The Big Interview: Dave Phinney
The Prisoner Company founder and Orin Swift winemaker Dave Phinney tells Sarah Neish about refusing to pander, and why it’s not true that all his customers are dying.
Whatsapp, Zoom and Google Meet are all off-limits for a chat with renowned Napa Valley winemaker and self-confessed technophobe Dave Phinney. “No-one is any more comfortable on those Zoom calls. In fact, most people look uncomfortable,” he shrugs. At least it sounds like he shrugs. Instead, we’re keeping it real with a good old-fashioned phone call and, other than a slight awkwardness at the idea of having his face beamed across the Atlantic, he claims he has nothing to hide.
“No skeletons in the closet,” he jests.
We’re speaking exactly one week after the UK launch of Phinney’s latest wine, Advice from John, a new Merlot-dominant blend by Orin Swift, the winery Phinney founded in 1998 and sold to E&J Gallo in 2016 for a rumoured $300 million. After the sale, Phinney stayed on to oversee the creative direction of the wines, and he remains closely involved to this day, overseeing everything from the liquid inside the bottle to the venue for the launch party.
Instead of settling for a phone call, we could have dialled up the weirdness level and conducted the interview through scrawling questions and answers on toilet walls which, grim though it sounds, would have been entirely in keeping with his wine release. The front label artwork for Advice from John is the brainchild of Phinney’s long-time assistant Samantha Smith, who some time ago became obsessed with photographing the graffiti she found in dive bar bathrooms.
Over the years, Smith racked up “thousands of photos” capturing messages splashed (sorry) across urinals and cubicle walls, running the full gamut from the philosophical to the obscene – more than enough to populate her own photography book showcasing this hidden world. The name John in ‘Advice from John’ in fact refers to the American slang term for the toilet – ‘the john’.
Anarchic aesthetic
As anyone with even a fleeting interest in Phinney’s wines will know, this anarchic aesthetic is not exactly a surprise. He has been kicking against the purist’s vision of what Napa Valley wine ‘should be’ since the beginning, not least with regard to price. Advice from John carries a cellar door price tag of just US$45.
“To me, ‘winning’ looks like a bunch of douchey hedge-fund guys drinking the wine and hearing them say: ‘These guys at Orin Swift are such idiots – they could have charged us twice the price!’”says Phinney. Suffice to say, that is not a philosophy shared by many Napa producers, who collectively have managed to ramp up the average price of a bottle of the region’s wine to more than $108, more than double the US average of $52, according to the latest direct-to-consumer report by analyst Sovos ShipCompliant.
“I’m always pushing for the lowest price possible,” Phinney says, unperturbed by the lofty numbers of his neighbours. “I do think there is snobbery in the wine world, but it’s much less than it used to be. If it was 30% when I started out 30 years ago, it’s more like 10% or 20% now.” Explaining that there is room for everyone, he says: “You have to have a ‘Louis Vuitton’, but there’s also room for The Gap or J.Crew or whatever. We can’t all be touting the same luxury brands.”
Orin Swift has something far more alluring than a ‘luxury’ brand, having taken on an almost mythical status among its fans. According to Rienne Bilz, business development manager, Europe, for the producer: “In the same way that people wait for a fashion drop, Orin Swift fans are like: ‘I heard this vintage went to Japan. I have to have it!’”
Cult following
Perhaps part of that cult following is Phinney’s refusal to go after consumers. Like the cat that shrinks away from an over-eager petter, he pays little attention to commercial trends or even social ones, such as the ageing population of global wine drinkers.
“When I was negotiating the Orin Swift partnership with Gallo, one of the questions they asked during due diligence was about our demographic,” he says. “I’d never analysed it, so I didn’t have an answer. I went down to our St Helena tasting room wearing sunglasses and sat in the corner, incognito, all afternoon. I wanted to see who was coming in, and it was everyone from a bachelorette party to a 70-year-old married couple, and everything in between.
“A large percentage of our clientele is Latino and African-American, but we didn’t plan it that way, and I don’t like to go out and get too much input from people when creating brands. My new favourite saying is: ‘If you get a committee to design a horse, you’re going to get a camel.’”
For this reason he scoffs at the scaremongering narrative that wine companies should prioritise Gen Z because the older generation is shuffling off this mortal coil. “I think it has been way overstated that all the wine consumers are ageing and dying,” Phinney says.
“Everyone is fixated on the next generation of wine drinkers, but let’s take care of the people who got us here. Consumption is actually up in the 30- to 50-year-old category. What I never want to do is pander to anyone. If I was to look at the research and say: ‘We want to go after 25-year-olds,’ that’s disingenuous. I try to focus on making wine that we can be really proud of.”
