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Hey folks,

Running a business is a bumpy road, and we’re not shy about sharing those bumps here. We spend a lot of time talking about the hurdles in our journey, but this newsletter tacks differently. It’s a list of little victories that fell through the newsletter cracks. Think of it as a one-time gratitude journal.

Happy reading/listening,

K

Close Angle

This newsletter is a camera lens. Sometimes it’s wide-angle: big picture, long game. Sometimes it’s a macro lens: close up, hyper-focus.

The camera can’t capture everything. There’s just enough space in the frame for the occasional, notable render. I collect these moments and write them down here to share with you, like chapters in a book.

This month’s newsletter is a retrospective. It’s a collection of moments too small for their own chapter, but that nonetheless shaped our story. Here, at the precipice of winter, is a good place to stop, rest, and remember the small wins that made this season possible.

Without further ado, the little victories:

The Wine Fête

In late April, we received an invitation to participate in the [ABV] x Oenoverse May wine fête at Waynesboro’s Common Wealth Crush. [ABV] Ferments, or Anything but Vinifera is, in their words:

“…a nonprofit events + education platform, and host of travelling wine summit ‘Anything but Vinifera’ where artisans, land stewards, and local communities gather to share resources around hybrid grapes, native agriculture, regional fruit, and solidarity economics.

To keep our messaging true, we rely solely on peer-to-peer fundraising, resource donations, and a dedicated network of volunteers and activators.

Through a decentralized approach, [ABV] will encourage a people-first, planet-first wine industry by facilitating workshops and seminars around experimental ferments made from hyperlocal and sustainable ingredients.

Our messaging will build across events, ultimately becoming a think tank aimed at achieving the liberation we dream of.”

Oenoverse is “an access and opportunity initiative dedicated to building a more inclusive Virginia wine industry through focused outreach to people from historically excluded and underrepresented communities.” Together with [ABV], they’re pushing for a more culturally and environmentally sustainable mid-Atlantic wine industry.

[ABV] has a fast-growing reputation in the U.S. for its emphasis on minority winemakers and hybrid or native grape varieties. Their Virginia wine fête was a gathering of local pioneers shaping the future of our state’s wine industry. With open discussion panels on wine and culture, and a ticketed tasting for the public, it invited its participants to rethink what independent, diversified winemaking looks like.

We were (and are) long-time devotees of their mission, but assumed that we were just too small to ping on their radar. We were wrong.

When they announced their plans to host a fête here in Virginia, we were among those invited to pour. All of our industry friends and colleagues were going to be there, as well as out-of-state producers whose work we’d admired for years.

It was an incredible opportunity for a small winery like us. There was just one problem: the buy-in.

To pour at the fête, we needed to supply four cases of wine. This might not sound like a lot, but for us, well… it was. Our production volume is pretty low, and every unsold bottle takes a bite out of our overall profit. We hadn’t budgeted for an extra four cases of unsold wine. We couldn’t afford the loss.

I emailed the organizers to say thank you very much, but we wouldn’t be able to attend. Then, I put it out of my mind as best I could (which is to say, not at all).

About a week later, an email landed in my inbox. The fête organizers talked it over. They felt so strongly that our products should be included in the lineup that they were willing to drop the case requirement down to just two cases.

We went to the fête.

There are so many happy memories from that day, but the one that stands out is walking into the tasting room at Commonwealth Crush and seeing our bottles in a lineup of like-minded makers along the bar. It was the pre-fête tasting for the participating winemakers and organizers, a space for us to connect and explore each other’s work.

Bottles from winemakers physically present at the event were stickered with a little yellow circle. In the middle, it read, “I’m here.” I found our bottles with their yellow stickers alongside Demarcation Wine Co.’s soft-launch vermouth, R.A.S. Wines Maine blueberry spritz, and Patois’ extended élevage cider. For the first time in this strange and wonderful journey, I felt like we’d finally made it. I’m here.

The rest of that day is a happy blur. Somewhere between the symposium on diversity in fermentation and the open public tasting, I realized that creative entrepreneurship need not be a lonely path. We are surrounded by other makers, each on their own unique journey to leave a small mark of color on the canvas of humanity.

It was a very special day.

The Upgrades

A Few Big Tanks

If you tuned into our October newsletter, you probably read about our first major winery investment of the year: new fermentation tanks. If you haven’t, it’s worth a look. The October installation is a snapshot of our very garagiste grape crush (the good and the difficult).

In total, we added five new 600L variable-capacity wine tanks to our lineup. They arrived the day before the start of the crush. We put them together at the last minute with the help of neighboring CSA members. It was an afternoon of laughter, and just like the wine fête, a gentle reminder that mountains aren’t scaled in isolation. It takes a village to build great things.

