An American Wine with Italian Roots
The Italian word dolcetto means "little sweet one." But don't expect the Ojai Pacific View Dolcetto wine in your glass to be sweet! Instead, dolcetto might reference the Piedmontese hills in northwest Italy where the grape originated.
California Poppies, the state flower, dotting the hillsides of Ojai Pacific View just outside of the vineyards overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Despite Dolcetto grapes tasting quite sweet, Dolcetto is made as a dry wine. The dark purple skins give the wine a beautiful intense color and impart a tanninc structure to the wine. With cherry and carnation aromas, and on the palate, the wine offers black cherry and licorice, with a pleasant bitter almond finish.
Tiny but mighty Ojai Pacific View produces about 35 cases of their estate Dolcetto grown a few dusty miles off Sulphur Mountain Road high above the Ojai Valley at 3000 feet. On Patti Mitchell's 50 acre oak tree dotted estate, she planted one experimental acre of Dolcetto in 2009.
With the success of her Ojai Pacific View Dolcetto, Patti plans to add five more acres of other Italian varietals, including Nebbiolo, which she hopes will also take to her high elevation terroir.
"I love my Dolcetto because it is a great wine to drink every day and goes with a lot of foods," said Patti, "but as far as greatness goes, it’s hard to top the noble Nebbiolo grape."
How did this mom of three find herself growing a relatively obscure Italian grape on a remote mountain top in Ventura County?
“I always enjoyed drinking wine," said Patti in this 2020 interview with Vero. She traveled for many years to the Piedmont region of Italy where she said "I was fortunate to have the opportunity to drink a lot of fine red wine there. My property in California, while once the ocean floor, is today up 3000 feet high in elevation with a southwest facing ocean view. The exposure and soil, of ocean bed limestone shale, is similar to what you find in excellent red wine regions like Piedmont. So, I was bit by a bug to try becoming a vigneron myself. My family was willing to help plant dolcetto, and voila! After 10 years of growing, we had our first release of Ojai Pacific View Dolcetto in 2017."
Patti's daughter Jacqueline is an important supporter-- and co-owner of Ojai Pacific View. In addition to their vineyard and winery, the mother-daughter team has a second business, The Wine Candy Company, which makes candies from wine including their own Dolcetto.
The mother-daughter team tasted their way around Northern Italy to determine which vines to plant, and in the process, created treasured memories.
"We went to so many different wineries and restaurants and really had so much fun," said Jacqueline in an interview published in April 2021.
Jacqueline Mitchell of Ojai Pacific View samples their dolcetto grapes pre-crushing in their first harvest in 2017.
While mother Patti lives on the family estate in Ojai near the vineyard, daughter Jacqueline is currently located in Northern Italy where she works as a chef in a Piedmontese restaurant. Listen to Jacqueline and Patti in THIS VeroTalk where Patti participated from her California winery home and Jacqueline from Italy where she cooked up some of her favorite recipes in the trattoria where she works in Piedmont.
So who does what in running the business?
While Dominic O'Reilly is the winemaker, "Who does what is a question that depends on who is where!" said Patti in the April 2021 interview. "With Jacqueline living and working in Italy, we have had to build a unique rhythm that ebbs and flows depending on who is in what country. This was even further upended last year; since Covid started, Jacqueline hasn’t been able to travel home at all."
For example, Jacqueline used to be the ‘bureaucracy’ person, but Patti now addresses most of those tasks with lots of Zoom meetings and daily calls between them.
The best part of working together, said Patti, is how the mother daughter team balances each other. Jacqueline mentioned how she appreciates "all the time we get to spend together... it allows me to spend a lot of extra time with my mom when I otherwise might not be able to." Even if they are mostly chatting about their business projects!
With its 3000 feet elevation far above the muggy fog that invades coastal Ventura county for May Gray, June Gloom, No Sky July, and Fogust, Ojai Pacific View didn't struggle in 2019 with the powdery mildew that impacted many Santa Barbara and Ventura County vineyards; the one acre vineyard of Dolcetto grapes produced about two tons.
In addition to avoiding the cool damp of the coast, the elevation of her vineyard moderates the high temperatures found in The Ojai Valley where summer days regularly reach 100 degrees. The vines absorb the heat during the day but the coastal air floods inland bringing cool nights and a diurnal fluctuation of 30 degrees or more which ensures acidity and complexity in the grapes. If it gets too hot and dry, she has tanks of rainwater that she has stored from the previous winter she uses to irrigate the vineyard.
"Being above the fog line, we're rarely in high mildew pressure up here in Upper Ojai, at least not like you'd see closer to the coast or at lower elevations," said winemaker Dominic O'Reilly in a recent email. "Though the nights are cold, and sometime moist, our warm days here tend to burn off moisture quickly."
Dominic grew up among vines, wines, and cellars in Oregon where his dad vintner David O'Reilly of Owen Roe guided him in making his first wine at 13. “I love the craft aspect,” said Dominic in a 2020 interview.
Ojai Pacific View sits above the fog line that creates not only good conditions for their dolcetto vines, but spectacular views.
Dominic moved to Ventura County at 18 to study philosophy at small Thomas Aquinas College located just a few miles down the hill from Ojai Pacific View. After graduation, he worked with the legendary Adam Tolmach at The Ojai Vineyard.
In 2019, "fruit was carefully hand harvested in the early morning hours, while still cold," said Dominic. "We sort the grapes on our gentle shaker table and by hand remove any bad grapes, raisins, leaves, basically anything that we wouldn't eat ourselves."
"Fermentations take place at carefully monitored temperatures and with close supervision to ensure the flavors are preserved and guided throughout the process," continued Dominic. The grapes "are mixed by hand daily, introducing oxygen and nutrients for the yeasts, and extracting flavors from the skins."
With fermentation complete, and when the tannins are in their correct levels, Dominic gently presses to minimally break the seeds (which can introduce harsh green flavors). The wine is then put into neutral French oak, where it ages until bottling.
"During the aging process we monitor it regularly," reported Dominic, "and when the flavors are developed to an optimal level, we bottle the wine."
The 2019 Dolcetto is Dominic's first vintage of Ojai Pacific View's Dolcetto, a grape well known for its winemaking challenges: the dark colored fruit tends toward low acidity, high tannins, and reductivity-- almost the opposite of the wine Dominic grew up making as Pinot Noir tends to be high acid, low tannins, and lightly colored.
So far Dominic has done well, and everyone is happy with the results of the the 2019 vintage. He's "very pleased with the results. The wine is clean and textural, with lots of fruits and spices, but restrained and elegant at the same time."
The 2019 Ojai Pacific View is gorgeous in the glass and offers plentiful cherry fruit on the nose and palate with balance making it a food friendly wine perfect for pizzas, pastas with tomato sauce, and sausage dishes.
The 2020 vintage is coming along well. Patti was pleased with the 2020 harvest because she was able to get her grapes in between two heat waves, which is important because she doesn't want to make a high alcohol wine. In addition to the heat spikes of 2020, smoke taint threatened the harvest when the region was inundated with smoke from nearby fires. In 2017, the Thomas Fire threatened the life of Patti Mitchell; she had to be rescued from her remote ranch on top of Sulphur Mountain. Fortunately, in 2020, fire was not a problem with regards to smoke taint or losses. Just one more example of magic on the mountain at Ojai Pacific View.
Get your bottle of mountain magic by purchasing the 2019 Ojai Pacific View Dolcetto, or try all three of Ojai Pacific View vintages (2017, 2018, and 2019) in our Flight Tasting Trio with shipping included.
