Is Cory Empting Writing the Next Chapter of Napa Valley Cabernet at Harlan Estate?

I'll Drink to That! Wine Talk

In this episode, Cory Empting discusses his lifelong journey within the Napa Valley wine industry, from his childhood near The French Laundry to

Key takeaways

• Cory Empting's early exposure to winemaking came from working at Foreman Vineyards as a teenager.
• Bob Levy's winemaking approach was characterized by an extreme, 'exploded diagram' level of attention to detail.

Main topics

• Napa Valley childhood and early influences
• The legacy of Bob Levy at Harlan Estate

Notable quotes

If you're green, you grow. If you're ripe, you rot.

Conclusion

A profound look at how meticulous craftsmanship and long-term vision c

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Very often, listeners tell me that they would like to raise a glass and taste wines together in person. Happily, I have opportunities for you to do that coming up in New York City. Bottles will be open, wine will be poured, and I will be there answering your questions. Check the podcast website for details. Go to alldrinktothatpod.com and click on the Wine Dinners tab to see what could be in your future. That's I-L-L. drinktothatpod.com, and then the Wine Dinners tab to find out the specifics of the next event happening in New York City. Sign up for the email list while you're there on the website, and I'll look forward to seeing you soon. I'm Levi Dalton, and this is All Drink to That, where we get behind the scenes of the wine business. Speaker 4 (1:08) Corey Emting on the show today. Corey is the director of wine growing at Harlan Estate in the Napa Valley of California. Hello, sir. How Speaker 5 (1:14) are Speaker 4 (1:14) you? Speaker 5 (1:14) Good. How about yourself? Speaker 4 (1:16) Really good. I really appreciate your being here. Well, thank you for having me. So before Thomas Keller bought the French Laundry in the mid-90s, a family named the Schmidt family owned the French Laundry, and your mother was one of their employees. Speaker 5 (1:31) Yeah, she came to Yonville in 1982 and was offered a job just working as a waitress at the French Laundry. And we lived a block away. And so oftentimes when you're a waitress there, they would all help out with the cooking. And she started working alongside Sally and became kind of an adopted member of the family. So we spent a lot of weekends vacuuming the steps up to the historic second floor there and running around the garden. I think the Schmidt family, they're extremely warm. They're very down to earth. There were no nonsense. They offered us plenty of fun jobs, picking blackberries for desserts at the restaurant. And so just kind of ran around. And you've lived there your whole life. Speaker 4 (2:15) Yeah. Speaker 5 (2:16) From a young age, growing up in Napa Valley, your main goal in life is to get out of there and never return. But mostly just because it feels like there isn't much going on. And then ultimately I fell in love with wine. So I knew I was going to work in wine, but I wanted to do it elsewhere. And then I think as you get older, you start to realize some of those things that you were trying to run away from are the things that you truly love about it and make it different from any other place you've been. Speaker 4 (2:41) You went to school in the Napa Valley and somebody that you knew from school was Charlie Wagner. Speaker 5 (2:48) Yeah, from a young age, I think even kindergarten in my class was a Charlie Wagner. Carla Mondavi, and then a couple years later, Alan Viadare. And so I had several friends whose family were in the wine business, and Charlie was probably my best friend Speaker 4 (3:05) at that time. Well, he's the son of Chuck Wagner, and that's the family behind Caymus. Speaker 5 (3:10) Yeah, when I was younger, we would go to Rutherford to Caymus, and we'd have sleepovers at his house, and his father was kind of a prankster, Chuck. And so he would always give me a hard time because I was this kind of skater kid with long hair. And he'd say, you know, threatened to cut my hair when I went to sleep. And he treated me like, you know, another son, another member of the family. Speaker 4 (3:33) Chuck is someone that funded for travel and other activities for you, right? Speaker 5 (3:38) Yeah. When I was 15 years old, he wanted Charlie to learn Spanish. And he asked me if I'd be willing to go with him, if he would fund the trip. And of course, being 15, traveling to another country and all of that, it's not something that I had even really thought of. But it turned out to be kind of a pivotal moment for me in my life because I caught the travel bug. I knew I wanted to get out. I wanted to see things. I wanted to learn new cultures. But more important than that, that would come up later is that learning Spanish and not just speaking it on like a conversational level, but really intimately, like being into the