Sean
Thackrey’s Orion: A Complete Retrospective

Of all of the cult wines of California, Sean Thackrey’s singular Orion
bottling is right at the top of my personal list, particularly so as I've been
following this consistently fascinating wine since its maiden voyage in 1986.
Orion is shrouded in mystery, created by an autodidact who lives off the wine grid
in the wilds of western Marin County and has never actively promoted his wines.<a target="_blank" href="http://vinousmedia.com/multimedia/in-the-cellar-with-sean-thackrey-apr-2015"><img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1428938013867-Thackrey2.png"></a> In The Cellar with&nbsp;Sean Thackrey. Click <a target="_blank" href="http://vinousmedia.com/multimedia/in-the-cellar-with-sean-thackrey-apr-2015">here</a> to watch&nbsp;the video. 

A Garagiste and a Scholar

In an earlier life, Thackrey co-owned and ran an art gallery in San
Francisco specializing in original posters, prints, drawings and photographs
from 1970 until he sold it in 1995. (Thackrey’s special area of expertise is 19th-century
European photographs.)&nbsp; He has also
assembled an extensive library of rare and ancient texts about wine and
winemaking. &nbsp;With no technical background
in winemaking, Thackrey began his own wine venture as a hobby, after having bought
a house in 1977 in the fog-enshrouded coastal town of Bolinas, barely 15 miles
northwest of San Francisco as the crow flies but half a world away. (The
Bolinas Lagoon, rich in waterfowl, is a protected tidal estuary that sits in a
trough formed by the San Andreas fault.) He planted a few rows of grape vines
on his property because he liked the way they looked, then decided to make a
bit of wine, purchasing fruit from Wine and the People in Berkeley, which at
the time supplied home winemakers with high-quality grapes. He soon discovered his
métier.

Thackrey took a few extension courses at UC/Davis in the early ‘80s but
he makes it abundantly clear that he views winemaking as an art rather than a
science. Actually, he thinks of himself more as a chef:&nbsp; “I make the best wines I can from the raw
materials that are available to me, and I’m constantly improvising with that in
mind.” Although Thackrey began with varieties like Merlot, Cabernet, Petite
Sirah, Sangiovese and Mourvèdre and has produced numerous other wines through
the years, including Pinot Noir since 2001 and his multi-vintage Pleiades
blend, Orion became his flagship wine from the first year he made it.<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1428897333569-Orionbottles.jpg"> 

A Singular Wine

The two vineyards that have produced Orion are also part of the wine’s
mystique. From 1986 through 1990, Orion came from a very old Yountville
vineyard behind Mustard’s restaurant that was owned by veteran grower Arthur
Schmidt, whose grandfather built the house on the property. &nbsp;Most of the vineyard was planted to Petite Sirah
of unknown origin, but Schmidt had interplanted some Syrah and sold a couple
tons of this fruit to Thackrey, enough to bottle about 150 cases of wine each
year. Clark Swanson and Swanson Winery purchased this parcel after the 1990
harvest and Thackrey lost access to the fruit after 1991 (he did not release a
1991 Orion, as the new vineyard manager picked the grapes much too late, “with
no taste of fruit”).

So in 1991 Thackrey entered into a long-term agreement to purchase
fruit from the rocky, low-yielding, five-acre Rossi Vineyard at the end of
Madrona Avenue in St. Helena. While most Orion fans of my acquaintance continue
to think of this wine as Syrah, it’s actually a very old field blend dating
back to 1905 that includes at least 11 varieties, including some that have not
yet been definitively identified. The first release from this new source was
the 1992, and Rossi continues to be the source for Orion today, with annual
production ranging between 300 and 400 cases.

Another element that makes Orion a wine unto itself is the precociousness
of the vines, which Thackrey frequently harvests as early as the Labor Day
weekend. “I pick when they’re ripe, based on the flavor of the grapes rather
than on any technical measurements,” Thackrey told me in March, making it clear
that he preferred to avoid cooked fruit elements in his wine. What the very early
ripening means is that Orion does not necessarily track vintages for
later-picked red grapes in Napa Valley. For example, in years in which Cabernet
growers have no choice but to let unripe fruit hang through October or even
late September rains, the Rossi fruit is already safely nestled in the winery.

