Classic Wines

Video Transcript: Mike Zimberg Reports - Philip Togni Vineyards

Michael Zimberg:  What would Mikey drink?  Because friends of ours would call all the time and say, I am making this for dinner, what would Mikey drink with that? I have been passionate about wine a long time. So Philip Togni Vineyards, a small limited production. The idea with Togni is, they are really into estate bottling their wines. They grow and they are in-charge of the whole process, all the wine making process. A lot of vineyards will purchase their grapes; they are only bottling grapes that they have grown. They make about 2,000 cases a year and they make their wine in a traditional Bordeaux style. I have had it a few times, I find it to be classic, and not as jammy as some people think of California Cabernet, and I think it will be interesting to talk to them and taste their wine. Philip Togni: My wife will be out to give you a walk through through in just a couple of minutes. I always like to explain that three words convey everything about us. The first word is Small; I mean pretty small, and people call themselves boutique when they have 50,000 cases. We reach 2,000 in a good year. Then the other two words are Estate Bottled, and they are on every label. Legally, it means that we don't buy grapes. We use only these grapes. We make principally one wine. 98% of what we do is just Cabernet, and its made up of the again we copied from the medoc, the way they mixed varieties. So we have five varieties in the M�doc. One is Malbec, we don't fool with that, we do so well -- Mendoza to drink and it does very, very well. 1% is Petit Verdot, 2% is Cabernet Franc, 15% is Merlot, and 82% is Cabernet Sauvignon. The vine has been discovered, it gets to a kind of crossroad; is it going to go that way and make fruit, or is it going to go this way and make leaves? You can predispose it to the way you want, which obviously is grapes. Mike Zimberg: But not too many, you don't want to -- Philip Togni: Well, I will come to that in a minute. You can do that by getting the sun down at the base of the shoots, and that's their on going job. Here on these clusters you can see -- if we look a little bit, you can see three conditions. There is the open flower; I like this stuff, and then there is the set fruit, where the bigger are going to become grapes. The condition I wanted to show you was the closed flower. Those are the closed flowers. Do you see? Each one of those little things will eventually -- the top I think the curolle, this little star shaped, five pointed cover, springs off and releases stamens with pollen sacs at the end, and they self fertilize with water and fair conditions. The pollen blows into a thing called the calyx, and it then swells and becomes the flower. Most of the people today in this part of the world seem to be on the trail of having it terrific when they release it, which usually gets one year in the bottle, at least that's the local custom. Two years in the barrel, one in the bottle. Then six, seven, or eight years later it might not be any good at all. They have a very short life actually. We do almost the opposite. We give it two years in the barrel, we don't give it any time in the bottle. We say, here it is, it just came out of the barrel yesterday. You age it, we can't afford to age it. You age it for as long as you can; one year won't do you any good. Mike Zimberg: So which was the first vintage you produced? Philip Togni: 83. Mike Zimberg: How is that drinking now? Philip Togni: It's just about heading towards the top. In some period it may stop heading down, but it doesn't yet. Mike Zimberg: It's 25 years old. I think this is art, I don't think it's -- I mean, of course you have to make money out of it. Philip Togni: Well, you have to keep an eye. It wouldn't make sense if you made a gorgeous wine, it existed in three bottles, and you couldn't pay the bills as a result, and out of business ten years later. The long haul is what it's about.