Those grape growers of Collier Falls

Here's pretty much the way Barry Collier's life was unrolling before the fateful September day in 1992 when his wife, Susan, asked him where he would like to spend his birthday. Born in Philadelphia, Barry was raised in Washington, D.C. where his dad worked for the Department of the Navy. After he was graduated from the University of Maryland with a BS in journalism, he planned to go on to law school, but took a summer job as head of the public relations department at the Ford Motor Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City. That led to an offer of a full-time post with Ford at the corporate office, where the company put him through graduate school while he earned an MBA. After a period of writing press releases for the Lincoln-Mercury division, Barry moved into PR for the Ford racing team, where the slogan was "Win on Sunday. Sell on Monday."

While at Ford, Barry was introduced to Ron Popeil, owner of Ronco, a company which manufactured and sold, through supermarkets, drug chains and department stores, a line of houseware items designed by Popeil. The most unique feature of the Ronco operation was its pioneering use of television as the exclusive advertising vehicle for introducing the merchandise.

The first time Popeil offered Barry a position, he turned it down, but a year later, when he was approached again, he said okay, and moved to Chicago where Ronco headquarters were located. His new post had no job description, so he created his own, and spent the next few years opening up Ronco companies in England, Australia and Canada. To Popeil also goes the credit for introducing Barry to Susan, a student at Loyola University, who worked part-time scheduling appearances by Playboy models in commercials and at trade shows. The Ronco offices were in the Playboy building and soon it was becoming a romantic habit for the young couple to go to lunch together or meet for a drink after work. In August 1973, Sue and Barry were married.

When the man in charge of the United Kingdom operation died unexpectedly, Barry was sent to close the office, but recommended instead that there was great potential there, and someone should be found to run it. Ronco found that someone by assigning the task to Barry, who called Sue, a bride of only a month, and said, close the apartment, pack our stuff, we're going to London. She resisted, but went. Then, with no work visa, she spent her time taking classes in cooking, art and other subjects, all the while falling in love with the countryside. "When we left," she says, "I dug my heels in so hard resisting the move, that I think the tracks are still there in the Heathrow carpet."

In the years between 1973 and 1980, while still in the U.K., Barry introduced diversity into the Ronco firm by creating a record company that marketed records the same way they had marketed the Vegematic Slicer. "We would put the records together, from existing tracks, put our label on them and sell them to major chains, promoting the outlets with aggressive television advertising," he explains. Two of their albums became #1 on the charts and one became the sound-track for the David Essex and Ringo Starr film, "That'll Be the Day."

And what about wine? "We drank some Bordeaux wines," Barry recalls, "and champagne for special events such as the birth of Adam in 1975 and Josh in 1978, but we had no inkling the role wine would one day play in our lives.

In the early 1980s, many of the record companies in the U. K. were moving into the video field, and Barry came back to the United States to be in at the forefront of the movement when it reached this country. He and Sue settled in Sarasota, Fla. where Barry's parents and brother lived, and he set up an office, and began a global commute, spending two weeks alternately in Florida and England. "It was great," he remarks. "With the time difference between my two locations, I had every afternoon free to spend with my sons." But that happy bubble burst when, a year later; Popeil called to say, "Come back to Chicago, or you're out." Barry and Sue stayed in Sarasota, where Barry made one of the worst financial moves of his life. "I decided to take all our savings and invest them in real estate, and make a killing," he remarks with a rueful shake of his head. But that was 1980/81 when interest rates soared to 22% and the Colliers lost just about everything.

Then, just like in the movies, Barry got a call from England asking if he'd like to serve as a consultant to help Heron Oil Company open a video company in the U. S. Logic dictated that the Colliers needed to be in Los Angeles for this to be a success, so in 1983 they moved again and in April, 1984, he and a partner, Paul Levinson, created a 50/50 partnership and formed Prism Entertainment. In 1986 the company went public and four years later moved from licensing video production, to producing their own films, most of them made-for-television.

The Wine Country Move

But we still haven't come to the wine. Or have we? Once back in the United States, the Colliers found top-quality California wines abundantly available in Florida, and, once they had moved west, Barry began to build a pretty good wine cellar. Then came that fateful day, when Sue posed her question: "Where do you want to celebrate your birthday?" Without hesitating, Barry replied, "In the wine country." After four days of tromping through vineyards, watching grapes arrive at the crushers and smelling the heady fragrance of freshly fermenting juice, Barry looked over the rim of his wine glass at Susan and said, "I would love to live in the wine country and have a vineyard." The door to the future had opened.

