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
“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
