Episode 207: Benjamin Leachman - Walsh Vineyards Management and Vidi Vitis

Podcast: Inside Winemaking
Host: Jim Duane
Guest: Benjamin Leachman
Recorded: October 31, 2025

Jim Duane
Ben, okay. Ben, thank you for doing this. I'm excited to have this conversation. It's long time coming. These are always the hardest conversations for me, because we know each other, we've worked together. So I do want to ask you to talk a little bit about your background for the benefit of people that don't know you that are listening. So let's start there and give me the quick intro and how you got interested in wine and how you got to where you are today, and then we'll take it from there, please.

Benjamin Leachman
I get kind of exhausted answering this question, because it's not, not a quick one. Currently, I'm director of viticulture and winemaker at large at Walsh vineyards management. I oversee about 1000 acres in Napa. The company does more in Napa as well as Sonoma, I have found, I found that I really like working together with hard other hard working people like that gives me a lot of joy, a lot of value, respect for other people, like hard workers, like, like, when, when I got to work with you at Seavey from 2011 to 2014 like, we were both hard working, had a common goal, and In that like, that was very fulfilling for me. Has taken, you know, 22 years in the wine industry to come to that 2004 I was graduating with a degree in biochemistry from a liberal arts school, and didn't know what I wanted to do. My brother needed, needed a roommate. He was getting a PhD at UC Davis, and I needed a job, so he took my resume and brought it around places he thought his younger brother should work, which were breweries and wineries. So I got a job, as in a lab at a winery that, at the time, was the biggest estate Chardonnay producer in California, RH Phillips, it. It was sold multiple times while I was there, eventually to constellation, constellation,

Jim Duane
I'm sorry, but remind me what you were there, because I worked there the harvest of 2002 hmm, as a grape sampler. Yeah, there's just a quick job. But were you there after?

Benjamin Leachman
Yes, I started in, June, 2004 2004 as a they call it a harvest lab intern. Two weeks into the job, they gave me a, you know, full time lab position, and eventually I was assistant winemaker, very cool. And so I helped manage the off site barrel facility. We did half a million SKUs of a single, sorry, half a million cases of a single skew Chardonnay known as toasted head, that you can now find in Costco for 599 above. It's kind of a blow, but that's what you know. That's how I learned what constellation was, and it's where I got my my first taste of the science behind wine making, and the the folks there, the staff, were great, answered a lot of my questions. Couldn't answer some other ones, so I eventually found my way back to school. Got a second bachelor's in vene at UC Davis, and I got a master's in horticulture and agronomy, which is where they put viticulture students at that time before returning to to the industry. Well, I mean, I took the summers to do wine making internships, but I didn't start back full time until Seavey in 2011

Jim Duane
so I hired you at Seavey a week after I arrived, the first of August. So you, you and I were the harvest team for that year, and then we stayed on to be the vineyard manager, to take over after Mario, who's kind of a fixture at the place he had lived on the property and been there for decades, kind of built the vineyards with Bill.

Jim Duane
Seavey, yeah. It let

Jim Duane
me think of way to phrase these questions. I'll do this quickly, because we still have to get to your current, current role and your current job. But what did you learn at Seavey? It's a huge like, just the other end of the spectrum of winery from from RH Phillips.

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, well, I had a passion for making wine at home and the physical labor of it, you know, I had, I liked the craft of wine making, you know, CB was a chance to do that on a larger scale, but, but putting in to use a lot of the technical knowledge that I I had barrels were something that I knew back and forth because of toasted head. So really, you know, Seavey was an exploration into Cabernet Sauvignon. I wasn't a huge Cabernet Sauvignon fan, you know, I really loved the Merlot. I still love the Merlot from Seavey. I think it's one of the best Merlots in California. But you know, Chardonnay for whatever, you know, for what it's worth was, was what we did at RH Phillips that really got me into wine

Jim Duane
when I was there the vineyard sample, and then I did a lot of checking Brix and temperatures in the barrel room. They would send me into the barrel room. The HR lady would run through with the CO two monitor, literally, like, open the door, run through, check that it was in the legal limit, and then run out. And she's like, Okay, now you can go, yeah. And I remember the floors were just oozing with over spilled leaves. Was that still the case

Benjamin Leachman
in your era, floor drains are really nice to have. You know, that's if you walk into a winery that doesn't have floor drains. The the off site barrel facility didn't have floor drains, and we had to have one of those machines that vacuums, squeegees and vacuums, I think safety was kicked up a notch a bit at RH Phillips when I was there,

Jim Duane
maybe after I put the floor grade into the floor auger.

Benjamin Leachman
Don't like that. That will make a noise. Get some attention really quick.

Jim Duane
I'm sorry. I'm getting us off track. Okay,

Jim Duane
one of the things I thought was incredible about about you taking the vineyard management position at Seavey was you were willing to do frost and art. See me, asked me if I was willing to do frost, and I said, Hell no, I will be here. I will do all your winery work. I'll do all the wine making. But I'm not. A, I don't want to live here and B, I don't want to spend all night out in the cold, in the dark, I'm afraid of the dark, and I know there's coyotes and all this stuff, but I remember Mario just talking about how, I mean, remember the Wonder Bread? He always talked about how you got to have a loaf of bread in the back of the truck to shove in the pipe to plug it, if you got to dig up and fix a break. Yeah.

