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Though you can’t see the ocean from our vineyard it's impossible not to feel it ...
impossible not to sense that you stand on its very threshold because the encompassing sky has been hollowed out by its immensity, bathed in an omnipresent light – cool yet powerful, radiating from nowhere and everywhere.
Even here, seven miles away, the feeling is of standing in the maw of an unfathomable giant, crouching on its lip about to be swallowed, resisting being blown back by its cold driving relentless salty breath.
rock that was itself inconceivably once alive, accreted from the bodies of the sea’s infinite microscopic organisms who lived and died and drifted to the depths and became the sea floor in gossamer layers into which the roots of our vines now plunge, searching methodically for the mineral remnants of ancient times and for the water being summoned ever back down underground and toward the sea whence it came.
In this churning cycle we grow our vines, not attempting to harness such vast forces, but to survive amidst them while guiding them to shape and carve our wines.
The Sta. Rita Hills are unique among winegrowing places, an austere and somewhat harsh place in which to produce subtle wines from Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, varieties long associated with gentler locales.
We lie in the contested space between that vast, frigid, tumultuous sea and an equally expansive, severe, arid desert.
We came to this place seeking an antithesis of the preordained richness of new world winelands, where plump and generous wines seemed inevitable, in search of a site that compels vines and people together to struggle in a productive way that can be overcome only by hands and effort, observation, and ingenuity.
We sought an incisive place that would scrape away a wine’s uncomplicated flesh to reveal the muscle, bone, and organ that become the contour, nuance, and novelty of wines unique to this place.
Finding a place where nature inexorably imposes its aesthetic we hope allows us, through viticultural choices and straightforward winemaking, to discern and clarify its signal.
The process, not just the product, nurtures us. A goal since breaking ground in 2006 was to be able to pose questions to the vineyard, as to an oracle, about elements and earth, about wine, about the nature of life itself.
Answers came first as vines that lived and claimed a foothold in the earth and blossomed and grew strong. Then as grapes, small in volume but dense with matter, energy, and potential.
And finally as wines, each year more pure and original, more beguiling and eloquent. Each year, the same questions elicit new answers, which we mull over and chew on and drink deeply of, and which ultimately further this story, our story, propelling us exhilaratingly into the new vintage.
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