Observing a lack of demand for poets in the workplace, Phil founded Enterprise Vineyard Management in 1979, the same year that Red and his sons, Tony and Phil, started Coturri Winery. Phil specialized in developing small properties. Determined to be a self-sufficient farmer and already an organic gardener, he was challenged by a client, Myron Freiberg, to farm his Sonoma Mountain vineyard organically. Phil never looked back. Today, he leases the Freiberg property, sending the grapes to his brother, Tony, winemaker at Coturri Winery.

Phil has built a reputation as the premier organic viticulturist in Sonoma Valley, if not all of Northern California. Today he serves some 20 clients, including Hanzell, Kamen Estate Wines, Moon Mountain, Arrowood Vineyards & Winery, Tom Smothers and Amapola Creek. He and his staff farm over 400 acres of vineyard, all without synthetic fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides or pesticides.

Who or what were your early influences?

There were a number of us from the Joe Miami school of viticulture, like Barney Fernandez, who was Richard Arrowood’s first vineyard manager at Chateau St. Jean, or David DiPiero, who was at St. Jean later and whose father farmed Monte Rosso. It’s ironic that here we are again, right next to Monte Rosso. Anyway, when I was 14, Joe told me about the basic cultures of a vineyard – pruning, cultivation, harvesting, and so on. For hillside vineyards, he stressed the importance of cover crops. In those days, that meant oats and mustard.

Cover crops stop erosion and add nutrients to the soil. Growers would plant them in September while waiting for harvest, and later it would rain and the cover crop would germinate. They did not want to see dirt between the rows during the winter months. They put life back into the soil. Cover crops are the key to natural farming, the most important culture. But cover crops took time and effort, and growers got away from them.

From April 1 until November 1, grape growing is a monoculture. From November 1 until April 1, you can have a polyculture that breaks the biological monotony. The vineyard may be kind of hairy looking, but you put 80% of the nutrients into the soil then.

What is your main goal at Amapola Creek?

Expression of terroir. You can’t express the soil if it’s dead. So we want to enliven the medium in which the vines grow to fully express them. This is wonderful ground. I’m working with 20 acres of hillside vineyards strewn along 600 feet of elevation. I like to grow grapes with a view!

For Cabernet Sauvignon, we want to get around three tons per acre maximum. With 2,000 vines per acre, that works out to three pounds per vine, which will give us intensity of color, flavor and body.

All Amapola Creek vines are cane-pruned, mostly two canes with one or two spurs per cane. We want exact placement of shoots to provide maximum air circulation and filtered sunlight. This is not strict vertical shoot positioning (VSP), but more of a hybrid with a little canopy flop on top. I want to change from a six-inch to 12-inch cross-arm for a little of that old California sprawl to maintain proper tannins and structure. A vineyard is never stagnant. It’s always a work in progress.

How has growing Cabernet Sauvignon changed?

For one thing, monoclonal Cabernet Sauvignon is gone. After a number of years working with Richard, I know exactly what he wants. So we carefully manage each block to express it and we provide clonal diversity as well to give him the tannin structure, flavor profile and textural richness that he looks for. After his 40 years of winemaking and my 30 years of grape growing, we can fill in the palette with our two inputs. For example, I won’t say the French Cabernet Sauvignon clones are “better,” but I knew that Richard would recognize their uniqueness. And he did.

Historically, Richard has blended Cabernet Sauvignon made from sites around Sonoma Valley. On a smaller scale, we’re able to do the same thing here – provide him with fruit from several non-contiguous sites scattered up and down half a mile of mountainside with at least three distinctive soil types. And that creates complexity. From the get-go, my job has been to design the bottle of wine in the vineyard with him.

Is it fun to design a vineyard operation like Amapola Creek?

Yes, it is. We developed this vineyard in three stages and deliberately did not fast-track it. We spent two years before putting a vine in the ground to gain an understanding of each site. The concept is that I need to farm each block specifically to create uniformity of ripening in this chaos of terrain and soil, and then let the terroir express its uniqueness.

What is your most important tool to accomplish that?

Experience aside, it’s water. Control of its application is a powerful tool. That’s why we studied the sites. China Wall, for example, had a lot more rock than the profile indicated, and it has abundant water from springs as well. We put in a mile of drains in that vineyard. It’s costly, but we have set up our irrigation sets much as you would install an irrigation system at your home. Ideally, you have the capability to irrigate differently in sun or shade, north or south lawn, on a hill or in a swale.

Was organic farming a “tough sell” for Richard?

No. I kid about working with numerous winemakers, all of whom desire something different. I say it’s like having a wife and ten girlfriends, and that I can’t possibly keep them all happy. But the truth is that Richard was convinced by flavors. When he tasted organic fruit, I knew that he understood. Today he’s urging us to put up new signs on the fences that say “No Spraying, Organic Farm.” His vineyards are all certified by C.C.O.F. (California Certified Organic Farmers).

After 30 years, you still seem to take delight in what you’re doing.

We have a responsibility. Sonoma Valley has become a chic destination, and we now see ‘trophy houses” dotting these hills. We must always remain mindful that anything that we do up on this property winds up in San Francisco Bay.

The kind of farming we do is really more traditional and natural. There’s an existing body of knowledge that we almost discarded. After World War II, we were led by the petro-chemical industry selling us product. Even our vineyard spacings were largely predicated on the width of tractors made for Midwestern farmers.

But with the maturation of the global wine industry, we have learned that Old World ideas, such as higher plant densities, have merit. Winkler wrote that, in essence, 400 big vines or 2,000 little vines on an acre will yield the same tonnage. Now we know that small vines can give more flavor and uniformity.

We’ve moved from the sterility of a grape-growing monoculture back toward bio-diversity. When I look at these cover crops, I see life teaming – not only plant life, but insect life, including beneficial predatory insects. Life is about bio-diversity. At the southern edge of the Montaña Vista block, we put in a little family fruit orchard that frames a view of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, so that we can have a variety of things flowering at different times.

Next I want to convince Richard and Alis to run some goats up here.