Benjamin Leachman
He also gave me his 22 Winchester and told me that you never know what you're going to find out in the dark. Oddly enough, not the weirdest thing somebody has told me about vineyard management, I applied for a job once where they wanted the applicant to have a concealed carry permit. And I said, No, are you serious? This is some you know, one of your one of your requirements. He said, Yeah. During the fires, we had people from Lake County coming down through our vineyards, and, you know, we really wanted somebody there, packing heat. Wow, not, not the job for me, but, but I could carry a 22 in the in the truck. I was up for the challenge of frost, and for better, for worse, I never did an overseas harvest, but I think I learned a whole lot you know about the entire process at Seavey. You know, I was feeding cows before it was cool to do that in vineyards, right? We ran the the, you know, Saturday tasting room. But, but frost boy, I remember that, that little sensor phone, you know, starting to ring in my ear at 11pm thinking, oh my gosh, I got to get up and get wet. But you have a feel for the for the vineyard really well. You know, if you have a 40 acre vineyard that you're at, you know, seven days a week, waking up, feeding the cows, you know, seeing the work that's out there, that was an experience. I wouldn't give up. Now with vineyard management, I see, you know, 25 of those, and I don't have, I don't know the vine that I pass, you know, seven times a year on a tractor and see boy that really needs to, you know, addressed, you know, I don't have that vine by vine relationship.

Benjamin Leachman
But I know you can, you can get that

Benjamin Leachman
at some point though, it's it's what Barry Bergman told me at RH Phillips was, Ben being a good winemaker isn't about doing all the work yourself. It's about hiring the people you trust to do it the way you want it to be done. And I think it's the same way with, you know, vineyard management,

Benjamin Leachman
I trust the people that I've hired to

Benjamin Leachman
manage each each vine the way it needs to be managed.

Jim Duane
Okay, so you leave Seavey, take us through your journey to get to where you are. Now, we got to talk about your job at Walsh, but also your your independent wine making too,

Benjamin Leachman
yeah. Well, I kind of, I was, I was, I saw something shiny while I was at CB. You know, I was, I saw something. It was, it was a director of wine making position that didn't have have the right fit after. Are all but it looked like a really awesome position in a really cool place. I mean, just amazing, immaculate, 20,000 square foot sellers, but just not the right fit for me. And that was a pretty quick harvest. It you know, I think that when I hear somebody is applying to work at checkerboard, my advice is, you know, I pride myself on being somebody who can work with quote, unquote, difficult people. But, but, boy, I met my match.

Benjamin Leachman
So I, I,

Benjamin Leachman
I actually was on disability for six months after checkerboard. And it was, it was tough, you know, the industry was still pretty compacted with applicants. You know, people would talk about 300 applications. It was before AI, so people didn't know how to whittle those down or game them. And I, you know, I basically stayed on wine jobs.com and was refreshing, you know, every hour trying to see what was out there. And actually, my wife

Benjamin Leachman
talked to one of her friends

Benjamin Leachman
that got me the job eventually at Walsh. So it was, you know, once again, like, the whole nepotism side of things, like,

Jim Duane
really, just have your friends down there get you jobs. Yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
it's like, it's kind of, it's, it's being older, you kind of look back and think, Why was I so, like, upset about taking advantage of my connections like that was really dumb and really held back my, you know, my growth. Like, I don't know what the ego is there that, you know, I thought it there was something, you know, dignified about not trying to make use of of who, you know, I think that's

Jim Duane
just a young thing you want to go out and strike on your own. Yeah, you know, build by your own sweat, but part of that is building a network and then using it,

Benjamin Leachman
yep, so, so, night and day, starting at Walsh versus starting at Seavey. I I felt like I had absolutely no impact at Seavey. I felt like, boy, if, if I don't do this job, it may not get done today, you know, like, like, this is dependent on me running the frost, you know, system,

Jim Duane
because Seavey, just so people know, was you as vineyard manager. And then three guys in the vineyard at that time, four, four, okay, four.

Benjamin Leachman
And then a mechanic slash tractor driver when he wanted to, yeah,

Jim Duane
when he was sober.

Benjamin Leachman
So at Walsh, I got to reflect on my, you know, vineyard management, at Seavey and and understand the way a large company has to do all those tasks was significantly different than the way an Estate Winery has to do all those tasks.

Jim Duane
Can you give me an example,

Benjamin Leachman
ECPs, oh, a requirement for Walsh if we're going to touch a redevelopment project, just in case people don't know what that is. Erosion control permit

Benjamin Leachman
in 1993

Benjamin Leachman
big part of a mountain that had been freshly ripped by a vineyard manager slid into Bell Canyon, which was the water source for St Helena, I believe, and that created the requirements to to monitor and control what, what, how vineyards are operated in Napa County. And the erosion control permit restricts you from being able to do certain things during certain times of the year, and in some cases, at all. So anything over a 30% slope is not to be developed into vineyard. Things between five and 30% can have varying degrees of operations take place on it based on a number of factors, including the soil type and the slope. Just it's, it's kind of, it's enforced through third parties in Napa, so erosion engineers are the enforcement, but they're also the vendor for the the plans. So they have an odd there's, they're in in a tight spot the county pushes them to make it hard on the vineyards. The vineyards don't want it to be hard, so they'll find the easiest engineer to work with. There are a number of vineyards that issue the whole process altogether. At Walsh, no, we're not going to touch it if. Doesn't have an ECP.

