Marlen Porter, Amplify Wine

PSB: How did you get involved in the wine industry?

MP: I got involved in the wine industry kind of by accident. I started working at this little bistro in Santa Maria while I was going to Hancock for psychology. They used to have these winemaker dinners in the back, like once a week. I met Lane Tanner, Talley Foley, Foxen, all the old guard of the valley. And I found that I had a pretty good nose, a pretty good palate, pretty right away I would say. The chef would have me do the pairings with him and I had just turned 21, so I was super excited. I didn't grow up drinking wine, it was actually not a positive thing to have (in) my family for a woman to drink alcohol in general. So, I was never really around it. If family was drinking, it was like tequila or beer, but I could never have any.

PSB: And that was because you were a woman?

MP: Yes.

PSB: How did that make you feel?

MP: You know, there were a lot of things…I’m one of the oldest of 21 grandchildren and out of those 21 grandchildren, I'm the oldest in this area. My cousins that are older than me live in Stockton. So, I was kind of the rule breaker of my family of the grandkids because I was on the older side. I moved out first without being married, at 19. My mother wanted me to have a different experience, and so she's like, “you're mature enough to live on your own and have that experience that I never had.” And so, I think that allowed me to kind of form my own life and explore things out of my mom's house and out of kind of that community of my family that has a say in everything. So, I kind of was able to kind of explore on my own.

The funny thing is that now my grandparents don't bat an eye at my cousins. I actually introduced wine to my family. My grandpa has wine with me and Cameron; there's something, he’s very proud. They're very proud, I think it kind of changed the culture and mindset of my family. My aunt who was ten years older than me, who I grew up with, like a sister, I remember she had like a beer at a family function. And my grandmother was like, “what are you doing? What are you drinking? You're not a man.” So, it really changed.

When I brought my first bottle of wine that we made, my grandpa was like at first like, “oh, you're making wine.” He genuinely liked it and then he saw how hard Cam and I were working. So, he actually came a couple times himself with my grandma to sort grapes with us and became really involved. And eventually, three years ago, he took a bottle of our Tempranillo back to Oaxaca and shared it with the president of his town. So, I feel like it's broken boundaries in my family with me being into wine, a very, patriarchal family structure, which is ingrained in the Mexican culture and not just with myself, but with other, Mexican, Latinx communities where alcohol is something that, especially for women, is very hard to get into, very hard to break down those boundaries.

And I've even seen that with Natural Action and internships that we have tried to bring to younger people, students, people in college. You don't really see a lot of women going to school for wine that are Latinx or Black, because I think there is that patriarchal stigma around it. And so that's really changed (in) my family, especially my grandfather's perception of women drinking now. I mean, I am 38, my younger cousins are in their early twenties and have no problem drinking in front of my grandparents.

So, it was just something in me that I had a palette for it. And Hancock had just started their viticulture program and I was like, I'm gonna take a class and see. And around the same time there was Addamo (no closed), which was this little vineyard that is basically right next to Presqu’ile Winery, which is the biggest winery in our area. I applied for a job there and I didn't have any experience, but I really wanted to learn. And so I eventually just started working my way up. I went to work for Iris Rideau while still going to school. I kept working hard, getting to know everything about wine.

I met Cameron within a year and a half of me starting to get into wine. He was working in music at that time, but also in his own way had started his own wine journey, working in LA at Vendome and different wine shops down there. So I think Cameron and I together really nurtured our passion for wine, I would say. We were young and were able to explore and taste different wines and work in different aspects of the industry to really know what it was like. And I think that has helped us to know what it was like to run a business, because people always wanna get into the wine industry, but they don't realize how hard it is.

In terms of Amplify as a business, it's really still just the two of us doing everything. Eventually I think we may wanna grow, but what we kind of work towards is to be able to know everything that's going on in our business and be able to be the ones that are moving it forward. So yeah, I think starting Amplify in 2013 was something that we knew we wanted to work for ourselves and make wines that were fun and interesting. Natural wine wasn't really anything that was super talked about at that time.

