Pied à Terre

From the moment Lidia took a chance on him, Richard expanded his horizons with a vengeance. An early turning point came during his exploration of Barolo. He knew what they could be like from complacent producers. The first one he’d ever tried “tasted like St. Joseph’s baby aspirin.” But now he encountered a whole new vista filled with captivating small-scale artisans. He came to see his (relative) ignorance as an asset, something that freed him from preconceptions and brand reliance—whether he was assessing Nebbiolo, Hermitage, or California Cabernet. “Because I felt underqualified,” he says, “I made a vow: I was only going to buy wines I loved.” 

The market was crammed with what he didn’t love: “slathered in oak, tastes a little sweet, really ripe, blah blah blah,” he says, bemoaning the stylistic homogeneity that was especially rampant among American reds. “It was like it all came out of one giant vat, and people were just hiring different guys to design labels for it.”  

Felidia amplified his Old World sensibility for transparent expressions of terroir. “You have a wine like that, and you’re like, Oh my god! This hasn’t been fucked around with—nobody’s playing with residual sugar or glycerol or hiring a flavor chemist to manipulate aromatics—it’s a real wine!” he exclaims. “There was an attention to detail, or maybe there was just good luck, but it wasn’t somebody pushing a square peg into a round hole. The winemaker was just shepherding the process, and something totally original came out.”

Of course the restaurant drew plenty of high rollers fixated on big-ticket domestic brands. “But after six months,” Richard recalls, “nobody was coming in and asking for Caymus and The Prisoner. Instead they would come in and say, ‘What am I drinking tonight?’”

That was as close to triumph as a somm could get, and Richard replicated it at one restaurant group after another until, in 2007, he resolved to come up with the ultimate answer to that question—by making it. He wanted to offer distinctive, Old World-style California Cabernet—“wines of restraint, and wines with soul”—without triple-digit price tags. So Pied à Terre was born.

By his own admission, it took him “about nine years” to truly hit his stride—and even now he’d rather skip a vintage than bottle a bad one. An early foray in the Alexander Valley yielded fruit that “tasted like jalapeno juice.” He tossed it. A site on Sonoma Mountain turned out to be virus-prone. Out it went. When one vineyard manager proposed spraying elemental sulfur uncomfortably late in the season, potentially skewing fermentation, Richard opted to take his lumps instead, effectively sacrificing a third of the crop to keep the remainder clean. He stuck to his value proposition, but the project was really about integrity. If the bottle’s going to bear his signature, he’s just unwilling to compromise anything about it. “This is my life,” he says. “This is my name. Everything I have is in this brand.”

He now works hand-in-glove with top farmers in Sonoma AVAs like Rockpile, Knight’s Valley, and Dry Creek—including the inimitable Nimble Vineyards, where nearly a hundred giant redwoods edge slopes that bask in 265-plus days of annual sunshine some 1,200 feet above sea level. A long obsession with cooperage has steered him toward thin-staved neutral barrels that won’t mark his fruit with vanilla or chocolate or caramel. 

Geographic specificity is a central element of his negotiant model. “I’m roped into what I have, vineyard wise,” he says. “But now that I’ve worked with them for 10 or 11 years, it’s easier. Each one has a different challenge—one with fruit set, for instance, another with potential shading, another with lack of water. But you know what the challenges are, and act accordingly.

“Yet no matter how much you think you have it under control, Mother Nature is still in charge,” he adds. So the other centerpiece is blending. In this respect Richard has singular focus on mouth feel, for which his obsession verges on mania. 

“For me, the sexiest part of wine is its texture,” he explains. “When I’m doing the blending, I don’t have a flavor scientist on my payroll. I’m not looking to change the red fruit to blue fruit, or blue fruit to cherry, or cherry to whatever—I’m not looking to change the qualities of the fruit in any way, shape, or form when I’m blending. I get what I get and I’m not upset. My guiding light is the texture. If the entry isn’t supple, and the middle isn’t juicy, and the ending isn’t succulent, then I need to keep working until every element is right.”

It plays out with blind tasting among his own barrels—every vineyard lot kept separate—to which he occasionally adds a bit of Malbec, Merlot, or softer Cabernet from a small handful of trusted source. It can get contentious. One year his then-partner Clay Mauritson got so wound up by Richard’s stubborn refusal to bottle a vintage—they needed the barrels for the next harvest, but Richard had yet to land on the perfect blend—that, in Richard’s telling, his counterpart exploded, “If we didn’t have a business relationship, I would leap across this table and kick your ass!” Which is not the kind of thing you want to hear from a former PAC-12 linebacker.

But you don’t work in the restaurant industry for a decade or three without learning how to defuse some tension. And sometimes a little exasperation is what it takes to serve the customer that still motivates Richard most: the one who asks, with a thirst for authenticity and expectations as high as his own, “What am I drinking tonight?”