Wine had been part of our lives long before Standing Fox.
Years of travelling, tasting and collecting had given us strong opinions about the wines we loved, and an increasingly clear sense of what we valued: complexity, texture, balance, the ability to evolve, and wines that remained interesting long after the first glass.
But appreciating wine and making it are very different things.
As the Quinta began to take shape in 2021, one of Standing Fox’s founders began studying winemaking at the University of California, Davis.
The purpose was not simply to learn how wine is made. It was to understand more deeply why it behaves as it does: what happens during fermentation, how decisions in the vineyard carry through into the cellar, and how oxygen, temperature, extraction, microbiology, oak and time can alter the course of a wine.
Years of tasting had taught us what we liked.
Studying winemaking began to teach us why.
That technical foundation also changed the questions we asked at Standing Fox. Instead of thinking only about whether a wine tasted good, we began looking more closely at what had created it: the condition of the fruit, the timing of harvest, the character of individual vineyard parcels, fermentation choices and what happened during ageing.
It did not replace instinct.
If anything, it made instinct more useful by giving it something against which to test itself.
Those studies became one part of a much larger education that continues today, through the vineyard, through each vintage and, later, through our work with our winemaker, Joana Pinhão.
Standing Fox began with a love of wine.
Learning how to make it changed the direction of the project.
