Andrake Cellars

Andrake Cellars

Who’s Afraid of a Big, Bold Wine?
To Bob Andrake, monster wines
are no fairy tale
by Shannon Borg

I’ve just walked through the large doorway of tiny Andrake Cellars, off the beaten path on Boston Harbor Road in Olympia, Washington, and Andrake is sitting on his throne -- a lawn chair – waiting for me. He does a lot of waiting, as do his big red wines, some of which are squirreled away in the French oak barrels they call home for up to two-and-a-half years. The cramped little warehouse is packed, literally to the rafters, with barrels. He welcomes me, shows me around a bit (it doesn’t take long) and I point to a particularly well-buried barrel way back in the corner.

“What if you want to get to that one there?“ I ask.

“That’s a problem,” he laughs, “Around here, we move a lot of barrels.”

And just as each barrel is shifted with great care to fit them all into this tiny winery, the elements of Andrake’s luxurious red wines – acidity, tannin, weight, alcohol, fruit and finesse -- are tested, adjusted, balanced, blended, and nudged into place, in order to get the most flavor possible packed into a wine glass.

Obsessed with quality, Bob Andrake wants to make “the biggest, baddest mother on the block.”

And every year, he reexamines and reevaluates that quest. “Just because we made wine the same way year before, doesn’t mean that will work every year. We are always trying to find ways to coax more flavor out of the wine,” he says.

Since his first vintage in 1997, this has been his simple goal, but the journey has been more complex. For this winemaker, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley and came to be interested in wine first as a collector and taster of Bordeaux wines, the journey has been one of trial and error, of starting from scratch, and of tasting, testing and more testing.

And slowly, the testing has paid off. With a background in the sciences (his first loves were astronomy and meteorology), Andrake sees winemaking as a series of experiments and decisions, reevaluations and adjustments.

For every release, he starts with wine that has been in French oak barrels for up to 34 months. That’s 2-3 years, before the wine ever gets blended or racked. Experimentation with yeast is one piece of the puzzle. “Through trial and error, we know how a particular yeast works with fruit from a particular vineyard,” he says, though he keeps his yeast secrets close to the vest.

When it is time for bottling the wine, he tastes each barrel of cabernet, merlot and cabernet franc, separately over a period of about a week and ranks each one. Then he begins blending, testing samples from each barrel with the equivalent from every other barrel until he finds the magic he’s looking for.

This is how he’s always approached wine, even in his days as a “collector,” a description he spurns. “I didn’t want to call myself a collector,” he says, “because nothing was sacred. It didn’t matter what vineyard a wine was from, I knew what I wanted to taste, then I had to learn how to produce it.”

AOl's Cityguide Seattle says: "Bob Andrake's bigger-than-life persona spills over into his award-winning wines and process, which Ben Smith from Cadence Winery playfully describes as "Bob in a Bottle." Andrake wines age gracefully, but taste great young, good with everything from venison and beef to lasagna and chocolate. "

A second-generation son of Italian immigrants, his father was an aeronautic engineer – science and wine are in the blood. Andrake himself studied astronomy, meteorology and history are the University of California in Los Angeles and Northridge.

But the stars he gazed at changed in 1978 when he was transferred to Washington for his job, and became interested in tasting, buying and collecting wines. The Daily Olympian needed a wine writer, so Andrake started blind-tasting wines and writing about them. He got bit hard by the wine bug, and eventually wanted to learn the process that brought wine from the vineyard to the glass. Volunteering his services to a few small wineries, including Andrew Will, he learned the trade from the mop up. It wasn’t until 1997 that he made his first vintage, a small production of cabernet. “My friends think it is still good, but I’m more critical.”

By 1998, he made about 900 cases of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, as well as a reserve blend of the three. Never concerned with how much wine he made, Andrake chose the best of the best, one of the few wineries to use only free-run juice.

Andrake and his son, Bobby, have also established the Hurricane Ridge label to utilize the juice that didn’t make it into the top tier of the of Andrake wines, usually about 2500 cases. But second place isn’t bad when you are working with such high quality fruit. Although Bobby first laughed at his father’s attempts at being a “garagiste” -- (“I thought it was a joke!”) -- he’s come around and is now enthusiastic about learning how to make wine from his father’s vast experience. Andrake the younger has a goal of increasing production of the Hurricane Ridge label to around 5000 cases over the next few years.

Learning how to produce the wine he envisions is a bit easier, Andrake feels, in Washington state. “We are incredibly lucky here. Washington has had fabulous vintages recently; where you want to be to make wine, as long as we only look for quality.”

Andrake is impressed with the way certain sites in Washington can produce big, bold fruit, and still retain the delicacy of the true varietal flavor, good acidity and balanced alcohol. “We don’t want to make wines with high alcohol. We choose fruit that is under 25 brix, to keep the wine balanced.”

He’s experimented with different varietals as well, including sangiovese, malbec, and syrah, using fruit from many of the best vineyards in the state, including the Red Mountain and Mattawa areas. Right now, he’s also enamoured of certain sites along the Columbia Gorge, where the river keeps the temperature warmer than in other parts of the Columbia Valley. If it is 20 degrees in Walla Walla, it is still 34 on the Columiba Gorge where it is a little dryer and a little warmer. And they don’t get freeze until December 1st, leading to a longer hang time and better balanced fruit. He shoots for fruit from the higher elevations, where fruit gets more stressed to find water and nutrients from the soil, therefore producing

Although Andrake’s come into the business during a golden period for vintages, his eyes light up even more when you mention 2003 and 2004. The cool nights and warm days throughout the long season last year bodes well for the vintage, and 2004 looks promising, too, letting the varietal characteristics he’s looking for come through in the glass. “I want a merlot to taste like a merlot,” he says.

And there will be another move, soon, as Andrake plans on building a larger facility to house the winery in Lacey, near Hawk’s Prairie. A bigger space will make it easier to do his barrels and his testing. But he also takes his show on the road, doing taking unlabeled bottles to wine tastings and winemaker dinners. He takes two or three different blends and lets the attendees give him feedback without having any preconceived notions of what the wine should taste like.

“We try not to fool ourselves. Just because you buy at an expensive vineyard doesn’t guarantee good wine.” So he keeps up a routine of blind tastings and research into the intricate weather pattern of decisions that get him closer to his goals.

Just before leaving, I asked if there was anything more he’d like to say.

“My soapbox?” he asks. I want to make the biggest, baddest, boldest wines I can make.”

Eschewing contests and awards, he sees those who drink his wines as the ultimate judges.
“ When people visit they always want to trade wines, so I know I must be doing something right.”

Now, there’s a small understatement from a maker of big wines.

xxxxxxxx

Reproduction of any part of this site prohibited without permission.
For questions or assistance email Customer Service at store@avalonwine.com 541-752-7418