Jim Duane
I mean, it's Halloween tomorrow, so late October. So I spent, you know, a third of my day working with our engineer for the erosion control work that we're doing right now to make sure that we're fully good and signed off for this our control for this year. Well,

Benjamin Leachman
you're in the Yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
you're in the lake Hennessy watershed. That's a municipal watershed. September 15, I believe, is a cut off for for that erosion control things, unless you get an extension.

Benjamin Leachman
But it's, it's, yeah, it's a lot of work,

Benjamin Leachman
but not something that was a major focus when I was at Seavey.

Benjamin Leachman
There are other things too,

Benjamin Leachman
just at Seavey, I felt like we always started early on one side of the block and finished late on the other, you know, at the end with whatever practice we were doing, that wasn't as, I mean, that was on a much larger scale, Walsh, you know, we had, we would throw a crew of, you know, let's say 16 people at something and knock it out and be done with it, and then move them somewhere else.

Jim Duane
How big is wash? In terms of people,

Benjamin Leachman
we have about 125 full time, what we call seniority folks that we try to give 10 months worth of work to excuse me during vine hand work season. So late April to early July, when we're doing all the shoot tucking and leafing and cluster thinning and all that good stuff, we may ramp up an additional 400 people. Wow, during harvest we have, we have about nine palanx for mechanical harvest. They take care of, you know, maybe half of the harvesting that we do. So we only need, well, I mean, we need we use less laborers during harvest than we do during the peak fine hand work season. We had about 24 crews of eight people join us for harvest.

Benjamin Leachman
So 192 people, I guess,

Jim Duane
how much fruit can a good crew harvest on flat land, in a easy situation, in a shift, yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
well, you know, if it's, if it's an eight foot row, and you're carrying like, like six or eight tons per acre,

Benjamin Leachman
you can, you can do,

Benjamin Leachman
I think you can expect to do, gosh, one crew. This is math that I haven't had to work on. Usually I my math is, like,

Benjamin Leachman
you know, a person a ton for an eight hour shift.

Jim Duane
Okay, well, then, but this is, yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
I would say that

Benjamin Leachman
when we push it in the right situation, we can probably pick that in three hours. You know, there's a there's a calculation to fill a box, you know, is a certain amount of time, a macro bin. We there's no good like nomenclature for vineyards versus wineries, like we call macro bin boxes, we call Valley bins, bins, you know, then, then the, the seven gallon, you know, Valley bins that I call Valley bins because I'm from the Central Valley, they call tubs. So there's, there's kind of a mismatch of nomenclature, but, but we look at it that way, and try to staff accordingly. And a lot of what, what I help Walsh with is try to staff each pick with the correct amount of people. And boy, is it, is it clone four Chardonnay, or is it, you know,

Benjamin Leachman
you know, client, clone 96

Jim Duane
is it? So, clone four be big clusters. It varies. Dijon, clone, smaller clusters,

Benjamin Leachman
yeah. So, so one, you know, one cluster might be half a pound, or it might be 10th of a pound, and that's going to really change the amount of speed that a harvester is going at, but I say in general, you know, we expect a 10 ton night. Boy. That may be two crews four hours, I guess is how I would look at that. But that's math that that usually Excel does for me,

Jim Duane
fair enough. Okay, sorry. I mean, we're in harvest mode. I know, you know you got to get to bed so you can get up early and pick fruit in the morning. So like, fruit is on the mine and these logistics are on the mine, but tell me a little bit more about. Your role at Walsh, and then let's, let's also talk about some of the other wines that you make.

Benjamin Leachman
Definitely. Well, I started as just kind of a database manager. A lot of vineyard management companies use the software called ag code. It's maybe the only good one. It's a little expensive, and it's sort of a equivalent to maybe as 400 Not, not as as rudimentary AMS is pretty low, you know, I don't know, I don't know winemakers database as well, but it's not as I think, I think the last time I used winemakers database, there was a lot of weird windows and pop ups, and this doesn't have that, that kind of graphical stumble. You know that, you know, AG, code is mostly just a point and click. We do all our payroll through it. I manage all the block data and the historical data in it. But that morphed, that morphed into client relations. My history in wine making, I think, gave me a special skill. You know, not only can I speak a little Spanish to the to the to the to the farm workers, but I can speak a little wine maker to the wineries, and that was a skill that that I think is still valued at my company. So I get to interact with a lot of different wine makers. It's a different way. I mean, when I was on the winemaking side, I would go visit a winery, and I felt that there was a little bit of attention with the, you know, like, maybe they were concerned. I was judging them a little bit as a vineyard man, vineyard guy, like, they don't care. They know, you're a joker. Like, they're, like, they're, they're a lot, you know, it's a little bit more easy going to visit a winemaker and discuss all their processes with them and and try to figure out what their goals are for a specific block. Yeah. Can

Jim Duane
we go into that a little bit like, what are the questions you ask when you're trying to figure out what a winemaker

Jim Duane
needs specifically with the grapes?

