In preparation for our Spain vs California wine tasting coming up on January 31st, we had the privilege of speaking with Sonoma winemaker, Palmer Emmitt, to learn a bit about his background and what he is doing at his winery, Emmitt-Scorsone, in Healdsburg, CA, as well as getting his opinion on Spanish wines compared to California wines. Below is our full interview with him.

IT: What first got you interested in wines?

PE: My first exposure to wine was through my dad and his wine collection in our home in New Jersey.  During our annual boys ski trips, where we travelled to different ski resorts each year, dad would always order good wine, and eventually I discovered that I especially was drawn to Oregon Pinot Noir.  Dad encouraged my budding interest by letting me order a Pinot Noir off the wine list, whether from Oregon or California, each night and he taught me that Pinot Noir comes from Burgundy, France, so then I started ordering some Burgundies.  Dad would also order a bottle of what he was passionate about – typically either a Bordeaux or Napa Cab.  So that is how I started to learn just a tiny bit about wine.  And then I met my business partner, winemaker Michael Scorsone, which led to the interest becoming a hobby, and then a passion, and eventually a full blown obsession.

IT: How did you meet Michael?

PE: I had a close friend, Jon Conway, who was living in San Francisco and I was living in LA, working in the film industry.  I went to visit him one weekend and he said “I have a friend in Napa who is a winemaker, do you want to go taste some wine?¨  So we went to Napa and that is when I developed a friendship with Michael.  I started taking a lot of trips up to Napa to visit him and learn more about wine.  Here I began to not only get exposure to wines from Napa Valley and Sonoma County but also see what Michael was doing in the cellar and the passion that he had kicked my interest into overdrive. 

IT: Did you have any other early influences that contributed to your wine obsession?

PE: The third component of my wine mentorship was Gary Vaynerchuck (also a New Jersey native and now well known entrepreneur, public speaker, and TV personality).

After one of those weekends with Michael, I came home with a bee in my bonnet and started searching the internet to get more information on various wines.  I stumbled across a video Gary had done about one of the wines for his Youtube wine show, so that is how I discovered Wine Library TV.  I devoured the show, watching every single episode. So much knowledge came from watching Gary… and then I got to know Gary personally and developed a friendship with him.  This influence motivated me to start taking classes at night after work to get certified as a sommelier and then eventually I quit my job, left Los Angeles, and moved to wine country to do the Sonoma State wine MBA program, still not knowing exactly where I was going to end up in the wine industry.  I wasn’t really thinking honestly that I would have my own winery but I started hanging out with Michael a lot once I moved up here and he eventually asked me “Hey, do you want to make some wine together?” and of course I said, “Hell yea, I do!”

IT: What is unique about your wine and what sets it apart from other California wines?

PE: In winemaking, I don’t think you can really reinvent the wheel.  People have been making wine for 3000 years and most of the best ways to do it have already been figured out.  Certainly there are different ways to market it but in the making of it, it is just a series of very subtle choices.  So Michael and I do not believe we are doing something completely innovative.  It is not revolutionary the way we make wine.  It’s just a combination of choosing really interesting vineyard sites, trying to find the right match of grape variety to the vineyard site, and trying to do less in the winery.  Doing less is really our winemaking philosophy.  The more you start with an interesting grape, growing in the right place, and the less you do in the winery to screw it up, the better your wine is going to turn out.  Our approach is a pretty old school/old world style of winemaking.  There is a big trend in wine making/marketing towards  “natural winemaking”, where people have these strict rules saying ¨ You can’t use this and you can’t use that, and you can’t do this and you can’t do that”, because you are manipulating the wine.  Most of those things they say you can’t do, Michael and I do not do anyway, but we don’t limit ourselves.  If we need to do one of those things to make wine that is not flawed, then we will do it.  So we do not consider ourselves natural winemakers even though 90 percent of our wines would qualify as natural wines.

Also, I would say what distinguishes our wines is that Michael is an exceptional winemaker, not because he knows a bunch of tricks to turn bad wine into good wine but because his palette is so good that he trusts himself to not do things when it is not necessary.  We can have the “do less” philosophy because Michael has that trust in his own palette, trust that it won’t deceive him.  A lot of the winemakers that are classically, academically trained do everything by the book.  ¨If you have this number, you add this chemical and if such and such happens to the wine, you do this¨.  There is an insecurity there where they are fearful of screwing up the wine if they don’t follow certain steps.  So, just the trust and confidence Michael has in himself to not do those things is a big reason why we end up with a higher percentage of special wines than maybe the guy down the road.