Markko of Distinction

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 ”.