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah? Well, I mean, ideally, ideally, money is not part of the equation, but almost all the time it is. So budgeting is a big part of that conversation, and there becomes a tourge. Okay, well, we really like these blocks, so let's focus on what we can do in these blocks, and then if we can't do it everywhere, at least we've got, you know, our a tier is like flagged. So what is it about your a tier that you'd like to improve? What's there that that we need to maintain? As you may have noticed when you know Mario at Seavey, the vineyard manager, step stepped back. You know, I didn't go and change every you know, root stock decision or irrigation like I'm not a I don't flip over the chess board. I try, you know, kind of ease into it. Learn how it's been done before. You know, don't try and reinvent the wheel and make little changes as you go, as you learn. I think I have a lot of respect for those who came before, which is, you know, benefited me in some ways, but maybe hindered me in other ways. So finding out, you know, what they'd like their their block to do for them is important. You know, some what's important to the winemaker, then needs to be important to me. We need to have a shared vision for for for what that finish line looks like, and and we go for it. And I love that vineyard management relies so much on on data and experimentation. It's, it's never, you know, it's never really focused or drilled down on grape quality, outside of terms like Brix. PH, ta, so it doesn't have all the solutions, but I think it's a little bit more measurable than than wine quality on the winemaker side. So it's a little easier to make decisions for other people on the vineyard side than I think it is on the winery side. So that's kind of where I try to make all my decisions be rooted in, in, you know, good practices or sound science, and go from there.

Jim Duane
So if, if you were meeting a potential winemaker client, and they said, Okay, I've got this vineyard. I want, you know, three. Five tons per acre. I wanted it this ripeness. It's cabs. We got to have the canopy open so we didn't get green. Maybe that was a problem for them in the past. They have some like, basic things they want from a wine perspective, what are the other key things that you need to talk to them about, to assess the vineyard and then assess, like, if this is a good fit, and how to manage the vineyard, yeah. I mean, an established vineyard, yeah, not a development.

Benjamin Leachman
I think a lot of it comes from what, what value can I bring to the to the vineyard? What's, what's inherently valuable to the winemaker Is it, is it owl boxes? Do you want to have photos of owls for your social media? Is it? Is it a reduce, reduction of inputs? I love to work on, you know, reducing inputs in a vineyard, if I can.

Jim Duane
So you're talking about tractor passes and things like that, yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
any, any and all. I mean chemical inputs, you know, fossil fuel inputs. There's a lot of activity in in, you know, the regenerative, organic, sustainable world. And I think there's, there's good things to be had, good discussions to be had in that space. I think some of it is, you know, some of it I just have to trudge through. And, you know, check those boxes. Okay. We, you know, we want to be fish friendly and be friendly and, you know, sometimes those may conflict, you know, what, what? What are we prioritizing

Benjamin Leachman
so? So I think that

Benjamin Leachman
the vineyard guys know how to run the vineyard, you know, the vineyard supervisor, the field workers, they've done it on, you know, a million grapevines by this point in their their lives. I'm not going to tell them, you know, the right way to do anything, but I want, I want the way it ends up to be what the winemaker expects it to look like. If, if the winemaker says, Boy, that Cabernet is really green. We should leaf it more next year. What do you think about that is, Do I have your buy in? We're going to go do it. I'm I'm also a pesticide. Oh, gosh. What's the DPR,

Benjamin Leachman
PCA, pesticide

Benjamin Leachman
certificate, advisor, pest control advisor, there he is. Thank goodness. Also a CCA, a crop. Yeah, I can't tell you it's like way past my bedtime. Sorry, it's harvest. So, so there are things that I'll watch out for. I found a number of invasive species at vineyards in the past, some of which I had to report to the county

Benjamin Leachman
and try to get those addressed.

Benjamin Leachman
But I don't know, it's kind of a tough question. What else do I bring to a to a vineyard. Besides, maybe

Jim Duane
I can phrase this better, a winemaker very often might not have a deep knowledge of viticulture. They know what they want the grapes to look like and weigh when they show up in September. There's a lot of things. Obviously, there's a lot of things that go into getting the fruit there. Yeah, you know, a lot of winemakers aren't necessarily thinking about buying nutrition, fertilization programs and, you know, soil amendments and things like this. And, you know, obviously they don't want powdery mildew or any sort of pathogens and on their grapevines, but there's a lot of nuance to that. I'm sort of curious, like, what's the dance with the winemaker to try and understand how they want to approach these things that maybe they're not thinking about or involved with very often,

Benjamin Leachman
I think that one of the larger tasks I do is not surprise anybody, if there is a client that wants to, you know, edge with powdery mildew, like I will go down that route with them. You know, there's one of my favorite quotes from Roger Bolton was, you know, if there are multiple ways to do one thing, probably doesn't matter which one you do like, probably it all works out fine in in various situations. So, so growing grapes isn't you know, for me, boy, there's a big spectrum of how to do it. I was fortunate enough to go to Davis with some a wide spectrum of folks who are out in the world, you know, doing crazy things, trellising grapes on on trees in Oregon, you know, like one of my friends bought Uber vines, which are 36 inch vines, and rather than taking advantage of the extra height and planting them, you know, in a in a foot hole, he dug a 30 inch hole and planted the whole thing down in there, you know. So, like, there's a lot of experimentation

Jim Duane
with the Scion roots, potentially, well,

Benjamin Leachman
so with Uber vines. It's all root stock up to the very the graft union is very top of the ground.

Jim Duane
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so he wanted an extra rooting potential,

Benjamin Leachman
yeah. Take advantage of all that extra rooting potential. So, so you can do it a lot of different ways. And if, if I'm showing up. You know, at harvest with, you know, half the fruit that they were expecting, or twice as much as the fruit. I think that causes more issues than whether something was, you know, leafed appropriately or not. I do like, I mean, there are some really cool, you know, measure ways of analyzing the phenolics and the the anthocyanins, and there are tweaks you can do and and we're still kind of experimenting with those, and seeing, seeing if we can make what happens In the vineyard relate to what happens in the winery. But there's a little bit of a disconnect there. I think that if a client goes, says, hey, just make this the best quality Cabernet that we can that's, that's really that's my time to play a bit and take a little bit more risk and a little bit more of an extreme stance on grape growing. But usually there's a there's a cost to implement, you know, constraint that makes the whole thing boring.

