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
“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
“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
Blending wine is like trying to turn over, blindfolded, all the tumblers in a cage whose lock is constantly moving. The Lineage Collection winemaking team’s sole job is to free the shackled prisoner inside. She is Perfect Beauty. We always go into Blending Season with the confidence that she is
The first time I saw our former estate vineyard rolling up from the valley floor to the base of the Altamont hills, the late rays of the summer afternoon were throwing shadows out long and epic on the loamy ground. I slowly drove my truck around the perimeter of the
Here is a throw-back video I made discussing how thinking (and feeling) about which wine an individual barrel should go into may be more important than tasting where it should go.
Harvest snuck up on me again. I’ve been doing this long enough to know when the first grapes will come in, but each year I’m still surprised. Harvest is holy. Harvest is hard. Harvest is healing.
The senses are the winemaker’s greatest tools. The ability to smell and taste and remember what you’ve experienced from barrel to barrel are crucial in putting together consistent wines. Outside influences, like Brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast that lives everywhere in the winery, can get in the way of the true expression of