culture of Latin America, I think really opened my opportunity to exchange with the people that I work with today. Speaker 4 (4:23) Charlie was your best friend and Chuck was his father and Chuck was the person who really kind of supported you early on, maybe with the idea that you'd get interested in wine and you'd get his son interested in wine maybe as his friend. Speaker 5 (4:35) But Speaker 4 (4:36) there was another part of that, which is that Charlie's mom and dad were divorced and his mom was dating Rick Foreman at the time. Speaker 5 (4:44) As you can imagine, going over to friends' houses for dinners, if I was going to his father's house, wine was on the table at his father's house for drinking Caymus. When you go to Cheryl's house, his mother's house. Rick would be there and he'd be opening, you know, Foreman. And there was always just a little bit of wine given to the kids. And it was kind of something I'd never experienced before. But it allowed me to kind of meet Rick. And when the opportunity arose, when I was 15 years old, Rick asked if I would help him out with bottling because he needed some extra labor. So that was kind of my first intro into the wine business. Speaker 4 (5:17) And how did that go? Speaker 5 (5:19) I mean, the job wasn't very difficult. There was a few of us kind of high schoolers. I think we were bottling, you know, Brad might shoot me down here, but I think it was like 1993, April. And I just remember David coming by and his brother, Jimmy, you know, my job was to stack the full cases, which was kind of like the hardest physical job, but it wasn't mentally too challenging. But I think because they saw that I put my head down and worked really hard. Later that summer, one of Rick's guys who always helped him out had hurt his back and he asked me, hey, would you mind helping me out with the Chardonnay harvest before you head back to school? And that's really kind of where things changed for me. Speaker 4 (5:58) And so, Speaker 1 (5:58) you Speaker 5 (5:59) know, unlike with the bottling experience, I wasn't working with a group of my friends. It was just me and Rick kind of working together. Had to get myself up to his house. And if you've ever been there, it's just up Howe Mountain Road. So I had to take my bike because I didn't have a driver's license and I had to ride up the road. And first day showed up at seven. You know, Rick had his coffee, came down and, you know, Grape showed up and we got to work. And it was it was backbreaking work. I mean. It was kind of like the old school days where you get in with a pitchfork, you jump into this macro bin and you're just trying to fill the press because really like the bottleneck in the process was all the pressing time. So if you could save time, it was in filling the press, emptying the press, all the things that went around it. But I was just inspired by Rick because, I mean, I don't even know how old he was at that time, but he's probably in his 60s, ripped his shirt off, you know, and he's just in. perfect shape starts just like shoveling like 10 times faster than I was. And I didn't want to get showed up. So I was just working harder and harder. But I think that opened the door for me because he said, Hey, if you want to learn more about this, like come in the morning, I start at like five 30, I'll be filling the barrels from that settled from the day before. He's like, I'm not going to pay you until seven, but if you want to show up, I'll teach you. And Day two, I'm in there with a headlamp on my head, riding up Howe Mountain Road in the dark. And I'm doing that day after day after day. And I'm like, I must be doing this because I really think this is cool. And it was just the opportunity to learn. I don't know. It just kind of sparked something in me that just felt like this is what I want to do with my life. And Rick, I mean, Rick's in his 80s now. And if you meet him, you think he's in his 60s. I mean, he just got this youthful energy. He loves making wine like he will. The day he stops making wine is the day he can't move anymore. So he's just one of those guys. He's got that energy, but he also knows how to enjoy life. And I think that was the other thing that really struck me because, you know. We'd put it all out on the crush pad and then you'd be sitting overlooking the valley and he'd just bring out like some cheese and some like charcuterie and he would just like cut it up with like, you know, an open old knife and you just sit there and eat it and, you know, drink some juice from the press. And he's like, this is an amazing life, you know, get to travel, get to do these great things. And so it was really great at kind of selling that dream and pretty amazing setup. You know, his house is right on top of his winery, which is right on top of the cave. And so he's kind of got. his own little environment ecosystem there. Speaker 4 (8:25) Why did Rick Foreman decide that