RECLAMACIÓN: A CHARLA WITH DAVID SALAZAR

 Reclamación Wines, a sustainably farmed label.

David Salazar grew up in San Lucas, a speck of southern Monterey County so small that in his childhood the population was 212. His father managed a 3,000-acre vineyard, the place David learned to prune, swim in an irrigation reservoir, and read the language of the vine. After a degree in viticulture and enology from Fresno State and stints at Skywalker Ranch and in New Zealand, he returned home to build Reclamación Wines, a Mexican-American owned, sustainably farmed label: Reclamación. Reclamation. Taking back what was always ours. What follows is our charla.

FREDERICK LUIS ALDAMA  You grew up in rural Monterey County, a region most people don't think of as the land of wine.

DAVID SALAZAR  Even King City isn't big enough to be recognized unless you've gotten a speeding ticket there, and San Lucas doesn't even have highway patrol, that's how small it is. My dad moved us up from Santa Maria after he checked our savings one day, we had about thirty dollars, and realized we wouldn't stay afloat if anything happened. So all my childhood memories begin and end on that 3,000-acre vineyard. I can still draw you a map in my head, every block, every road. I learned to prune there, learned to swim in an irrigation reservoir, caught crawdads in the river. A rural, country childhood, but with a Mexican twist, because everybody around us was Latino and worked the vineyard.

ALDAMA  What does the country around King City and Salinas taste, touch, sound, smell like to you? How does it live inside your wine?

SALAZAR  It's a windy place. Around three the wind kicks up, and the soil outside our house was all little pebbles, so you'd walk out in shorts and get sandblasted, the pebbles hitting your shins. I remember that whenever I open the wine. And the smells, always dust in the air, and my dad always smelled like sulfur, because they were too frugal to buy chemicals, the only thing they dusted was sulfur to keep the mildew back. That frugality is why his was one of the first clean vineyards, and people at the start of the sustainable movement sought his fruit out. That's the wine I make now, sustainable, mostly biodynamic.

I remember the wind whenever I open the wine.

ALDAMA  When you walk a vineyard today, what do you see that someone who didn't grow up in it would walk right past?

Salazar in his element: The Salinas Valley, the Salad Bowl, fertile ground for vegetables, cultures, and creativity alike.

SALAZAR  The vines are a book, but you must know how to read its language. The thickness of the trunk tells you the age, thin is three or four years, thick is fifty, sixty, seventy. The leaves tell you if it's been over- or under-irrigated. In summer when everything's dead, you'll spot a big green patch in the middle of nowhere. The first time, my dad said, there's a leak there. I said, how do you know? He said, because everything's green. That knowledge isn't exclusive to Latinos, but it is exclusive to the people who work the land.

ALDAMA  When you walk a vineyard today, what do you see that someone who didn't grow up in it would walk right past?

SALAZAR  The vines are a book, but you must know how to read its language. The thickness of the trunk tells you the age, thin is three or four years, thick is fifty, sixty, seventy. The leaves tell you if it's been over- or under-irrigated. In summer when everything's dead, you'll spot a big green patch in the middle of nowhere. The first time, my dad said, there's a leak there. I said, how do you know? He said, because everything's green. That knowledge isn't exclusive to Latinos, but it is exclusive to the people who work the land.

The vines are a book, but you must know how to read its language.

David born into the life of the vine!

ALDAMA  In a way you're already a professor of this land and its life.

SALAZAR  On my resume I used to call myself the man between the vineyard and the winery. They have contradicting goals, the winery wants the highest-quality fruit exactly when it's right, the vineyard wants the most grapes off the vine as fast as possible.

Growing up in the vineyard, I knew the farmer had to get paid to survive another year, and my degree taught me the enological side, so I could bridge the two. It's a good job for a Mexican-American, because your roots teach you one side and school teaches you the other. There's a lot of code-switching in it, one way with white people, another with Hispanics, and being able to intersect the two is valuable, but taxing.

ALDAMA  You grew up just up the road from San Juan Bautista, home of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, born on flatbed trucks in the vineyards, known for the actos and for Zoot Suit.

SALAZAR  Funny enough, until I went to college I had no idea about Valdez and El Teatro Campesino, even though it was basically in my backyard in San Juan Bautista. But I did grow up watching his films like Zoot Suit and La Bamba, with Lou Diamond Phillips playing Ritchie Valens. To learn in college that all of that was born right down the road hit me hard. It got me thinking, how can I let other kids in that region, who have no idea, know about it?

ALDAMA  The Salinas Valley is land marked deeply by struggle and activism.

SALAZAR  I remember working a vineyard during a United Farm Workers strike, la huelga, driving past the huelga eagle every day, and honestly, because of the gang culture out there, I thought that red flag was a Norteño flag, because the gangs had adopted it. There's this wild intersection between gangs and farmworkers. They call the Salinas Valley the Salad Bowl, and it's a salad bowl of vegetables but also of cultures, gangs, theater, agriculture. So much has come out of that little corner of rural America. It's fertile land, not just for Hispanics but for creativity.

ALDAMA  Your mission runs parallel to Valdez's, bringing the dignity of our labor and history into the center of the narrative rather than the background.

