Novak & Mason Cellars
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Novak & Mason Cellars
Welcome to Novak & Mason Cellars. We are heritage-style winemakers who seek the virtue in the fruit to craft uncommon wines.
Wine is a living story. It weaves together the work of many hands and many natural elements into something unique and unrepeatable: the distilled essence of a year.
By pairing California’s historic varietals with the gentle, integrative approach of heritage techniques, we at Novak & Mason Cellars seek to harness the interplay between the vineyard, grower, weather, and winemaker to create distinctive wines worth sharing.
Every wine is a story; every vintage is an adventure.
"Wine is drinkable history"
"Can anything be richer in product or more beautiful to contemplate?"
We’re small experimental winemakers with an interest in heritage techniques. We specialize in California’s historic varietals to make structured, living wines. We seek to find the virtue in the fruit, and to produce wines that evolve in the bottle to reveal new facets over decades.
We aim to create wines that honor the virtue in the fruit. We believe in using gentle heritage techniques in order to highlight the qualities inherent to that harvest.
In everything, we will strive to find the virtue in the grapes as we receive them. All our decisions in the cellar - in what we make, in how we do it- are in service of illuminating what is best about the wine. We are adaptable, responsive, and intentional in the cellar. We aim to make wines that dance on the tongue and linger in memory, each wine a microcosm of the year that produced it.
We aim to source from small, independent growers who have a deep understanding of the interplay between varietal and terroir, and whose decisions on everything from trellising to soil management reflect a commitment to producing high quality and distinctive fruit.
We utilize both natural and conventional fermentation. In keeping with the principle of gentleness and in the style of many heritage wines, we start with slow and wild natural fermentation, and finish with carefully selected conventional yeast. The wild yeast add complexity and the slower pace of fermentation allows for a gentler extraction while on the skins. Finishing with conventional yeast ensures that the wine will finish cleanly so the fruit will shine through the wine and not be overshadowed by cellar-induced flaws.
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