40 Years of Winegrowing

A Grower of Wine

Written by Tim Fish for Wine Spectator

June 30, 2022

Tony Soter helped set the course for Napa Cabernet before championing Pinot Noir in California and ultimately Oregon

Armed with a degree in philosophy and “unqualified for any serious job,” Soter came to Napa Valley in 1975 to make wine. “I got all the way through high school and college without taking a science class of any significance,” he laughs.

His first job was scrubbing tanks and hauling hoses for Warren Winiarski at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Born in Portland, Ore., Soter grew up in Southern California; by age 23, the bright young man was restless and hungry for challenge. He worked part time his first few years in Napa, so he could take viticulture, chemistry and other classes at the University of California, Davis. “It was a good opportunity to fill in some technical understanding,” Soter recalls. “I wasn’t after another degree. I was too impatient for that.”

Napa Valley in the mid-1970s was a different place than it is today. “When I first started in Napa, there were only 30 wineries in the Yellow Pages,” Soter recalls. There were the “Big Four”—Inglenook, Beaulieu, Charles Krug and Louis M. Martini—wineries that emerged after Prohibition and that processed the bulk of the valley’s grapes. A new generation was also rising. Robert Mondavi had left his family’s Charles Krug to build his own winery in 1966. Others in the mix included Chateau Montelena, Heitz and Stag’s Leap.

The modern California wine industry was emerging, and Soter was in the right place at the right time. With little interest in working for the big producers, he sought out new players. He worked the harvest of 1976 with Chuck Ortman at Spring Mountain Vineyard before joining Chappellet, where he assisted winemaker Joe Cafaro in the cellar. When Cafaro moved on the following year, Donn Chappellet offered the position to Soter. It was his first official job as a winemaker.

Soter moved from winery to winery over the first few years of his career. In 1982, Mary Novak hired him to be Spottswoode’s first winemaker, and it was there that he solidified his opinion that the best winemaking was done in the vineyard. It’s accepted as gospel in California now, but not 40 years ago. When he took over management of Spottswoode’s vineyard, he farmed it organically—another rarity in the day.

“To say that he set the tone for Spottswoode is an understatement,” says Beth Novak Milliken, daughter of the late Mary Novak. “That structure and elegance, the sort of tensional core of a yoga master in the wines, all of that really started with him. I admire him greatly.”

Next, Soter decided to spread his wings and become a winemaking consultant. In the mid-1980s, Shafer was one of Soter’s highest-profile clients. Owner Doug Shafer and winemaker Elias Fernandez were struggling. “We were young and green,” Shafer remembers, “and we were kind of at our wits’ end.”

The initial wines had been too lean and tight, and there were other issues. Soter took the winemaking back to square one and focused on the vineyards: Water and canopy management and shoot thinning became more disciplined, and crop load and ripeness levels were fine-tuned. “Without Tony, we might not have achieved the same level of success,” Shafer says. “Without a doubt, he had the greatest influence on winemaking at Shafer.”

As his consulting business grew to include wineries such as Dalla Valle, Viader, Niebaum-Coppola and Araujo, Soter hired winemaker Mia Klein to assist. “I loved working with Tony. He was superfocused and was always seeking perfection and at least attaining excellence,” says Klein, who worked with Soter from 1988 to 1998. “He would say to me, ‘What does the wine want right now?’ He wasn’t trying to impose a style.”

Developing a signature winemaking style and leaving a strong fingerprint on clients’ wines never appealed to Soter. “The one thing you have that nobody else has is the nature of your property,” he says. “With almost every client, it was an opportunity for me to work with great properties. That was fundamental.”

Yet his approach was demanding for vintners, requiring a long-term and usually expensive commitment to the vineyards. “Very early on Tony understood that no one can make wine any better than the grapes that come in the door at the winery,” says winemaker Cathy Corison. “He has always been a true winegrower, and he’s one of the best winemakers I know.”

When you get to know Soter, it comes as no surprise that he was a philosophy major in college. It comes across in the way he talks, how he thinks. He even looks like a philosophy professor: stocky but fit, with a trim white beard, glasses and a bald crown. If he doesn’t immediately stand out in a group of winemakers, that suits him. He is comfortable in his skin. When asked about the arc of his career, Soter thinks for a moment and says, “Things look more orderly in the mirror than they do going forward.”

