A nose for the wine trade

Cartlidge & Browne does big business from AmCan digs

By JACK HEEGER
Register Staff Writer

Heading south on Highway 29 toward American Canyon, just before Green Island Road, drivers see a huge billboard that reads, “Please stick your nose in our business.” The sign features a nose in a large glass of wine.

It’s an invitation to visit the tasting room at Cartlidge & Browne, just about a mile west on Green Island Road. The tasting room is in a small corner of the gigantic 115,000 square foot winery, and consists of a bar about 10 feet in length with perhaps a dozen bottles lined up on the counter and a rack with bottles ready for sale on the wall behind it.

Technically, the facility is called Greenfield Wine Company, a corporate entity named for the road on which co-founder Glenn Browne lives.

The billboard, which draws attention from passing motorists, is the brainchild of Tony Cartlidge, the CEO of the winery, who said he awoke in the middle of the night a few years ago with the idea. “Some of my friends told me it was crude, but I think it’s the graphic that makes it,” he said, referring to the nose in the glass. After all, it’s something every wine enthusiast does before taking a sip.

Cartlidge has a poster-sized replica of the billboard in his office and others are all over the building, on the side of each case of wine and on the back of business cards.

But it’s not the graphic or slogan that defines Cartlidge & Browne wines — it’s the affordability.

All Cartlidge & Browne brand wines carry a retail price of $12 to $15, and the wines are varietally correct, Cartlidge said. “We believe that someone spending $12 to $15 is entitled to a high quality wine. Our goal is to make wines that almost everyone can afford.”

The secret, he said, is to find vineyards throughout California that produce high-quality grapes and then to blend them into a single wine. “We’ve always been a California appellation,” he said, “because we think that blending (wine) from all areas makes a better wine.”

It’s not that he disdains individual appellations — Cartlidge & Browne is coming out with a single vineyard-designated cabernet sauvignon from Lake County’s Snows Lake Vineyard, which will sell for $20.

But Cartlidge said, “If ‘appellation’ means fine wines, great, But if ‘appellation’ only means higher prices, then it should go back to being a mountain range on the East Coast.”

Rave reviews

Making high quality wines for $15 and under is difficult, and it’s hard to find a winemaker who will do it, he said. For the past 25 years, Paul Moser has been crafting C&B wines from grapes grown in about 45 vineyards on 1,000 acres in a variety of appellations, including Mendocino, Sonoma, Napa, Santa Barbara, Monterey, Paso Robles, Solano County, Lake County, Lodi and Clarksburg, in the Sierra foothills.

“He’s a master at blending,” Cartlidge said. He credits Moser’s arrival shortly after the company was started as a key to C&B’s success. Some help from Robert Parker, the highly-regarded wine critic, helped immensely, too, Cartlidge admitted.

“From the very start what kept us going was that (Parker) gave us good reviews,” he said. Parker called the 1995 chardonnay “the best value in American chardonnay I have tasted in several years.” The following year, he said, “This winery, known for its excellent bargains, has again turned out a knock-out chardonnay.”

In fact, Parker gave rave reviews to C&B for eight years in a row and in 2003 said, “The question that begs to be answered is why so many producers ignore what Cartlidge and Browne does better than just about anybody else in the state — produce fruit-forward, pure, varietally correct, delicious wines.”

Cartlidge proudly points to the fact that the average score given to C&B wines by Parker over the past 10 years has been between 87 and 88, and “in the last five years, 569 California wines have been given an average score of 88. The average price of those is $35, our price is $12.”

He’s never met Parker personally, nor has any contact with him. “We just send the wines to him,” he said. “We see  (the rating) when everyone else does.” He said he no longer sends wine to any other critics.

100 percent varietals

Total production of the C&B brand is about 150,000 cases of cabernet sauvignon, merlot, pinot noir, chardonnay, syrah, zinfandel and sauvignon blanc. All are 100 percent varietals, blended from grapes coming from as many as eight different areas — for example, the pinot noir is composed of 17 different components made from grapes sourced in Monterey County, Carneros, Russian River Valley, Solano County, Napa, Mendocino and Santa Barbara.

