JamesSuckling Interviews: Matt Dees

JamesSuckling Interviews features innovative and influential winery owners, winemakers and industry notables representing the new generation that is shaping tastes, trends and techniques in the greater wine world. 

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In his 20-plus years of winemaking spanning Vermont, Napa, New Zealand and now Santa Barbara, winemaker Matt Dees has established a track record of proving people wrong and defying odds. His early love of the “efficiency of plants” led him from his native Kansas to the University of Vermont for a soil science degree, followed by winemaking in Vermont and vintages at Staglin Family Vineyard in Napa and Craggy Range in Hawke's Bay, New Zealand, before his final landing in Santa Barbara at Jonata and The Hilt. A lover of vibrant, “electric” wines, Dees’ experimental nature and deep understanding of weather, soil, vines and varietal expression have found an ideal match in the Ballard Canyon and Santa Rita Hills vineyards, from which he produces elegant and award-winning blends and single-variety bottlings of pinot, syrah, chardonnay and cabernet – as well as from newer projects in assyrtiko, picolit and beyond.

We talked to Matt about the challenges of maintaining tension in wines in the face of a warming climate, why he considers being a good listener a key to his winemaking success, how his time in New Zealand steeled him to Mother Nature’s biggest blows and why he thinks California should stop planting low-acid varieties.

Jonata and The Hilt draw grapes from very different microclimates: Jonata in warm Ballard Canyon, and The Hilt from the cool and windy Santa Rita Hills. How do they differ and how do you tackle managing such different varieties in these very unique terroirs?

Even though they're similar in being in the margins of the margins, those margins are rather different. Jonata is in a warmer area; Ballard Canyon is 25 miles away from the coast. You get warmer days and then really cold nights, with that giant diurnal shift, which is so instrumental in ripening cabernet but keeping energy. Sometimes it’s not that easy to ripen there and it's quite surprising. The Hilt is wild and crazy: seven to nine miles from the coast and windblown. It makes stunning wines, but it sure is a miserable place to spend time, which I think some of the greatest vineyards in the world are. The Hilt is struggling to ripen chardonnay and pinot noir. It has to get to the 11th hour of the 11th day to get those ripe. Jonata is dealing with more the Bordelais grapes and the Rhone varieties.

As a winery, we are first and foremost an estate. We own our own properties. We farm them, we harvest those grapes, we make those wines, we age them under our own roof and bottle them ourselves. And we wanted to own properties that were in the margins of the margins, to make exciting grapes with energy and something that pulls you in with that tension. We found that we had to grow these grapes just right where they'll ripen and then push them a little bit further away from that comfort zone.

Let’s talk about the 2022 vintage and how you dealt with the heat dome of extreme highs during early September.

I had the pleasure of making wine in New Zealand for a number of years (at Craggy Range) and I was there for a couple vintages that were “New Zealand bad.” Extreme, with rains and locusts and blood in the rivers and frogs falling from the sky. That said, the 2022 heat spike here [in Santa Barbara] was pretty difficult. It was interesting because it was a cold vintage leading up to that heat spike and there was a lot of disparity in ripeness, not only between vines, but in single vines and single clusters, with pink, green, red, black grapes on the same cluster. So for the first couple of days, the heat actually pushed ripeness forward in a good way, to at least be more even.

Beyond that, even though it was it was relatively small yield for us, we thrived by picking things over a period of time. For example for the pinot noir, we picked some of the fruit on the early side before the heat got really extreme, from some of the early-ripening sites that offered soft, pretty and pure fruit expression. Then we had the blessing of being able to irrigate and watered very lightly. Initially the vines shut down. They did not take water during that heat spike. Eventually they took it and started metabolizing again. We ended up getting phenolic maturity, which is the big thing. The blessing is that we farm our own properties and that goes a long way – to make our decisions, to wait for our decisions to come to fruition and then act. We were completely in control of our destiny with that vintage. And it worked. I love those wines.

How did the cabernet and other varieties fare?

The cabernet and those grapes at Jonata were at a perfect stage of ripeness when that heat hit, so they kind of mellowed out for that heat. We were able to keep shrivel at a minimum. And then they took water and we waited.

Can you talk about the partner projects of The Hilt estate vineyards – Radian and Bentrock in particular – such as Montemar, Alma Rosa, Samsara, Dusty Nabor, which use The Hilt fruit?

Radian and Bentrock are both about 100 acres, and there's too much pinot and chardonnay for us to keep at The Hilt. Since we purchased the property in 2014, we have had partners. I think the most interesting part of the relationship of The Hilt growing and selling to all these buyers is that we have the ultimate authority to say, yes, you can bottle with our name or no, you cannot bottle with the name of the vineyard. Just quality control and protecting the name. But we’ve never had any issues because they're such great producers here. And the fruit, if I may say so myself, is pretty damn good.

Your passion for chardonnay leaning toward an “electric” and acidic style dates back to a time before palates were leaning in that direction. What convinced you that this approach to chardonnay in California was the one to pursue?

We didn’t come into the vineyards with the idea that we wanted to make Chablis, Puligny-Montrachet or something big and rich like old-school Napa. We listened to what the vineyard said and then reacted. To say there's acid in these wines is a bit of an understatement. And if we wanted to cook the acid out of these grapes for some God-awful reason, we couldn't do it. When we first started making the wines, malolactic fermentation was something we discussed but a lot of them wouldn't go through ML because the pH was so low. That style was really given as a gift, as a conversation between ourselves and our properties. And I'm happy with it.

Climate change presents unpredictable challenges and requires an almost constant presence in the vineyard. What are those particular challenges for your projects and Santa Barbara County as a whole, and has your own approach to viticulture prepared you for the weather and climate changes you’re seeing in Santa Barbara and the Santa Rita Hills?