Never a couple to do things by halves, Barry and Susan built a library of wine volumes and read everything they could get their hands on about grape growing and wine. Less than a year later, they began looking at properties. "We were receiving packets of materials from realtors and I would evaluate the price and the potential, and run the numbers to know before we jumped what we might be leaping into. For most of the properties, the numbers didn't check out," Barry explains.

Their search had been limited to the Napa Valley, until someone suggested they check availability of vineyard land in Sonoma County. The first piece they looked at was in Nun's Canyon, owned by Jack and Ann Air, themselves about to own their own winery, Everett Ridge in the Dry Creek Valley. The Dry Creek area was more where the Colliers wanted to be as well, so no deal was made, but the Airs and the Colliers became good friends, and when Barry was ready to make his own wine, it was produced at Everett Ridge, and guided by that winery's winemaker, Alex MacGregor. But we're a little ahead of our story.

When Barry seemed to be having second thoughts about the vineyard plan, Susan spoke up. She liked Sonoma County. She found it more open and friendly than Napa and liked the people. By then it was 1994, Josh had just graduated from high school and Sue felt it was time to make a serious search or give up the idea altogether. "One of us had to be on the scene," she reasoned, "because by the time a realtor alerted us to a possible piece of land, and we flew north, it had been snapped up by someone else." Sue was the one elected to be on-the-spot family representative. She packed the car and drove up to Santa Rosa and checked into a hotel. Then she enrolled in Rich Thomas's viticulture classes at Santa Rosa Junior College. Barry was poised to look at anything Sue felt might be what they wanted, and the search went on. "I don't think there was a property of 50 acres or more, between Big Ranch Road in the Napa Valley and Dry Creek Valley in Healdsburg that we didn't look at," Sue surmises.

In a wonderfully over-simplified statement, Barry describes the discovery of the 100-acre property which was to become home, and Collier Falls Vineyard: "One day I left the highway, turned left on West Dry Creek Road, and found heaven." It wasn't quite that easy. There were things to be considered: the hillside property was pretty steep and could be difficult to farm. There was an old 8-acre Zinfandel vineyard, and about three plantable blocks, separated from each other by roads and canyons. But Sue was impressed with the feeling of community in Dry Creek. "It's an intimate valley," she says, "Narrow, small and the people are friendly and always willing to help."

One bit of help they got, after signing the papers on the ranch in 1997, was permission from the previous owners, Don and Rhonda Carano, to prune the vines and start retrofitting the trellises before bud break, even though escrow had not closed.

The original Zinfandel vines had been planted on St. George rootstock, with an 8' x 12' spacing, and were head-pruned and dry-farmed. With the help of Thomas' classes, observation of what various vineyard managers were doing in the Valley, and with a lot of conversations with their neighbors, the Colliers doubled the density of vines by interplanting the rows of Zinfandel with Primitivo on 1103P rootstock. Between January and April, 1997, the Colliers installed drip irrigation, and converted the head-pruned vines to bi-lateral cordon. In 1997 and 1998, 18 acres of new vineyard were added, with 6' x 9' spacing and VSP trellis. The varieties planted gave a hint of what would lie in the future of Collier Falls: 10 acres of Zinfandel, six Cabernet Sauvignon, one Petite Sirah, and the rest in small plots of Petit Verdot and Cabernet franc.

New Vineyards

In installing the new vineyards, because of the steep grade of the hillside, Collier Falls provided underground drainage by installing 16" ADS drain tile in every other row from the top of the slope to the bottom, with 12" raisers guiding the water into rock catch basins. "Before we planted, Fish and Game wardens came to look at the property and discuss what we planned to do. We then worked with vineyard consultant Doug Lloyd, who had considerable experience meeting environmental regulations for developing hillside vineyards in Napa," explains Barry. "At the bottom of each block we put in a silt pond. As the silt settles, the overflow of clean water goes through a galvanized pipe into Fall Creek, which empties into Dry Creek--a spawning site for steelbead. When the rainy season is over, we clean the silt out of the ponds with a backhoe, and relocate that rich soil to appropriate spots in the vineyard."

To further protect the land against erosion, all the vineyards are no-till and a permanent ground cover of rose and crimson clover, fescue and blando brome has been planted. In homage to their pleasant years in England, each vineyard block is marked with a London street sign. The signs were purchased as props for a TV commercial Barry was producing, and they crossed the ocean with the family when they came back home.

