Our Farming

Of all the tabs you could have selected, this one is by far the most elaborate and involved.  It is in fact our FARMING that makes us, and our wines, what we/they are. First I need to clarify that all of what we do is bound by two sacred precepts:
1.    Anyone who grows food has a tremendous responsibility to assure their product is safe.
2.    Wineries are born over decades so you better give some serious thought to sustainability.

Because we consider the responsibility of safety to be inherent, we would never want to confuse you with the idea that because an organization or 'independent judge' applied a certificate to our farm it is now a healthier or more thoughtful product!  As for sustainability and the danger of various chemicals: my family lives, relaxes, and all work on our vineyard.  It's impossible to imagine a place more precious to us or that we would ever want to compromise less.  Having ruled out safety, health, and sustainability, the only thing I can imagine folks believe a certificate stating, "Organic", "Biodynamic", or even the absolute pinnacle of sensitive, sustainable farming- "ALBANIC", could bring is an impression of quality.  We feel that is truly unnecessary because YOUR certification is the only one that matters.  YOU will be the only judge that makes that determination and our goal is to thrill and delight you.

It is this focus on curating the very best wines our beloved plot of land can yield that gave birth to ALBANIC viticulture.   Like the greatest vineyards all over the world, where our soils become particularly unique, we isolate those blocks and make named wines that we feel are sufficiently distinct to recognize as more than mere expressions of a grape variety.  It is the different soil types that each emerges from that gives them their distinct character.  Our entire farming philosophy is founded upon doing our utmost to maintain all that is special about these blocks.  We don’t want to add anything to the extent possible: no fertilizer, pesticides, or anything else we can avoid so as to maximize the attributes that make these vineyards different.  To help put this in lay terms, we coined the phrase "Closed Loop" farming (turns out a lot of folks get intimidated by scientific concepts like carbon or nitrogen cycling...).  In the simplest terms, we want to only add what we export, and we want to export as little as possible.  We put EVERYTHING other than the wine itself back onto our ground.  When you look at what is in a bottle of wine that comes exclusively from the ground, it's a tiny amount of Nitrogen, and even smaller amounts of various minerals.  

Along with making sure we replenish whatever trickle of nutrients leave in a bottle of wine, we want to simultaneously disrupt as little of our land as possible: leave it exactly as we found it!  We want a virgin piece of land that just happens to have orderly rows of vines on top.  As easy as tilling all those 'weeds' (they're only weeds when they aren't where we want them) would be, we wouldn't have all those nitrogen fixing species, all the microorganisms, protection from erosion, hosts for all our beneficials...we'd be changing the property and disrupting its unique natural character: violating two of our prime directives.  Since herbicides and insecticides would also represent foreign additives, we need employees that can control the cover crops without leaving any non-native residue.   If they could also compost all our skins, stems, seeds, leaves, and lees they'd be absolutely perfect.  We were one of the first vineyards in the world to maintain its own flock of sheep year round and exclusively for the purpose of vineyard management.  The sheep graze down everything and simultaneously compost what they eat.  Since our sheep are not given supplemental feed, they do not add anything ‘new’ to our soils; they just keep cycling through and composting the nutrients that are already here.  Unlike a mowed field, the eggs and insects on the grazed plants are destroyed.  The sheep are in the vineyards from soon after harvest to bud break.  Sometimes they return to our fields for a month preceding veraison (the stage where red grapes develop color and white grapes soften).  As long as the grapes aren’t soft or red, they won't touch them; I wouldn't either!

Understandably we have been associated with some primitive techniques involving a lot of livestock and hand labor.  But remember, our goal is not to be traditional, it's to be delicious; in fact we'd love for you to consider that to be our tradition.  Therefore, our efforts and ideas will embrace virtually ANYTHING that fits into our vision and goals.  Opposite the sheep, we are very much looking at and forward to using drones and robots to help as well.  For years we've been using  programmable drones with speakers and an MP3 player to fly our vineyards in very precise patterns on auto-pilot blaring native predatory bird calls.  While we engineered El Diablo to chase away the birds that cause us problems, we didn’t anticipate the extent to which real hawks are drawn to his calls.  These genuine predators further deter the birds that would like to eat our grapes.  El Diablo does the work of 3 employees on ATV’s without burning fuel, compacting the soil, creating dust or making sound audible beyond our fence lines.

 
I have learned no matter how crazy an idea may seem, if it is worthwhile it will soon be emulated.  Winemaking is a continuum.  Just as we have built on concepts that date back centuries, we have sincerely enjoyed watching our innovations proliferate.  If there is an age old technique that works, we use it.  If we discover a new and, in our application, better technology, we’ll use that too.  We want our tradition to be: delicious.  We also want to help perpetuate the work of winemakers who came before.  If you'd like a deeper dive, here's our ode to “The Next 8000 Years".