winemaking is how he wanted to spend his life? When I asked him that question back in 2014, I really wasn't expecting that blowing up things would be a part of the answer. Speaker 3 (8:39) It kind of evolved, I should say. I was very, very fascinated with chemistry. Blew up my parents' house making fireworks, very, very high-end fireworks, explosives, I should say. I was so fascinated with fireworks and explosives that I suppose if I hadn't become a winemaker, I'd be working for Zambelli making them. I loved it. And that kind of led me after high school into college chemistry. Chemistry really fascinated me. I caught on. I loved it. It was interesting. And as I got involved in chemistry, I thought, now what am I going to really do with chemistry? Obviously, I'd gotten beyond, at that point, fireworks. And I thought, well, you know, I also like agriculture. I like to be outdoors. Agriculture interests me. I'm really not the kind of chemistry guy who wants to sit in a lab all my life. And so I learned of the Department of Food Science. And I thought, well, that's kind of nice. I like, that sounds good. So I... Got into the Department of Food Science, and once there, realized that they also could offer oenology and viticulture, you know, even more refinement. And something clicked, and I thought, you know, I really like the thought of that. That fascinates me even more. My family had no background in it. I came from Oakland. They had no clue. Didn't even drink wine. But the whole idea of fermentation really interested me, and I just... The light went on and I thought, I want to do that. And so I just dedicated it. It was like one of those crazy things that evolves and you know all of a sudden when the light goes on, it's there. And I became passionate about it very quickly. And I remain so. I'm so excited about harvest every year. I'm 70 years old and I'm the only cellar worker. I do it all. And I love it. I can think of new things I want to do every year. I realize what I did wrong the last year. I make these extensive notes. I correct things. I fine-tune things. I look forward to it. I keep saying to myself, you know, one of these days I'm going to make that wine I want to make. I haven't gotten there yet. Speaker 4 (10:45) When we come back, we'll hear about Corey Empting's first visit to Harlan Estate and also about exploded diagrams. That's right after this. Speaker 3 (10:55) I talk to winemakers all the Speaker 4 (10:57) time, and something they tell me is that oxygen management is a key to aging wine. Finding the right balance is crucial, and that's why I recommend DM's revolutionary cork closures. With DM corks, winemakers can achieve precisely controlled oxygen management after a bottle leaves the winery, ensuring a wine that matures gracefully and reaches its full potential. With over 2 billion DM corks sold each year, it's clear that winemakers worldwide trust DM for consistent results. And DM has recently expanded the permeability options for their popular DM10 and DM30 closures, providing winemakers with even more flexibility to choose a cork that will guarantee the kind of wine life they envision. Banish surprise dud bottles and embrace DM closures. Your customers will thank you. Ready to ensure the lifespan of your wines? Go to dm-closures.com forward slash idtt to learn more. That's d-i-a-m-closures with an s dot com forward slash idtt for more information. Speaker 4 (12:15) So you took an internship at Harlan Estate in 2001. That's now been a place that you've been for over 23 years, right? So what was that first experience like? Speaker 5 (12:27) The first experience for me was really setting foot on that property for the interview. I mean, I knew Bob from the Maryville era and I'd worked at Maryville just doing events to make a little bit of money and worked there long enough to be scared of Bob. He was a pretty intimidating guy. Bob Levy. And I was a little bit late to the interview because I got lost. Anyway, I stepped foot on the property and I had to walk and you know, you're nervous. You've got all these emotions going. You'd never been there. You didn't know what to expect, but there was a certain ease and a certain kind of groundedness that I felt immediately on walking on that property. And ultimately I was able to find Bob and was able to get the internship. But the experience was, was completely different from anything I'd ever experienced. I mean, I'd worked, I think I'd worked seven harvests before I worked at Harlan estate. So it wasn't like it was the first time around, but you know, I'd seen gondolas turned into macro bins at wineries, you know, and, you know, hand punched down and pump over and all these things, but got to Harlan and it was. Speaker 5 (13:33) It was really like this maniacal attention to every single little detail. I mean, the sorting tables that I think we all take for granted today just didn't exist. I didn't see them anywhere