We have two vineyards that are reactionary. You have to stay one step ahead of what's going to happen. But we’ve had a lot of training and practice. We work with Ruben Solorzano, who's a really wonderful vineyard manager, and we spend every day together, basically walking the vines. The sand at Jonata reacts instantly to climatic change. Rain hits it and it goes down deep, and dries out quickly. The diatomaceous earth soils that we have at Radian and Bentrock are also very reactionary. There’s a ton of clay under there creating a sponge where you're going to have moisture if it gets hot. Our other concerns include increasing salinity in our groundwater and lack of access to groundwater.

Are you experimenting with new varieties in the face of these changes?

To me, there's nothing worse in the world than a flat wine. And for some reason, in California, we continue in the face of increasing warmth to plant lower- and lower-acid grapes. It just drives me crazy.

Winemaking should be a waltz. It doesn't necessarily need to be a tango, right? You can find grapes that become stable. They make great wines that are stable without adding all this crap in them. We are doing big experiments at Jonata and The Hilt with uncommon grapes. Ones that hold acid, like assyrtiko, where if you plant them in Santorini the sun just blazes them and you can't get the acid out. Petit manseng, furmint, picolit. Same thing. We’re also growing some nebbiolo.

You’re known to take chances in your winemaking, including forgoing traditional methods like grape sorting. What would you consider the most successful “unconventional” risk you have taken in your winemaking career?

The greatest successful risk we took that kind of defines the way our company works and the way we look at the world was how we started Jonata. People said it was a dumb idea to grow grapes on sand because it doesn't work and that if you’re going to grow grapes on it, you have to grow syrah. Our neighbors make beautiful syrah and we make a great one. But we also are a young region, so we have to be diligent and try things, because maybe we're going to miss the true nature of what this this valley is meant for. We currently have 18 grapes out there at Jonata and that's risky. People would say we lack focus, but it's actually quite the opposite. We have our core of grapes that we still love: cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, sauvignon blanc, syrah. But we took a risk with assyrtiko – which is a wine that really stops you in your tracks and one that others are already making successfully in California – planting a half-acre of it on vertical shoot position [VSP],  and we made our first barrel last year. It’s got such a future in California for us. Sauvignon blanc can be such a gorgeous, luxurious wine when we grow it at Ballard Canyon and when you add that acidity, bitterness, length and resinous nature.

Your time at Staglin, Craggy Range and beginnings of taking on the Jonata project happened at a relatively young age. Do you think there was an advantage to your youth and how did it influence your thinking in approaching these projects?

I think starting at an early age, you realize that you have to show up early and you have to give a shit and you're going to get dirty and it's going to be kind of miserable, and you're going to find yourself selling wine in the middle of a blizzard somewhere. You're going to find yourself in the middle of a vineyard pruning with your hands frozen. It's going to be all these parts of the industry that if you get the industry later, become frustrating. If you get into them young, they become part of the rhythm and you embrace it. And for me, this industry is all about cycle, the rhythm. And I find it unbelievably charming. But it sure as shit isn't romantic.

How did you get your start?

I fell into winemaking kind of ass-backwards. I was always a plant kid. Plants make more sense to me than people. Their logic, their ferociously efficient nature. I was going to do something with plants. I was going to do trees. But then I ended up getting a job growing vines in Vermont in ’97-‘98. I could barely drink. And then I got into importing. But also, you have to put yourself in a position to be lucky. And I did that. I was some idiot from Kansas who had gone to school in Vermont, and Andy Erickson [ at the time the winemaker for Staglin] took me in. I don't know why. And then I worked with the late, great Doug Wisor [the founding winemaker of Craggy Range] and the late, great Adrian Baker [the pinot noir winemaker at Craggy Range], which changed my life. And I picked something up everywhere I went.

Would you say any one philosophy unites the winemaking you have done over your career? Has it changed over time?

I think the approach has always been really simple. It’s showing up early and giving a shit. I think you have to care. And it sounds so simple and so dumb, but you have to pay attention. You have to be a good listener. Certainly our case here at Jonata and The Hilt, we have a really remarkable team of people who care. As a team, we've proven a lot of people wrong but more importantly, we have pride in what we do. And that shows in the wines. I've taken little things from everywhere: balance from New Zealand, the importance of power from Napa, the importance of sticking with it from Vermont because Lord knows, to make wine in Vermont you have to be tough as nails. That certainly plays into the philosophy and the way that we make wine. But at the end of the day, the simple recipe for us has always been find beautiful vineyards, farm them with every attention to detail, and then surround yourself with and kind of eccentric cast of characters who care as much as you do.

What new projects are on the horizon for you?

I'm giddy about our dry-farm, head-train approach for Jonata. It's how people farmed in California and everywhere else until the last century. It’s not groundbreaking, but it just works on our property.

We have two blocks now that are about 660 vines per acre planted at eight by eight feet. Next week we're going to start putting vines in the ground, 4x4. We have an acre of petit manseng, of small-selection cabernet franc, an acre of sauvignon blanc with a small amount of picolit in it. I’m so excited to go into the winery tomorrow and taste our tanks of riesling. And then syrah at The Hilt: who would have thought that syrah would work at a place where it's almost too cold to ripen pinot? It has all the best parts of syrah – you have a glass on the table and you're afraid to look away because it might crawl out of the glass and run across the table. It’s a beast and it's unapologetic and it's spicy. And we're just starting. Those grafts are young. At The Hilt, we continue to find the pinot noir sections that are appropriate. We’re just scratching the surface of what’s possible.

– Susan Kostrzewa