Maitre de Chai: Mastering the Cellar and the Vineyard through the Kitchen

4/13/17 -

Established in 2012, Maître de Chai was started by Marty Winters and Alex Pitts. They met in early 2010 while cooking at Sonoma’s Cyrus restaurant under chef Douglas Keane, and bonded over their mutual love of wine. Given the impecunious nature of working as a cook, Marty and Alex explored their nascent wine fascination by attending numerous (and most importantly, free) wine tastings.

In 2011, Marty decided to take a much needed break from the kitchen, and worked harvest at Stuhlmuller Vineyards. Afterwards, he left Cyrus and took a job as a sommelier in southern California to feed his burgeoning vinous obsession. Alex took a job at the French Laundry, and after about a year there, he worked his first harvest with Abe Schoener's Scholium Project (he's now Schoener's assistant winemaker).

Neither Alex nor Marty had formal winemaking backgrounds, but pulled from the multi-faceted nature of their learning in the kitchen. The mixture of learning history, geology, viticulture, and winemaking was very much similar. In Marty's words, "You pull from experience, your influences, the classic chefs and recipes, but you trust your palate and inevitably aim to create something new from these influences."

Maître de Chai translates to cellar master, or the person responsible for the development and aging of wine. The name is purposeful: the wines (and the winemakers) are meant to be vehicles that showcase the vineyard. Marty and Alex source from distinct vineyards in California; often they have close relationships with the growers and in some cases do the work themselves. Herron Vineyard is a 1.6-acre, cool-climate site in the Sonoma Mountain AVA with 65-year-old dry-farmed, organic vines; Stampede Vineyard, located in Lodi’s Clements Hills AVA, is an own-rooted, dry- farmed Zinfandel parcel planted in the 1940s.

The winemaking is hands-off – nothing added, nothing taken away. All fermentations are carried out with natural yeasts; sulfur is kept to a minimum; most wines are bottled without fining or filtering.

We're excited to offer these wines today, made by very talented up-and-coming winemakers from some extraordinary vineyards in California!

-Jonas Mendoza