Winemaking didn’t start in 1960. A great deal of modern winemaking – including the most fundamental principles – arose from strides made by UC Davis and other centers of enology attempting to modernize and commodify winemaking. It was incredibly successful in creating reliable, reproducible methods of winemaking, but it severed winemaking from tradition, and in supplanting the old ways, it flattened wine. 

To make truly distinctive wines, one must be a bit of a heretic, and this is why we’ve come to embrace exploring if perhaps there’s a baby we can extract from all that bathwater. 

For us, this means experimenting with some of the abandoned methods of winemaking, including basket presses, letting the juice brown before fermentation, eschewing overripe grapes, and embracing ambient fermentation. We eschew the modern practice of letting grapes oxidize on the vine until they hit port-like sugar levels. We embrace malolactic fermentation, even in wines where it is not common, because that is the traditional way of protecting a wine and making it more resilient. We respect the place of sulfur dioxide in a thousand years of winemaking, but within moderation. SO2’s effectiveness is directly correlated with pH. California’s modern high pH wines require three or four times as many sulfites to reach the same level of protection than wines with traditional pHs, so simply by embracing old fashioned picking targets, we can be more modest with our additions. 

By exploring heritage techniques in our winemaking, we’ve uncovered why these techniques were handed down for generations: they work, and even though they sometimes are more risky, they are also rewarding. They’re different, but it our belief that paired with heritage varietals, they showcase facets of the fruit year to year that are otherwise lost.