Zero Defects

Written by Mike Stepanovich

Rosa Lee deLeuze was holding court. She and her son, Brett, were at the recent Yosemite Vintners’ Holidays seminar in Yosemite National Park relating how their family got into the wine business.

The matriarch of the deLeuze clan said her husband, Norman deLeuze, and good friend Gino Zepponi, a couple of aeronautical engineers at Aerojet General in Sacramento, decided to elevate their love of wine. So in 1968, the two of them pooled their resources—$3,000 apiece—and launched their winery, naming it ZD Wines.

The name ZD has a double meaning, said Rosa Lee, who has a perpetual twinkle in her eye and a smile that speaks of a life well lived.

“At the time Aerojet had an internal program known as ‘zero defects.’ So that’s what we called it; the ZD stands for zero defects.” But of course it also stood for Zepponi-deLeuze, she said.

The partners rented a barn on the Sonoma County side of Carneros, the cool region atop San Pablo Bay. They then applied for a winery permit. At that time, a winery permit hadn’t been issued in Sonoma County in 20 years. When Norm applied for the permit, Brett related, “the guy said, ‘Oh, yeah, we issued one of those once.’ ” Then he fished around for the right forms. “Dad wasn’t too happy about that.”

Norm asked the Sonoma County official for a list of things he needed as part of the permitting process. Included was a tank. “The guy said, ‘You don’t have a tank. I can’t issue the permit unless you have a tank.’ So we had to go out and get a redwood tank.” No matter that the proprietors didn’t need or plan to use a tank; they needed one to get a permit.

Back then, the California wine industry was still waking up from its 13-year slumber known as Prohibition. A handful of wineries existed in the Napa Valley, and Robert Mondavi’s new winery, opened in 1966, was the first new winery built in Napa Valley since the end of Prohibition. ZD was launched two years later, making the deLeuzes true pioneers in the wine industry.

The founders did everything from scratch. “We redid old whiskey barrels,” Rosa Lee said. “We scraped them out, sanded them, and re-toasted them...Gino and Norm were engineers, so we did our own bottling.

“One of the things people wonder is how we knew how to make wine. [Gino and Norm] had been home winemakers for a few years, and UC Davis was so great to help them and consult with them.”

The winery was a weekend venture because Norm and Gino were still working at Aerojet. So the deLeuzes would pack up and head to the winery for the weekend. “Robert, our oldest child, always wanted to come,” Rosa Lee said. “Julie, our daughter, came after slamming the doors. Brett came because he was four.”

Norm deLeuze had a great love of French Burgundy, “so we started out as a Burgundy house,” Brett said. They bought their first grapes, pinot noir, from Winery Lake Vineyard in Carneros in 1969, which had been planted just a few years before by its owner, René di Rosa (he later sold the vineyard to Sterling Vineyards). The 300 cases they made were their first commercial production.

One of the great things about being a small, family operation “is that you can try different things,” Rosa Lee said.

An example of that, Brett said, is the winery’s chardonnay. Their first chardonnay also came from Winery Lake Vineyard in 1971, the first year that vineyard produced that varietal. By 1975, they were making three different chardonnays: a Napa Carneros, Sonoma Carneros, and Santa Barbara County from fruit they bought from well-known grower Louis Lucas. Those three bottlings continued into the late ‘70s, but some in-house experimentation changed that.

“We believed in appellation-designated wines, but were open to the best bottle of wine,” Brett said. They discovered that by blending the three chardonnays together “we created a more complex and interesting wine. In 1980, we gave up the single appellations and went to a blended chardonnay. In 1982, we added Monterey County chardonnay to the blend, so now our blend has grapes from Napa and Sonoma Carneros, Santa Barbara County, and Monterey County.”

The family is “working hard to be innovators, too,” he continued. “Dad and Gino found that if you could slow the fermentation way down, kept the yeasts swirling in the wine, and allowed the fermentation to go on for six to eight weeks you got a better tasting wine, and a nice creaminess to the wine.” To do that they cooled the must (the unfermented juice) to 40 degrees before inoculating it with yeast. “You have to start there [at that temperature] and hold it there,” because fermentation generates heat. It’s one thing to control fermentation temperatures in a stainless steel tank with a refrigeration jacket; it’s something else again to do it when you’re fermenting in oak barrels.

Also, ZD’s chardonnay isn’t put through malolactic fermentation, conversion of the grapes’ natural malic acid to lactic acid. Malolactic fermentation, or ML as it is known, is a useful technique for highly acidic wines; while putting a portion of the wine through ML can add greater complexity, if overdone it can lead to a buttery-flavored wine. By not using ML, and instead using extended yeast and lees (the dead yeast) contact, ZD is able to produce a creamy, fruit-focused wine that emphasizes the qualities of the grape. And because it retains the natural acidity, “it richens up with age, and will easily last seven years or more,” Brett said.

The deLeuzes believe that the delicious flavors in their wines stem from organic farming. Their vineyards have been certified organic for more than a decade, and were farmed organically a decade before that. The focus is on balanced soils that lead to healthy and productive vines. The family is so committed to an ecological approach that the winery runs on solar power, and its tractors use bio-diesel fuel.

In 1979, ZD moved into a new winery that they built on Silverado Trail in Napa Valley. Gino Zepponi died in an auto accident in 1985, so Norman and Rosa Lee bought the Zepponi family share . And in 2007 cancer claimed Norman.

Today, all three siblings are partners in the winery:

• Robert earned a degree in viticulture and enology from UC Davis and succeeded his father as winemaker. Today he is the winery’s winemaster and CEO, overseeing all aspects of winemaking.

• Julie, who threw temper tantrums as a child when forced to come to the winery, has been a full-time employee since 1980. Today she is the winery’s administrator, tracking sales, handling day-to-day details, and serving as the winery’s chef.

• Brett earned a marketing degree from Cal State Sacramento, worked closely with his mother in sales and marketing, and now is the winery’s president.

And Rosa Lee? She just smiles, sips her wine, and reflects on her 42-year adventure that is true to its name: zero defects.

Photos Courtesy of Zd Wines

Article appeared in our 27-6 Issue - February 2011