Cameron and Marlen Porter

PSB: When you started it, did you know that you wanted to make natural wine, or is that something that you like grew into?

MP: We started out making natural wine without knowing that it was going to be labeled natural wine, right. We were just drinking a lot of old-world wines from like the Jura. We would go down to Lou on Vine that had a bunch of old-world natural wines and were super excited by those wines. And we also were, at that point, not super excited about the wines that we were working in or wineries; they were producing wines that were very much Robert Parker focused, you know, super oaked, super high alcohol, super ripe. Next to these really pure unfiltered, whites or reds it was such a like, wow, “this is so interesting. This is so different. Why can't we do that here?” So, that's how it started.

And I will say that Cameron, in terms his wine knowledge has always surpassed mine. He’s an advanced sommelier. I helped him basically pick out all these wines.  I was with him throughout his journey, but in terms of his knowledge of wines of the world, it's very expansive that I never really got into that as much. I got more into like the business side of the wine world, and that's where I really did well in. But so, he already kind of had a sense of, “this is the kind of wine I wanna make,” like with our Carignan. Like, “I wanna make it carbonic. I want it to be on the skins for this long.” And so, when we came out with this like super light, juicy red, we were at first kind of freaked out because we were like, whoa, “this looks like a rose. Everyone's super worried about color, and how is this going to work?” And when we first went out and sold the wine, they were like, “is this a rose? But it tastes like red. What is this?” And that was ten years ago. We launched, Amplify in 2013, so this will be our 10 years of, making wine.

PSB: Do you ever go back and taste the wines that you made, ten or even six or seven years ago, to see how they're holding up?

MP: We tasted some of them through last Christmas. Our Carignans are still pretty delicious. They're picked low alcohol, with high acidity; they're balanced. People always say. “oh, natural wine can't age.” I've heard that so many times in our tasting lounge. Or “would we need to drink this within a year?” It's like, “no.” We actually have some whites that are 2013, 2014 that are delicious right now, you know? We had some wines that were really reduced, and we were just like, okay, we're not gonna release this. We're gonna hold on to them. And now they’re beautiful, like that reduction was actually something that helped to protect the wine and it's now this really pretty, minerally wine.

PSB: Yeah, that happens with reduction. People just dismiss them, especially when they're young and they can be unpleasant, but often that’s a wine you shouldn't be drinking right away. When people say that natural wines can't age, it’s a misunderstanding. Sure, there are natural wines that can't age there; there are lots of wines that can't age, but natural wines will often age in a different way. What I think is kind of interesting is that when wines are mousey, the longer they're open, the mouseyer they get. But I've also heard people say that with wines with mouse, you just need to leave them be and wait a few years, obviously not when they're open, but that eventually in the bottle that sort of corrects itself. So, I kind of wonder, I've never really done that experiment.

MP: I would say that's true. You know, we've made wine in a number of facilities and this, our own facility has actually been the most challenging. We never really had experience with mouse until we moved into our facility as well as some issues with like VA (volatile acidity). We’ve had a lot of post bottle mouse where the wine is totally fine in the barrel and we bottle it and it's super mousey, and we don't really know why it happens. But yeah, we have our 2020 Tempranillo that we bottled that we were super excited about, couldn't wait to release it, actually had an open house, in October 2021 and went pull the cork, taste it, and it was like such a mousey wine. We ended up not pouring it. It was kind of a bummer, honestly. We literally just put it in the corner of the winery, put it on top of cases and forgot about it. And we were moving through some of our other wines and we're like, “let's open it and see.” It's been sitting there, and the mouse is pretty much gone; it is lightly in there. But I mean, at first, it was one of the messiest wines I've ever tried. And again, we didn't do anything different.

PSB: What are you vinifying in, are you using wood?

MP: We use plastic ferment mentors. And we had used those for years. When we first made wine at Cotiere, it was basically very much like a little industrial facility. So that's what didn't make sense. It was a really similar environment, literally one street down. That's definitely been a challenge, but we've learned from it. We know now what we need to do, for this next vintage. We start to develop VA pretty quickly if we do whole cluster, so we just have decided that that's not something that we can do. We’ve thought about looking for other spaces, but everything's so expensive, and we're established there right now, so we're just kind of making do with what we're we have to work with.

