Friday, January 7, 2005

The Morning Read: Back Bay Cuvee 
Richard Moriarty was offered an investment in a Santa Barbara winery. Instead, he started his own.

BY CHRIS KNAP 

NEWPORT BEACH – The inspector in the Newport Beach building department peered through his glasses at the tall man with skinny legs poking through camouflage shorts.

"So, Mr. Moriarty, what bizarre thing do you have for me today?" he sighed.

Fair question.

On this day Richard Moriarty was seeking a permit to install a wind-powered generator. (The paperwork was judged insufficient; the answer was no.)

Before that it was a 70,000-gallon fish pond. (No.) An 85-foot-long underground wine cellar (No.) And, of course, Moriarty's most famous folly, a barn in which he intended to make a Bordeaux-style red wine, fermented from grapes grown on his hillside in the Back Bay.

"Mr. Moriarty, you can't build a barn in Newport Beach!" the city planner lectured that time.

Nor, for that matter, can you make a decent Cabernet here; at least that's what some experts would say. But those experts, like the city planner, would be wrong.

Last fall, the camouflaged man with the do-it-yourself work ethic released 82 cases of Back Bay Cuvee, a well-received Bordeaux blend made from grapes grown on his Newport property, vinted and bottled in his, uh, garage and aged in his underground, um,storagefacility.

"The more people tell me I can't do something, the more I want to do it," Moriarty says.

Moriarty is one of a handful of monied eccentrics who are struggling to make world- class wine from Southern California sites better known for million-dollar homes.

There's Tom V. Jones, who planted wine grapes on nine hilly acres above Bel Air back in 1978, when he was CEO of Northrop. Jones has the grapes trucked to Napa to be made into Moraga Red.

And George Rosenthal, a real estate developer who bought land in Malibu Canyon to build a retreat, then added 25 acres of Chardonnay, Cabernet and Merlot. Rosenthal, too, trucks his grapes elsewhere to be made into wine.

Of these, Moriarty is the one with the smallest estate, the vineyard closest to the ocean (in fact, it's bay view) and the only one who picks, crushes and ferments his own grapes on site.

In other words, from a wine expert's point of view, Moriarty has the slimmest chance of succeeding.

But somehow, serendipitously, bizarrely , to use the Newport planner's word, he has succeeded. Judges at the Orange County Fair gave Newport Beach Vineyards a gold medal for his inaugural effort, a 2001 vintage.

"I was skeptical when I heard about the wine, but after I tasted it I was just humbled," says Shaun Crowley, manager of Morry's of Naples, which stocks both Rosenthal Merlot and the Back Bay Cuvee.

There was no single inspiration that drove Moriarty toward this odd quest. As you begin to know him, though, you can see how it happened.

Moriarty is a man of some means. His mother is a Segerstrom, as in the lima bean farmers who developed South Coast Plaza. He receives partnership dividends from the family investments.

But Moriarty has always worked, since he was a teenager laying irrigation pipe in his grandfather's bean fields. He founded and sold an interior landscape company that put the fern into fern bars back in the 1970s. And he still runs an orchid nursery.

So while Moriarty enjoys finely crafted things - the Suzuki Hayabusa, the architecture of Fleetwood Joiner, Screaming Eagle Cabernet - he also appreciates a bargain. Most of all, he likes doing things himself - especially with his own hands.

Once, told by a body shop it would cost $5,000 to paint his 24-foot truck, he drove to the auto-paint store, bought the colors that were on close-out, and painted it himself - camouflage of course - for $100.

In a way, that's what happened with the wine, too.

A group of friends was investing in a new Santa Barbara winery: It was a $30,000 buy-in; in exchange he could get the wine wholesale.

"I thought, why would I want to pay that much money just to get wholesale?" Mor iarty grumbles, annoyed at the very idea of it.

Moriarty looked at the olive trees, palms and table grapes on his 3.5-acre bay property, all growing like weeds, and thought, why don't I just grow my own grapes right here?

"We thought he was going to invest with us in Santa Barbara," says longtime friend Jon Bull. "Instead, he read a couple of books; went to Vin Expo in Bordeaux; the next thing we know he's got the trellises going up."

Moriarty considered it from the perspective of a landscape contractor: He figured grape vines are $3.50 each. They grow 12 feet a year. How hard could it be?

Here's how hard:

For a successful vineyard, you want well-drained soil and lots of dry, hot days. You need a moderating influence at night - typically, sea breezes. But if you're too close to the coast, some days never warm up. That means an extraordinary amount of work to keep the grapes from rotting.

"When you are growing Bordeaux varietals in a cool area, its hard to get the grapes ripe," says Etienne Cowper, winemaker at Mount Palomar. "The bunches are looser; the berries, straggly. You get more vegetal flavors, like green pepper. If it's exposed too long to cool, damp conditions, it will developmold and mildew."

It's a toughbusiness, he adds. It's hard work and it takes a long time for the vines to mature.

Jones, the Moraga Red owner, agrees: "I don't want to say trying to make good wine is crazy, but it's not a good investment. You have to have a real desire. Even if you do everything efficiently, it still takes years to make money."

But Cowper understands why a Moriarty, or a Jones, would want to try.

"For them it's not economic. They just like good wine and they want to try their hand. There is definitely a prestige that goes along with making your own wine. People imagine the lifestyle of the gentleman vintner."

Moriarty concedes that he had a vision of Robert Mondavi in a tuxedo.

Instead, he was outside in dirty shorts, spacing trellises, planting vines, pruning the canopy, checking sugars, spraying sulfur every three weeks to stop the powdery mildew.

"It's a lot more work than the brochure said it would be," he grumbles.

Maybe it was the special rootstock Moriarty chose, all that hands-on work, or a smidgen of beginner's luck, but his inaugural effort is hauntingly close to Bordeaux.

The wine smells of pencil shavings and cedar - the classic Bordeaux nose.

In the glass it is elegant and supple, with restrained flavors of black cherry and blueberry, well-integrated tannins, hints of black tea and molasses.

Moriarty waves off the success: "French barrels, Bordeaux blend, Bordeaux yeast; of course it tastes like Bordeaux," he says.

But the cost, he acknowledges, was far more than he can ever recover by selling 82 cases of wine.

In addition to the winery, the barrel cave, the vines and the terracing, there were the French oak barrels ($800 apiece), the heavy Bordeaux bottles ($2 apiece), the labels, cork and wax closure ($8 per bottle). All told, he has sunk over a million in the project.

Moriarty priced the wine at $80 - naysayers saying no one would buy Southern California wine at that price.

Today the 2001 is sold-out.

"People said, 'Why is it $80 a bottle?' I'd say, 'You're lucky I don't charge you what it cost me,'" he growls.

Then he laughs.

"Ah well. We'll make it up in volume."