Vineyards

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“I let my vineyards speak out and shine, not my ability to change them, so I tend to listen to my vineyards rather than instruct them.”

I make small lots of vibrant wines from vineyards where geology, altitude, climate and culture shape the land in special ways. I prefer cooler, higher-altitude sites over the lowlands, and steep, exposed sites over flat ones. Nutrient-poor rocky soils and dry-farming is more my jam than copiously irrigated and fertilized sites. I like to farm these sites old school; the way our grandparents would have, a.k.a. organically. “I let my vineyards speak out and shine, not my ability to change them, so I tend to listen to my vineyards rather than instruct them.”

I own and farm about 5 acres (~2 hectares) of old vineyards in the frigid hills south of Burgundy (Morgon Cru “Bellevue” and Fleurie Cru “Fonfontin”) that are organically-farmed. These are cool, high-altitude sites with plentiful precipitation; less exposed to drought and forest fires as we are in California. I also lease/farm or buy grapes/wine from unique cool-climate sites along the Sonoma Coast and Oregon’s Willamette Valley.

My farming vibe reads like an agricultural brochure from the 1920’s. It includes lots of handwork, sometimes French plough horses, limiting or rejecting petrochemicals, enhancing the soil biome naturally with diverse cover crops and compost, dry-farming and integrating local flora and fauna as much as possible (bat & owl boxes).