else. And they were kind of a laughingstock when they first came out. But Bob was really willing to look at any little thing, any minutiae in question, whether that was the right way to do it and how we should be thinking about it differently. So I think. And one, I respect people that work really hard. Bob Levy worked really hard. He did the work himself. Like he could do anything that you needed to do in the cellar. He could do it better than anybody else. And he held himself to a high standard, but he was also willing to question himself on, is there a better way to do this? You know, and not constrain himself by kind of all of these different logistical thought processes. And I was blown away by the wines that I was tasting. Speaker 5 (14:27) I was blown away by the place, but it was that culture that he kind of led with that was unlike anything that I'd ever experienced in the wine world. Speaker 4 (14:36) When I think of Harlan from the outside, I think of it as kind of flashy and where rich people go to buy wine. But actually underlying that is this guy who's just obsessed with details. Speaker 5 (14:51) Yeah, I mean, there's no detail too small for him to fixate on for hours or days. And like, I think the best way to summarize, if you want to understand the way Bob's brain works, it's like, have you ever seen like an exploded diagram of like, you know, take an engine and they just pull everything apart so you can see the lines and how they're going to connect to one another, but you can see each piece on its own. Like that's Bob. And I think he told me the story when he was young. He got like this kind of transistor radio where you could kind of build it yourself from the ground up. And he just became obsessed with that. One day I had to bring him some samples and we were going to do a little tasting of some things. And I went to the house and he had completely taken apart his washer and dryer. And I have no doubt that he spent twice as much money as you needed to, to fix that thing. But he was going to do it himself and he was going to understand how it works so that he could keep fixing it. And that's just, that's kind of Bob in a nutshell, every little detail. And the thing is, I don't think that's changed. Like meeting Speaker 4 (15:49) him recently, I felt like he's still like that. It's not like he's like, Oh no, I got to figure it out now. Speaker 5 (15:55) Not enough. You know Speaker 4 (15:56) what I mean? Speaker 5 (15:56) No, it's a mindset. His thing he said to me is if you're green, you grow. If you're ripe, you rot. And it's just this mentality of having this like student mentality. Like you always need to be curious about the next thing. The moment you think you've got it figured out, there's only one way to go. And so I don't think that's what motivates him, but I think that's the outcome of how he approaches life and how he approaches wine growing specifically. Speaker 4 (16:19) And so you went to this place and it's. kind of a peaceful place. Like they had made the winery by that point, the Howard Backen facility. And you go up there and then I think you've used the word cloister before. It has that kind of Zen feel to it as like a kind of a monastery. It's up on a hill and it's, you know, quiet, you know, it's not, not a lot going on around there. And it sounds like that drew you in. Speaker 5 (16:42) Yeah, I mean, I think for most of my life, I had all of this passion and excitement to be the very best. But, you know, like many people, you don't really know what that means. And you're kind of searching for it and it's kind of baseless. And so you're driven and you've got this, you know, this desire to go to the next level. And I think what Harlan Estate did for me was to give me this kind of like foundation and this groundingness. And, you know, and so many times, as you can imagine, in wine growing, you... you hit these like really tough roadblocks where you don't know what to do, or you feel like the variables are just kind of exploding out. And, you know, it's a little bit of chaos. We talk about going from naive simplicity to kind of like this mountain of complexity to get to enlightened simplicity on the other end. And I always found that when I got into these kind of more chaotic moments that you could just walk the property and you just kind of come back to, okay, what's the essential thing here? Where do we need to focus? And, and it, it has a certain energy and a, I do think that my gift to Harlan Estate has been my ability to kind of zoom out a little bit and see the forest from the trees and then go back to the trees instead of just be focused on this little detail but not understand how it fits into the bigger picture. Speaker 4 (17:57) And so the thing about Harlan Estate is that it's owned and was founded by Bill Harlan. It's run now in partnership with his son, Will Harlan. But Bill laid out from the beginning what's called the 