About
We make beer and wine that has something to say.
Expressions and illustrations of the farms. Projected colors and recollected aromas of the vineyards.
Locally and responsibly sourced ingredients from our region, painstakingly processed by hand.
No additions, subtractions or modifications are needed. None are offered.
Just honesty, care, and quality.
Nature provides something unique each year. We embrace that innate beauty and potential.
We are a family-owned business.
There are no investors or outside inputs. Just our own small team. Crafting and sharing beautiful things that we care deeply about.
We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do. It has all been worth doing.
It’s about place.
It’s about time.
Our Beer
Our beer is a representation of place, and equally, a representation of time.
While many of our processes are similar to most breweries, we diverge when we transfer our beer to our coolship. It passively acquires the native yeast and bacteria from our environment there, and that’s all that we use. It’ll be offered to painstakingly prepared large oak barrels the following day.
Most beer takes days. Ours take years.
Nature operates on its own time. There’s a near glacial pace to the slow progression of truly wild yeast and bacteria. In comparison to the norm of one or more laboratory isolated organisms being added in large amounts, the harmony of a fabulously diverse array acting in a delicately beautiful progression is incredibly slow. We believe they are capable of providing so much more though. We believe it’s worth giving time.
Each evolving stage of fermentation and aging brings an unfolding of possibilities.
We see our job as nurturing, not making. Crafting, not manufacturing.
We humbly craft and offer a kaleidoscope of everchanging options throughout the year.
We work with the seasons. We brew in the colder months, when the environmental yeast and bacteria is in its most ideal balance. We process fruit and botanicals in the warmer months, when such things are ready. We care for our barrels, and their maturing contents, always.
Each season and each year bring us different opportunities and ingredients. We embrace those that we find exciting.
Who knows when nature will provide the same opportunity again?
Our Wine
Yummy is easy and cheap. Wine should be good. It should excite.
Great wine speaks of a specific place and time.
We work with vineyards that excite us. Vineyards that truly have something to say. Unabashedly unique.
Our job is to coax and encourage that voice.
This pursuit of expression, of letting the vineyard and grape speak, is best accomplished by minimizing our own thumbprint. Or sometimes, footprint.
We foot crush the grapes, typically whole cluster, using our own weight and effort. It’s more gentle, and not something that can be precisely emulated mechanically. There’s value in knowing and feeling.
An extended but gentle maceration in oak follows, with fermentation kicking off naturally, using only the native yeast and bacteria on the grapes.
After a month or more, we gently move the wine off of the solids and into obsessively cleaned and prepared large format oak (and the occasional amphora). Almost strictly neutral French oak, with the majority of our barrels being over ten years old. Aging and natural malolactic fermentation happen over the following years, with all of our wine spending a minimum of two years in barrel, and some of the larger oak casks maturing much longer.
We don’t add to, subtract from or otherwise manipulate the wine in any way.
It’s wholesome, well farmed fruit. It’s wholesome, well matured wine. The only sulfite addition is a nominal one that we add immediately prior to packaging, to offset any potential oxidation from that process.
Ultimately, we’re trying to get out of the way of nature.
