Winemaker Paul Hobbs
Interview by Ellen Hoffman
Paul Hobbs, one of the world’s most famous and peripatetic winemakers, visits Mendoza, Argentina several times a year to check on the progress of his wines, including the Cobos and Bramare lines from his Mendoza vineyards that have garnered numerous 90+ ratings from Robert Parker’s The Wine Advocate and Wine Spectator.
Early in 2008 he honored Riccardo and me with a Sunday morning visit to our Posada de Rosas in Mendoza, Argentina. On the terrace under the grape arbor, he munched on Riccardo’s American–style pancakes and shared the story of how a Niagara County, N.Y. farm boy, the second oldest of eleven children, became an award–winning winemaker who practices his craft on three continents.
The farm where Hobbs grew up consisted of orchards—apples, peaches, cherries. But after a taste of the classic 1962 Chateau Y’Quem sauterne offered by his father left a striking impression on his palate, at age 15 Paul, as he says on his website, “convinced my father to uproot a section of our apple orchard and replant it with wine grapes, and put me in charge of it.” While studying pre–med at the University of Notre Dame, his romance with the grape blossomed, abetted by regular wine–tasting seminars hosted by his botany professor. The tastings prompted a major life shift –away from medicine, to study winemaking at University of California Davis. His first wine–making job was at Robert Mondavi. In 1981 he became head enologist of their Opus One team, and later, he joined Simi winery, where he became vice president and winemaker.
In the 1980’s, Hobbs became interested in the development of the Chilean wine industry, and made a visit there. He was reluctant to accept an invitation from Jorge Catena, brother of Nicolas Catena of the Catena Zapata wine family in Mendoza, to cross the Andes to visit Mendoza because “everything I had ever heard about Argentina was that it was a wine wasteland.” But because Jorge was a good friend, Hobbs finally accepted the invitation to visit. “We came down Route 7 in Agrelo near where our winery is today, and it was much different from what I expected. The fruit clusters were big, and the berries were small. I thought the climate must be very bad,” he recalls.
“We went to Esmeralda,” the Catenas’ winery, “and they were among the worst wines I’d ever tasted,” Hobbs recounted with a laugh. But when invited by Nicolas to work in Mendoza with him on “a big vision, to focus on white Burgundy–style wine,” Hobbs agreed to return in 1989 to work with him for two weeks.
During those two weeks, “I got to know the vineyards. They had ancient equipment, no stainless steel tanks, no refrigerants, and ...only continuous screw presses of bad quality. But what they had was knowledge of wine.” For that first chardonnay vintage, in 1990, they worked with the old equipment but the wine “never made it to bottling because it was oxidized in the bottling process. We had to start all over again.”
Over the next few years, Hobbs continued to work with the Catenas as they developed what has become a stunningly successful wine empire. The work was hard, “but we had a lot of fun. There was breakfast at 7 or 7:30, work started at the winery by 8:30, then lunch with the team at the house where Catena was born, a nap before the afternoon work, and dinner at 9:30 or 10 p.m. Nicolas wanted to suffuse me with the culture, and I learned a lot about Mendoza and its history.”
After years of consulting to California wineries, in 1991 the Upstate New York farm boy had realized the dream of establishing his own Paul Hobbs Winery in California, but he also wanted to make wines under his own label in Argentina. Through his Mendoza connections, he met a recently–married couple, Luis Baraud, a winemaker, and Andrea Marchiori, a viticulturist whose family owned vineyards in the region, and offered them jobs as interns in California in 1997. Then in one magical evening, at a dinner at the Marchioris’ apartment in Santa Rosa, Calif., his next dream burst into reality: A new, three–way partnership, based on the Marchioris’ experience and vineyards in Mendoza and Paul’s desire to develop a high–quality local wine brand. The result was Vina Cobos.
Rather than building a winery, their first priority was to develop the brand, “so we put all our money into getting the best quality fruit,” and used others’ facilities for the early vintages, Hobbs says. But to ensure the best quality, he felt it was necessary to build the facility, which crushed grapes for the first time in 2006. Located on Route 7, within view of the Andes and the road to Chile, the winery is a tiny distance from other wineries including Ruca Malen, Septima, Dominio del Plata, Walter Bressia and Sottano.
Hobbs especially enjoys the challenge of blending wines with grapes from different vineyards, as “a way to show the (various) terroirs” in Mendoza. He compares the process to French painter Claude Monet’s creation of a series of works “showing paintings of (the same) cathedral in different lights.” Vina Cobos produces more malbec wines than any other, but “I think Mendoza has the ability to produce very interesting varieties, to become more diverse,” he says.
Currently Hobbs somehow manages to do his award–winning winemaking in California and Hungary as well as Mendoza, and to thrive on this globe–trotting lifestyle. When we met, he was planning a trip to scout out the winemaking potential in Armenia. So what does a winemaker who can work anywhere in the world want people to know about Mendoza and wines? What makes him want to keep the connection? “Mendoza satisfies all the food groups,” he says with a a smile,“ mountains, great people, a great culture and a great agricultural area.” The region “has something unique, the soils, and the native people...which you can recognize in the wine immediately.”
And as if that’s not enough, he also has family ties. His 13–year–old daughter, Agustina, lives there with his ex–wife. And his brother, Matt Hobbs, is also currently a Mendocino—vice–president of marketing and sales for The Vines, a multi–faceted Mendoza wine and real estate business owned by two Americans, Dave Garrett and Michael Evans, and Mendocino Pablo Gimenez Rilli.