Jim Duane
What is some of the things that money enables you to do such that situation where you were describing where you want to you know, they money is not an issue. They want super high quality. What might you do that you wouldn't do in a more constrained situation?

Benjamin Leachman
I think the biggest boy, the biggest thing that I would love to have the money to do in any situation is if there are replants, you need to have a second drip line to irrigate those replants. There are so many situations where they try to shoehorn replants into an operating vineyard, and it fails every time. Like that is one investment you know that you can't, that you can't,

Benjamin Leachman
yeah, overload, skimp out on water.

Benjamin Leachman
Uniformity, or rather uniformity in your vineyard, is exacerbated by about the time your vineyards 15, your your drip line was designed to last for 10 years, and you're going to try and get another 10 years out of it when it's already five years over its prime. No no vineyard I've worked with has has taken the step to tear out the drip line at 15 years and replace it entirely. I think that it for water savings and for wine quality and uniformity. I think that's something I'd like to get to.

Jim Duane
All right, that's pretty cool. Yeah, so you said that you're the I forgot the actual words that you use, but special projects, winemaker for Walsh, yeah. Does that mean you're actually making some wine for Walsh?

Benjamin Leachman
We don't have, we're not a bonded winery, yeah? So we custom crush, but I have got to custom crush for a number of clients. We, we, you know, have have Estate Winery clients as well as grower clients. The past couple of years, growers have had more fruit to deal with and don't have a winery to try and salvage the value of their crop. So I've got a chance to dip my toes in that a bit.

Jim Duane
So you're working with like a custom crush place, and are you writing protocols for the winemaking? Wow. Yeah, cool.

Benjamin Leachman
Also looking at a project now we have had a long term relationship with Byron kusagi Making some Pinot Noir for Walsh that Walsh grows. Walsh owns,

Benjamin Leachman
and he we're. Talking about

Benjamin Leachman
when Byron retires, who's going to make that wine and and so I'm expecting to to make a little bit of Pinot Noir for the Walsh brand itself, which is an exciting project. Pinot is not my forte either. I guess this is the third, you know, cultivar reinvention.

Jim Duane
But here's a secret. Just spend most your time talking about how hard it is to make and how sensitive so thin skinned, yeah, and then you have to go to all the Pinot Noir festivals. There's like nine of them per year. Yeah, yeah, it's a big commitment. Okay, tell me about some. Tell me about the the beginning of your own wines and brand, yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
well, in 2015

Benjamin Leachman
it was a really light crop year, drought year, yeah, really, really tight year, one of, one of our clients had 70 acres in stag sleep and they, they picked early stag sleep district, stag sleep district, thank you for the correction or for the for the detail. This winemaker, you know, if something hit 25 Brix, he would come to me and said, Ben, we missed it. And it was not uncommon to pick 22 and a half Cabernet. Wow, I wasn't warned when you are ski, yeah. So, so we missed a pick. We missed a pick, and these grapes were at like 26 and, well, the wine winery couldn't be bothered with it, so there was about a ton of stag sleep district Cabernet that I'd farmed all year that wasn't going to get harvested because it was 26 because it was 26 Brix. And, you know, it was in an area along the Napa river rife with Pierce's disease and, and actually, I worked on, this is maybe a side topic, but, but we were going to replant the area with with Andy Walker's Pierce disease, resistant cultivars that I helped make the wine out of when I was at UC Davis. But so these vines were going to be torn out. They weren't going to be harvested. And they had PD, so I went out there and I started, you know, checking things out and pierce disease, blocks the xylem of the plants and stops water from being able to

Benjamin Leachman
transpire out of the leaves,

Benjamin Leachman
so the leaves get hot.

Benjamin Leachman
If a grapevine is transpiring, the leaves will be cooler than ambient temperature because of the water it's transpiring, not the case for Pierce disease affected vine. So I could touch some of these clusters, and the clusters were noticeably hot compared to the healthy cluster, so I had to do some thinning, but I ended up with about a ton of stag sleep district Cabernet, and I needed a winery, and I went to you first and and you said, there's no way the SeaveyS will let me make it here. So I got a I found another friend to help me make it into wine. Walsh provided me with the equipment and the people to pick it and the delivery to the winery. And that's what started my my commercial brand that I call vidi Vitis. There's a Latin phrase, Veni, vidi vici. I came, I saw, I conquered. Vitus is the genus for grape and Latin so vidivitus, as I saw grape with the suggestion that I conquered it, and my friends convinced me that nobody in a restaurant would try to order any vidi VITAS vici. I agreed with them. I said, You're right. That's not going to work. So it started 2015, you know, just 50 cases of stag sleet and Cabernet, but it was fantastic,

Jim Duane
even though it was 26 Brix, right?

Benjamin Leachman
That's a whole nother conversation. How you know you can't let your your opinion of when grapes should be picked interfere with that relationship with the winemaker like I will never tell a winemaker when they need to pick because that that needs to be their personal decision. Yeah, I've done it one time. I've told the winemaker,

Jim Duane
winemaker has to own one decision is true, yeah, sorry.

