most confounding things about all of this, perhaps. Are we even perceiving this in the same way? And it makes the idea of perfection kind of silly, but I understand why people need that as a North Star, something to strive towards.  You have a really intense job. We've already touched on the area, but how do you keep coming back? There's gotta be some bad days in the wine world too, right? And yet Mother Nature doesn't give you a day off. Once the season starts, you're locked in.

Jasmine Hirsch 38:30

Well, when I took over the winemaking in 2019, I didn't know how to make wine. And I was so afraid of failing. This was not a little experimental project where I was making a couple barrels of wine. This was my family's winery. Failure was not an option, and I did not handle it well. I was actually confronted by an employee who told me I needed to change the way I was behaving. I was so insecure, and I was trying to overcompensate because of that. I'm very lucky and grateful that she said something to me. I realized that I needed to completely change my orientation around what I didn't know, and that gave me an opportunity to change the culture of how we handle when we don't know something at Hirsch, that we acknowledge when we don't know something, and we will spend some time trying to see if we can figure it out ourselves. And then when we can't, we say, let's go figure out who can help us. Starting from the point that there's so much that we don't know, and just acknowledging that and being open— I thought that that was weakness, but actually there's power.

Jamie Schwartz 39:43

There's so much power in that.

Jasmine Hirsch 39:44

And it's efficient. You're not wasting your time pretending like you know something or trying to speculate endlessly about how to solve this problem that none of us know how to solve. Let's go figure out who can help us. You meet, sometimes, people in your industry, and they are at the top of the industry. And my experience has been, pretty universally, that those are the most humble and the most curious people. There's an amazing person named Allan Benton. He is probably the greatest ham maker in America. And when he was already in his 50s or his 60s, he went to Spain to study how they make ham there. I saw him shortly after he came back, and he was nearly in tears. He said, "If only I had gone sooner, just imagine what I could have done with my craft." And I'm like, this guy is a master, and he's humbled by and he's thinking about the vastness of his craft. He was almost depressed that he wouldn't have enough time to learn everything. I think those are the people who are going to be the greatest. And let that be a lesson to us all. Thank you for a great lunch today. You have one year until I come back to figure out where our next lunch is gonna be.

Jamie Schwartz 41:02

I think we can arrange that.

Jasmine Hirsch 41:04

Cheers.

Jamie Schwartz 41:05

Cheers. Thank you, Jasmine.

Jasmine Hirsch 41:06

Thank you.

Harmon Skurnik 41:18

Skurnik Unfiltered is recorded at Skurnik Wines & Spirits headquarters in the Flatiron Disctrict of New York City, which is why you might hear some city noises as we go along like horns honking. If you found the conversation interesting, then please consider liking, subscribing, and leaving a review. You can stay up to date on our show and upcoming events by following @skurnikwines on Instagram and visiting our website at skurnik.com