200-year plan. So he had traveled to Bordeaux and to other parts of Europe with Robert Mondavi. He'd seen the first gross in Bordeaux. And he came back with this idea that wine is a multi-generational thing. And if you want to be the best, you're not going to do it overnight. Rome wasn't built in a day kind of idea. And he laid out this long-term plan. And this directly affected you, like almost immediately. Because unusually in the wine world, they didn't say, like, you did a great job interning here. Why don't you come back when you're a bit older? they basically said like, if I understand correctly, one day we're going to need someone to replace Bob and we'd think you might be it if you stuck around. Speaker 5 (18:47) Yes. Yeah. Right after the internship, I think Bob and I had worked really well together. I felt like I got good at anticipating. He was a pretty quiet guy, but it was kind of clear to me what he needed. Obviously I wasn't perfect at it, but I think he felt like I might have what it takes to go to that next level. Spoke with Bill. Bill had a good friend. His best friend was actually overseeing the ranch and he had put in a good word for me as well, which I would find out later through Bill. So when I sat down with Bill and they said, we're looking for the next winemaker for Harlan Estate, I mean, it was hugely validating in one sense. On the other side, it was meaning I would be returning home to a place that I wasn't ready to be returning to. I could kind of hope to keep going on. So it wasn't one of those things that was immediately exciting for me. Speaker 4 (19:42) If you think about Bill Harlan's life, a guy who was around Napa from the 70s, he'd sailed the world and done motorcycles and paid for school with poker winnings. you know, done all these exciting things. And he was essentially saying like, I don't want you to do any of that. Could you just have a nine to five for me and like take care of some details for like the rest of your life? And you were like, I don't know. Speaker 5 (20:04) Yeah. Will, Will and I kind of commiserate about that a little bit. I mean, Will jokes around. He joined the business back in 2007, but he's been at, he's been at meetings and the table since he was probably like 10 years old. Speaker 5 (20:20) But yeah, Bill gets the wax poetic about living about 10 lives, which none of us can verify. And then, you know, at the same time, I think he did realize that, hey, me asking you to come back doesn't mean that I'm expecting you to be here year round. And so I think he had the foresight to say, if I do that, you probably won't be here in the long run. So we kind of had this side agreement that he would give me six to eight weeks a year to go travel. He wasn't going to pay me, but he wasn't going to fire me either. And let me just kind of. go and do things. So usually went to a wine region, did a couple of motorcycle trips. But I think he knew that I needed to live and not just for my own sake, but also to be able to contribute at the level that he had hoped in the long run. Speaker 4 (21:05) So it seems to me with barely meeting this person, Bill Harlan, that he's pretty good at recognizing talented individuals and he's pretty good at giving them situations that they find appealing, that they stick around for decades. And then He's pretty good about staying out of the way but giving them financial support but then bringing vision to the whole project. Is that kind of a summary here? Speaker 5 (21:26) That's an excellent summary. I think that at the same time, he's kind of in everything. But he does know that he needs to trust people to do things. And I think it's not something that comes as natural to him on occasion. But certainly with wine growing specifically, I think he identified in Bob this person that had the ability to do something that, of course, he didn't have the ability to do. And he wasn't going to sit there and second guess and question everything that he was doing. Speaker 4 (21:56) And there is a third leg of the stool, which was Don Weaver, a guy who was a master salesman. Very important third leg. put this wine around the world and built a lot of key relationships, right? Yeah. For decades. Speaker 5 (22:07) I think each one of them was in exactly the right seat. Don jokes around. He said, you know, because Don was a winemaker by training and he had worked at Heights under Joe Heights. And so he said, when Bob showed up, I realized this guy was way better than me at making wine. So I quickly reinvented myself as the guy that needed to travel around the world talking about the wine. We wouldn't be where we are today if Bob was in charge of doing that and Don was making the wine or if any of those guys traded seats, it wouldn't have been the right fit. So it was this kind of alchemy of the three of them. Speaker 4 (22:39) But you chose to stick around Harlan when they made you this offer. And now you've, you