VOLANTE Elyse Glickman visits Palmaz Vineyards, a family-owned and run property that blends tradition with technology, aided by geology and a gift for winemaking. PHOTOGRAPHED BY THE AUTHOR AND COURTESY PALMAZ VINEYARDS
Julio and Amalia Palmaz have always believed that if given the proper attention and care, their land can produce excellent wine for generations. Along with their children, Florencia and Christian Gastón (and Christian’s wife, Jessica Louise), they set about creating a winery that leverages tradition and technology in the service of crafting great vintages. The result is a 600-acre estate with 64 acres of vineyards that produce truly modern vintages, thanks to the technology harnessed in support of the art of winemaking.
There’s nothing better than curling up on a chilly Winter night with Steve and the puppies, a good movie (like Bohemian Rhapsody – AMAZING!) and a nice bottle of red wine. And if you’re also a fan of indulging in delicious, full-bodied red wines this time of year, you won’t want to miss my timely podcast interview with Christian Palmaz, CEO of Palmaz Vineyards, which is home to some of my favorite Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons.
You can listen to the podcast here.
Napa is a celebrated romantic destination for Valentine’s Day (or President’s Day weekend and wedding anniversaries, for that matter). And what’s there not to love? The best-known wine production in America has going for it fantastic, spring-like weather, first-class dining, and a refined and sophisticated mix of familiar and emerging wineries. In fact, Napa Valley in some years has had more tourists populate its fields than Disneyland. For couples planning quality downtime, those crowds can deflate the romance factor.
A simple solution to the crowd issue is to take the road less traveled, and, for wine lovers, that means seeking out wineries a bit more hidden. That philosophy worked for Julio and Amalia Palmaz, regular vistors to Napa who loved the idea of winemaking so much they decided to relocate and purchase a winery in the 1990s. They happened upon a late 19th-century home in Coombsville (in Napa’s southern reaches) surrounded by 600 acres of land draped over Mount George. While 60 of those acres were ideal for the cultivation of grapes (particularly Cabernet Sauvignon), the couple discovered they uncovered a long lost piece of Napa’s winery history.
Somewhere between industrialized winemaking and the full-on natural/no-intervention movement, there are a growing number of producers using the environment—and more importantly, gravity—to refine their winemaking technique. Many believe that removing pumps or motors from the winemaking process preserves better fragrance and flavor. Some wineries have even gone so far as to build their facilities underground or on sloped land to bypass machinery and let gravity better work its magic.
Growing up on his family’s vineyard in Napa Valley, Christian Palmaz knew exactly what he wanted to be: a winemaker. But after apprenticing, he learned he couldn’t quite read the wines the way a winemaker should. But that didn’t stop him from wanting to help make a great wine. He turned to his other passion instead, computer science. –continue reading below–
Palmaz Vineyards is a family-owned Napa Valley winery that is entirely encompassed inside Mount George. Unique to Palmaz is its own propriety ML software developed by Christian Palmaz, CEO. FILCS (pronounced “Felix”), stands for Fermentation Intelligence Logic Control System. It gives insight on fermentation by measuring variables in the process, then adjusts the temperature and rate of fermentation as needed. Another system, VIGOR, or Vineyard Infrared Growth Optical Recognition, monitors the health of the vineyard and adjusts irrigation accordingly throughout the growing season.
Discussions of alcohol levels in wine are analogous to the third rail of train tracks: Often dangerous to even approach, and it should only be done with extreme caution. This is because everyone, it seems, has an opinion about what constitutes an “appropriate” amount of alcohol. It makes sense: The abv in a bottle has a huge impact on the balance of the wine, the flavor profile, the texture, the ways in which it interacts with food, and more. Strong opinions, on either side of the proverbial aisle, are justified, and I find plenty of merit in both.
But as with all deeply held convictions, it’s far too easy for logical argument to devolve into orthodoxy, when the reality is that there are plenty of great wines that don’t have all that much alcohol (the Kutch Bohan Vineyard Pinot Noir 2016, for example, clocks in at 11.3% abv, and it’s magnificent, with copious red fruit, Indian spice, and roses leaving a lasting impression long after the wine has been finished) and just as many that have higher levels (the Faust Limited Release “Graffiti Edition” Cabernet Sauvignon 2015, which comes in magnum and boasts 14.9% alcohol, is balanced and assertive all at once, with chocolate, cedar, blueberry cobbler, cassis, and cigar tobacco). They are verydifferent wines, but I find a ton of pleasure in both.
American Chardonnay has gotten a bad rap—not without cause, in many cases. For a decade or more, beginning in the 1990s, it was impossible for them to be buttery enough, creamy enough or ripe enough. Sugar levels were staggering almost across the board. Returning from a trip to Germany in 1998, I was startled to find that many domestic Chardonnays were sweeter than the Rieslings I had been drinking in the Mosel and Rhine.
In this episode we met with Christian Palmaz, CEO of Palmaz Vineyards and President and CEO of Vactronix Scientific, a material science company based in Silicon Valley. Palmaz Vineyards has been able to pull together wine and data together to not make better wine but how can big data make the process less prone to error, more sustainable to quality and to allow the wine makers to focus on what is most important, making the best wine possible… to enhance the human element which makes wine beautiful, multi-dimensional, and complex. All the things we have a hard time putting numbers to
In the wine industry, there are many creative people, true artist but as Christian stated, “you can spend your whole life studying art but that does not mean you are going to be a great artist”. Christian now feels like he plays a supporting role to those that have the artistic direction even though he has a computer science background. His father started this innovative spirit and the process of using innovation to problem solve. Christian said it best when talking about his role in wine and data analytics, guys like him “don’t wield the paint brush, we make the paint”… and what great paint it is.