That’s a good way to describe Soter’s tenure in Napa. There were few straight lines from one winery to the next, and many projects overlapped. Yet even while his influence as a Cabernet Sauvignon winemaker was growing in the 1980s, even when it was clear that Cabernet was Napa’s future, Soter decided to make Pinot Noir. He loved Burgundy and thought Pinot would be a great challenge.

“It wasn’t really about developing a label or a brand so much as a learning exercise for me. Because Pinot is so unforgiving and transparent, it’s a great vehicle for learning,” Soter explains. In the 1980s, California was having only limited success with Pinot Noir, but the potential seemed there. “When you turn the clock back and you don’t take for granted the consistent quality of Pinot Noir around the world today, it was the Holy Grail and the unsolved puzzle: Why were we so abjectly failing in Sonoma or Napa, not achieving anything close to what the Burgundians were doing?” muses Soter.

Serendipity led to his first attempt at Pinot, in 1980. A Yountville grower had grapes on the vine that no one wanted and he offered the crop for free. Soter was working for Chappellet at the time, and the vintner gave Soter the OK to make Pinot on the side. The first vintages were experiments, but by 1982 Soter was encouraged enough to launch his own label: Etude.

“Tony was always determined to make great Pinot Noir,” Corison recalls. “Even when many, myself included, thought he was crazy.”

Soter’s consulting business paid the bills as he built the quality and profile of Etude, producing its Pinots, and Cabernets too, in rental spaces. The biggest challenge was finding worthy Pinot Noir vineyards. Carneros was the one region planting lots of Pinot in the mid-1980s. “That was mostly for sparkling wine, and that was a little bit of a blessing and a curse. A lot of the clones and techniques that people were applying for sparkling were antithetical to making good red wine,” Soter says.

Crop size is less of an issue for bubbly producers; they demand bright acidity, but the depth of color and flavor that comes with lower yields is more significant for still wine.

Convincing growers to adapt wasn’t easy; when you earn your living by the ton, dropping perfectly good fruit on the ground seemed mad.

Somehow, Soter was able to convince Larry Hyde and Lee Hudson, two growers who became pioneers in Carneros. “Tony helped me farm better,” Hyde says. “He really knew more about growing grapes and making wine than anyone around him.” Instead of buying by the ton, Soter paid by the acre, a more profitable business model for growers that allowed them to farm at a more rigorous level.

In the mid-1990s, after years of buying grapes and renting production space, and newly married to wife Michelle, an Oregon native whom he met while consulting for Moraga Estate in Bel Air, Soter wanted something to call his own. Napa land was too expensive, so they looked to coastal regions of California.

“Finding property was frustrating. We looked to west Sonoma County to find something more affordable, but we didn’t find anything that clicked,” Soter says. He worried about getting grapes ripe along the coast before fall rains arrived, yet Napa was becoming warmer. “I was watching my Pinot Noir shrivel right in front of my eyes,” he recalls.

Frustrated with his search in California, Soter eventually found a property in Willamette Valley: the 44-acre Beacon Hill Vineyard. That was 1997; that year he made sparkling wine, adding Pinot Noir in 1998. Soter admits not being very ambitious with the property at first, perhaps because Etude and his clients in California kept him busy. The Soters continued living in California, requiring him to dash between the two states. “I was doing two harvests a year. Luckily, the harvests are typically a month apart.”

Meanwhile, he was looking to the future of Etude. The winery had relied on rented production space for nearly 20 years, and Hudson and Hyde remained his only vineyard sources. He approached Beringer Blass (now Treasury Wine Estates) after the company bought land in Carneros with plans to plant vineyards. Talks ensued, and Soter sold Etude to the company in 2001. “There were a lot of alignments there,” he says. “And by 2001 we had it clear in our minds that we were going to relocate to Oregon.”

Soter remained with Etude for five years before moving to Oregon in 2006. He didn’t look back. “I don’t miss making Cabernet. I dedicated a big part of my life to Napa, but that chapter has closed and I have a new one in Willamette Valley.”

