A vineyard teaches patience because it offers no alternative.
The cellar offers more opportunities to ignore that lesson.
Modern winemaking can be extraordinarily efficient. Wine can be moved, stabilized, filtered and prepared with remarkable precision. There is nothing inherently wrong with efficiency.
But we keep finding ourselves drawn toward small lots, close attention and time.
Small oak barrels have become central to the way we work with all of our wines. Part of the attraction is practical. Small volumes allow us to follow individual wines closely and respond to how each develops.
Part is less measurable.
A barrel asks for attention. It needs to be tasted, watched and topped. Two barrels containing wine from the same origin may begin to behave differently. Decisions become individual rather than automatic.
Oak itself is powerful, which makes restraint essential. We do not want a wine whose first impression is simply wood. We work with both French and American oak, choosing barrels according to what a particular wine needs. Some are new, while others have already held wine before. Occasionally, we deliberately seek out used barrels when we believe they will give the wine the right environment without adding too much new oak character. There is no fixed formula. The age, origin and character of a barrel matter less than whether it serves the wine in front of us.
Time is part of the same equation.
Our wines are not conceived as fleeting wines for immediate release. We are interested in depth, texture, structure and the ability to evolve, including in our whites.
There are faster ways to make wine.
We choose the pace that we believe makes the wine better.
