A Visit with Absentee Winery

Hanging with Avi's dog, light drug use, and more AI line graph play

Welcome and thank you for being here.

Last week I had a nice visit with my friend and winemakers, Avi Diexler. we smoked a marijuana cigarette. It isn’t like me, and I had trepidation. I think it was illegal, but I didn’t care. As an importer of wine, a fisher of men, “down” for a multitude of radical situations, however harrowing, I had a duty to my cause. I wanted to enter the mind of a friend and colleague who supports the use of surfing and marijuana for intellectual and spiritual growth; and I wasn’t going surfing.

For what it’s worth, I think Avi Diexler makes some of the most beautiful young/new wines in California. The name ‘Absentee’ is a nod to a particular aspect of most young and exciting wineries in California right now. Avi owns no vineyards and buys grapes for his production.

Following a deep and meaningful mentorship with Baptiste Cousin, I found that this aspect of Absentee’s arrangement left a deep and useful chip on Avi’s shoulder, one he’s mostly shaken off in his new and enlightened state. It’s been quite a journey.

Prior to our “sesh” (re. marijuana), Avi and I were rolling barrels in his cellar. These were from the new harvest. This technique has become more common in recent years, but when we met in 2017, I had only heard of one other winemaker working in this way: Philippe Pacalet. Not bad!

Basically, Avi puts whole clusters of grapes in barrels and puncheons, which are sealed. He rolls them back and forth, twice per day, “to make the yeasts happy.” He says this in a kind of wry, sarcastic way. I don’t know if he’s serious or not. As two sensitive men, we have a hard time knowing when the other is joking. I know, at least, that rolling the barrel will often puncture the grapes and let out free juice that ferments in a different way than it would in the berry. I believe it tends to ferment faster, with oxygen as a catalyst. In any case, after the procedure, one can hear the soft, rolling boil of a happy fermentation very clearly.

In some years, Avi will buy enough grapes for 20 some-odd barrels. This year he’ll do only 8. It’s a little bit because demand is down across the board, and a lot of bit because of an episode I like to call ‘Magnum-ageddon’ (portmanteau of ‘magnum’, and ‘armageddon’.), but more on that later.

“The only thing you really have to worry about are the b—gs.”

“Bongs?” I said?

“Bungs,” he pronounced in an elevated tone.

There’s a hole in the barrel where juice comes in and out. It’s about a 4-inch diameter. The bung is the plastic or rubber thing that stops the hole. It can’t knock into another bung or barrel in case it is dislodged and there’s a spill.

In the days where Avi was rolling 25 barrels, twice per day, this could take 2 hours. It always seemed to me like the task could be automated in some way. Maybe the barrels could be on a track, pushed down a ramp or some such thing. The bung problem stood in the way of this solution, but I daydreamed as we gingerly rolled each barrel across the winery, stopping and pulling back to avoid problematic collisions. I imagined a Cartesian graph plotting out my idealized ramp system, with perfect arcs mapping out the barrels trajectory with time over distance.

… and then all the funny braids this graph would make with us rolling by hand, stopping and starting, crossing over and back again.

This kind of human messiness is something important to Avi’s wines and to all the handmade wines of the world. Removing what might be automated, and avoiding the regular lines.

At the start, Avi was admittedly dogmatic and extreme about this hands on approach. The story goes that he asked a french intern to move a dozen or so fermenting barrels from his old winery in Point Reyes to his current in Mendocino. Avi drove and asked the poor stagiaire to ride in the back of the closed cab with a walkie-talkie. This was hands on, quirky, and spiritually correct, just like Avi wanted. After a few miles, Avi heard a cryptic message coming over his walkie.

“Je vais tomber dans les pommes,” I’m going to fall into the apples!

“What?”

Avi pulled over, the rider was passing out.

(Incidentally, this story also tells about the great deal of oxygen exchange that takes place during fermentation in barrels. It’s a lot! Avi’s wines easily last a week or more open without faltering too much. This was the saving grace of Magnum-ageddon, but that’s another story.)

“Let’s get some lunch in Fort Bragg, then we can do the second punchdown,” Avi said to me.