SALAZAR  That's exactly the goal. When I came back from New Zealand, I realized people only saw me as labor, and nobody was trying to change the fact that the people doing the bulk of the work got zero recognition. It reminds me of Stand and Deliver, when Jaime Escalante, played by Edward James Olmos, writes one word on the board and says he asks only one thing of his students. Ganas. Desire. That's really all it is.

Nobody was trying to change the fact that the people doing the bulk of the work got zero recognition.

ALDAMA  Tell me about the art on your labels, the story in the bottle.

The pét nat sarape with its stitched R, the symbol of Reclamación.

SALAZAR  My wife and I collaborate on all of our labels, always thinking about what best represents our people and our culture. Our first label featured the cempasúchil because I wanted it to feel representative without being cheesy, something that would catch your eye even if you did not realize it was a Mexican brand.

Most wineries pick one label and just change the vintage, but I wanted every release to stop people in their tracks because there is almost nothing on a wine shelf that immediately feels like it is speaking to a Latino audience. Our pét nat label features a sarape blanket with our stitched R, the symbol of Reclamación, while other labels incorporate images like ajolotes, nopales, and other symbols of Mexican culture. Some references are obvious and others are more subtle, but the goal is always the same. I want our gente to recognize themselves in the bottle and feel like these wines were made for them.

I want our gente to recognize themselves in the bottle.

David among the vines, where his childhood and his winemaking both begin.

ALDAMA  So much wine invents its heritage, signals prestige with a French château. You're anchored in real roots. Is there tension there?

SALAZAR  No real pushback to my face, maybe whispers I never hear. But it's one thing to be persistent, another to beg, and I won't beg. Mostly people are inspired by my story, because it's authentic. They ask how I got into the industry, and I say I never got into it, I was born into it. It chose me.

ALDAMA  You don't carry a high-brow vintner swagger.

SALAZAR  I wear t-shirts, jeans, and Vans. I don't look like what the industry says a winemaker should. A lot of us Latinos don't get credit because of our skin color, the car we drive, the neighborhood we live in.

ALDAMA  Take this wherever you want, but how would you answer a critic who called this selling identity as a flavor, using Mexican-ness as a marketing ploy?

SALAZAR  That's a valid criticism, and I don't disagree with it. I'd only be offended if it were true, but I'm Mexican and I can represent that without feeling like a fraud, because I'm not one. I make the wine, I source the grapes, my family and I speak Spanish, my mom worked in the fields before school and again until sundown. So yes, if people say I'm using the Mexican plight as a marketing ploy, I am, but not to make myself rich, to let people know there are a lot of us, and a lot of parents like mine who worked the vineyards for generations and got no recognition. If I can capitalize on recognition, with interest, I'll do it proudly, and pay it back to the community.

ALDAMA  Less than 1% of California wineries are Latino-owned. How do you fit into the groups working to change that, and how do the events themselves need to change?

Cork-inscriptions: Reclamación

SALAZAR  I'm part of a Napa producers' group, and one of Napa's problems is that everything's too expensive for visitors. An average tasting runs eighty to a hundred dollars for four small pours. We sold tickets for thirty-five, six winemakers pouring four wines each, so you got twenty wines for less than half the price. We expected fifty tickets and sold about a hundred and twenty-five. Everybody came, everybody made money. Then there's the part nobody talks about, we share resources, buying glass and corks in bulk, moving barrels when someone has a truck, which lowers our costs enough to survive another year.

I used to wish I could get into the big, well-known events, but they want their own people. By the numbers, we're winning anyway. Our events are cultural, there's music, people dancing to banda, and it's not just Hispanics, it's California as a whole. Curated right, they're as successful as the ones we don't get invited to, if not more.

By the numbers, we're winning anyway.

ALDAMA  You have a baby boy now. What do you want him, and Latino kids generally, to know?

SALAZAR  As a new father, I think about this a lot. Being first-generation, there's this heavy weight about not being a failure. The winemaker dream was a seed my dad planted, and for years I asked myself whether it was mine or his. So first, I want my son to do whatever makes him happy, wine or art or anything else, without unnecessary pressure. Beyond that, I want him proud of his cultural identity. You hear about families whose kids only speak English because the parents feared discrimination, and they lose that part of who they are. I never want that for my kid, because being Mexican American is such a cool thing.

ALDAMA  What do you hope your little boy as part of this new generation will put their name on someday?

Familia Salazar and the passing down of tradition

SALAZAR  I want him to know he can be proud of his cultural identity and still be proud to be American, that he is both, just like me, and nobody can say otherwise. I want him to recognize not just the struggle of his ancestors, but their strength, that they came from so little and still built lives, families, and opportunities for the generations that followed. I hope he and this next generation put their names on things our parents and grandparents never imagined possible, whether that's a business, a vineyard, a work of art, or something none of us can even picture yet.

None of this happens without recognizing the strength of the generations that came before us. Which brings us back to that one word Edward James Olmos, as Jaime Escalante, wrote on the chalkboard: Ganas.

Reclamación Wines is sold in San Francisco and Sacramento and is expanding into Los Angeles. Follow @reclamacionwines and visit reclamacionwines.com for upcoming releases.