know, decades Speaker 3 (22:44) later, you're still Speaker 4 (22:45) there. So what was it that you decided to stick around for? You weren't married at this time. You didn't have kids. Speaker 5 (22:52) I think it was, it came down to three things. It came down to. I had a feeling about that place that just felt like home and I couldn't shake. Speaker 5 (23:03) I saw a team of people that were holding themselves to a standard that I didn't even know existed and redefining what that was. And I just felt like there was a never ending growth curve there. And I think the third thing was that Bill was reinvesting everything that the company made back into the business because the company was meant to sustain itself for generations. Speaker 5 (23:31) I think a lot of places I had worked, you saw two of those things, sometimes only one of those things in existence, where you have a vineyard that you feel really strong about. There's not enough financial resources to make it happen. You've got a really intelligent team, or you don't have people that are passionate, and you've got someone throwing money at it and trying to solve it. So I think I identified really young that I could travel the whole world. I could go everywhere and never find this opportunity ever again. Speaker 4 (24:01) So one of the real signature vintages of the Napa Valley that really kind of set in motion a different reality for it, both in terms of the wines that were being made and the commercial reception, is the 1997 vintage. And that's before your time at Harlan in terms of when that wine was made. But I think you've talked to Bob a lot about that wine. And I think you've also opened a lot of that wine. Because one of the things about Harlan is you have old vintages to open and you do. Maybe you could just kind of run me through 97 and how it was experienced for Harlan and in those bottles. Speaker 5 (24:35) Yeah, I think to speak about 97 and whenever you speak about these wines, you kind of have to put them in the context of the human element and also the time. But you have to think like when I showed up in 2001, 97 was like the wine that they were releasing. And so every once in a while, Don would have a distributor over and they would just leave a half bottle. So I probably drank like in that first like two months of working there, like I drank more 97 than I probably had since. But and it was, I mean. It was the most full mid-palate wine that I'd ever had. I'd never tasted anything like it. It was quite fresh at that point. And I kind of had this reverence for it. And it was interesting because like that would start to change very quickly, my feeling about it. But when I talked to Bob about it, because I was enamored with this wine early on, he goes, oh yeah, I mean, it was, you know, the harvest was bigger than I anticipated. We were still making wines at the original winery, which is now the Bond Winery. And he said we didn't have enough tank space because, you know, winery wasn't big enough so he had to wait a little bit longer to pick the last pick of the old vines on the east-facing terraces and when he finally brought those in the fermentation just didn't finish and so he sulfured them put them in barrels and let them sit there and they slowly ticked away like over the next literally like 30 months i want to say and so every time One would go dry. He'd check it, make sure the VA was fine, everything else. And he'd add it to the blend. And that literally happened barrel by barrel until the very last barrel. And I think he added that one like right before bottling. And so I think part of understanding 97 was that like, you know, I mean, there was a ripeness. It's not quite as ripe as most people kind of give it credit for being, but what would end up happening to that wine is like, it started to kind of develop these real like acid aldehyde notes. As you know, during fermentation, like it's both like reduction happening and oxidation happening kind of like over and over and over again as the redox potential changes in the wine. And so that wine, you know, depending on how someone stored it, like there was still a little bit of active fermentation happening because it had almost finished. And so these aldehydic notes made people think that it was overripe notes. Speaker 5 (26:56) And, you know, maybe like, I want to say 15 years ago, like it was at a place where I was like, like maybe this wine should never be opened again. On the palate, it was super fresh and dense. You know, it had good acidity. pH was, you know, relatively low. The VA wasn't ever crazy, which is another like really important fact about the wine. Speaker 5 (27:19) And I was like, it just smells so evolved aromatically. Speaker 4 (27:23) And then I was in New York. I Speaker 5 (27:27) want to say it was like. seven years ago before the pandemic for sure someone opened a magno 97 harlan and i didn't know it was 97 and i was