Highway 99W goes through the heart of Willamette Valley, a path from Portland that skirts Salem, Ore., and stretches farther south. Along the way are mostly small farming communities such as Newberg and Dundee, towns that still straddle a paradoxical line between wine country glamour and working-class culture. Many of the hazelnut and fruit orchards have been replaced by vineyards, but crops such as grass seed and hay remain a significant commodity; combines and grain elevators still populate the landscape.

That’s the view as Soter drives south toward Eola-Amity Hills, where he’s planting a new vineyard, wedged between Zena Crown and Cristom. A lot has changed for him since moving here 16 years ago. Beacon Hill, his first Oregon vineyard, never lived up to his expectations. Getting grapes to ripen every year was a challenge, and too often the Pinots ended up firm and with gritty tannins. “We made some pretty interesting wines at Beacon Hill, but it was always a struggle,” he says. “I have a better understanding now of what a successful vineyard site looks like after that.”

He decided to start over, buying Mineral Springs Ranch in 2001 and selling Beacon Hill in 2005. Mineral Springs, a former cattle ranch, spans 240 acres in the Yamhill-Carlton AVA. In 2002 and 2003, Soter planted 40 acres of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay along the ridgeline, while Michelle Soter had a vision of the property that went beyond winemaking.

Together, the Soters created a biodynamic farm, with a herd of Highland cows, plus chickens, sheep, pigs, turkeys, donkeys and goats. Falconer Kort Clayton and his falcons and hawks are a regular presence, deterring pests. The assembled livestock are an integral part of the ranch, providing fertilizer, weed control and food, among other things. There is an extensive organic garden, orchards and 25 acres of grain plus plantings of oak and fir trees. The bounty of the ranch provides sustenance for employees, the local food bank and guests of the tasting room, where wine and food pairings are available. “Every winemaker would give life and limb to work with this property,” says winemaker Chris Fladwood, who was hired by Soter in 2009.

“I turned in my rubber boots a long time ago to work in the field,” Soter says. Indeed, the vineyard is the heart of the ranch. The soils are well-drained marine sedimentary sandstone, the vines situated on a south-facing slope with rows running east-west, which allows Soter to manage sun exposure with the leaf canopy.

A mix of Pinot clones are planted, including Dijon, Wädenswil and Pommard, but about 40% is a mysterious clone Soter calls Heirloom. “It has a unique flavor profile,” he says. “I don’t know what it is, I just like it.”

Like many Oregon winemakers, Soter harvests early, at least compared to California. As a result, his Pinots seldom rise above 13.8% alcohol. In the cellar, Soter and Fladwood employ a significant percentage of whole-cluster fermentation for added texture, flavor and structure. The Pinots are generally aged 10 to 12 months in French oak, typically less than 40% new. A vineyard’s personality, Soter believes, is overwhelmed by too much oak and ripeness: “In Oregon, there’s a notion of savoriness and complexity. I reference other things rather than fruit.”

The consensus is that Soter seems at home in Oregon. “Tony loves purity and values texture in a big way,” says winemaker Ken Wright. “[He] left Napa to come up to God’s country. Oregon got to reclaim him.”

Tasting through a vertical of Mineral Springs Pinots back to 2006, Soter smiles and says, “Several surprises today, I’m pleased.” Fladwood tastes along and Hallie Whyte, managing director, joins the group for lunch. “These two are the future,” says Soter, who has turned much of the day-to-day over to them.

It wasn’t quite the future Soter had in mind. Michelle, who inspired much of what Mineral Springs Ranch has become, died of cancer in 2019. She was 55. Their children—Olivia, 23, and Anton, 20—are too young to take the helm, and Soter is not certain they’re interested in the long run. “My daughter told me: ‘Wine’s your thing.’ ” Since the pandemic, Anton has lived with Tony in a small house on the ranch. “It’s hard to say what will happen,” Soter says. “But they have a love for the property they grew up on.”

The veteran vintner is philosophical about it. “There is a finite time we have on Earth, and if you build something with legs, you have to find someone to take it on.” Meanwhile, “I’m going to keep walking the vineyards and making wine for as long as I can.”