Markko Vineyard for edible
Cleveland from Steven Corso
TAKE 2
Coming from the
west, from Kingsville, South Ridge Road crosses Conneaut Creek before
climbing onto glacial moraine. Passing farms and woodlots, the road
is soon transformed into the perfect country road, dropping your car
from the quiet monotony of asphalt onto the exhilarating rumble and
clatter of gravel and dirt – the roads of wagons and model-T's,
Soon after you'll have to make a choice: To follow South Ridge is to
make a right and pass under the freeway, otherwise you continue
straight toward Conneaut on West Under Ridge Road.
Or you could turn
left onto an easily-overlooked wooded drive marked with a simple
concrete pillar. The pillar is a sign: Markko Vineyard 1968 – the
sign you've arrived at the origin of northeast Ohio's European wine
production.
Your wine merchant's shelves are
populated with bottles labeled with exotic names from far-flung
places. There are bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon from Italy and
southeastern Australia; Chardonnays from France and Chile; Pinot Noir
from California and South Africa; and Riesling from southern Germany
and Oregon.
Despite the diverse array of wine
names, all of the above wines and most drained from the nearly 32
billion bottles of wine consumed by earthlings in 2010 are varietals
of one species of European domesticated grape - Vitis vinifera.
And although wine producing regions
might seem like disparate places, they tend to occupy predictable
locations on Earth. Grab a globe and let your finger circumnavigate
and you'll discover that most of the wine we drink was produced on
west coasts between about 35 and 45 degrees north or south latitude.
Heavily influenced by westerly winds off of cool ocean water, these
temperate places have similar climates: mild summers with warm, sunny
days, cool nights and low humidity - indeed they often have no rain
during their summer months. Winters are cool - but not too cold - and
rainy. This so-called “Mediterranean climate” is that in which
wild Vitis
vinifera,evolved and was first cultivated over 8 thousands years
ago.
And this is
decidedly not the climate of northeast Ohio.
And yet Arnulf
“Arnie” Esterer, Markko vineyard's vitner and co-founder (his
partner Tim Hubbard died in 2000), has been producing these same
varietals of vinifera grape wines in Ashtabula county for over
40 years.
Markko was the destination for me and
my family – my wife, Tatiana and our two daughters ages 4 and 8 -
one sunny, cool late September Saturday. Arnie is in his early 80's
with slight stature, white hair and beard highlighting blue eyes. On
this day, our first meeting, I'm impressed with Arnie's energy,
sustained by continual fascination for what he does.
“We're trying to
figure out which way to go, how to do it. We have so much to learn”,
he says of his nearly half-century of viticulture.
A moment later he
and my girls are playing with a litter of wiry-haried puppies and
their Muppety mother. I ask him what breed of dogs they are.
“These are Markko puppies,” he
tells me with a straight face.
Having wondered about the name of the
winery, I ask a naïvely earnest follow-up:
“Oh you named the winery after this
breed of dog?”
My first experience
with Arnie's subtle sense of humor and I fall for it.
With a playful
smile he invites me for a tour.
Having lived for a decade in the
California Bay Area, and made my rounds of the area's wineries, I'd
become accustomed to those that take themselves obnoxiously
seriously. Where guests are greeted either by arcane ultra-modern
architecture replete with acute angles, curvy glass whatevers and
obscured doorways or by imposing classical facades, imperial gardens
of sculptured hedges, naked statues and squirting fountains, and
tasting rooms with all the quaintness of the Pantheon.
By contrast, Markko appears a
ramshackle in the forest, where I'd rather expect the production of
moonshine than Cabernet Sauvignon. The wine is pressed, aged,
tasted, sold and shipped all from this unassuming facility from which
no grape vines are visible. Of the 100 acre property, about 15 are
vineyard.
“We're very
small”, he admits, adding that much of the rest of the property is
designated a conservancy, wooded with a big gully and Conneaut Creek,
which flows westward a few miles to the south of Markko before a
sharp turn brings it back through the northern portion of the
property. Later he'll show me the vineyards. And later, I tell
myself, the biologist in me will have to see some of this
conservancy. But for now we head inside.
Markko's public entrance begins with a
rustic front step of rough log and stone. This opens to a small,
homey tasting room with a short bar and a large communal table. An
adjoining outdoor deck is suspended in dense forest foliage of varied
greens. Here one get's a sense of Markko's, and Arnie's, history and
personality: decades of photographs, kitschy nicknacks (“Age
Improves with Wine”), parched wine bottles and straw-wrapped jugs,
dusty glasses, a cow bell all occupy the room's shelved spaces.
Linda, who's been working for Arnie for
most of Markko's existence, is pouring my wine samples. Behind her,
in direct sight of anyone tasting, hangs a wooden sign with a simple
message:
“Wine is Good Food”
I ask Arnie about this and receive an
animated reply:
“We're just producing food!”
