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| History of Slug Gulch Red |
| A Brief History of Fair Play, California |
| A brief history of Oakstone Winery Oakstone Winery Featured wines are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Meritage,
all from the estate "De Cascabel" vineyard. Additional wines
include Pinot Grigio, estate Zinfandels, Sangiovese, Petite Sirah and a selection of varietal
Ports. Slug Gulch Red, a non-vintage, very affordable red table wine, has
achieved cult status with customers who have consistently found it to be the
“best mediocre red wine” in the area. Small lots of specialty wines are made
each year in response to the annual variations in weather and grape
crop from the twenty-four acres of estate grapes, and serve as a reward
for visitors who make the trip up to Slug Gulch Road. Most of the wine is
sold from the tasting room, with retail distribution very limited in the
Highway 50 corridor between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe.
The tasting room is surrounded by the elegant, mature estate
vines, and features a tasting bar formed from a solid oak slab, with a viewing
window into the barrel room that allows guests to contemplate future
vintages slumbering in the barrels as they taste the current releases. The
name Oakstone was originally coined to reflect the grinding rocks on
the property that were used in past centuries by Native Americans
(primarily the Miwoks) to grind live oak acorns into edible meal. When the
property adjoining the original vineyard was purchased to create the winery
grounds, the owners discovered a black oak tree that had grown out a huge
granite grinding rock, fracturing it and creating crevices large enough to walk
through. It serves today as both a monument to the people who
originally owned this land, and as a picturesque, shaded picnic ground. The
tasting room is open from 11 am to 5 pm Wednesday through Monday.
John Smith, the Founding Winemaker, has a Ph.D. in analytical
chemistry and spent his professional career in the design and development of
scientific and medical instruments. His most recent employer was the LifeScan
division of Johnson & Johnson in Milpitas, where he retired as Vice
President and Chief Scientific Officer in June of 1998. He began home winemaking
in 1972, a year when winemaking kits were the preferred Christmas
present. After a few notable failures, the quality of his wine gradually
improved, and what had been just a hobby evolved into a passion and finally into a
consuming obsession. Until his retirement, he held the position of Adjunct
Professor of Chemistry at San Jose State, where he taught Advanced Analytical
Chemistry and a course entitled "The Chemistry of Wine." John served as the
winemaker for Single Leaf Winery and Vineyards from 1992 to 1996.
Susan retired in May of 2007 from a careeer as an educator at West Valley College in
Saratoga, where she taught College Reading and was Chair of the Reading Department. She
holds a bachelor’s degree in English and a master’s degree in Reading.
When John and Susan Smith first heard in 1989 that a vineyard was for sale on Slug Gulch Road, they were intrigued by the name, and after buying the vineyard, they immediately set out to learn the name’s origin. Like almost all of California’s gold rush, the truth is clouded by countless retellings of oral history, but the prevailing version is that a prospector was poking around an old river bed at about the 3,000 foot elevation of southern El Dorado County when he came across a piece of gold the size of (pick one) a man’s thumb, or a man’s fist. Gold comes in dust, flakes, nuggets and slugs, with slugs this size being very desirable, indeed (the $50 gold piece of the late 1800’s was known colloquially as a “slug” as well). The name was applied to the mine that was developed at the site, and then to the road that led from the settlement in Fair Play to the mine. The town blacksmith, John Barclay, lived about halfway up toward the mine, and his house, many times remodeled, still stands on the property next to Oakstone Winery. When Oakstone Winery opened in 1997, most of the 1995 vintage was still in barrels, and the owners were preparing for their first bottling on July 4 (they use a mobile wine bottler, and the new kid on the block gets the least desirable dates). 