Winemakers with a story to tell

As much as Mark Estrin likes Chinese food, he’d always thought fortune cookies were a bit silly. But he changed his mind about three years ago, when he read his fortune after lunch at a Panda Express.

His buddy Carroll Kemp, with whom he shared a Hollywood past and a love for cigars and wine, had been urging him to become his partner in a winemaking enterprise, and Estrin had been saying no. But Kemp was persistent, so Estrin decided to see what his fortune cookie said.

It said: “The venture you are thinking of will bring you wealth and fame.”

Estrin laughs at the recollection.

“I pulled out my cellphone, called Carroll on the spot and said, ‘OK, I’m in.’ ”

Neither Estrin, 56, nor Kemp, 38, is rich or famous yet. But as things have turned out, wine is getting them closer to those goals than Hollywood ever did.

The first three vintages of their Red Car wines have received excellent reviews and sold out quickly. After starting out on a shoestring, essentially making their first 50 barrels in Kemp’s driveway, the two men have now raised more than $1 million in investment capital, bought their first vineyard, quit their day jobs and seem to be having the time of their lives.

“The wine business is such a delight, such a personal thrill,” Kemp told me when the three of us had lunch not long ago. “I was in the movie business for 13 years as a producer and manager, and success there comes at such a high price -- to the soul, really -- that it makes this just unbelievably pleasurable.”

Kemp and Estrin are among many Hollywood transplants who have found happiness in the vineyard. Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Seagal and the Smothers Brothers are but a few of the others. None, however, has managed to graft a new winemaking career onto an old moviemaking career as seamlessly as Estrin and Kemp.

That’s because they think they’re still making movies, with Estrin as the writer and Kemp the producer -- except the movie is in (and on) the bottle, not on film.

“It’s all a story,” Kemp says, and the first story is the name of the wine itself. They picked Red Car as a tribute to the old streetcars from “P.E.” -- Pacific Electric -- the “red cars” that gave Southern California a mass transit system during the first 60 years of the 20th century.

Moreover, every Red Car wine label literally tells a story. On the back label of each of their wines are 10 or 12 lines of prose, one passage per vintage, tiny installments of what will eventually be a serialized novella that Estrin says “tries to re-create the sense and mood and tone of those noirish melodramas of the 1950s.”

Thus, the label Estrin wrote for the back of their first wine, a 2000 Syrah called “The Window,” says:

“I walked to the window and pulled back a thin, tobacco-stained curtain. What passed for a breeze from the street below was hot and close and remorseless. Then a west-bound Red Car trolley lumbered by, filled with people. For a fleeting moment, I imagined I was in the Red Car, heading to the beach, where the air was fresh and clean and cool. Riding the Red Car to the edge of the continent, to the edge of everything.”

The label on Red Car’s 2001 Syrah (“The Stranger”) continues in the same vein, advancing the story incrementally, and the label on the 2002 Syrah (“Sugar Daddy”) says:

“I once loved a woman who belonged to another man. I held her in my arms. She told me she’d love me forever. Her eyes were as blue as the desert sky. But her sugar daddy’s money was green. Forever was a long time ago.”

Pinot Noir meets film noir

Estrin and Kemp have two more Syrahs planned, one of which will bear a label telling the as-yet-untitled story of four desperate men seated around a Las Vegas card table in the 1940s. The other -- “The Fight” -- will chronicle a heavyweight championship bout, also in the late ‘40s, with each vintage telling the story of one round in the battle. Both will be released this fall, after the partners release their first Pinot Noir, “Amour Fou” (“Crazy Love”), with yet another story line, in June.

This highly stylized approach owes as much to Estrin’s work as a wine store salesman after abandoning screenwriting as it does to his still not fully extinguished writerly ambitions.

“I spent enough time working in wine shops and watching customers pick up a bottle and look at it and put it back to know that to succeed, we had to do something different to catch the buyer’s attention as soon as he picked up our bottle,” he says.

The Kemp-Estrin wines -- with a drawing of a Red Car and the words “Red Car” in a bull’s-eye on the front and the paragraph of engaging prose on the back -- certainly merit a second look. And based on the wines I’ve tasted so far, they merit a second taste as well.

“Sugar Daddy” is a big, dark, brooding wine with a long finish. I drank it with a charred rare New York steak and thought they stood up to each other like two superb heavyweight fighters.

My favorite Red Car wine so far, though, is “The Stranger,” which reminded me of a pudding made with ripe blackberries, boysenberries and a hint of blueberry.

Robert Parker gave “The Stranger” 93 points and said it had an “earthy, peppery, Provencal-like nose ... tremendous richness, loads of complexity, and copious quantities of red and black fruits.”

Kemp and Estrin made just 264 cases of “The Stranger” and priced it at $42. “Sugar Daddy” production is 467 cases; it sells for $45.

They also make a lower-priced line -- “Some Like It Red” -- a blend of barrels that Kemp says “don’t quite make the cut for Red Car.” The 2002 “Some Like It Red,” which will be released next month at $30 a bottle, is 65% Syrah, 25% Pinot Noir and 10% Cabernet Sauvignon.

What they’re most excited about now, though, is the 128 acres they just bought on the Sonoma coast. Until now, most of their grapes have come from Santa Barbara County, with a much smaller, fluctuating percentage from Paso Robles.

“We started by buying fruit from vineyards we liked,” Kemp says. “Then we asked vineyards to plant to our specifications. Now we’re going to grow our own fruit.”

They don’t have their own winery, though they hope to build one in the next two or three years. For now, their wines are made at Central Coast Wine Services in Santa Maria, a winemaking facility used by many other small vintners.

Kemp is the more hands-on wine guy, though the two jointly make winemaking decisions with their consultant Tim Spear.

Kemp didn’t begin drinking wine until about 10 years ago, but he fell in love with it quickly, and it wasn’t long before he started dreaming of having his own winery. Five years ago, he enrolled in a winemaking class at a community college in Santa Maria. The class included weekend harvest work in the vineyards.

“I made wine with 20 other students, and I was hooked,” he says.

Off and running

Kemp says he realized “you don’t really have to be rich to start out,” so after he persuaded Estrin to join him, they pooled $12,000 to $15,000 between them and made their first 50-barrel batch.

Estrin, the marketing guy in the partnership, picks up the story from there.

“I took a barrel sample of that first wine to a blind, ‘bring your best Syrah’ tasting with friends. There were some pretty good Syrahs on the table, but ours finished first.”

Kemp interrupts.

“We were off and running.”

But life, alas, hasn’t been as cooperative as the grapes. Last September, Estrin suddenly found that he couldn’t type with his left hand. What was initially diagnosed as a small stroke turned out to be a brain tumor.

“They operated three days later,” he says, and now he’s fully recovered.

But the experience hastened his decision to stop selling wine for others and start selling his own wine, full time. “When it’s your own wine,” he says, “you’re not just selling a bottle of wine. You’re selling your hard work, your time, your imagination, your hopes and dreams.”

Sounds a lot like writing and making and selling a movie.

David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com. To read previous “Matters of Taste” columns, please go to latimes.com/shaw-taste.