Kevin Harvey Quotes

Our very long-term prospective hinges on making the best possible wine we can.

I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine.

There are many great wine producers from all over the world making fantastic wines. Italian wines especially are making an enormous comeback after sometimes being labeled as inexpensive jug wines.

The French make the best wine.

You can grow grapes in almost any part of the world. You just have to develop your palate enough to realize wine is an expression of the place where you make it. You don't have to take over the world; just be an artist and express your area.

Today's winemakers still worry about quality.

Although the French appellation system has its roots in the 1923 system created in Chateauneuf-du-Pape by Baron Le Roy, proprietor of the renowned Chateau Fortia, Chateauneuf-du-Pape never developed a reputation for quality or achieved the prestige enjoyed by such regions as Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Back in 1990, there were fewer than 20 wineries in and around Paso Robles, a farming community midway between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Most of the wines produced there were rustic, highly tannic and alcoholic, with little charm or finesse.

To work a vineyard, you need a lot of guts to do that. To go out there and work all year, you almost feel that these people talk to the grapes. Wine is a lifestyle, and you can talk about it for ages. It's a passion, but it's not something I can do on a daily basis.

My goodness, everyone is planting grapes, even a neighbor with only five acres.

The reality is that I'm making better wine than I thought I would. The whole process is simple but beautiful.

There are so many impassioned winemakers. I think there are more impassioned winemakers than chefs.

My grandparents in Istria had a frasca, which is about the most basic kind of grocery/restaurant. They sold wine from their own vineyard. I took control of the vineyard, hired a local winemaker, and bought another winery in 1996. We had our first commercial vintage in 1998.

Great wine requires a mad man to grow the vine, a wise man to watch over it, a lucid poet to make it, and a lover to drink it.

The very best of vineyards is the cellar

The most savory grape, the one that produces the wines with best texture and aroma, the sweetest and most generous, doesn't grow in rich soil but in stony land; the plant, with a mother's obstinacy, overcomes obstacles to thrust its roots deep into the ground and take advantage of every drop of water. That, my grandmother explained to me, is how flavors are concentrated in the grape.

The people who make the greatest wines in the world, they love their dirt, they pick it up, they coddle it, they kiss it, they put it in a jar and it sits on their mantle in the living room, because they know. They know.

Wine is earth's answer to the sun.

What grape to keep its place in the sun, taught our ancestors to make wine?

I did a show with Tori Kelly, and it was really cool that I got to meet her. She has always been a huge inspiration of mine, and I'm obsessed with her voice, so it was great to get to talk to her about the industry. The best advice she gave me was to just be myself.

Winemakers have to adapt to what they're given by nature: the vines, the fruit, the soil and the weather.

My unrealized ambition is to tend my vines, produce wine, and work like an artisan. I dream of rediscovering the old traditions and customs of wine growing, not necessarily to deny the technology which we have today, but to harness it and work in harmony with nature.

Walla Walla is where I make wine, with Eric Dunham. He and I partnered up on a small project for me. We make pretty good cabernet and syrah.

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

I want to get more involved with the vineyards I have all over the world and to spend more time with the people who work in them.