The main hospitality area of the new Law Estate Wines property in Paso Robles, Calif., was designed to blend into its surroundings.

The owners of Law Estate Wines made major investments in design, construction and winemaking equipment to produce estate wines of high quality in an exceptionally simple manner.

Located on a ridge in the Peachy Canyon area of the Paso Robles AVA on California’s Central Coast, the winery is an excellent example of the modern, open style that is designed to almost blend into the land around it.

Owners Don and Susie Law purchased the 55-acre property after searching throughout California for a site to produce premium Rhone-style wines with estate-grown grapes. Don Law is the founder and president of a Denver, Colo.-based oil and gas firm. The Laws’ property is near Epoch Estate, which is owned by another Colorado couple that found success in the oil industry before founding a winery.

John Crossland of Vineyard Professional Service and winemaker Scott Hawley designed and developed the vineyard in 2008. More than half of the property is planted with Syrah and Grenache. The rest grows Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Carignane, Tempranillo, Marsanne, Roussanne and Clairette Blanche.

As for the winery, San Francisco, Calif.-based BAR Architects designed the 28,000-square-foot building, and San Luis Obispo, Calif.-based Specialty Construction Inc. (SCI) built it. Grapes arrive at the top level, which is the first stop of a gravity-flow production process.

Laid out in the above graphic and accompanying text are the key steps and equipment in wine production at Law Estate Wines.

1. CRUSH PAD
Hawley is a consulting winemaker for several Central Coast wineries and owns Torrin Vineyard with his wife, Viquel Hawley. The Laws hired Hawley to help design both the vineyard and the winery, and from the start he advocated a simple approach to winemaking that he says respects the care taken in the vineyard. He says Law doesn’t apply pesticides or other inputs in the vineyard, so the grapes don’t require much manipulation in the cellar, a modern interpretation of centuries-old winemaking practices.

“It’s very clean, it’s very simple,” he said. “You look at this estate, and it’s in a beautiful place, and it’s in a beautiful location, but when we really break it down to the nuts and bolts of it: It is basic and simple and as clean and straightforward as possible.”

Whole clusters are dumped onto Key Iso-Flo shaking tables with stainless steel hoppers where they undergo sorting before falling into a Bucher Vaslin E-2 destemmer. The destemmed grapes then receive another round of hand sorting on an Iso-Flo shaker table that sorts out raisins, stems and shot berries. “There’s not a lot of moving parts,” Hawley said. There’s not a lot of bells and whistles, and again that carries over as a direct reflection of how we farm.”

2. TRANSFER TO FERMENTATION TANKS
The most unique step of the production process at Law Estate is how the grapes get from the crush pad to tanks.

Grapes fall from the shaker table into custom-built stainless steel dumpers that cellar workers move on to a stainless steel catwalk built by SCI that provides access to all the top hatches of the tanks. Once positioned in place above a tank, workers connect the dumper to a compressed air hook up, hit a switch and the grapes slide out of the dumper directly into the tank. Custom metal fabricator Steve Rinell, who is based in San Luis Obispo, Calif., built the dumpers as well as steel screens that go over the tank tops to help ensure worker safety.

Hawley said the process is gentle on the grapes, efficient, quick and clean. “We have two of them (the dumpers) that could be in a loop, but we found that it’s so quick by the time we get down there and dump it, it’s less than a minute,” he said.

The system also limits the mess of harvest to just a small area beneath the sorting equipment, and that makes clean up at the end of a long harvest day quicker and easier—and it doesn’t require as much water. “Our mess at the end of the day is limited to a 20-square-foot spot on the crush pad,” he said. “When you’re targeting a half-ton bin over the top of a tank, there’s a good chance you’re going to miss some of it and create a big mess.”

3. FERMENTATION AND PRESSING
The winemaking cellar at Law is built around a central bank of 22 concrete tanks from
Sonoma Cast Stone. Grapes arrive from the platform at the top of the tanks, while the bottom hatches and racking valves are accessible from an open workspace around the tanks. Large windows provide plenty of natural light to illuminate the cellar.

