It is an amazing time: we moved into a new winery this Summer with our friend Raj and completed a wonderful harvest there with him and our stalwart colleagues. We are now bottling the wine of this vintage and preparing for our next move.
We are ready for you to visit the space in which we made wine this year. Please reach out.
It was a truly wonderful and joyous harvest; so many of us working together in a great space on the edge of the city. We harvested delicious fruit in perfect condition from one vineyard after another and made our best wines ever. The one point of sadness and regret: the drought continues to take its terrible toll, and we made only half the wine in 2022 that we did in 2021.
Bottling is now complete! It is so exciting, so rewarding. The wines are beautiful, improbable illuminations of the possibilities of Southern California winemaking.
As often as possible, we host you. We pour wines. Rarely ours alone. How can we welcome you without the presence of our friends?
We have accomplished the daring and difficult Futurist aim of forcing bubbles into still wine. Blowout is all about speed, anticipation, audacity: it is a Sparkling Wine bottled and initially released only months after harvest and fermentation. There was no patience in the making-- or consumption-- of Blowout.
And then-- the labels stopped sticking to the bottles. We could not figure out a solution; in the face of so much more to do, we gave up. And let the unlabeled wine age.
Now, in 2021, we have tasted the wine again and it is delicious. I designed new labels, ones that stuck this time. We now release the wine again.
I am so excited about this collaboration: it marks the real flowering of a relationship begun 15 years ago.
Tolenas is a young, small, winery absolutely flourishing in Suisun Valley, under the direction of Lisa Tenbrink-Howard, daughter of Steve and Linda Tenbrink. Lisa learned to make wine working with me and Steve, in their family winery as I made Scholium and he made small amounts of wine from his own fruit.
In the beginning, all of the wines flowed from fruit grown by Steve, some from vineyards I had worked with since 2003. Soon Lisa and her husband Cliff purchased land in Suisun and began growing their own fruit.
Both of these wines hail from their own home ranch, planted to Petite Sirah and Zinfandel. The wines were made at Tenbrink under Lisa's direction, using techniques that she had learned from me during the years that I worked with her and her family.
Both wines are serious, deep, dark, and rich. Because of their origin in Suisun, and the farming heritage Lisa inherited from Steve, the wines are reminiscent of the great Babylon wines I made from 2004 to 2017-- and are radically different from the lithe, light, red wines I am making from desert fruit in Los Angeles. It is so wonderful to return to Suisun and resume a collaboration with the Tenbrinks-- now involving a second generation of the the family.
A note on the names: when we tasted the wines in preparation for bottling, they somehow both seemed highly literary to me. They were definitely wines of place, but in naming them, the vineyards were not in the front of my mind. For one of the wines, a mythological creature dominated; for the other, the musical sense of a favorite poem.
These the wines that we made in Napa in 2018 and 2019 while we were consumed with founding the Los Angeles River Wine Company. I did not give the wines the attention that they deserved in 2018 and 2019, and during the pandemic year of 2020, I alternated between forgetting about them and being afraid of them.
I finally tasted the wines in April of 2021 and they are absolutely brilliant, the best two vintages of wine we have ever made. How strange and unexpected.
Please note that there is a 20% discount on all orders of 12 bottles or more-- mix and match or whole cases.
We have just begun bottling Magnums again after a hiatus of several years. We have 25 bottles from the 2021 harvest newly available.