like oh there's maybe there's 95 like you know maybe 94 and he's like it's 97 harlan and i was like holy Speaker 1 (27:43) moly like this is this Speaker 5 (27:45) is like totally different than the wine because i'd like written it off and i hadn't tasted it and even like this last uh god in the last month i think i've had it three times just by chance and like very consistent Not a lot of bottle variation, but it is getting fresher and fresher. I don't know why that is other than like we never find, we never filtered. So like there, it's still a living bottle and things are still happening, but it seems to just get fresher and fresher. And now like the aromas are starting to match the palette and it's starting to make a lot more sense. And so it's kind of fun, kind of been a fun wine to track. And I think one that's kind of stretched my imagination of. like what could be possible and what is, is wine's life linear? I don't think it is. I think it depends on certain circumstances and it could kind of go through these different phases, but I think it's a wine. Like I have no doubt that wine will age another 20 years. I think it will be fresher in 20 years than it is today, which is kind of a crazy preposterous thing to say, but. Speaker 4 (28:47) What's a normal aging curve for Harlan Estate? Does it go through a dip and come back? Does it get fresher later? Does it go 50 years? Does it go 20 years? Like what's Speaker 5 (28:56) normal? Yeah, I mean, clearly we're building a track record as we go. You know, Don Weaver used to speak eloquently about this, but like we called it the seven-year itch. There was always like kind of this moment seven years from harvest that things got a little bit weird for a second. I'm not seeing that as much anymore. But I do think when you get to the other side of 10, you kind of get to this next point in it. But certainly the wines that we're tasting now that are 20, 30 years old, those are in a really different spot. Things get silkier. It's lost a lot of the baby fat and the weight, and you can see through the wine a little bit more. And I think a lot of aromatically, the aromas that smell like the forest there that we walked through start to come out in the wines. Speaker 4 (29:44) But I don't Speaker 5 (29:44) know. It'll be interesting when we start to have wines that are 40, 50 years old that were from seven, eight-year-old vines and what does that mean for what we're doing today and how we're approaching it. Speaker 4 (29:56) Will Harlan came back. He got his philosophy degree at Duke. He'd been in the tech world for a bit and then he started showing up more and more. And then he developed a wine project out of the young vines called The Mascot. And I feel generationally that you bonded generationally. Speaker 5 (30:14) It's interesting. I feel like a little bit of like a tweener in the sense that I got to spend a lot of close time with Bill early on. And I think in a lot of ways, we shared a lot of similarities in our drive and the way we looked at things. And same thing with Bob. I was clearly from a younger generation, but Bill really took me under his wing. And so I felt... Like I had this great relationship with him. And I think when Will, and I knew Will, you know, I think when I first joined the organization, I was 20 and he was probably 12. And so we didn't have much of a relationship early on. But when he came back to this, his dad said, oh, Will wants to work a harvest. And I kind of like in my mind, I was like, oh, he's probably just doing this because Bill's making him do it. And so we sat down and we had this conversation. I said, do you really want to do this? is this what you want to do? And he almost was like so offended. He took it like so personally. He was like, I wouldn't be sitting in front of you having this conversation if it was because my dad wanted me to do it. And I realized that like, he really wanted to be part of it. And like, he was making a conscious choice to do it. And I think over time I realized this guy's really the future. And I told Bill, I said, you know, I really am starting to like, build this bond with will and i think it's super important that we have trust and i think for a time there bill was kind of like talking to me and hoping i would talk to will and i was like i'm not doing this anymore like i've gotta i've gotta build this relationship with will i really believe in him and i believe that together we can go to another level but it means that you know if we want to talk about things we have to talk about them all together i've Speaker 4 (31:57) watched a lot of will harlan interviews now preparing for this one and one of the things he always does is mention you Always. Like, unprompted. It'd be like, Corey says, you know. Yeah. There's a respect level there. Speaker 5 (32:09) Yeah. I mean, I would say, like, at this point, like, I feel like Will's my brother. And, like, the irony of it