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
Aging away gracefully is a puncheon of 2021 Cabernet Franc from the Ghielmetti Vineyard destined for Lineage or L’Autre Côte. The 2021 vintage is stunning, perhaps the finest we have yet made though the newly released 2018 is now available and setting the current standard of excellence for Livermore Valley
“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
Today, my book Lineage: Life and Love and Six Generations in California Wine is officially birthed to the world and available on Amazon.com. What an amazing feeling! I spent about 18 months before and during Covid writing this love letter to cellars and vineyards, wine, and those crazy and wonderful
Chapter 1: The Deep and Simple Immensity It is wondrously lonely out now. And it’s cold in the night. Cold compared to the bed I came out of, untangling from the warm body of my woman, a half-hour before. There is not another soul anywhere around, and it is so
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
Lineage is our most complicated blend; it can comprise five different grapes (the classic Bordeaux varieties) and Cabernet Sauvignon from more than 10 blocks on six vineyards. Aidan, Beth, and I start each year with nearly 150 barrels of wine, and from these, we carve aspirants away until we are
If no one knows a wine exists, it doesn’t matter how great it may be. When the people who know about that wine are prominent wine critics (and they’re saying nice things about the wines), the megaphone gets larger. Steve Heimoff, former critic for the Wine Enthusiast and one of
History and story are inextricably bound…the Story is what we tell to make sense of where we came from and from whom. As we know from great literature, the two are very malleable. In America – maybe most especially – if you don’t like the reality of the history, simply
I am fortunate to be working in the Livermore Valley, a too-little known gem that is demonstrating – at its best – the ability to grow Cabernet Sauvignon as great as any in the world. I’m also fortunate to have been born into the oldest winemaking family in America – a family for
