Our winery project is predicated on a return to the Dionysian. The industrialization of wine has wreaked havoc on our bodies and our palates, predicating wine to a cheap copy of a few European styles. The wild characteristics of fermentation have all been minimized so as to barely exist. Instead of the 50+ wild yeasts we find on our grapes, most wineries jump straight to one, which is usually cultivated on big sheets of plastic in factories. Through filtration, fining, over 96 additives, and a laundry list of other horrors, wine gets rectified to some sort of chemical solution that fits some kind of weird, ghost of a taste profile which probably never really existed, because those profiles are all based on thousands of years of natural, more wild, winemaking. Our wines are alive in the bottle. They change over time. We get bottle bouquet in a way that a sterile filtered wine (or worse, one chemically murdered) never could. Is there more risk? Potentially. But we know wines made properly and naturally can last over 100 years and still be drinkable, magical even. We do not have any sterile filtered or chemically murdered wines that old, because the technology has simply not been around that long.

We do brix tests on our wines after crush. That’s it for our chemistry set. Everything else is done by feel, smell, and taste, because that is how the wines will be rated. We are open to mystery in our winemaking. We are open to non-knowledge. We have things we learn, and try to repeat sometimes, but we go with nature’s rhythms. We have wines which are cooked in the sun, wines which are cold stabilized by the gods when winter comes. We pick our vineyard 8-10 times based on feel and taste.

Science’s greatest triumph is it’s own refutation: observing a system disturbs it and can change the outcome by attempting to look too closely, rate it and quantify whats happening. We are anti-observation in our winemaking. We often leave ferments or aging wines for very long periods of time. This physically reduces the chance of spoiling things by jamming tools into the wines, and also in some moments allows protective gases to build around the wines. But for the mental clarity of the winemaker, it is also a triumph to embrace the unknown and give up on the paranoia of constant testing (we never started). We often bottle our wines slightly sweet to preserve them naturally with carbon dioxide from the final moments of fermentation. When the wine is ready, we will recieve an auspicious signal from Dionysos.