Benjamin Leachman
In 20 into 2022, during those heat waves, I had some hillside vineyards up up in the vaca mountain range, kind of around Rector ridge or Rector reservoir, and I had to tell the winemaker, he had to pick it. And I was like, No, you can't leave it out there anymore, like you have to the. Everything. Everything was just toasted. It didn't get below like 90 at night during that heat dome that we had and and it was just going to get worse.

Benjamin Leachman
So anyways, back to vidivitus. I

Benjamin Leachman
forgot to make any wine in 2016 because I had my first kid, and in 2017 I was consulting for a winery that was buying fruit from the UC Davis South Station. They had switched vineyard managers at the South Station. They Mike Anderson had recently left. And kale, I'm sorry, Nathan kale, maybe Nathan kale took over, and they sent me to go look at it and make sure you know the new guy wasn't missing anything. So I went and started walking the South Station with their venue manager, and I just said, Hey, if you have any, you know, fruit to sell, give me a call and whether to ingratiate himself to me or just the stars aligning, they had cab available from the north Experimental Station, which is surrounded by a vineyard known as tokelon that UC Davis doesn't have a trademark to use. So I think I got it because all of their research projects were being confounded by red blotch. Red blotch was identified at the Oakville station in 2011 by one of my, UC Davis, you know, masters, acquaintances and they had, you know, complete randomized designs, replicates of five vines each, and one of the vines would pop up with red blotch, and they'd have to scrap all the statistics. So what may have been meant for experimentation was now up for sale, and I started buying that fruit from 2017 on, and that's kind of the backbone of my video VITAS brand at this point. And it's, it's, it's amazing vineyard with a very, very pure sense of expression, not unlike Seavey that, that, regardless of the the clone of Cabernet or the vintage has a very telling profile.

Jim Duane
It's pretty awesome fruit to get to work with.

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, I mean, it's probably some of the best Oakville land for Cabernet. On top of that, some of the neighbors have made more prudent viticultural choices in the rootstocks they select. There's nematode pressure. Zero 3916 is the major root stock that Beck Stauffer uses. There is some concern that zero 3916 leads to more green, vegetal flavors and Cabernet, because it's a subtropical species, muscadinia is one of the parents, and so it tends to grow more during the summer than any of the other rootstock that we use, and UC Davis doesn't use That. UC Davis uses 110 R and a couple other non O, 3916 root stocks, which I think makes impact of the grape quality.

Jim Duane
So 3916 is most of Rutherford, right?

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, mostly the valley floor. Yeah. So, so you could say, well, what is bringing that greenness? Is it the vigor from the valley floor, or is it the O 3916 you know? And it's hard to pull those apart, yeah, but certainly, certainly having a spot, you know, in Oakville, that's not o 3916 makes them really rocking grapes.

Jim Duane
So what did you want your wine style to be, hmm,

Benjamin Leachman
well, unlike Seavey, where you're really trying to rein in those tannins, you're you try and coax them out on on valley floor sites. So So did I have, did I have a style in mind. I would say that I followed a lot of the same protocols that I learned. You know, previously. You know, Philippe Melka has a way of making red red wine, Martha McClellan has a different way of making Cabernet. I maybe picked and choosed what I liked from both of those kind of styles to see what I like I mean. First and foremost, California, born and raised, I love fruit like I love ripe

Jim Duane
fruit. So you're not picking a 22 Brix.

Benjamin Leachman
22 is off the off the table. You know, I remember we picked some Cab Franc that was 32 Brix at a previous job. And it was just ridiculous. It was like, How is this even possible that this isn't just a pile of raisins? That's a little extreme, but I think that it's one of those things where, if you get a really good site for grapes, you know, it's going to make some good wine, unless you really mess it up and and that's kind of what I focused on, is single vineyard, you know, unfined, unfiltered, you know, the Cabernet for my video vias, I do a Chardonnay from the fire tree vineyard that's in the car, narrows that that is becoming a brand that the Jimenez family is working on Julian Fayard who who may be consulted with Philippe, or worked with Philippe in 2013 Yeah, you know, met him at Seavey. He's the their winemaker, so I get to talk with him a little bit. See the see the French. I mean, I'm going to pigeonhole him into the French style of Chardonnay making. That's pretty interesting.

Jim Duane
What do you mean by French style? What is that?

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, well, I mean,

Benjamin Leachman
Chardonnay picked, you know, 21 Brix, I guess I didn't thought

Jim Duane
it was maybe like smoking a cigarette while you stand by the press.

Jim Duane
I Okay, so is that kind of the portfolio now, the Chardonnay from Carneros and the Oakville cab.

Benjamin Leachman
I mean, those are the those cores for those two brands, yeah, I think because

Jim Duane
you always have access to these, these last minute opportunities,

Benjamin Leachman
yeah, yeah, and I don't let those pass up. I guess when the when everything works out, obviously, I butted over half an acre of of alienico and sino Mavro to terega National in 2023 in 2024 those grapes weren't going to be picked. Boy, I'd like to make some triga Nationale that, that kind of a thing, like playing around with that, that kind of opportunity, it really,

Benjamin Leachman
for me, is really fun.

