Local musicians pair wine and notes
When Gary Cornick and Iain Crabb first met, it was over a glass
of wine. The two are both avid guitar players and had both had
experimented with winemaking.
Local musicians pair wine and notes
When Gary Cornick and Iain Crabb first met, it was over a glass of wine. The two are both avid guitar players and had both had experimented with winemaking.
“I had a pinot [noir] vineyard for a while and we started making wine – not commercially – experimenting with different blends,” Cornick said. “We enjoyed working together and we were making good wine.”
Cornick, a Hollister resident, and Crabb, who lives in San Jose but has family in Hollister, were making close to the legal limit of wine for personal consumption when they decided to start selling their wine commercially.
“We figured if we were going to put that much effort into it, we might as well sell it,” Cornick said.
The two set up a storage facility in a barn on property owned by Crabb’s mother.
“We pooled our equipement and this is where we started,” Crabb said, of the unfinished storage room that still has insulation showing.
In 2005 Six Strings Winery was born. While many wineries offer food pairings for their products, Cornick and Crabb wanted to connect their love of music with their wine. Their dark blue label has a guitar string icon, and the new releases of wine will have a guitar pick on the top of the bottle. On their Web site, they offer musical pairings for each wine they have released.
“There’s a style to wine and a style to music,” Crabb said.
The pair recommend pairing the 2005 pinot noir with latin jazz while they suggest acoustic guitar for the 2006 chardonnay.
“We are not that much into gourmet food so we thought we would try something different,” Cornick said. “Mostly when I drink wine, I listen to music.”
Crabb agreed.
“For the chardonnay, the idea of acoustic guitars worked,” Cornick said. “It’s bright, clean and not overdone and obnoxious. Its not full of oak or overdone. Its subtle.”
Crabb is the master behind the wine, while Cornick handles the business side of things. Crabb’s family had vineyards and he experimented with home wine-making before Six Strings went commercial. In addition, he has taken a few viticulture classes at University of California, Davis.
The fruit grown in the vineyard has a lot to do with the quality of the wine, the two said, so they spend a lot of time in their fields.
The two have vineyards in the Saint Lucia Highlands of Monterey and the Dry Creek area of Sonoma.
With their first releases, the pair received accolades at the 2008 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. The 2005 Monterey county pino noir won a gold medal for wines in the $25 to 35 category. The 2006 Santa Lucia Highlands Chardonnay took home a bronze medal for wines in the $30 and over category.
“It’s a really good [competition] because the judges are not a bunch of celebrities,” Cornick said. “You have 60 judges who are buyers, people from the industry, publications.”
The pair had been selling their wine mostly through direct sales and were glad to get feedback based on industry standards.
“The chardonnay got the bronze in the high end competition,” Cornick said. “We were competing against big Napa wineries. We were happy about that.”
Two new wines are set to release in 2008, including the 2006 vintage of the pinot noir and a 2006 cabernet sauvignon. The wines released in 2007 are available at Ridgemark and the Inn at Tres Pinos locally, and is distributed to restaurants throughout California.
“We could sell it all direct, but you don’t build a brand that way,” Cornick said.
The pair have to carefully manage how many cases are sold through direct sales because restaurant buyers would be frustrated if they ran out before the new releases became available, Cornick said.
For now Cornick and Crabb have kept their day jobs, though, they hope to continue to grow the business. They made 1,000 cases of wine during their first year of winemaking and they plan to increase that to 5,000 in the coming years, but they want to stay in that range.
“The only way we can really control quality is to have it small,” Crabb said. “We can hand sort our grapes. We sort of micromanage it.”
They pick grapes in small bins and their grapes are crushed by hand.
“When you get in with your hands, its more gentle on the grapes,” Crabb said. “Grapes don’t like to be handled, the pinot noir are especially finicky.”
Six Strings Wine is available locally at Ridgemark and the Inn at Tres Pinos. For more information or for direct sales, visit www.sixstringswinery.com.
