To commemorate Red Car’s 20th anniversary we asked our co-founder to share some stories from the early formative years.
Chapter I – “Life is a Journey, get on the Red Car”
I started collecting in 1997 when my future business partner, Mark Estrin, revealed the simple joy in sharing a great bottle of Syrah. His precise palette, extensive knowledge and nuanced communication skills made him a respected wine-merchant and the perfect mentor. One afternoon we shared an old bottle of Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle. The complexity of the wine stunned me, it was rich, deep and concentrated, the aromatics vibrated with licorice, tobacco, earth, iron, blackberries and something floral. I have loved Syrah since that moment, and it turns out, that moment changed my life.
Two years passed and Mark approached me with a proposition; he and his friend Carroll Kemp planned to try their hand at winemaking and wanted me to join them. I was pretty sure it was a dumb idea, but I liked Mark, and I said yes. It was a low budget project with big ambitions—we purchased a ton of Syrah, a fermentation tank, an oak barrel, and supplies—and set out to make some wine. That year, 2000, we made our first 50 cases of Syrah in Carroll’s spare bedroom in Culver City.
The label featured a drawing of an old Los Angeles Pacific Electric Trolley Car and the words “Red Car” in a bull’s-eye. In a prior life Estrin had been a screenwriter and Kemp had been a film producer. The highly stylized approach to our early marketing married Mark’s background as a writer and his experience selling wine. The distinctive front label was a nod to a romantic, idealized past in our home city of Los Angeles. For the back label, Mark wrote a vignette with a tip of the hat to Raymond Chandler:
“The Window”
I walked to the window and pulled back a thin, tobacco-stained curtain. What passed for a breeze from the street below was hot and close and remorseless. Then a westbound Red Car trolley lumbered by, filled with people. For a fleeting moment, I imagined I was in that Red Car, heading to the beach, where the air was fresh and clean and cool. Riding the Red Car to the edge of the continent, to the edge of everything.
From then on, the back label of each wine carried lines of prose written by Estrin: one passage per vintage, each offering a new chapter in an ongoing 1940s era noir melodrama.
“The Window” was surprisingly good—a view shared by several of Mark’s friends who, conveniently, were sommeliers. These early supporters added the wine to their lists at The French Laundry, Spago, Charlie Trotter’s and several other highly respected restaurants.
The first 50 cases sold quickly, and we declared ourselves a “business”. Production moved from the garage to a custom crush facility in Santa Maria, we acquired more fruit, and retained wine maker Tim Spear as an adviser. For the next three years Mark, Carroll and Tim sourced fruit from a number of vineyards and made wines that met with critical acclaim from Robert Parker, who praised the Syrah writing “Red Car has the Midas Touch when it comes to producing wines of character and richness.”
Encouraged, we added a new wine to the lineup, a Syrah we named “The Fight”. Each vintage we commissioned an original painting to create the front label and a serialized installment on the back label written by Estrin. The packaging took almost as much work as the wine.
"The Fight" Syrah Series
2002 – 2008
The wines were a hit, but we weren’t yet making wines like that Northern Rhone Syrah that originally inspired us. For that we would need to grow grapes in a cooler place. We decided Sonoma was that place, specifically the wild coastal ridges North of Bodega Bay known as the True Sonoma Coast. The cool temperature, like that of the Northern Rhone, would allow the fruit to ripen slowly and develop the complexity and depth we wanted. It would be a big commitment, but we were all in………..
To celebrate Chapter 1 of our 20-year journey, we have selected several special vintages of Syrah to share with you. These wines will be available for one week only, ending June 4th.
Explore Them Here.
All Syrah’s in our Wine Shop are 20% off through June 4.
Club Members take advantage of 50% off all Shipping Methods.
Discounts applied automatically at checkout.
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Our mailing address is:
Red Car Wine Co
8400 Graton Road
Sebastopol, CA 95472