Enjoying a glass of wine is much sweeter when you know the details of the winery and the winemaking process. At your next dinner party, consider offering a little history behind the wines you serve to enhance the experience of your guests. This article looks at the J.R. Storey Winery, providing tidbits of information you can share at your next get together.

The Photography/Winemaking Connection

Photography requires nuanced attention to detail, framing the subject, choosing a certain distance from the focus of attention, regulating light, enhancing texture, using color, choosing appropriate equipment for a desired result, which ultimately evokes the feelings and ideas that will captivate the viewer.

Instead of visual attention, winemaking requires nuanced savory attention. It begins in the vineyard, picking the fruit at a particular time for different flavors, selecting fermentation yeasts that complement certain grapes, adding just the right amount of sulfur, extracting specific flavors, texture, and color from the solids, transferring the wine to particular barrels for various lengths of time, and regulating its various stages. Simultaneously, the winemaker projects how current flavors will modify over time, intervening to prevent undesired results and supporting desired results.

From Photography To Wine

This winemaking-photography connection started when award-winning photojournalist, John Storey, working for the San Francisco Chronicle started his own winery in 2005, now making 2,000 cases of wine yearly that he sells to restaurants, wine club associations, and wine shops mainly located in the San Francisco Bay Area. Since John doesn't own his own vineyard, he is free to roam the state for grapes. He tries to find unique vineyards in unique places in California, usually between Sonoma County and Paso Robles on the Central Coast.

Making Wine

Now that so many wine bottles contain not only the name of a particular appellation within a county, but also the name of the vineyard, J.R. Storey Winery finds the less they manipulate the fruit, the more the wine preserves characteristics of the location.

The winery uses oak barrel aging to benefit the wine. Because the wood is porous, red wine undergoes a very gently oxidation that softens the tannins. However, the oak imparts flavor and in exaggerated amounts can obscure the character of the fruit so they winery monitors the oak aging carefully. Certain wines produced by J.R. Storey Winery lend themselves to more oak, Cabernet and Pinot Noir for example. Pinot Noir can handle a lot of oak because certain varietals just don't take it in, but some wineries in Napa do 200% new oak. They age the wine for a year in new barrels, take it out, and put the wine back into brand new oak barrels again. The result is that the wine has less specificity of place because all wine subjected to extended periods in new oak barrels tastes more like the barrels than the fruit. J.R. Storey Winery doesn't prefer this for their wines. That's why they supervise oak barrel aging vigilantly.

J.R. Storey Winery also sees organic and biodynamic farming as important as consumers, retailers, distributors, and wine club associations become more interested in the nutritional value of their foods and beverages. The winery believes this makes sense because it's better for the land and ultimately for the environment and the end user.

The story behind J.R. Storey Winery will enhance your dinner party and their wines. As you pour the wines of J.R. Storey, the history of this winery can not only lead to a discussion of wine, but also a conversation about photography and just how these two opposites have similar qualities.