How we make wine, from the ground up.
Alchemy 101
It All Starts With The Farming.
Health (soil or otherwise) comes from a vibrant, diverse, unpolluted ecosystem, and provides the basis for healthy, whole, nutritionally-rich fruit… which happens to be essential to avoid problems during fermentation. Ecological farming also allows for the development of natural, healthy yeasts and microbes that live on the fruit skins, and removes harmful chemicals, which aids a clean and complete fermentation.
Think Locally.
Ecosystems aren’t limited to what we commonly think of as “nature.” We don’t think of vineyards as rows of vines, but as ecosystems that include entire regions and the human cultures within them. Tending your vineyard also means caring for your community and everyone in it. We want our wine’s ecosystem to be healthy, vibrant, rich, and magical.
Don’t Screw It Up.
We see our job mainly as protectors. We work to serve and honor processes that are much bigger and longer-lived than ourselves. We want the farming and terroir to be clearly expressed, with as little intrusion from our egos as possible. We simply allow naturally occurring yeasts & beneficial microbes to ferment the fruit, then store the resulting wine in used oak barrels to settle out sediment. We bottle without filtration or any other form of chemical or mechanical manipulation. We usually choose to add a small amount of sulfites to protect the wines from spoilage and oxidation.
Be Unique.
What kind of wine does Los Angeles do well? To answer that question we look to find fruit that thrives here naturally, with little input from humans. We love working with grapes that are dry-farmed, even in our drought-prone climate, and prickly pear cactus, which are indigenous here. Combining these and other locally-foraged fruits and ingredients helps us create wines that can’t be found anywhere else.
With this approach, we hope to provide you with wines that reflect your values rather than compromise them.
We aren’t dogmatic… except about farming.
Our goal is to add nothing (but minimal sulfites) to our wine, and to take nothing away. But despite our best efforts, the wine gods can be fickle. Since our #1 priority is to promote regenerative agriculture - and we believe the wine must taste and smell great to do this - we are not okay with bottling wines that have flavors that would be considered flaws by a majority of wine drinkers. Therefore, we will occasionally, if absolutely necessary to keep the wine tasting great, add natural and organically allowed ingredients during fermentations, and sometimes filter, to prevent spoilage flavors and aromas in the finished wine.
We will always list any ingredients added, and if the wine is filtered.
We will always center the discussion of wine - ours or anyone’s - around the agriculture.
Winemaking is a personal, stylistic choice. Winegrowing is a global, environmental choice.
Take only photographs, leave only footprints.
“Low-intervention” is more than a winemaking approach for us. When we say that we are an “ecologically focused winery” we mean that we make every decision by first asking how it will protect or improve the environment. The best photographers are experts at finding beauty - through perspective, timing, lighting, and composition - by adjusting themselves, not their subjects. We believe great wine is made the same way. We attempt to capture in a bottle the unique story of a place and time in the universe by cultivating the artistry, in ourselves, to find beauty without constructing it.