1995 was extremely unkind to area grapegrowers, and much of the crop never really ripened, so they were left with estate cabernet sauvignon, heavy with the distinct green bell pepper aroma of unripe cabernet, and a zinfandel that had not fared much better. Surprisingly, when the two wines were blended 50:50, the combination was much better than either one alone, so seeking to capitalize on the memorable name of their road, they prepared to bottle the first Slug Gulch Red. An amazing total of 740 cases (it seemed like an awful lot to them at the time) was put into the bottle, and a couple of months later, the first sample bottle was opened. John swirled, tasted and exclaimed “This @%#%& stuff is carbonated!” Sure enough, in his haste to get the wine bottled, he had neglected to check for residual malic acid. When malic acid is present, as it is especially in cool years like 1995, it can ferment inside the bottle, leaving wine with a little “spritz” and sometimes a faint aroma of sauerkraut (Every winemaker does this once, good ones don’t do it twice). Undaunted, he prepared a written disclaimer warning people not to store the bottles on their side (for fear of popping corks which might disgorge wine onto the carpet), reduced the price to $3.00 per bottle, and sold it at a prodigious rate. When sales lagged, the tasting room staff would prepare Sangria by combining the wine with fresh fruit to inspire customers to find even more ways to use it up. The years that followed, 1996 and 1997 were both excellent, and with the winery’s rapid growth, no wine was available for Slug Gulch Red. (That’s not exactly true. John was so unhappy with the final quality of the 1995 Cabernet Sauvignon that he “declassified” it to Slug Gulch Red, slapped a tacky sticker over the label, and sold it all for $6.00 per bottle.) Then the el niño year of 1998 hit, and more than enough uncertain wine appeared. The second version of Slug Gulch Red combined under-ripe syrah (harvested November 5, 1998 at 21.4% sugar) and over-ripe zinfandel. Once again, the two wines compensated for each others’ deficiencies, and the wine was a hit. The unmarked lot #3 combined Carignane, Sangiovese and Cabernet Franc, each of which was quite hard to drink alone, but when blended in the right proportions proved to be an immensely enjoyable wine and a huge commercial success. As people started to take note of the “good red wine with the funny name,” the winery began to speak of it, tongue-in-cheek, more and more in terms of its “mediocrity.” They advertised it as “the best mediocre red wine in California,” and decided it was time to designate the different versions. The next edition, now labeled as “Slug Gulch Red Lot #4,” combined Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sangiovese, and was described in the winery’s newsletter as “A Terrible Mistake.” they realized they had created a wine that was much too good, but the winery lived up to its commitment to sell the wine for $8.00 per bottle, and 914 cases sold in less than three months. Lot #5 followed, known to the winemaker as the “Rhone blend,” combining Syrah, Carignane and Sangiovese. Its introduction was marked by an entire busload of wine lovers attending the El Dorado Winery Association Passport Festival, who were seen and heard leaning out of the bus windows, chanting “Slug Gulch! Slug Gulch!” as the bus made its way slowly up the steep hill to the winery. Lot#5 sold equally briskly, and disappeared just before the Fair Play Wine Festival in June of 2002. Realizing that they could not participate in a major wine festival without Slug Gulch Red, the owners borrowed a page of history and created an interim version called Slug Gulch Red Lot #5.5 by “declassifying” the remaining 1998 Estate Cabernet Sauvignon and selling it all for $8.00 a bottle, complete with another tacky sticker to slap over the label. Additional lots have followed, and with Lot #9, introduced in early 2004, a new label was added which depicted the whimsical nature of the wine. It shows a miner who looks remarkably like a winemaker pushing a mining cart full of grapes out of the "Slug Gulch Wine Mine," while another, white-bearded miner stands nearby, leaning on a long-handled shovel in the classic "DOT" posture. The symbolism, which was not lost on many, is that Steve now has to do all the hard work while John takes the credit, but--he did dig the mine! The winemakers admit to spending more time perfecting the blend for
each
lot of Slug Gulch Red than many of the other, more expensive wines we
produce. The results have not gone unnoticed, and the wine has received
gold medals at the El Dorado County Fair, the Long Beach International
Wine Competition, the Calaveras County Fair, and the Mother Lode Fair,
as well as many silver and bronze medals. In three successive years, it
has been recognized in the California State Fair Competition as the “Best
Red Table Wine with a California Appellation.” All in all, not a bad showing
for “The Wine that Made Mediocrity Famous.” John Smith insists, “Anyone
with the experience and resources should be able to make a really good
$20 bottle of wine, but the real challenge, as well as the real satisfaction,
comes in making a wine that everyone can enjoy, which only costs $9.95
per bottle, and which brings some enjoyable notoriety to the funny-sounding
street weary miners once trudged in their search for the area’s elusive
bonanza.”
