Overview
Our winemaking is focused on accomplishing the following goals:
- Pure, silky concentration that can only be achieved through low yields
- Beautiful balance with no component revealing itself separate from the whole
- Fruit that tastes fresh-picked and perfectly ripe, not jammy
- Capturing complex aromatics
- Ability to age and improve in the bottle. Nothing compares to the aromatic beauty of aged wine!
- Thrilling complexity and beguiling interest that never leaves you bored
- Wines with a strong sense of somewhereness (rather than someoneness)
Consistent with our organic/biodynamic approach to viticulture, we believe that hands-off winemaking provides for enhanced vineyard expression and complexity.
At harvest, all grapes are picked into shallow 500lb bins to minimize fruit damage. Each cluster is rigorously sorted by hand and gently dropped directly into our small stainless steel one-ton fermenters. This methodology insures that only the best grapes are used, and allows us to have many unbroken grapes for our whole cluster fermentations. We do not add any yeast or supplemental nutrient in order to allow the native yeasts from each vineyard to perform a completely natural and biologically diverse fermentation.
Once fermenting, our wines are gently punched down by foot in small one-ton, open-top tanks. These small tanks allow us to evaluate each of our half-acre vineyard blocks separately, as each fermenter produces a 2-barrel lot of wine. This micro-vinification allows for a rigorous selection of barrels for vineyard designates as well the isolation of blocks with unique character within our vineyards.
In the cellar, we employ barrels built from the finest French Oak that have been air dried for four full years in Burgundy. This expensive program requires that we purchase our oak as uncoopered stave wood 4 years before the barrels are even made, but accomplishes two primary goals: very consistent barrels year after year, and wines that are differentiated entirely by the vineyard and not by the barrel. The resulting barrels are extremely gentle and help raise our wine with pure fruit rather than noticeable oak flavor.
Our process, from Harvest to bottling, is based on a gentle gravity system and our wines are never pumped, fined, or filtered. This gentle approach is intended to deliver the purest possible reflection of our vineyards’ unique character in each bottle.