At the end of the crush, hands blistered and backs aching, it was the memory of that laughter that got us through our final hours on the winery floor.

A Bottling Line

This one calls for a little introduction, so I’ll start with some scene-setting:

It’s 7 PM in early November, dark, with a full moon rising. I’m just getting home from a day delivering CSA shares. I pull my SUV through the frost-dusted gravel drive and around the winery’s shoulder. The motion-sensing winery floodlights burst into flame at my arrival, illuminating a ten-foot, plastic-wrapped monolith in front of my bumper.

I slam on the brakes. It’s a tilting hulk of a rectangle, latched down from four sides with heavy-duty plastic straps. The whole thing leans slightly to the side, the sheer weight of it sagging the panels of the wooden pallet under its base.

I stare for maybe thirty seconds, dumbfounded. Then I remember… the bottling line! We ordered it weeks ago. UPS was, apparently, generous enough to drop it directly in front of the winery doors, blocking both the drive and the doors themselves.

I text Andrew a photo of the moonlit plastic monolith, “Bottling line is here.”

“Great!” he replies instantly, immune to the sight of the unnerving rectangular tilt.

We mutually decide that the hour is late and leave the monster to sleep outside overnight. The following morning, we spend three hours shearing through its wrapper and maneuvering the two-hundred-pound steel bulk of the thing off its pallet and into the winery.

It’s a six-spout, fully automated mobile line that fills at a rate of one hundred cases per hour. That’s 1,200 bottles. With just the two of us hand-bottling (assuming no equipment breaks), Andrew and I can fill at a rate of about forty bottles per hour. This is a serious step up in efficiency.

We’re producing a lot more wine than we did a few years ago, and we plan to keep growing. The more wine we make, the longer it takes to make it. That’s where machines like this enter the picture. This bottling line is more than an investment in speed. It symbolizes the next level of our evolution as a winery, from impassioned garagistes to something bigger.

One step, one piece of equipment, at a time.

The Very Good Viticulturist

Frank Lazarus is wiry and sun-tanned, with bright eyes, feathery gray hair, and a clear, dictatorial voice. In a previous life, he was a college professor, later working in collegiate administration. In his post-academic retirement, he’s a viticulturist in Virginia’s Loudoun County. He meticulously tends a few acres of Vidal and Chambourcin along with his daughter and son-in-law. His vineyard is a mote of quietude tucked back into the woods of rural Hamilton.

Frank is our vineyard partner, without whom our wines wouldn’t exist.

Our vineyard is still too immature to produce grapes fit for wine. We work with local growers for each vintage, but it’s been a tricky road to navigate. We’re too small to be worth most growers’ time, but big enough that we need a dedicated supplier to support our production needs. Our early vintages were a real scramble, scrounging together contracts for whatever hybrids hit the local grape market. These last few years, we’ve been able to work solely with Frank. It’s made a world of difference.

Frank is old-school: kind and courteous, and diligent in communicating the harvest in every detail. From regular Brix updates to seasonal variations in grape disease activity and pests, he’s refreshingly organized and down-to-earth. Qualities that we very much appreciate in today’s wine industry.

After he dropped off this year’s harvest, he told us that he was taking a trip to visit old friends in Ohio and beyond.

“You know,” he said in his buoyant, professor’s voice, “These are old friends, some of whom I’ve known for many years. I’m not sure how many more times I’ll get to visit them.” He put his hands on his hips and looked from Andrew to me, and then with a chuckle said, “You might say this is a kind of farewell tour.”

“Oh Frank…” I stuttered. And then… I didn’t know what to say. To me, Frank looked so strong, so vital, but suddenly, I could see how this trip must’ve felt from his perspective: the question of how many more cross-country travels lay ahead, how many more seasons friends ten years his senior would be around.

I hope Frank is wrong about his farewell tour. I hope this is just one of many more trips he’ll take, just as I hope there are many more vintages from his vineyard to come.

I handed him a ready bottle of botanical wine in gratitude for his work. We shook hands and hugged, and Frank packed up his truck to leave.

By the time of this writing, Frank is back from his not-a-farewell tour. He’ll probably read this, so I just want to say here, Frank, thanks again for everything. We couldn’t do it without you. Happy holidays.

We also couldn’t do it without you, dear reader (or listener!). If you’re reading this newsletter, you know our story. You know it hasn’t always been easy. There have been tough times, but there have been more beautiful times than I can ever begin to capture through the lens of this newsletter.

Thanks for walking this path with us, for reading our story, and for helping us to remember, “you’re here.”

Remember to be grateful for the little victories. Happy holidays.

Until next year,

Kelly & Andrew

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