Jim Duane
That reminds me, so we've got a block, block 10 at Seavey planted in 1998 we were looking at redeveloping it recently, Luis,

Benjamin Leachman
it's the liar, it's, it's close to the reservoir, yeah,

Jim Duane
that's, right, was the liar who

Jim Duane
Luis came to me and he said, Let me, let's let me cut, you know, the trunk with chainsaw, and I'll cut down until I see, until I don't see, you know, disease, whether it's you type, or whatever it is, I don't see visible disease. And then I'll re graft in, you know, Cabernet, back on the Cabernet, and we'll regrow it and retry it. And the benefit of that is, then, by cutting the vine to the trunk, we can pull out the existing trellis, which was like, almost a liar, like insufficient liar. I mean, you can put in a new trellis, which we did, and I said, Okay, well, that's not going to work. So these these vines, have all sorts of disease, and whatever virus they have is going to be systemic through the plant. So even if you graft on clean buds, the virus is going to spread. And he really talked me into it. And so I said, Okay, well, five rows. You can do five rows this year. We'll see how it goes. So that was our compromise, and we did that, and the vines look fantastic the next year. He he butted in two buds per plant, and he's very specific about that. He thinks if you bud just one plant, like he went on this whole rant about how you're you're never going to be successful when you just when you top graft with just one bud. So two buds and the canopies look great. I mean, the like, the color green was just healthy again, and the fruit looked good. And but obviously I can't, I can't know that wine quality, you know, on a year basis. And so I said, Okay, well, five more rows next year. So did five more euros again. It looked great, and the first five rows looked even better the second year. And so I said, Okay, well, let's try this. And, you know this in but what I'm not saying is like block 10 is one of the most important blocks at Seavey. It's always part of the the Seavey cab sometimes reserve it's one of the two main blocks at Seavey. So I'm very hesitant to experiment on this block. And so by the third year, I said, Okay, let's just redo the. Rest of the block. It looks good. We're waiting to see on wine quality. That's more of a long term project. But this year so I had essentially, you know, I had fruit from

Jim Duane
top grafting done in 2223

Jim Duane
and 24 and in tasting the fruit, just on the vine, not in the wine, but tasting the fruit. I felt like the the older grafts the first two years were significantly better, where I was not impressed with some of the fruit that had just been grafted the previous year. So I ended up fermenting those separately. I had to put the one in with another block. So I don't have it on its own, but I could tell it wasn't as high a quality. But I'm curious and wonder if you have any thoughts, like, is there a year when you kind of expect the divines to be rolling at full good capacity, again, in this situation? Yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
full good capacity. I mean,

Benjamin Leachman
so yield wise, or quality wise? Two different, yeah, two different.

Jim Duane
Yield. Yield was there right away. Yeah,

Benjamin Leachman
I so my, my way of thinking about it is, when, when the vine is young, you're still trying to to, to grow out permanent structure of the vine. So if you're, if you're building cordons or arms, or, you know, training it out like you're you should be farming that for the plant and not for the grapes. I think that's why quality suffers in in the young vines. I have had the chance to work with some really smart winemakers with, you know, present company excluded that that you didn't like that joke that have have really dug into that. And there are certain situations where young vines can make very high quality wine. I've also spoke with winemakers who say no at 15 years, you know, the the vine changes, and you really, you know you don't need to wait as long for the grapes to ripen, because it's kind of gotten through its adolescence, and its hormones have have righted themselves, and now the fruit tastes good, you know, four Brix lower than than what you were picking it up before. So to me, that's still a little bit more of a mystery, like, what is the magic? What is the growing season while they're young? You know, are you scrutinizing them more when they're young than when they're old? And you're chalking it up to their youth rather than the vintage? In some situations, I'm not sure. But, you know, I've, I've made what I think is some pretty successful wine out of young vines. So, and if you're a client of mine, I'll tell you that there's no point in dropping the first harvest to the ground like that. There are studies that show you'll never make up economically for that loss, either in year three or whatever year of development it is. More recently, I've experimented with only having one full year of development. So I'll, I'll take a Uber vine, or a tall vine,

Benjamin Leachman
and plant it in November.

Benjamin Leachman
So I haven't, I don't have any spray costs. I don't have any, you know, any training that first year I planted in a tall vine in November. I don't have to worry about watering it in because these, these tall vines, have a really steep water requirement the first two weeks of planting and and I can get away with that, planted in November. As long as it's a wet winter, I have one year of establishing canes. These are going to be cane pruned tall vines, maybe I spray it two or three times, probably. I don't do any leafing, I don't do any canopy management, I just let it grow out. The next year, I get two and a half tons an acre, you know. So it's a production block at this point. Um. Them. And I think that in the current condition of we need fruit yesterday, that's a pretty nice solution. You know, it saves water. You're not wasting a bunch on getting the vines established, but how? But what is the quality of those grapes? Boy, they tend to be more tannic. You know, the tannins are really not in balance. They're not mature. The vines have been pushed a little bit, you know, I wouldn't, I wouldn't say that they've I see the grapes as a sink that balance out, you know, the source of the leaves that are, that are growing. So I wouldn't ever cut them off, just whether or not I'm going to harvest it. I like having that kind of anchor on the vine. But there is something, if you're pushing a vine like that, the quality of the grapes just don't, don't hit where they should in that that year of development. I think after that, you can start getting, you know better structure, more balanced hormones in the plant, and expect your tannins to ripen appropriately.

