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
A new video on Wine Saves Lives! chronicling the start of Harvest 2022. The first day of 2022 Harvest saw the winemaking team at The Steven Kent Winery traveling to Lodi to pick up Albariño and overseeing the delivery of Sauvignon Blanc from the Lencioni Vineyard on the western edge of Livermore.
I’ll delve much deeper into the overall quality and scope of the 2021 vintage in a future post, but I just wanted to share – at the end of the harvest season – that we finished much as we began…with cleaning stuff out. Here is your moment of Zen:
“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.
I’m headed back home to the winery after most of the week in Portland to take care of some family issues. God, how I have missed my morning routine in the cellar, and god how I fucking love my work! There is nothing routine about getting to the winery every
Never have we experienced so much uncertainty…the health of our family and friends, the long-term health of our business, the way the world will look after Covid. In the midst of all that we do not know comes the one thing that we can count on, the one thing that
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.
