It's July 2019. We signed the lease on the amazing space on the 4th of July. A great friend of mine and Raj's, deeply serious about wine, Christina Rasmussen, had asked about coming to intern for harvest. I was full of trepidation because I was not sure we would even have a winery. There was still so much to do— so much! I had only secured about half of the funds that we needed to get started— but we had a building. I told her to come.
Christina did most of the driving so that I could work on my laptop. We drove up and down the 5 day after day. We began our first harvest in the sandlands of Oakley. Christina had tasted an old vine Palomino made by Cline at an tasting in San Francisco the year before.
She had an idea about a wine that she wanted to make herself. It's hard to get in her way when she has an idea. She reached out to Megan Cline and secured a ton of the same Palomino that she had tasted. Cline had never sold it before. We harvested with Alex Pitts and hauled the fruit to the new winery.
Christina's Palomino pick crew, with Megan Cline in the center
Christina and Brenna Quigley pressing the Palomino
Christina and Alexander checking brix
Christina creating a tiny, 5 gallon, destemmed skin-fermentation,
to complement her juice-fermentation
Christina sampling Guman in Napa
The Winery, August 2019
Next, we made Palomino from an organic, own-rooted vineyard in Fresno, with a haunted house on the property. (That is the fruit pictured in the photo above, taken at Point Mugu, on the long way back from Fresno to drop off Palomino in Lompoc for Raj.)
We were making wine in the city. It felt like a dream.
We made Rosé from Lopez Zin, pressed in the street, guarded by cops because they were filming in our yard. We harvested mixed reds and mixed whites from Galleano; we drove up to Napa and Lodi and made 1MN from Cinsault, Sylphs from Guman, and the Prince and LSB from Farina. But most of all, we discovered Lone Wolf.