At the other end of the spectrum, the sauvignon blanc is sourced entirely from two vineyards in Lake County.

A key to the continued quality of the grapes is the relationships Cartlidge has established with growers. “We have long-term contracts with them, and we’re working with others in some planting contracts,” he said. “They own the property, but we choose the clones.” Supervising the vineyard operations is Samuel Barron, a viticulturist from Chile who has been with Cartlidge & Browne for two years.

Although the C&B brand makes up most of the winery’s production, it also produces 100,000 cases of other brands.

Stratford is a brand that was created in 1982 and the current releases include two 2002 cabernet sauvignons bearing Napa Valley and Knights Valley designations. Each retails for $25.

Chardonnay, merlot and cabernet sauvignon are sold under the Manzanita Canyon label, priced from $7 to $8, and Cartlidge said they are made primarily for the export market.

Moser created a blend which is whimsically called Rabid Red and the 2004 vintage is composed of petite sirah, syrah, cabernet sauvignon and tempranillo, with an added touch of grenache and zinfandel because “the blend was better with them than without them,” according to the tasting notes. It sells for $15. Cartlidge said the blend may change slightly from year to year, “but it will keep the same flavor profile.”

The Rabid Red label is taken from a painting that Cartlidge saw in a restaurant in New York’s Greenwich Village one day. “It was painted by an 80-year-old Irishman, Jack Delaney, and I loved it, so I bought it and got the rights to use it on the label.”

A new brand is making its way to the market — a higher-end pinot noir called Moser Scharding, named for Moser and his assistant, Rebecca Scharding. It’s made from grapes grown in the Durrell Vineyard in Sonoma County and carries a $35 price tag.

Another brand, Dancing Crow Vineyard 2006 sauvignon blanc from Kelseyville in Lake County, will be introduced next year.

Cartlidge said the wines are distributed in 48 states and eight countries, and boasted that the wines are in 10,000 restaurants and shops throughout the U.S. The biggest distribution is along the East Coast — he said 25,000 cases of Cartlidge & Browne cabernet sauvignon are sold in New York, and indicated that the wine is big in some unlikely areas — 6,000 cases are sold in Colorado and 3,000 in Mississippi.

Started in tasting room

Cartlidge, a native of England, earned a degree in architecture, came to the United States in 1971 and drove logging trucks around Washington and Oregon. He made his way to the Napa Valley in 1979 and started calling wineries, looking for a job.

He was hired in the tasting room at Rutherford Hill, and shortly after was introduced to Browne, a retired State Department official. Within six months they formed Cartlidge & Browne, and had secured a contract to buy chardonnay from Bill Jaeger.

“We made 1,200 cases and sold it out in six weeks,” Cartlidge said, “and it just took off from there.”

Moser joined the firm in 1981. He heads production for all brands, leading a team of seven people.

They started by buying grapes and making the wine in other facilities “all over the valley,” and in the early 1990s bought the old Ehlers winery facility in St. Helena. “But it was too small for our purposes, so we looked around and had an opportunity to buy this (the American Canyon facility) in 2000,” he said. The current building is 115,000 square feet and houses 8,000 barrels.

Browne, now 88, maintains his interest in the company and continues to act as an adviser.

Bob Babbe, national sales manager, heads a team of five regional sales managers who work with the company’s distributors, but in California, the company sells directly to customers. “We have a network in California of our own sales people and brokers,” Cartlidge said.

The winery maintains a staff of about 55 people on a year-round basis, and in addition to producing its own wines, does custom bottling for numerous other wineries. Cartlidge said that last year it bottled 400,000 cases for outside clients, and even handles some custom winemaking duties for others.

Cartlidge plans to keep a winning formula going, but he’s excited about the new line of vineyard-designated wines. “We’re happy where we are, but we’re growing,” he said. For information, go to www.cartlidgebrowne.com.

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