As someone exposed to an awful lot of wineries, wine brands, and their winemakers, it’s hard not to have something of a soft spot for the rebels and innovators, especially when they also happen to make excellent wine.
Dan Petroski is a former magazine publishing executive who, after spending a career-reset year in Sicily helping out at a winery, decided to turn his back on the publishing world and become a winemaker. Essentially self-taught, Petroski worked his way up from a harvest intern to become the winemaker at Larkmead Cellars in Napa.
Along the way, he came up with the (rather harebrained) idea of launching a white-wine-only brand from Napa Valley. In a milieu where white wine almost always represents an afterthought, and entry-level pricing tends to start at $50 per bottle, Dan envisioned Massican as a wine brand that would bring Mediterranean flavors and lifestyle to his customers at extremely accessible prices.
Massican winemaker Dan Petroski
Dan launched Massican as an estate-less wine brand in 2009 with small quantities of two Italian-inspired white blends and a Sauvignon Blanc made from purchased grapes. Within only a couple of vintages his wines quickly became the darlings of many a sommelier interested in higher-acidity, food-friendly wines from California, and the wines became representative of a fundamental shift in California winemaking towards balance and diversity.
The winemaking regimen at Massican aligns with an approach I like to call low-intervention pragmatism. Petroski likes to work with growers who farm organically, but he can’t always find enough organic sources. Whenever possible he chooses to work with farmers that don’t use glyphosate. When the fruit warrants it, Petroski ferments with native yeasts, but inoculates fermentations he believes will need it. His Annia, Gemina, Chardonnay and Pinot Grigio wines are fermented in oak barrels of various sizes, with an emphasis on used barrels for the most part. The Sauvignon Blanc is fermented in stainless steel. Malolactic conversion is often blocked to retain acidity, and consequently the wines are all sterile filtered before bottling in deliberately lightweight glass bottles.
Petroski, in addition to his natural talents as a winemaker, brought his considerable marketing savvy to the exercise of creating the Massican brand. In addition to taking great care in the design of packaging and visual presentation of the brand, Petroski has been unafraid to experiment in the service of innovation. He has created branded virtual real-estate in the metaverse, an Instagram cookbook, a magazine, wine bottle NFTs, a line of beers, vermouth, and more.
Not all of these ventures have been successful, but they have collectively elevated Massican to something more than a wine label, as well as marking Petroski as a true innovator in the wine business, a fact not lost on the folks at Gallo, who finally made Petroski an offer he couldn’t refuse in late 2023.
Now, with an inconceivably large set of vineyards at his disposal, world-class production facilities, and a distribution network second to none, Petroski seems quite enthusiastic to take Massican to the next level. His 2023 wines, the first made under the aegis of Gallo and utilizing those vast resources, show no real departure from his style, and the addition of a tasty screw-capped Pinot Grigio suggests the shape of things to come.
The author and the winemaker in the midst of tasting everything
No doubt assisted and encouraged by the corporate resources now at his disposal, Petroski recently put together a comprehensive look back at nearly every wine he has ever made under the Massican brand.
The tasting, held at Gallo’s Louis Martini winery in Napa and pictured at top, was a rather low-key affair, but in classic Petroski style, it featured old Fellini movies projected on the wall, energetic music, sommelier-like service, and a paid photographer, which is why you’re…
Source : https://www.vinography.com/2024/09/backward-and-forward-the-complete-massican-retrospective