From 1997 through 1999, 80% of the Collier Falls fruit was sold to Everett Ridge. "We filled a mutual need for each other," comments Barry. "Jack needed fruit while his vineyards were maturing, and we needed to have a place that would buy our grapes and make our wine. I may have come into grape growing totally uninformed, but I knew enough to know that I wasn't a winemaker--nor did I want to be." Alex MacGregor, Everett Ridge's winemaker, then assumed responsibility for production of 500 cases of Collier Falls Dry Creek Valley Private Reserve Zinfandel, the first 100% Estate Zinfandel ever produced from those vines. "We would have stayed with the Airs forever," says Barry, "but with their vines in full production and our new vineyards in their third leaf, we just outgrew the facility. Our 16,000 vines are purposely crop-thinned, and it is my conservative estimate that, at maturity, each vine will produce 10 pounds of fruit, and that's 80 tons. Of that we will keep 50 tons to make 1,500 cases of Cabernet and 1 ,500 cases of Zinfandel, and we will sell the rest."

First Crop in 2000

The 2000 harvest yielded the first Collier Falls crop of Cabernet Sauvignon (10 tons) and Petite Sirah. The Cabernet is grown at the thousand-foot level--the highest point in the ranch. "That spot is the windiest and hottest on the ranch. It gets sun from daybreak to dusk," observes Barry, "but the temperature can drop 50[degrees] between nightfall and morning."

The grapes were crushed at La Crema, and Collier Falls has hired Cecile Lemerle-Derbes as consulting winemaker. Lemerle-Derbes grew up in the Champagne region of France and has been a grape grower, has taught winemaking, worked for Bollinger and opened a winery in Israel's Golan Heights.

Her first winemaking position in California was with Walter Schug at his winery in the Carneros, followed by several years as director of wine production at Opus One in the Napa Valley.

"She loves being in the vineyard," remarks Barry, "and when we first met we spent several hours walking the rows. She advises us on irrigation procedures, when and how much to thin, and when to harvest."

Then he repeats: "Sue and I feel comfortable growing the fruit, but we don't know anything about winemaking."

At harvest, the grapes are handpicked. Barry drives the tractor, and Sue rides on the back of the gondola with a member of the picking crew, hand-sorting and removing MOG. The grapes are sorted a second time at the winery, as they move along a conveyor belt into the hopper. The Zinfandel is cold-soaked to extract tannin and color, then fermented in stainless steel to dryness. Malolactic fermentation is induced after the wine is put into barrels. The 1997, 1998 and 1999 vintages were aged for 15 months, with the decision of when to bottle determined through group tastings with the Colliers and the winemaker.

The Bordeaux varieties are fermented in stainless steel, allowed two weeks extended maceration and then spend two+ years in a mix of new French oak barrels from one of four cooperages: Demptos, Seguin Moreau, Tonnellerie Radoux USA and Nadalie USA. "At the moment, we are planning to bottle these wines in the summer of 2003 for release that fall," Barry remarks, "but that is not a locked-in prediction. It depends on how the wine is developing as we conduct our periodic tastings."

Collier Falls wines may be ordered from the Web site: collierfalls.com, but past experience dictates that buyers must act fast when the 1999 vintage becomes available. The previous two vintages sold out in 30 days. "We learned from that experience," the realistic growers state. "Now, with brokers representing the wine in San Francisco and Southern California (where it is already on allocation), Florida and Illinois, and with plans to expand distribution into North and South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and the Northwest, we are holding back a portion of the production so as not to disappoint our new retailers and our Internet shoppers. We have to do this to establish the brand in more markets as we grow."

Collier Falls wines are in the ultra-premium category, selling for about $26 a bottle. Not only has each vintage of Zinfandel been rewarded with medals and 90 scores in the Wine Spectator and Wine Enthusiast, but even before the first wine was released, the 1997 vintage was given the top prize at the annual Zinfandel Taste-off, sponsored by the Dry Creek Valley Association. As members of Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) and Family Winemakers, the Colliers pour samples of their wines at tastings sponsored by these organizations, and will be behind the table at ZAP events in Arizona and Nevada this year.

Sue and Barry are in the vineyards every day, just because they enjoy the beauty of the changing seasons, but perhaps they are also proving the old saw that the best wines are made from grapes where the owner leaves his/her boot marks in the vineyard. Asked if a second generation is being groomed for Collier Falls, both parents shake their heads. "At 25 and 23, Adam and Josh are just setting out on their own career paths," says Sue, "although I know nothing would please Barry more than to have them working in the vineyards."

"This has been a life transformation for us," Barry adds, "but it's not for everyone. We have friends who visit from Los Angeles, and they look around and shrug and say, 'I don't get it.' That's okay, because we are doing exactly what we want to be doing."

COPYRIGHT 2001 Hiaring Company
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group