PSB: It’s been a really challenging few years for small businesses. How were you impacted and how have you managed to stay afloat?

MP: We were at the point, we had grown so much, in the last seven years – we were at like 3000 cases and had a bunch of distributors. We were really looking forward to a great 2020, so Cameron was like, okay, “it's time for me to just come on board full time. Like we're here, we can do it.” So that's when we found our space. And he was actually laid off three months before he was really ready to leave. So that was really hard on us because that was the exact same month that everything shut down. So we were in this new space, all purchasing stopped, he had no job, we had no additional income.

I think what really saved us honestly, was the fact that we did have a great customer base. The places we had established, we were able to market D T C (direct to consumer) and, and ship. We did a lot of shipping that year, and that's really what kept us afloat was being able to market on Instagram, on social media, do live tastings from home.

A lot of distributors were not in the same place, financially. A lot of restaurants were closed. I know that a lot of restaurants started wanting to send wine back. So, if they placed an order for wine the week that everything shut down, they were trying to give the wine back or restaurants went out of business and just didn't pay their bills. So that whole trickle effect honestly just really affected us because we weren't seeing the amount of cash flow that we were used to on top of having all these bills of owning a winery now and having that responsibility. So, we've had to really change and, and kind of look at things from a perspective of like, okay, where can we cut costs and be able to save?

Glass for example, for all the 2020s we found this supplier that had these small bottles. So, we got those bottles for free and it's like, okay, this is not a normal bottle, but this is gonna save us, you know, $7000 in bottling, which, is going to help us financially. We were able to bottle everything in those small bottles and it was a great savings to us. Unfortunately, not all our distributors were super happy with the 500 mls (milliliters). And so it was something that was a little harder to move. So now, the traditional clear glass that you see now was like $4 a case when we started doing Mixtape Red and that clear glass $4 a case, and now that exact case goes for like $21 to $24 a case on top of shipping.

The distributor relationships are still not what they were because the markets also changed. There's a lot more competition, so these last two years going on three years we have custom crush clients where we make wine for other wine brands. That has really helped us. I mean we're just basically hustling. We're just trying to make it work and, I've done some consulting on the side to work with other brands to launch, wine bars or small wineries, things like that. But yeah, it has not been an easy last couple of years, but we're still here and we're still grateful to be able to do what we love, and be able to be in this, community that's definitely making more change than it ever has before. But it is definitely, as a small business, something that is challenging.

Marlen with Simonne Mitchelton and Justin Trabue of Natural Action

PSB: You’re not alone and I'm glad you're still here. One more thing I just want to discuss: Natural Action. You said it's going through some changes now, so first can you talk about what Natural Action is, how the idea for it originated and how it's evolving.

MP: Yeah, I mean, Natural Action started with our friend Eric (Bach) having an idea in regard to everything that was happening with George Floyd, the times that we were in. Cameron had actually met Khalil (Kinsey) and Teron (Stevenson), in LA at an event and they bonded over music. That happens with us a lot. We bond with a lot of people over music that also happen to love wine and we just become great friends. And so, Cameron was like, “I think these guys would be really great to bring into that.”

We met Justin (Trabue) when she first started working with Lane (Tanner) many years ago and always knew that she was really on board to do something with the movement. At the same time, she had just become friends with Simonne (Mitchelson), and they did that open letter. And so, it was just kind of, again, one of those things that was meant to be. Cameron went on a Zoom with everybody, and it was really just everyone kind of starting to talk and being able to be open about their frustrations, not only in the industry but just in the world at that time. And so, it was like, well, “what can we do? Um, what can we do to, to make a change in this industry?” And I think with, with Simonne and Justin, they're young and women that were looking at being in the industry, being in this area that was very challenging for them, and they were feeling it and they were like, “you know, this is something that really needs to change.”

