Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine
by Steven Kent Mirassou
Hardcover – June 2021
Steven Kent Mirassou received his BA in American Literature from the George Washington University and his MA in Literature from NYU. He was born in the Salinas Valley and grew up in San Jose and Los Gatos before going east to college. Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine is his first book.
Mirassou started his wine career in sales but found his true passion after moving into the production side of the business in 1996. Steven has made the highest rated wines from the Livermore Valley, is a founder of the Mount Diablo Highlands Wine Quality Alliance, and the President of the Livermore Valley Wine Growers Association.
Steven has four adult children, April Coffey, Aidan Mirassou, Katherine Mirassou, and Sara Mirassou. He lives in Livermore, CA with his wife, Beth Murray Mirassou, and their two dogs
Author: Steven Mirassou
Home Ranch Vineyard
Our Home Ranch Vineyard. Take a look at that beautiful dirt! Our estate vineyard was planted in 1996 on top of gravel from a now-extinct river that ran through the Livermore Valley Wine Country for centuries. The resulting gravel is hundreds of feet deep in this spot. This rock drains
A Great Walk…
We changed farming companies before the 2018 harvest, and one consequence of this move was the need for me to do my own fruit sampling. Sampling is the process of taking berries or bunches of grapes randomly from a block of fruit in order to gauge the ripeness of those
Lineage 17: The Beginning
Over the course of the next 12 months, we’ll be whittling a redwood down to a finely-sharpened toothpick as Aidan Mirassou, my assistant winemaker, and I move through 85 barrels of 2017 Bordeaux varieties in 12 separate barrel groups to get to the perfect few that will become Lineage 2017.
Proportion and Balance; Elegance and Evolution
From the proper pronunciation of Pinot Meunier to a workable and acceptable definition of balance, wine can be a really confounding thing…and that’s just for the folks who actually make it. So much of what we ultimately end up doing – from picking decision to press date to final blending is done by
The Morning Tool Chest
First thing, every morning (well, after a cup of coffee!) I take my collection of stuff to the fermenting bins to determine how far along the road to dryness each fermenter is. I draw some wine from under the cap of skins with the siphon (turkey-baster thingy), strain it through
Oh, Cabernet Franc
Cabernet Franc is… The 17th most widely planted red grape variety in the world; The 16th biggest red grape in terms of tons crushed in California in 2017; The parent to Cabernet Sauvignon (with Sauvignon Blanc) and Merlot (with Madeleine Noire des Charentes) and Carmenere (with Gros Cabernet); And it accounted