Thackrey’s Approach to Winemaking

Thackrey assured me that he improvises every year. He has completely
destemmed his fruit “for a long time.” The wines spend 60 days on their skins
in open-top fermenters, which Thackrey says yields substantial but lush,
long-chain, polymerized tannins. He ages Orion in a variety of French
oak—originally supplied mostly by Sirugue, then some François Frères barrels too
and more recently a percentage of Taransaud. He used about one-third new oak at
the beginning, but the percentage of new wood has increased steadily over the
years and is close to 100% today. But Orion has never been dominated by its
wood component: “Oak is simply a spice for me,” says Thackrey.

The wines get minimal racking and are bottled during the second spring,
with a light fining (originally with egg whites but more recently with lysozyme,
which also has anti-bacterial properties) but no filtration. Thackrey told me
that the pH of Orion is never higher than 3.8 and that only rarely has he made
slight acid additions. “My ideal is to make a wine that’s delicious on release
and also after 30 years,” said Thackrey. “Those two characteristics are not
mutually exclusive.” But he added that Orion routinely goes through a dumb phase
between five and eight years after the vintage.

<img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1428897279132-foxy+taste+in+Orion.jpg"> The&nbsp;fox&nbsp;at the door is not responsible for Orion's often feral characterAn Overview of the Tasting

As was the case with most of the other vertical tastings I carried out
in California in March, the Orion wines stood out for their deep colors,
inner-mouth energy and slow evolution. They are aromatically complex, sappy
wines that were bottled with alcohol levels in the 13s through the mid-1990s;
only in 2006 did they start routinely reaching 15% or more and yet the more
recent wines impress as much for their balance as for their size. Thackrey is
not inclined to attribute the higher octane levels to climate change; instead,
he simply noted that he harvests the grapes when he thinks they're at the ideal
level of ripeness and admitted that his own tastes have evolved over the years.

Orion is a one-off wine, not unlike some of my other favorite distinctive
blends like <a target="_blank" href="http://vinousmedia.com/articles/vertical-tasting-of-sadie-family-wines-columella-jan-2015">Eben Sadie’s Columella</a> from South Africa’s Swartland region or
<a target="_blank" href="http://vinousmedia.com/wines?utf8=%E2%9C%93&amp;search-filter=reviews&amp;q=Ravenswood+Old+Hill+Zinfandel">Ravenswood’s Old Hill Zinfandel</a>, which actually includes more than a dozen
varieties. Orion is very much a hand-made, natural wine that has frequently
showed a feral character on release, with elements of menthol, mint and pepper
adding nuance to its pungent fruit and smoky mineral flavors, usually without
overwhelming them. The first time I saw the open-top redwood fermenters in
Thackrey’s cool, shaded yard under the eucalyptus trees back in the early ‘90s,
I knew where the wine’s often exotic resiny, piney nuances came from. And yet,
after a decade or two in bottle, most Orion vintages are clean and stylish,
sometimes with almost Pinot Noir-like silkiness and finesse. They are not
blockbusters.

Thackrey offered an explanation for Orion’s graceful aging curve.
“Rather than beat my wines up and make them polite when they’re young, I’d
rather that they became civilized with age—and not by castration. And what’s
the point of aging a wine if it’s not undergoing change?”

The Rossi wines, as a rule, were denser than the earlier vintages from
the Schmidt vineyard, no doubt due in part to the venerable age of the vines. Crop
levels in Rossi are extremely low: Thackrey told me he harvests about seven
tons of fruit from five acres in a good year, and sometimes as little as
four.&nbsp;

I tasted this extraordinary range of wines on a quiet Saturday
afternoon in Thackrey’s barn in Bolinas in March, beginning with his first
vintage, the 1986. Our only companion was a wild fox that Thackrey has taken to
feeding cat kibble outside the kitchen door of his barn. Thackrey assured me
that he had never before done a vertical tasting of all of his Orion bottlings.
You can hear his comments on the tasting, as well as on his approach to winemaking,
in the accompanying video that was shot in the dimly lighted attic office of
his barn, as a group of his local friends descended on the open bottles with
partying in mind.

<a target="_blank" href="http://vinousmedia.com/wines?sort%5Bdirection%5D=asc&amp;sort%5Bname%5D=vintage&amp;wf_dirty=false&amp;wf_export_fields=&amp;wf_export_format=&amp;wf_id=&amp;wf_match=all&amp;wf_model=Wine&amp;wf_name=&amp;wf_order=vintage&amp;wf_order_type=desc&amp;wf_page=1&amp;wf_per_page=25&amp;wf_submitted=true&amp;wf_type=WillFilter%3A%3AFilter&amp;wine_filter%5Barticle_id%5D=1104">See all the wines (from oldest to youngest)</a>-- Stephen Tanzer

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