He had mentioned ‘punchdown’ a number of times and I realized that he was talking about the rolling barrels procedure. Each time he said it kind of plainly, as if it might have already occurred to me what this phrase meant. By my lights, a punchdown is a procedure whereby you literally punch down the cap of grape skins and pulp and must that form atop juice during fermentation/maceration. This is done in order to introduce some kind of kinetic energy to a ferment and move things along, release carbon dioxide, add oxygen, etc.

On our way to lunch I started daydreaming about the 2-dimensional nature of my normal understanding of a punch down versus Avi’s 3-dimensional, spun version. I though about tracking a tiny yeast’s progress on our graph as it bobs up and down with a winemakers arm or wooden tool.

A yeast in Avi’s rolled barrel might make a funny knot.

Rolling back and forth, maybe the yeasts return back home in a strange loop. Or maybe it is wilder and the yeast never quite find a pattern.

Anyway, maybe the difference between these knots are meaningless, but I’ve learned enough to know that a meaningless statement is also one that implies everything.

Then we’re at a shop in Fort Bragg because we’re a little bit early for lunch and a lot of bit because Avi and I enjoy each others’ company in funny situations/interactions like the one he intuited we would have in this craft store. Here, a woman from New Jersey clocked my Long Island accent and tried to sell us knick-knacks from local artists. She was a photographer and gave us some advice about selling wine, about “getting out there.” Men and women from her generation, from my part of the world, are big into “getting out there.” This tickles Avi because — in deep-down fact — he’s also from my part of the world, but I didn’t tell you.

Avi buys an illustrated map of Mendocino and a frisbee for his dog, Balou. He says, “I’m in charge of art at home.”

(Incidentally, Balou is the name of one of avi’s most famous cuvées. Balou, the wine, is primarily Syrah. Both the wine and the dog share a rustic bouquet. He’s a good boy.)

“Do you know any interesting knots?" Avi asks, pointing at a kind of shoddy, arts n’crafts shadowbox containing labeled and tied cloves hitch, bowline, square knots, figure eights, binding knots…

This question brought me great shame. My poor father has tried countless times to show me a handful of knots he used to use on his factory floor, tying boxes. I am completely unable to retain one little monad of instruction here. Spatial reasoning is a skill of great importance to the famous IQ test, and a very reliable indicator of low IQ, but I’m going on…

“Let’s smoke a jazz cigarette,” He says eventually, when the time had come.

That may not be an exact quote just since it was right around the time I had nearly fell into the apples myself, “stoned” as it were. Soon enough and thankfully I’m recalling fond days in grad school, talking about topology and set theory and mathematical theories of knots. Avi and his wife Natasha are tickled by this because they prize me as the worst Rummy Cube player on God’s green Earth. I’m playing my favorite Louvin brothers’s songs, loud, and later I will demonstrate some interesting James Brown dance moves. What a life!

Avi Diexler makes some of the most convincing and truly great wines in California. He buys used barrels, shaves them raw to remove the influence of old wine, the gummy plugs of sulphites, and their vanilla scented torching. He puts full grape clusters in the shaved barrels and rolls them twice a day for 3 or 4 weeks. After, he presses the grapes and returns them to the same barrels for the wine to age. His wines see no sulphur additions or additives, and they render the beautiful climate of Mendocino like a dream of awesome weather, exceptional fruit, and modern bombast. In 2019, Avi had the vintage of his career and made excellent wine. He decided to bottle the entire harvest in magnum bottles. The influence of Magnum-ageddon stays with us to this day, with 5 and 6 day old bottles usually somewhere in my apartment, or on a by-the-glass list near you. What did it mean!? Certainly simpler bottling and transport, for an extremely hands on operation. Quirky and spiritually correct, yes. Truly one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard of a winemaker doing.

My friend and I like to strive for these kinds of funny tasks with no ideology or pretense. Years ago we started a project to try and eat some fermented food with every meal. Now, we’re going to try to eat meat from only one animal per meal, no ground beef, no sausage, no pile of chicken wings. I’m not sure what it means, but I know in retrospect it will imply everything.

Further reading

Frenkel, Edward. Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality. Basic Books, a Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2014.

Heath, T. L. Apollonius of Perga: Treatise on Conic Sections. W. Heffer & Sons, 1961.

Satan Is Real. Capitol Nashville, 1996.

A quick note of appreciation to my friend and colleague, Jules Dressner, who has been a great source of encouragement and who writes the best producer profiles I know about. If you read all of his writing on their company website, you’ll know a lot about wine!