In addition to the concrete tanks, the winery also is equipped with 12 open-top stainless steel fermentors by JVNW. These tanks are also filled from the top platform with the grape dumpers. The tanks are positioned beneath the catwalk, and destemmed grapes fall directly into them via a stainless steel chute.

Hawley became familiar with how well concrete works for Rhône varietals, especially Grenache, while working in Australia and New Zealand. He said it’s also an excellent tool for managing temperature. “The main advantage is the fact you’re dealing with about 4.5 inches of concrete, and it’s incredibly well insulated, so if you bring in fruit cold, it stays cold.”

The tanks at Law are equipped with heating and cooling coils that can be used to moderate a fermentation that’s running a little warm or heat the must up near the end of fermentation to help finish the job.

During the design phase, Hawley and the Laws had planned to install oak, steel and concrete tanks. Taking into consideration the cost and effort of maintaining the oak vessels, and the fact that concrete insulates like double-walled stainless steel, Hawley said he talked the Laws into buying just concrete tanks. “They gave me a lot of just carte blanche, not with cost—I mean everything had to make sense—but with winemaking. They basically said, ‘You tell us; we hired you for a reason. You tell us how to get to where we want to be,’” he said.

The grapes undergo a cold soak of about four or five days before the native yeasts begin fermentation, which is managed with manual punchdowns. Hawley said the custom-designed, unlined concrete tanks have a bit of taper that causes a slight convection current in the juice that keeps more fluid in the cap, making punch downs easier.

Once fermentation is complete, the free-run wine flows via gravity to the barrel room, which is adjacent to the cellar but built into the hillside to provide a gradient for gravity flow. The pomace is removed from the tanks into the basket of a Bucher Vaslin JBL press, and press wine is also sent to the barrel room with gravity.

4. PRIMARY BARREL ROOM
Hawley uses a few coopers including Taransaud, Boutes, Hermitage, Francois Freres and Tonnellerie de Jarnac. Once the wine is in barrels, he said he doesn’t rack. The barrels are filled in place and later emptied in place. “We don’t move our wine.”

Adjacent to the cellar is the primary
barrel-storage room, finished with concrete. As Hawley noted with the fermentation tanks, concrete is excellent at maintaining temperature. “There’s a lot of concrete here, so once it gets to temperature, it kind of hangs out here,” he said of the barrel room.

To ensure the wines finish malolactic fermentation, Hawley said the Laws installed radiant heating by SCI in the floor. Large fans in the ceiling circulate the warm air,
and the system has proved to be far more efficient than pushing hot air out of ducts
in the walls. “It’s actually incredibly energy efficient,” he said.

5. SECOND BARREL ROOM
Large, roll-up doors to the primary barrel room provide access to an open area where SLO Bottling Services of San Luis Obispo can park a mobile rig for bottling. None of the Law wines are filtered prior to bottling. “It’s really
as simple as we can make it,” Hawley said.

Near the doorway and bottling area is a large drain for barrel washing with an Aaquatools system. Hawley said instead of washing barrels where they’ve been laid down for racking, it’s proved better to keep that job limited to one area. Each two-barrel rack is brought over to the washing area, and taking that extra step limits the mess of barrel washing and the amount of water used.

When Wines & Vines visited Law Estate in spring 2014, the barrels holding the 2013 vintage were laid down one high in another concrete barrel room. This room, however, had a curved roof, recessed decorative lighting and a private glass-walled tasting area in the back.

When visitors first arrive at the winery, they get a glimpse of this room through glass doors before heading up a flight of stairs to the main tasting area. In addition to providing more barrel storage, the private tasting room is a subtle suggestion for visitors to “aspire” to private tastings or other perks reserved for wine club members and VIP guests. Interior design was by the international firm HBA, which has an office in San Francisco.

Current production at Law Estate is around 4,200 cases, but the winery has the space and infrastructure to reach 10,000 cases. While the winery is a showpiece of design and winemaking equipment, Hawley stressed it also is a lean, efficient operation in which costs were often matched by efficiencies to save money on water, energy and labor. “We didn’t just come up here to spend money for the sake of spending money; everything had to pencil out,” he said. “This isn’t a trophy winery, this is a production winery that’s expected to sell a certain quality of wine and pay people for their livelihood.”