In a sense, this little sign is the
most succinct expression of Arnie's driving philosophy and business
model.
“We've gotta get away from Pepsi and
Coke”, he proclaims.
I tend to think of “wine versus beer”
as the mutually exclusive choice I'm offered at dinners or parties.
But Arnie sees wine as the beverage choice among many, and his
vision is a northeast Ohio where people drink inexpensive,
lower-alcohol, un-aged vinifera wines at ball games, fast-food
joints, every post-breakfast meal.
“If this industry doesn't promote it
as a food but promotes it as entertainment [we winemakers are] in
trouble”.
He rattles off per capita annual
consumption rates for several European countries that are in the tens
of gallons, arguing that a broad base of everyday wine drinkers
supports a region's wine industry such that “great wine” can be
produced at quantities that result in affordable everyday prices.
Wine “shouldn't be just the rich people's food or a snobby,
aristocratic thing”, he tells me. This statement leads me to ask
why Arnie established a European winery an hour drive from Cleveland
during its culinary “pre-enlightenment”? In my pursuit of an
answer I use the word “quality” in reference to wine. This word
irritates Arnie, and my use of it set's him off on a half-hour
debate, pitting cheap wine against expensive bottles, all the while
demonstrating his preferred wine lexicon: The wine at the top of the
price pyramid might have unique “artistic value”, he says, but if
the abundant and inexpensive wine displays the “true varietal
character” while revealing the “personality” and “beauty”
of the region and the vintner, who is to say which wine is of higher
quality?
Markko specializes in growing, as Arnie
calls them, the World's five great wine grapes: Chardonnay, Riesling,
Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot gris, all selected from the
European grape species Vitis vinifera. I'll refrain from
trying to pull off sophisticated descriptions of the wine I tasted.
Let it suffice to say: I liked Arnie's wine. But what is my reference
point?
An obvious point of comparison are the
wines that have been the basis of Ohio's wine industry for much of
its history, namely, wines made from American grapes of the species
Vitis labrusca - the most
widely grown grape in the U.S., the Concord, is one variety of
this species - or wines made of vinifera X American grape
hybrids, as grape geneticists think Catawba likely is.
For those
with a wine education based solely on
vinifera curriculum,
these wines can be an unpleasant surprise on first tasting. If not
outright sweet these wines are off-dry at their driest. And the term
“foxy” is also often used to describe musky aspects of their
flavor.
Methyl
anthranilate is the predominant
molecular component of Concord grape flavor which, isolated, has been
the stand-in “GRAPE” flavor of KoolAid and lollipops. Not exactly
a flavor profile of subtle complexities.
Other local wineries produce some
vinifera wines but Markko specializes in only producing
vinifera wines.
And when I casually ask Arnie for
clarification, I get it:
“So you were one of the first
wineries in the area to make wine from vinifera grapes?”
“The first,” he gently
corrects
My tour continues
passed a small, cluttered “chemistry lab”, where a developing
wine's characteristics can be measured, through Markko's modest
warehouse, which opens to a shipping dock. Outside is the circa
1950's German grape press, which looks like a cylinder of metal grate
caging a deflated inner tube running its length. I watched grapes
loaded in, pushed around the inner tube. Once full and cage door
closed the inner tube is inflated, pushing the grapes against the
metal grate. The muddy juice that's extruded is captured in a trough
below the press that empties, by a hose running through the floor, to
a settling tank in the cellar below.
Andy, an intern at Markko who spent
Ohio's last winter working the summer vineyards and presses of New
Zealand, leads me down for an olfactory tour of the cellar, where I
climb and scramble up racks of damp, yeasty barrels smelling this
variety, now that vintage, coaxed into detecting differences with my
amateur nose.
“Has Arnie told
you about the black mold?”, Andy asks me, referring to that which
is growing on nearly every undisturbed surface of the cellar. The
question sustains my developing sense of history of this place:
everything, including the mold, has a story.
Arnie grew up in Ann Arbor. His father,
a German expat, and mother were both research biochemists. He went to
the University of Michigan for mechanical engineering and wound up
working for Union Carbide in Ashtabula. Wine-making became his hobby
in the mid 1960's. When he was laid off from Union Carbide in 1972
(“I was gonna quit the next year”), wine-making became his
primary occupation.
He tells me about a pivotal meeting
with the man who would become his mentor, and who shaped the
development of wine-making in the Finger Lakes region of New York –
Dr. Konstantin Frank.
Frank was Ukrainian, born in 1899. He
had studied agricultural science at the Polytechnic Institute in
Odessa where he later became a professor. His research focused on
growing vinifera grapes outside of their native environment.
In the early 1950's he emigrated to the U.S. Not wanting to give up
his career in viticulture, but unable to speak English, Frank got a
menial job at New York's agricultural research station near Geneva.
