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
“The genius of the best wine and food is the seemingly effortless way in which complicated and disparate ingredients harmonize a series of notes into an irreducible and unrepeatable song. No matter how many components are in the dish or how many different grape varieties are in a blend, there
“Really good wine gives a pleasure that is thrilling in its physical briefness, and very long in the memories that it creates. A great wine has less to do with how long it can live and more to do with its ability to transfigure the Time that it has.” Excerpt
“The day is winding down and three people are doing what they love, and I even say as much… “isn’t this fucking amazing what we get to do?” We’re about to talk about the ten wines in front of us… what’s compelling about #2 or why we should kick out
“I can measure the amount of titratable acid there is in a wine, the pH level, the amount of alcohol by volume, and a bunch of other things. What I can’t measure, though, is how these things make you feel, how all of these individual planks combine in your mouth
“Balanced acidity, to me, is the single most important answer to the question: what makes a wine worth drinking in the first place? Without the litheness and aliveness and pace and sexiness of a beautifully acid-driven wine, you are left with flabbiness, too little verve, and a wine that has
“Every single wine on the table bears a family resemblance to the other in its blackness of fruit, precision of fruit expression, and shape of the wine in the mouth. There is such a sense of place in these wines; the incredible mid-palate focus and austerity of structure translate the
“Harvest is like a national holiday in this sense. The clocks reset to our own special time zone and the more pedestrian concerns of the day get lost in the tumble of Cabernet tonnage. I love the fact that the grapes own the calendar from August to November. The grapes
The mornings are cold now. And the bins don’t throw off heat anymore either. Fermentation is practically done; now it’s an exercise in revealing structure, an exercise in extracting all of the purity and all of the grace and all of the goodness that these grapes we’ve picked this year
The purest day is a day without hands. Face clean, Numbers – reliquary abstraction. Blankness is blessed, and it unwinds to ancient time. Below the beat of clock, deaf to appointment, to hunger, to anticipation. The end comes when we are told; Foretelling is for fools. Harvest.
There are no real ends in wine (maybe when the bottle is finished…but that just leads to the beginning of another bottle being opened!), but there are moments in the history of harvest to bottling where the winemaker needs to make a definitive decision that separates one part of winemaking
