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The Right Stuff: Conner-Lee Vineyard

August 30, 2012

Owing to a pair of entrepreneurial growers, Conner-Lee Vineyard is producing grapes in growing demand by vintners on the the quest for elegant wine

Winegrape growers Tom Thorsen (left) and Jerry Bookwalter

Click here to view the article and Wine Picks as it appeared in the Winter 2011 issue.

It takes a certain canniness to coax world class wine out of a vineyard year after year, something growers Jerry Bookwalter and Tom Thorsen know a lot about.  The spirited pair has been the driving force behind Conner-Lee Vineyard since 1988.

Today, the vineyard produces grapes that winemakers clamor for and critics swoon over.  Nearly three dozen wineries are using fruit from Conner-Lee.  The largest customer is Bookwalter Winery, founded in 1983 by Jerry Bookwalter and his wife, Jean, now owned and operated by their son, John Bookwalter.

Over time, winemaker John Bookwalter has developed a keen palate and deep understanding of the flavor profiles the grapes bring to his wines.  “Overall, it’s an elegant style of fruit,” John says.  A true believer, he produces more than one Conner-Lee designated wine (see Wine Picks, page 45), and also uses the fruit in several of his blends.

“The red grapes are soft, with polished tannins, good acidity, with savory herbs, and flavors of forest floor and dark to blue fruits.  The white grapes offer bright, vivid, fresh, delineated fruit with good acid and clarity,” John says.

Arbor Crest’s winemaker Kristina van Löben Sels also makes Conner-Lee designate wines, “This is one of my favorite vineyard sites for Chardonnay in Washington. Some fruit yields spicy, green-apple characters, and some fruit has more of the honey and tropical fruit flavors.  The combination is an intensely lush and concentrated wine.”

Among others buying Conner-Lee grapes are top notch producers like Abeja, àMaurice, Arbor Crest, Barrage Cellars, Buty, Gorman Winery, Guardian, William Church, and the list goes on.

MANY HANDS AT WORK
Grooming the 160-acre Conner-Lee Vineyard to consistently perform among the top sites in the state doesn’t happen without a lot of shrewd guidance, and many helping hands.  “Intense management practices,” is Jerry Bookwalter’s thumbnail sketch.

He explains this involves crop loads, canopy ratios, fruit load management, fruit exposure, irrigation, fertilization, shoot positioning, everything.  “And a lot of hard work,” he adds with emphasis. “Our crews repeatedly make passes through the vineyards throughout the entire growing season.  It’s more man hours per acre, but we think it shows when it comes out in the wine.”

Bookwalter and Thorsen “direct traffic” as they plainly put it, and longtime trusted vineyard manager David Ayalla executes instructions flawlessly in the vineyard. “He’s the on-site guy in the fields leading the crews.  David’s a phenomenal person who’s been here since 1988.  He’s family,” Bookwalter says.

“It comes down to footprints in the field,” Thorsen says.  “The vine at the end of every row is as uniform as the vine on the other side of the block and that takes intelligent, well-informed people like David and his crew.”

Strategies often change.  Thorsen says, “We manage to the vintage.  What we’re doing this year in the field may be different from last year, maybe different from next year—because each vintage is different.”

A COOLER SITE
Named after the owners Bill Connor and Rhody Lee, the vineyard was planted in 1982.  Situated on sandy loam soils along the upper east edge of the Wahluke Slope in the Columbia Valley appellation, Conner-Lee is considered among the cooler sites and as a result, one of the last to be picked during harvest.

The vineyard has 146 acres that are planted to several leading varietals, including Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay, Malbec, Merlot, Syrah, and Viognier.

Several winemakers commented about why this site is so remarkable:

John Bookwalter of Bookwalter Winery says, “The site is unique because it is a cool site within a warm area (saddle mountains).  With less wind pressure and heat, the vineyard consistently puts out polished, elegant style fruit.  With a very subtle slope and soil that is remarkably consistent throughout all 140 acres, the fruit tends to be very consistent from corner to corner and vintage to vintage.”

Kristina van Löben Sels of Arbor Crest says, “Conner-Lee Vineyard is a unique growing site for Chardonnay. The cooler climate allows for extended hang time which results in a wine that is rich and complex.”

Marcus Rafanelli of William Church says, “Conner-Lee is a cooler site and the Viognier always ends up with beautiful aromatics, nicely balanced with good acidity. In cooler years the flavors tend toward citrus and stone fruit while in warmer vintages it leans toward tropical fruits and pear flavors.”

OUTSIDE OF THE BOX
Great vineyards don’t happen by accident.  Early on, Bookwalter and Thorsen started conducting annual vintner barrel tasting’s, inviting the winemakers to bring barrel samples from the preceding vintage, giving both growers and vintners a chance to critique each other’s wines and exchange ideas.

“It’s been a great learning experience for the vintners, and the feedback for us as growers has been great,” Bookwalter says.

Thorsen points out how this practice has improved the quality, “We can take a block of Merlot and examine 13 different barrel samples from 13 different wineries, all from the same fruit and same vintage. It helps us as a grower, because we can find out where the common threads are, and where differences are.”

Vintners too, benefit from the tastings.  Thorsen says, “We’ve been an incubator for a lot of small wineries by getting them started with really good fruit and a chance to share with knowledgeable winemakers that have done it a while.”

GLOBE TROTTING CONSULTANTS
Through their connection to Bookwalter Winery, Conner-Lee Vineyard has enjoyed the rare and enviable position of working with some of the wine industry’s top consultants such as Zelma Long, Phillip Freese, and recently Claude Gros.

“They’re all fascinating viticulturists in their own right.  They’re literally looking at vineyards around the world, and we’re able to look at this vineyard through their eyes,” Jerry Bookwalter says.  “They’ve been good friends to Tom and me, and brought cutting edge stuff to us.”

With hardly any viticulture practices remaining that Bookwalter and Thorsen haven’t tried already, where do they go from here?

Bookwalter says, “I was in the orchard-growing side of farming long before the vineyards.  You try to make your orchard look like a cookie-cutter, where every tree looks like the one on either side of it.  Well, you try to do the same thing in the vineyards, but it’s much more difficult because you have more vines per acre than you do orchard trees.  But as much as we can, that’s an effort of ours, to cookie cutter the vineyard.  You never quite get there, but you keep working toward it.”

Written by John Vitale

 

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Tasting Room® magazine is the ultimate authority on the Washington wine scene and your personal tour guide to wineries, vineyards, destinations and travel tips, and artisan foods, chefs and artists. In short, Tasting Room is a metaphor for life’s simple pleasures that pair remarkably well with wine—touring, food, travel, culture, recreation and people.

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