Friends With Benefits

By Mike Muirhead, Sommelier, CMS, ISG

We are very lucky in our industry: there are few jobs where business trips mean visiting vineyards and talking to winemakers. Like any trip, what you bring home are the experiences and the people you’ve met. We have been lucky to make some amazing connections over the years, and sometimes those connections turn into friendships.

When we travel to Napa, we always look for our Next Big Thing. We look for wines and people that represent the place and feeling. So when we first tried the Moone-Tsai wines, we were enamoured by their presence and elegance, and we sought out a meeting with the owners. From our first meeting, Larry and MaryAnn Tsai not only welcomed us, but they also shared our love of wine and all that goes into creating it.

When you meet Larry and MaryAnn, it is easy to be fooled by their laid-back demeanour. But once you start digging into their accomplishments, their success in winemaking makes sense. MaryAnn’s pedigree in the Napa wine industry comes from over 20 years of building one of Napa’s most famous family wineries: Beringer. In her time at Beringer, MaryAnn helped create three wines that were awarded Wine Spectator ’s coveted Wine of the Year. Larry, a lover of wine and its intricacies, came to the industry after a successful career as a management consultant, where he built brands for companies like Kraft and Nestlé. He talks about his wines with such passion and reverence that they feel like branches of his family.

Larry and MaryAnn have come to Winnipeg to pour wine and meet our customers—and we have sent many friends to visit them in Napa. So when it came time for Jones & Company to find our Next Big Thing, we used one of the oldest tricks in the book: we asked our friends to hook us up.

Without hesitation, the Tsais put us in touch with their close friends, Philippe and Cherie Melka. We were looking for another family winery to add to our selection, and this was a natural fit. Philippe is the consulting winemaker for MooneTsai, but he also works with other icons, such as Bryant Family Wine, Dominus, and Hundred Acre. He has been credited with many 100-point wines in his career. Cherie is a self-taught enologist with a microbiology background who has worked in the labs of Ridge Vineyards, Beaulieu Vineyard, and Silver Oak. We jumped at the chance to talk with Cherie and Philippe, and—with a good word from Larry and MaryAnn—they gave us Manitoba’s first allocation of their Melka Estates wines. (You can read an interview with Philippe in our “Big Reds” issue of The Cellar Door.)

We consider ourselves fortunate to have met the Tsais and the Melkas—and added them to our circle of wonderful people who happen to make great wine. We are excited to share their wines with our wine-loving customers here in Manitoba.