Tapestry of Merlot materials
Indeed, while fans and the media tend to fixate on the abstract and often confusingly beautiful designs of Orin Swift’s wine labels, which have featured everything from tattooed knuckles to a mummified priest in the catacombs of Palermo, Phinney insists: “We do actually make pretty good wine.”
The composition of Advice from John is “a tapestry of different Merlot materials” (77%), taken from both cool and warmer vineyard sites across Napa Valley, with a touch of Petite Sirah and Grenache making up the rest of the blend, and the wine aged for 14 months in French oak.
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Phinney sounds mildly frustrated when asked about his trademark red blends, but is quick to reject the notion that ‘single-vineyard’ or ‘single-parcel’ wines are the top of the viticultural tree. “I’m lucky enough to play on both sides of it,” he says. “We’ve been typecast as only making red blends, but we’ve also spent 10 years trying to refine Pinot Noir. The quick and dirty is that the easiest way to achieve quality and consistency is through geographical diversity. Some of our wines – Machete, Abstract, Mannequin – are California-appellated by design. It’s actually the more expensive approach, because if the grapes are further than two hours away from the winery, then they have to be refrigerated to get them here.”
Continuing, he demands: “Why wouldn’t you utilise the entire state and get a more consistent product? Even the best vineyards have bad years.” A little-known secret is that Phinney made the call to declassify four vintages of Orin Swift wine Mercury Head – 2000, 2010, 2011 and 2020 – “because it wasn’t up to standard”, dispelling the outdated perception that blends automatically equate to lower quality wines.
Thanksgiving table
As a child, Phinney split his time between California and Bristol in the UK, where his professor parents often took sabbaticals, and where he “quickly had to get over people calling me a yank”, but not before a few fist fights had broken out. Intriguingly, when asked which family member Orin Swift would be at the Thanksgiving table belonging to the wider Gallo family of brands, he replies: “The 15-year-old kid who got in a bunch of trouble and everyone had written off, but then got their shit together and surprised everyone.”
His parents “always supported the underdog” and “gave us a lot of rope, even though there were moments when they were probably scratching their heads, thinking: ‘Is this guy ever going to sort it out?’”
By anyone’s standards, Phinney did more than just sort it out. The Prisoner Company, which he launched in 2000 with just 365 cases, was sold to Huneeus Vintners in 2009 for $40m-plus. Just six years later, Huneeus flipped the business to Constellation Brands for an eyewatering $250m. Today, The Prisoner is the number one luxury red blend in the US, selling more than 2m bottles annually. Phinney’s sale of Orin Swift to E&J Gallo was a different beast, with the winemaker describing it as “a partnership”.
“In the 10 years that I’ve been working with Gallo I’ve never been told ‘no’. But I have been ‘asked’ not to do something twice,” Phinney reveals.
The first instance was over a photograph of Marilyn Monroe that Phinney wanted for the wall of Orin Swift’s tasting room. “We had a couple to choose from, both taken during her last photoshoot with Bert Stern before she died. But the one I wanted was a little risqué,” he says.
The other time was over the wine label for the producer’s L’Usine Pinot Noir. “It was a picture of an African-American model, and the way that she’d been shot, the tip of her nose looked a little bit white. I could see how it could have looked a bit like blackface. The labels were already printed and I got this call from Gallo. I was like: ‘I totally get it.’ We’ll touch the line, but we’ll never cross it.”
Bullish on UK
Thankfully, one thing Phinney is more than happy to cross is borders, and having spent more time in London in recent years, he says that we can expect to see a greater number of Orin Swift wines in the UK. “I’m really bullish on that. For a while we didn’t have enough wine, but we’ve established enough of a presence in the UK now to increase our exports there.” He adds wryly: “And it helps that there isn’t a language barrier.”
What would Phinney like to achieve in the world of wine that he hasn’t already experienced? To finally make a wine he loves.
“I rarely drink any of my wines because it’s kind of torturous for me,” he admits. “I think that’s why I like winemaking – it’s like fly fishing or golf. You never figure it out. You just have better days.”
He adds that he would also like the Orin Swift brand to continue to stay relevant “for the right reasons”.
“They say that every brand has a life cycle, and I want to buck that. You don’t have to be a Petrus to be a ‘forever brand’. Winemaking has always been an obsession, but now I’m starting to think about the word ‘legacy’. How can the brand exist when I’m no longer here? Or in 150 years’ time?”
He is far from haunted by the idea of failure. “We’re probably going to come up with a wine that falls flat on its face some day, but we’re going to learn from it.”
There’s a first time for everything…
Advice From John is available in the UK through Enotria.
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