By MATTHEW STOSS
GW Magazine / Spring 2017

Steven Mirassou, BA ’86, is the Mirassou of that mass-produced $10 wine you’ve seen everywhere, the one with the yellow label and the Art Nouveau sun, kept cheaply and plenteously on suburban supermarket shelves.

That is not Mirassou’s wine. It hasn’t been since 2002, when his cousins sold the name to Gallo—another patrician California wine family—and today the wine in those Mirassou bottles has nothing, other than the name, to do with the wine the Mirassou family made for five generations.

“You can only have so many Gallo-labeled bottles, so they buy other brands, like Louis Martini, like Mirassou, so they could have more facings on the store shelves,” Mirassou says.

Between the selling of the family wine business and now, Mirassou has left the wine industry and returned. As a young man, a romantic enamored with the East Coast, he wanted to teach literature at a fancy college and write novels. Two brain-numbing real jobs later (one in software and one in municipal street sweeping) and one near-religious experience drinking a 70-year-old dessert wine from his grandfather’s private store, he’s back and trying to rewrite and, in a sense, redeem his family’s oenological legacy.

“I wanted to get back to that original impulse, which was to make one great wine—one world-class wine, one iconic wine,” Mirassou says. “Or at least aspire to that.”

In 1996, Mirassou and his father founded Steven Kent Winery in the Livermore Valley, a wine region suited for Bordeaux varieties (Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Malbec, Merlot and Petit Verdot) about 40 miles southeast of Oakland and about 40 miles inland from Santa Clara County where Mirassou’s ancestors in 1854 planted some of California’s first vineyards.

Steven Kent—the first and middle names of Mirassou and his father—is a venture toward a kind of atonement for what, in hindsight, seems more like a selling out than a selling of the family name.

“The family had an opportunity to take advantage of certain situations that it didn’t end up taking advantage of,” Mirassou says. “When I think about what the family accomplished over time, it’s sort of bittersweet in a way. The first mover—the first company into a certain industry usually has a gigantic advantage over the people that come after them. We had an opportunity as a family to do significantly better and more in the business than what we ended up doing.”

Mirassou admits it’s strange to see his name on a bottle of wine he didn’t make and that he doesn’t endorse, except to say that it’s fine for the price. The wine Mirassou makes today starts at $65 and goes up to $165 for his flagship. Mirassou’s mission today, which, when he talks about it, sounds more like divine obligation, is to grow fruit in one great region and make one great wine.

“If you are in the area that can produce that kind of fruit,” says Mirassou of the Livermore Valley, “and you don’t choose to do that, I think you’ve wasted an opportunity, wasted resources. And, if you want to be dramatic about it, you’ve committed a little bit of a sin because you’re supposed to take what you have and, as a winemaker, help to marshal and shepherd this beautiful, fragile thing to its ultimate quality destiny. And if you take shortcuts and you don’t do that, you’re sinning against something that should have been the goal.”

Mirassou’s grasp of the sentimental is firm. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on Willa Cather, got a master’s degree in literature from New York University and rereads The Great Gatsby on occasion, just to see if he can find anything new in there.

He is attuned to his winemaking ancestors, going all the way back to the Mirassou patriarch, Pierre Pellier, in 1854, and nurses an immanent connection to what he now feels is a birthright. Mirassou grew up playing in his family’s vineyards and in their tasting rooms decorated with pictures of dead Mirassou vintners. Those pictures now hang in his Steven Kent tasting room. And although Steven Kent makes six wines, he designated just one—his best, the $165 bottle—to represent the Mirassou heritage. It’s a Bordeaux blend he dubbed “Lineage.”

“I don’t think I thought about Lineage at first as a way to redeem the family,” Mirassou says. “I think it’s related to my thoughts of what ultimately happened to Mirassou over the 150-some-odd years that it was in existence. I look at Lineage as a separate thing now. Lineage is about the Mirassou family from six generations forward, moving with, hopefully, a very focused idea and a focused plan about what it’s capable of accomplishing.”

For a while, it looked like Mirassou wouldn’t end up in wine. He says no one in the family pushed the business on him, and it wasn’t until his late 20s, spurred by conversations with his father, that he decided to start making wine.

Then, for Christmas in 1994, his father gave him that 70-year-old bottle, passed down from Mirassou’s grandfather. It contained a California Angelica, a fortified dessert-style white wine. Mirassou later recorked the empty bottle so he could revisit the smell of that wine.

“It just bespoke of time,” he says of the wine, which tasted like roasted nuts, saddle leather, brandy, cherries and vanilla. “You can smell the work that went into the wine. It was just a very romantic moment for me at that point in time, and it was one of those things that said, ‘If you can feel [that way] about a simple wine like this that was not expensive and not highly regarded from a production standpoint, then maybe you should be looking at getting back in the business as an adult.’”

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