Not much was written about Fair Play and the surrounding communities during the early days of California. It was not because there was nothing going on in the southern part of Fl Dorado County during that time, but because most of the world's attention was focused on the feverish mining activities nearer Placerville, Coloma and Sacramento, where the population was larger, the roads were better, communication was easier and, of course, where the newspapers were published. Because of this, we have only bits and pieces of information on the little, but very important towns like Fair Play. The settlement of Fair Play and the many other communities in the area was a result of the discovery of gold in and along many of the nearby streams. This occurred only a few years after the first discovery of gold in Coloma as newly arriving miners found the good claims taken and set out to search for new, undiscovered deposits of gold. As in most other communities founded by miners, the gold soon gave out and many of the miners left to search for new deposits. But the region around Fair Play had attributes that much of the rest of the county lacked - like large stands of timber and deep, well drained, fertile soils. So, as time progressed the population remained fairly stable, the departing miners soon being replaced by farmers, ranchers and lumbermen. The original settlement of Fair Play is attributed to two gentlemen, Charles Staples and N. Sisson, who arrived there around 1851. The story goes that some time after that the two apparently fell into a disagreement that grew into what must have been a not-too-gentlemanly fight. The fight ended when some of the other newly arrived residents appealed to them for “fair-play.” Thus, we're told, the town became known as Fair Play. Since that time the name has been shortened to one word - Fairplay - mostly for the convenience of various government agencies. But, as you will see, the name is on its way to being returned to its original two words. In its first few years the town grew by leaps and bounds as more and more rich deposits of placer gold where found in many nearby streams and ravines. Later, in the surrounding hills, minable veins of copper ore were located. By 1860 the population had reached that point that a post office was established in Fair Play with George Merkindollar as the first postmaster (he also owned the hotel that housed the post office). By that time the business section of town had grown from a few quickly erected tents to several stores, owned by Purrinton & Carr,- A. Church and J. G. Carr; the hotel owned first by Mr. Merkindollar, which was later sold to M. N. Remich and then George Washington McKee; a Saloon, butcher shop, carpenter's shop and a blacksmith. As mentioned, unlike many gold rush "boom towns", the town did not die as mining slacked as the miners left, mainly because of the quality of the soils for agriculture. By the 1870's numerous farms and ranches dotted the nearby countryside, taking advantage of the ditch water brought in by the miners. These provided fresh meat, produce and many bushels of grain to the local towns and communities many miles away The Fair Play School District was organized in 1890 with classes being held in private residences until a permanent school was built around 1902 on land donated by a John Barkley, the town blacksmith. The Fair Play schoolhouse that is now a private residence, about one-half mile south of the present town, is not the same one that shows up in many early photographs of the town. The original schoolhouse was very similar to the simple, one-roomed Mt. Aukum schoolhouse that is preserved several miles away on Mt. Aukum Road. A fire would destroy most of the town in 1944 and, as a result, the post office that had fortunately been moved to the present site of the town in 1929, was closed are reopened in Somerset. The store to which the post office had been moved would burn in 1956. One or two years later, the last of the old town would burn. The bell in the tower of the Fair Play School would ring its last call to students in 1958 when Fair Play became part of the Pioneer School District. Literally nothing remains of original Fair Play, except the cemetery. The town was located adjacent to the cemetery, about one -half mile east of the present town, on the south side of today's Perry Creek Road. In the past two decades, the Fair Play area has seen a huge resurgence of agriculture, this time in the form of hundreds of acres of prime vineyards. Within the last fifteen or so years, eight wineries have been built in this area, with more planned in the very near future. From the grapes grown in the soils of the From the grapes grown in the soils of the Fair Play area, these wineries have been continually producing world-class wines. As mentioned, over the years the original name for the town, Fair Play, had been shortened to one word, Fairplay. Wishing to start the process of returning the name of the town to its original spelling, the wineries and businesses of the area, with the assistance of the Somerset Postmaster, Karen Mickel, recently convinced the U. S. Postal Service to allow mail to again be addressed to Fair Play (two words), instead of Somerset. The Fair Play area of our county continues to grow as an agricultural community with not only vineyards, but also Christmas Tree and flower farms. Located between Placerville and the Amador County line, it can be easily reached by taking Mt. Aukum Road (E-16) south from Pleasant Valley Road. Additional information was graciously provided by Joyce Smith, a resident of Fair Play since 1946 and the owner of the Fair Play hardware store. Copyright 1998 Doug Noble
P.O. Box 313
Diamond Springs, CA 95619 Mailing
Address: Phone:
530-620-5303 |
opened in March of 1997
as the culmination of twenty-five years of preparation by its owners,
John and Susan Smith. The winery is located in the Fair Play
American Viticultural Area, where rolling hillsides emphasize the warm days and
cool nights that produce grapes and wines of unusual intensity. The
2500-foot elevation of Fair Play combines with deep, rich decomposed granite
soils to add strength and complexity to the wines.
