Martha Stoumen and Californian freshness

(Sebastopol, CA) Goodbye, sweet zinfandels, extracted cabernet sauvignons and oaky chardonnays. Hello, fresh and digestible wines! A gang of thirsty young people have been redefining the Californian vineyard for the past few years. Martha Stoumen is part of the movement. She will be at Raw Wine Montreal with several of her compatriots who make natural wines under the sun.

Eve Dumas

The Press

We visited Martha Stoumen in August, in the large municipal cellar in the industrial district of Sébastopol, which she shares with four other winegrowers. The harvest began slowly. So there was activity around the presses and the fermenters, without it being madness either.

“It’s a very creative and collaborative space,” exclaims Nina Kravetz, Marketing Manager, as she shows us around. Outside, the team leaves the table, after a lunch prepared by the designated harvest cook, owner of the premises, Pax Mahle. The cellar belongs to him. It was at the sale of Wind Gap, his other label, that the “Californian king of Syrah” found his home a little big. He therefore invited young nomads to make their wines at his place.

You should know that in California, the vast majority, if not all of those who get into wine today buy fruit or rent vines that they can then cultivate in their own way. Access to property? Impossible.

That said, there is no shortage of grapes in the “Golden State” and you can find everything, whether it’s Mediterranean, Chilean, Nordic or other varieties. There are even very old vines, since California has been producing wine since the 18^e century. Some of Martha Stoumen’s cuvées, for example, are made from 70 and 75 year old Carignan.

First-generation winemaker, the 30-year-old grew up in Sebastopol. She spent eight years learning the trade from Didier Barral (Domaine Léon Barral, France), Giusto Occhipinti (COS, Sicily) and Chris Brockway (Broc Cellars, California), among others, while earning a master’s degree in viticulture. and oenology at UC Davis University.

During her years on the Old Continent, she fell in love with grape varieties that resist heat well, such as Carignan and Nero d’Avola, grape varieties that she was able to find at home when homesickness took her. . It was in 2014 that she went solo.

To source quality grapes, she has entered into agreements with landowners and winemakers in Mendocino County, already known for its large number of vineyards with sustainable practices, and Contra Costa further south, in particular.

The first wines were born in 2016 and were immediately offered in Quebec, through the Oenopole agency. You can find them today at the SAQ. In 2022, production is expected to reach around 9,000 cases, or over 100,000 bottles, which is no small amount of wine for a young independent operation.

On the scale of California, with its 75 million annual cases, Martha Stoumen’s 9000 are a drop in the ocean. But while climate change is no longer theoretical in this region – drought is rife, heat waves are intensifying – drinkers are looking for wines that are more digestible on all levels. They want to know the process from root to glass. They want to know that their consumption causes the least possible harm. For these reasons and many others, agricultural practices and winemaking methods need to change as soon as possible. Hundreds of thousands of cases at a time.

For Martha Stoumen, wine is an agricultural product, a “food”. The mother of a baby boy feels increasingly connected to her environment. “I developed my instinct over time and today, I feel that my way of making wine, of tasting it, is much more linked to sensations than to the search for a precise result”, confides the one whom Montrealers will be able to meet in a week.

Raw Montreal will take place on November 19 and 20, with a host of satellite events, including an evening with Martha Stoumen, Arianna Occhipinti and Theo Zierock of Foradori at Bar Wills, starting at 4 p.m., in collaboration with the pizzeria Elena .

Transportation to California was provided by Air Transat, which had no say in the content of this report.

A wine to discover

This red with a cute label is available in fairly good quantities on the SAQ website. It is mainly composed of Zinfandel (55%) and Pinot Noir (34%), with a little Carignan and Petite Sirah. Martha Stoumen herself calls it a “kitchen chameleon”, concentrated like pomegranate juice and juicy like hibiscus water. It is indeed a wine that is neither completely light nor completely fruity, with a touch of salinity that makes you want to dip your lips in it again and again and again… then oops, the bottle is empty! The white and rosé Post Flirtation and other cuvées from the winegrower are also on sale at the SAQ right now.

Post Flirtation Red 2021, $45.25 (14205648) 12%