Being in the industry for as long as I had, I'm like, yeah, “I totally understand what you're going through. I've been there, you know, not to the degree that you have, but it's definitely not, an easy thing. How do we make it easier for minorities to gain access to careers and opportunities and education?” And so that's kind of how Natural Action was born. Brian Simas has been instrumental. He is an old high school friend of Cameron’s; I think one of the only wine lawyers in our area. He was gracious enough to really help us with the formation of Natural Action.

The wine club is kind of what started as being able to provide funds to be able to raise scholarships for the BIPOC community. Cal Poly was going to be the first recipient of that. Natural Action has changed in the fact that the wine club aspect of it just wasn't and hasn't been sustainable as a whole. With the amount of work that goes into maintaining a wine club, it's essentially running a small winery. And so, we're shifting that model and going into really focusing more on internships and work placements and job placements, mentorships, also, working with wineries, bigger brands like Wente who really are interested in making changes in becoming more diverse. They have been a huge partner with us. We had an intern go there in 2022 and are hoping to really grow the relationship.

That’s something that's really amazing to us because pretty much everything that they have said they're gonna do, they have, and so we hope that that is kind of a benchmark for what Natural Action can do is to partner with other wineries that really don't know how to diversify, don't really know how to make the changes. That's huge to growth is partnering with people that want to make a difference but don't necessarily know how to, don't know who to talk to. And that goes, I think for people that are interested in getting into this industry as well.

When we first started, it was really geared towards students and that has since changed because we've realized that there are also a lot of people who’ve worked in wine for years, but never had an opportunity to do more than maybe just pour in a tasting room or work in a cellar, and not really move beyond that. They either want to get into marketing or become a winemaker. That's something that we have seen as well. And we kind of broadened that search of just going to universities when we had a hard time gaining internship applications for a couple of internships, we had available.

All of us look different, we all have different backgrounds, and we all realize that we have these amazing conversations with people that are like, yeah, “I just been kind of intimidated to apply or to reach out, but I feel more comfortable now talking to someone that I can relate to.” So, I think that's been a huge part of why Natural Action's been so successful in the sense that we are the faces of a lot of different people, and we can be relatable.

I mean, you meet someone like Justin, who is this amazing personality and so warm and welcoming and just an amazing person overall. Just in talking to her, people get excited. So, she's been someone that we love to have go and speak about Natural Action cause she just is so relatable and has been there, done that. She's worked abroad, she's, worked at different parts of the industry. It's not just her talking about it, she's done it. And so, I think that's what makes it also so, so powerful.

PSB: Well, you're doing great stuff with Natural Action and with Amplify, it's really encouraging to see people like yourself who are taking this industry in a direction that's much more inclusive. You also have the bravery and honesty to to admit to some of the issues that you've been having, let's say with the winery, but realizing this is part of the learning curve and that you might have made a wine that was messy a couple years ago, but look at what it's turning into. And I think that is something that is good for people who are just starting out as winemakers to hear because as, as you're, as you know, when anyone who starts out with winemaking, you're gonna make tons of mistakes.

MP: Oh yeah. I mean, especially working in natural wine, I mean, there's not much, if you're gonna be authentic to being natural, there's not much you can do. And as much as you embrace your wonderful, beautiful years, you have to also embrace those years that are not as great cause you're gonna have them, and it's just part of like life honestly, like, it's not going to be great every single year and you're gonna learn and you're gonna have times where you're like, “oh my god, how did that happen?” But it's like, okay, you learn from it, especially with us, I think having, even going from making wine in other places versus making wine in our own place, it's like that in and of itself is a, a learning curve. For me personally, I love helping people that are starting new wineries or starting their own brands, trying to be as helpful as possible because as much as there are so many great things that go along with having that, there's a lot of responsibility and there's just, there's also a lot of money involved.

So, I think that it's very important to kind of be realistic as well about that part of the industry, and being able to be helpful, when you can be.

PSB: Great. Well I really appreciate your time, Marlen, thank you so much.