Ram’s Gate Winery

COMPOSED Ram’s Gate Winery director of winemaking Joe Nielsen.

Wine Song

Finding harmony at Ram’s Gate Winery

BY DAEDALUS HOWELL

Wine and music have long been happy bedfellows. Just ask Beethoven, who once opined, “Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.” » »

HARMONY Since 2018, Nielsen has overseen the 28-acre estate vineyard’s wine program. Working somewhere between Beethoven and Bacchus is Joe Nielsen, the director of winemaking at Ram’s Gate Winery in Sonoma. Located where the San Francisco Bay meets the edges of Napa and Sonoma counties, Ram’s Gate Winery is the gateway to the area’s lauded Carneros region. There, since 2018, Nielsen conducted the 28-acre estate vineyard’s wine program, finding harmony through a balance of precision farming and sustainability. And plenty of music too.

«« “I'm a huge Paul Simon fan, and his ‘Graceland’ album is still one of my favorites,” says Nielsen of Simon’s seventh solo album, which came out in 1986—incidentally, the same year Nielsen was born. “I've listened to it my whole conscious life, and even probably before that,” he laughs. Besides priming his aesthetic tastes, Nielsen’s in utero introduction to music also provided him an apt metaphor for what became his life’s work. » »

Joe Nielsen’s wines are notable for the way they harmonize vibrant acids and tannins with richness and full-bodied fruit.

«« “I like trying to pull analogies from different areas of life that people may resonate with more than wine making— like cooking and music,” Nielsen admits. “To me, the most amazing musicians are those whose albums you want to listen to from start to finish,” he says. “You probably go to the album because you had a favorite song, and then you realize that we're building towards something, and there's a resolution and things. It's almost like a movie; there's a plot, there's a development and then it finishes well. That's how I think about our program.”

Nielsen wants the “voice” of his wines to carry throughout the entire portfolio, starting in the vineyard—which is planted with chardonnay, pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, pinot blanc, grenache and syrah— through to the cellar and finally the glass.

His wines are notable for the way they harmonize vibrant acids and tannins with richness and full-bodied fruit.

“As we’re building out our portfolio, there’s a commonality year to year. There’s a unique sound to the year. There is a unique characteristic, but we're going to deconstruct that into our pinot blanc or our sauvignon blanc and then build from there,” Nielsen explains. “Along those lines, if we are trying to build an ‘album,’” he says, extending the metaphor, “we don't want redundancies. We want the plot and the theme to evolve…I want each one in that lineup to be different and to have a purpose and something interesting about it.”

And, for the record, Ram's Gate doesn’t do covers.

“We want to do originals, so I have a strong desire to find vineyards that only Ram's Gate will be working with,” Nielsen says. “And yes, the sound is going to evolve. But I think that's part of being a creative. I know some people hated it when Bob Dylan went electric, but I think, but you have to, it's part of that process.”

The Ram’s Gate Winery tasting room is open Thursday through Monday by appointment. (707) 721-8700. ramsgatewinery.com