There he coaxed a local winemaker, Charles Fournier of Gold Seal
winery, to plant vinifera vines and make European wine. In the
early 1960's he bought his own land on Lake Keuka. Shortly thereafter
his first vintage was released under the appropriately-named label
Vinifera Wine Cellars. Soon he was the guru of eastern U.S. vinifera
wine-making, and in a 1967 pilgrimage, Arnie the young acolyte wound
up on Franks doorstep. Directed by his wife to the vintner's
workshop, Frank greeted Arnie:
“Who are you? A somebody or a
nobody?”
Arnie responded: “A nobody”
“Good, follow me”
One night while pressing grapes
together, Frank gave Arnie his mission.
“He told me I
should buy 100 acres, so I went and bought 100 acres”. Arnie left
his apprenticeship and returned to Ohio to apply what he'd learned in
the Finger Lakes.
As the sun descends its late-September
arc, Arnie agrees to lead a small flock of visitors down the dirt
road to his vineyards. I take advantage of the distance to learn
more.
The explanation for how Mediterranean
grapes can survive and produce here is largely a matter of air
circulation, Arnie explains, and site selection for his 100 acres was
the most important single predictor of his eventual success. On hot
summer days, as air heats and rises off Markko's ridge-top vineyards,
relatively cool air is pulled up the ridge from Lake Erie, cooling
the grapes. approximating summer temps experienced by vinifera
grapes in their native climate. As winter approaches, before the
lake freezes, winds coming off the lake are warm relative to the
chilly uplands, helping to lessen the severity of late fall cold
snaps and early winter deep freeze. Once the lake freezes, the cold
air moving inland keeps Arnie's grapes dormant into spring,
preventing an early flowering that might be fine in a Mediterranean
climate but would be in danger of a March or April freeze here. The
ultimate value of Arnie's site - close to the lake and on a hill - is
measured in air movement: up and down the hill, day and night, season
by season, moving cold and hot and humid air and disease organisms
through, not settling on, the vines.
In the vineyard as when drinking wine,
the key is moderation.
The group reaches rows of trellised
Chardonnay vines. To the north I can nearly see the lake except for
the light clouds. Interstate 90 is roaring within earshot to the
south and I strain to listen to Arnie explain a bunch of grapes he's
holding in his hand. My amateur assessment is that the grapes are
“bad”, many look shriveled, bruised, punctured, and scarred. I'm
sorry for Arnie's loss as I would never buy this bunch of grapes in
the store, but Arnie has insider knowledge obtained through millenia
of vinifera cultivation plus decades of his own local
application.
“This mold is not what you want”,
he says, pointing to one afflicted grape, “but this one”,
referring to that grapes's neighbor, “this is 'noble mold', this we
like”.
He eats that grape. Then he offers us
similarly nobly-moldy grapes for our own sampling.
We take them. And we eat them. Arnie
had us eating out of his hand, almost literally.
“This is Arnie in his element”, I
think, chewing on my grape and admiring what I consider Arnie's
perfect uniform for a vintner: worn utility jeans and a shabby
cardigan sweater over a flat blue flannel shirt - collar up. And from
his crusted shoes to his deeply-soiled cap, his clothes are the
embodiment of Markko's terroir, animated by the passion of its
dedicated keeper.
The sun is getting low and there's a
chill in the air now as we walk back down the dirt road to the
winery. Arnie continues the education for those listening, but I am
distracted by what looks like a trail heading into the woods of
Markko. I decide to slip off for a quick look at the conservancy.
The gorge was impressive, arching
around me, I was on a promontory with an abrupt 20 foot drop on three
sides. But something else quickly caught my eye. An angry tangle of
giants - grape vines of the native species common in northeast Ohio,
Vitis riparia - emerging
thick from the ground like trees with indecisive trunks growing this
way, then bending back, branching out in different directions,
quickly become woody tentacles, with pealing bark a monster's
coarsely shaggy fur, extending dozens of feet into the canopy,
weaving together as many trees in a shared fate during every foul
wind and stormy night.
It was easy to imagine this scene, a
few hundred feet from Arnie's vineyards, as a secret gathering of
angry natives plotting their attack on the European invaders. But
that fantasy ignores a more complicated reality, a forced
relationship between European and American Vitis imposed by
vintners and wild American nature. All of Arnie's vinifera
grapes are grafted on to rootstock of this American species. A
parasitic insect native to the New World happily destroys European
grapes at the root; any successful vinifera planting depends
on the perseverance of American rootstock in the face of this
challenge. If I wanted truth in metaphor, I'd have to do better than
“angry grapes”.
I return to find Arnie, restating his
mission:
“We're a demonstration. The point is
to demonstrate some of the ways you can make wine in this region,
drawing back to some of the very basics”, he reiterates to his
guests. “These grapes haven't been grown here before. We roughly
have 40 years experience. That's nothing in the wine business ”.
