Riise

Mercado grew up in Brentwood, California, in a family with its roots in Sinaloa, Mexico; his father worked two jobs and died when Juan was twelve. He served as a medic in the army, then worked for nine years as a nurse at a hospital in Oakland, mostly in the cardio-pulmonary and intensive care units. He took a month off every year and spent it on wine: visits to European regions, or the Wine Spectator Wine Experience in New York.

It was there, in 1997, that he met the winemaker Pax Mahle, who saw he had come alone and invited him to tag along. In 1999 Mercado spent his month off working the harvest at Livingston Moffett in Napa. When Mahle started Pax Cellars in 2000, Mercado offered to help for nothing, cutting his hospital shifts to three days a week and spending the others in the vineyards, dropping fruit, pruning and thinning. “That’s where I learned how much I didn’t know,” he told R.H. Drexel. “But I thought, if they can do it, why can’t I?”

In 2002 he founded Realm Cellars, which quickly became a darling of the critics, with a waiting list that ran for years. The same year a road trip with Mahle took him to the Hospice du Rhône in Paso Robles, to a house party at Justin Smith’s, just starting Saxum, and into friendships with the winemakers who were building Paso’s reputation.

Mercado left Realm in 2018 and began Riise in 2019. Making another Napa Cabernet next to the house he had built “just didn’t feel right,” he said, and Paso, where his friendships had deepened, felt like home. The Roman numeral two that forms the double I in RIISE marks the second chapter. “It’s also about continuing to rise,” he says, “whether it’s above your background or above the odds.”

The names are personal. Peace is a tribute to Pax Mahle, the friend who brought him into wine. Fermin, the reserve, is named for his father. Doyen is the Grenache blend, named for the mavericks who founded modern Paso. Jovian is the Tempranillo, a grape that is no more from Paso than Mercado is, and its label, painted like the others by a friend in Barcelona, is about exploring a new land.

He is a hands-on vintner. He calls the picks, works harvest with Yount, takes part in the blending trials and runs the brand himself. Riise made its formal debut in September 2023, with about a thousand cases.

Riise owns three vineyards, all on Paso’s west side. Shadow Canyon, on York Mountain, was the first purchase: at 1,800 feet it is the highest of all their sites and the closest to the ocean, about eight miles from the Pacific. 1200 Arbor, in the Willow Creek District, will be the home base, with a winery and caves to come. Heaton brings eighty-five acres of sloping hillsides and a mix of soils from limestone and calcareous rock to alluvium. Kevin Wilkinson and Lucas Pope, two of the best vineyard managers in Paso, oversee most of the farming.

Riise also buys from a few of the most sought-after sites nearby. Paderewski Vineyard, in Willow Creek, was farmed in the early 1900s by Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the pianist and Polish statesman, and then lay fallow for most of a century; its lean, rocky, limestone-rich hillsides give the old-vine Graciano in Jovian. Catapult is extremely rocky siliceous shale with little limestone. Fulldraw, in the Templeton Gap, is chalky white limestone under about eighteen inches of topsoil.

What these sites share is the cold. Ocean air comes through the Templeton Gap every afternoon, and the nights on the west side are cool even in a hot summer. That is how Grenache and Syrah here reach full ripeness and still keep their acid.

Anthony Yount makes the wine, as consulting winemaker; he is known for his own Kinero and Royal Nonesuch Farms labels and his work for Denner Vineyards. He knows what Realm was, and what Mercado wants. “Juan gives me direction,” Yount told Drexel. “I know what Realm was like. I know what his customers were like. So when he’s telling me about palate impression, texture and layers, I get it.” When growers offer fruit, he can tell Mercado whether a site will give him what he wants.

The cellar is minimal: the vineyards and grapes are meant to show through. Doyen, seventy per cent Grenache, ferments in stainless steel and spends eighteen months in French barrels, half of them new. Peace and Jovian spend twenty-six months in oak, seventy per cent new, which these concentrated wines absorb.

Mercado describes the style better than any critic. The wines are all over fifteen per cent alcohol, he admits, so they are not light. They are hedonistic, with a tension between acid and weight. Drexel found them remarkably balanced, with an underlying elegance of structure and texture. If you open one, open Jovian.

They’re like offensive line men with quick feet. They’re fast for as big as they are.

Juan Mercado, to R.H. Drexel, JebDunnuck.com