Jim Duane
We redeveloped block 16 at Seavey in 2023, planted root stock in the spring, grafted sound in August and so we had a little bit of fruit this year, 2025, is it Merlot? Half Merlot, half cab. And so it's going through tasting the fruit, trying to decide, like I was thinking we would pick it for Roset, right? Because I wasn't expecting much quality out of this fruit. But I was also nervous that, like, you know, these vines were not going to have much in the way of acidity, which wasn't going to be good for making rose. So in tasting the fruit on the run up to harvest, I decided, okay, it's, it's not going to go for Rose. It's, it's not, it just doesn't have the acid structure for that it's going to need. And Merlot tastes good. Tannins were nice. So I ended up harvesting that, blending that with some the new Malbec planted in the same generation. And that's nice wine. Not much of it, but that's fine. But then tasting the cab, I haven't tasted monster tannins like that, like really harsh, coarse tannins, in a long time. And I said, like, there's no way I'm throwing this cabin with the Merlot or anything else, like, it's, it's, it's gonna ruin the other wines. And so I was looking, trying to figure out what I was going to do with it. Ultimately, I just decided, like, I just got to pick this on its own isolate. It do its own fermentation. It's not a lot, just like a ton of fruit, but like, the tannins and the grapes were so rough and so coarse, like I know I don't need to wait till this is wine.

Benjamin Leachman
We're gonna press it off at five Brix. No, I pressed it at 12 Brix.

Jim Duane
Whoa. When I say press, I mean drain. I didn't press free. Drain cool. I drained it at 11 Brix. And I'm waiting to see what this does. But yeah, I was just that reminded me, when you're talking about the tannin structure of young cat being real rough, that was true this year.

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, and you're doing it on Elkhorn, right? You've got the T post that's kind of bent up, yep, that's a really, you know, that's a unique trellis, and I think that leads to much more exposure on the fruit. So I could see the tannins being pretty even worse than my situation.

Jim Duane
I mean, the goal is that we have some good coverage of the canopy, ultimately, but as we're developing the vine, yeah, it's really exposed, yeah.

Benjamin Leachman
And that's kind of a vigorous spot. I think, I think a lot of folks try and put that trellis into, like, lower vigor areas, and I see that failing, because you're trying to make this month this big vine, yeah, I mean, this block 16 has, it's relatively flat in the Seavey sense of what flat is, but, but it's, it's fertile. So I think you could, you could get a big vine to support that.

Benjamin Leachman
Well, there's a lot of opportunity out there, a lot of a lot of

Benjamin Leachman
really delicious fruit that I tasted through this year. I made a call on some coombsville Merlot. Actually, I farm a couple acres of organic head trained Grenache. I. Up soda Canyon. I think I asked you a couple questions. Yeah, inventing that already that get dry? Yep. Well, it's, it's, it's sugar dry. It's going through malolactic right now, okay, but it's still sounding pretty good. I had a bit of a scare. I think the guy who wrote it made his nine look like a four, and so it looked like it was stalling out when it really wasn't stalling out. So I think that was just a scare, but it'll be my first Grenache. Starting a new you know, boy, I have, I have two tons of that Grenache. So I have 10 barrels of it. That's the equivalent of 250 cases. Not the right time to really start, you know, a new, you know, 250 case program of Grenache,

Benjamin Leachman
but, but it'll be a challenge, you know, and,

Benjamin Leachman
and, really, so as a winemaker, seeing what the best cab I can make, you know, from the same vineyard every year. You know, is kind of a study in and of itself, kind of like Picasso painting, 40 of the same paintings. You know, that's, that's one way of exploring, you know, an art or craft. But getting to do my first triga, my first Grenache, Zinfandel casino, Mavro, I playing around with completely new, you know, colors of grapes, I think for me, is really exciting as part of My career and in in the wine space.

Jim Duane
Very cool, yeah. Okay, tell people where they can go to find your your wines.

Benjamin Leachman
Ooh. Well, you can go to www dot forgotten union wines.com I also made vidivitus.com redirect at the same site, there's great support for me at Acme fine wines in St Helena and over at Wine access. So I think, I think I can say that legally without getting in trouble with tight, tight house laws. Yeah, you're fine.

Jim Duane
I'm not a lawyer. Okay, Ben, I know you grew up in the Central Valley. Tell me what your childhood smelled like.

Benjamin Leachman
Oh, you know, I thought about this question a lot.

Benjamin Leachman
So my grandmother

Benjamin Leachman
had lilac, fake plastic lilac flowers in her bathroom, but she had, she had the scent of lilac in a spray can next to it, and so it, you know, it was evocative of lilac, and it's more of a cooler climate, you know, shrub or tree, or whatever they Want to classify it as but it's a pretty neat smell. I also really like rediscovering smells from my childhood, coming across like geranium. There was a scratch and sniff book that I had as a kid, and finding geranium like, whoa. This is that smell from that book. That's that's a cool experience to be had,

Benjamin Leachman
but I think the lilac

Jim Duane
Awesome. Okay, and then Walsh vineyard management, I assume people could find it if they search Walsh vineyard. Yeah. I was stuck at an intersection the other day coming home, and there was a Walsh truck just on the side of the road, and I was looking at that. I was thinking of you, and then I'm looking at him, like, is that the worst logo I've ever seen?

Benjamin Leachman
Yeah, a lot of people, I mean, it's not the best head train vibe, you know. And it's like Groot from Guardians, you know, for me, Boy, I've had to explain that logo. Yeah, I think you have to know. You have to know what a head train vine looks like

Benjamin Leachman
to even have the chance of understanding what it is.

Jim Duane
Better farmers than you are graphic designers. We did that in house, all right.

Jim Duane
Ben, anything else we need to mention before wrapping it up?

Benjamin Leachman
No, just it's a pleasure. I you know, sorry, this wasn't as interesting as some of the other ones.

Jim Duane
I was great. All right. Good luck with your pick tomorrow and the rest of harvest. Thanks, Jim. Thank you. Bye.