Placer County winery helps stamp out breast cancer
When people talk of wine in the Sierra foothills, they almost always mention the wineries and vineyards of Amador, Calaveras and El Dorado counties.
Jim Taylor, his wife, Lynda, and their son Ryan are out to add Placer County to the list, and they've enrolled the help of a passionate, energetic and admired ally: Dr. Ernie Bodai, director of breast surgical services at Sacra- mento's Kaiser Permanente Medical Center.
Bodai is the sparkplug behind the U.S. Postal Service's rainbow-hued breast-cancer stamp, of which approximately 600 million have been sold over the past eight years, raising $50 million for research into the causes and cures for breast cancer.
This fall, that stamp will become a wine label. It's to appear initially on about 2,000 cases of a moderately priced blended Sierra foothills red table wine.
If all goes as discussed, the bottling line that will crank out these wines is housed in a small shed along narrow and winding Mt. Vernon Road on the north edge of Auburn.
That's where the Taylors have lived since 1986, where a decade later they started to plant some grapevines in their front yard in part because they thought they'd look pretty, and where in 2002 they opened a tasting room in a converted 1950s-era milk house over the cave they'd dug to house the barrels of their Mt. Vernon Winery.
The prospect of the breast-cancer stamp doubling as a wine label grew out of a tasting that Bodai attended at Mt. Vernon Winery this spring. When conversation got around to that possibility, Bodai embraced it. "I usually leave no stone unturned," he says of his efforts to promote breast-cancer awareness and research.
He sees no mixed message in putting the stamp on wine, given government-mandated warnings linking excessive alcohol consumption to cancer.
"I don't think a glass of wine is going to cause anyone cancer, not as long as it is taken in moderation," Bodai says. "Besides, wine also has some health benefits."
Still to be determined is what percentage of the sales of the wine would go toward breast-cancer research, but the Taylors are proposing 12.5 percent. "That would be very generous," Bodai says.
The Taylors expect the first run to sell for $23 a bottle, which pencils out to about $2.88 per bottle, or a total of $69,120, toward breast-cancer research.
"This is a no-brainer for us," Jim Taylor says of the project. "It would be an absolute honor to make that wine. It will raise a tremendous amount of money. We just have to be ready for it."
Bodai perhaps could have lined up a winery with greater production, distribution and marketing clout to create and sell the wine, but he says he likes the energy and the accessibility of Taylor.
"I have a direct connection with him; I don't have to go through millions of other people to get to him. He's accountable," Bodai says.
He also is talking with an organic-coffee roaster and a luggage company that have proposed products that would replicate the stamp.
The Taylors have submitted a label design with the breast-cancer art to federal officials who oversee the wine trade. They hope to see the label approved next month. The wine would be released in October - Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
The Taylors bought their 31-acre Auburn property in 1979, when he was a real-estate broker in Fremont. They built a house on the site in 1985 and moved up the next year. "I came here to semi-retire," Jim Taylor says. "And we thought this would be an excellent area to raise our kids."
They hadn't considered planting wine grapes until an old friend, Napa Valley winemaker Nils Venge, said he'd like to have a source for foothill zinfandel. "Lynda said they'd look pretty in front of the house," Taylor recalls.
They were content to sell the grapes until Ryan, then studying economics at Chico State, calculated that the family "could make a whole lot more money if we put the grapes in the bottles ourselves," Taylor says.
Thus began the construction of pads to hold fermentation tanks, the digging of a cave, the appropriation of a barn into a barrel room and the conversion of the milk house into a tasting room.
Ryan and consulting foothill winemaker Rich Gilpin make the wines. They're producing about 5,000 cases a year and starting to accumulate gold and silver medals on the competition circuit.
They make a couple of chardonnays but are most enthusiastic about their larger and more varied lineup of red wines. Notable for its lushness, clarity and balance, the current Mt. Vernon portfolio includes a licorice- accented 2001 Sierra foothills syrah ($20); a lean, bright and sharp 2002 Placer County cabernet franc ($24); a fruity, wiry and tart 2001 Sierra foothills cabernet sauvignon ($28); and a silken and lilting 2002 Amador County port ($23 per 375-milliliter bottle), all chocolate and raspberries.
The most novel release in the lineup is a nonvintage blended red table wine consisting largely of syrah and petite sirah sold under the proprietary name "Girly Man" ($23). Bearing a cartoon label of a club-wielding caveman resembling a slimmed-down Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's an aromatic, sweetly juicy and refreshing burger and pizza wine. One hundred fifteen cases were made, and after two months in circulation three cases remain.
It's a playful way to help raise the profile of Placer County as one more serious Sierra foothill wine enclave.
Mt. Vernon Winery, at 10850 Mt. Vernon Road, Auburn, is Placer County's only winery with a tasting room open to the public (from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursdays through Sundays). For more information: (530) 823-1111.