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
I had the great pleasure to talk with Cheryl Benton on her Three Tomatoes podcast. We had a far-ranging conversation about wine and books and what it means to have wine part of a well-lived life.
“The best Cab Franc continually resonates at a pitch and frequency just out of the range of comfortable explication. It is the great conniver, is Cabernet Franc. At one moment it is as prosaic in the nose as mediocre Merlot—all cherry and wood. In the next though, it’s as mysterious
More than a perfect spot to grow important grape varieties well, Ghielmetti, or Out From Land, as it came to be called by my family, became the center of a vision for living that captivates to this day. Nestled in the 100 acres of vines is an olive grove of 111
“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
