Defining our Future

This week preparations are underway at the winery to begin bottling the 2014 vintage of red wines. The ‘14 vintage provides our first look at the fruits of efforts I started two years ago with the hiring of Dave Hendrickson, a winemaker who shares my passion for the historic Livermore terroir, and Stella Proukaki, a viticulturist with extensive training in growing heritage cultivars. At the same time, we started our ‘farming for Livermore” approach to growing and harvesting our fruit. Together, we began working with our cooperages, long practiced in the Napa style, to create barrels designed specifically for Livermore fruit. We collaborated with our vendors to improve our packaging, so that today our bottles are more elegant and, at the same time, lighter in weight and more environmentally friendly. We even changed our cork supplier, now individually testing each cork for ‘taint,’ thereby eliminating the major threat to your enjoyment of our wines.

Investment continues as I pursue my founding vision to recreate the wines of Livermore Valley’s past. These legendary wines possessed elegance and finesse, and were renowned for their purity of fruit and ethereal aromas. These were wines that could only come from Livermore – wines unique to our cool, rock-strewn soils.

In a previous post, I argued that, for Livermore Valley to be recognized once again, we must make wines of quality and uniqueness. To do this, each wine we make must have a history, a story, and a style unique to our valley. Copying the Napa style won’t achieve this. A better starting point, I believe, is to recover the style of wine that made us famous in the first place, over 130 years ago.