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Just some musings about this whole process from my (Brooke) persepctive. If you have any specific questions about our process into becoming Farm Winery owners in Arizona, email me at brooke@vinostache.com and I will write about it!
2022 Harvest Recap...Kinda...fruit is still coming in!
Oh hey, it's raining again! That should be the theme of Harvest 2022: Rain, rain and more rain...July through October...rain! Our growers pivoted well though, and stayed on top of their farming regimes to mitigate rot and the other challenges related to monsoon season in Arizona.
We worked with Rhumbline Vineyard again out in Willcox. Todd and Michelle really embody the mindset of serious and thoughtful growers. We received Malvasia Bianca, Tempranillo, Graciano and Mourvèdre. Rhumbline does such a fantastic job of catering to the needs of us winemakers and I am super thankful for my relationship with them. I made the Malvasia into our second vintage of The Proper, a skin fermented white. It is currently aging in 132 gallon puncheons. The Tempranillo came in super pretty too. I am excited to work with this varietal, as I have yet to on my own with Vino Stache! Rich and velvety, this wine is going to be a fun addition to our line up. The Graciano and Mourvèdre came in with nice maturity and phenoic ripness. They are spending the next two years in new (25%) and neutral (75%) oak.
The Sonoita vineyards started coming online around the time the Willcox vineyards did, but are lingering on ripeness a bit due to the rain and cool nights. It is almost like the rain hit Willcox more heavily in the beginning of harvest and then Sonoita got more of the action later. We work with two hard-working growers in Sonoita, The Tangled Vine Vineyard and The Whitmill Vineyard. Tangled Vine produces Graciano, Aglianico, some field blends of Vranac, Malbec and Malvasia, along with a block of Cabernet Sauvignon. The Graciano will be the main grape in our award-winning "The Boss" wine. This pick was super fun! We worked with some dental students and a dentist from Tucson. I am playing with the Aglianico a little this year. It will either be a rosé or a sparkling base cuvee. The Cabernet will be featured again in our second vintage of The Prairie Lass Rosé.
The good folks at Whitmill Vineyard, Kat and George, have been hard at work harvesting fruit during these last weeks in October. As I am writing this they are picking Mourvèdre. I just bottled a single varietal wine from their 2020 Mourvèdre harvest and it is super pretty! This wine will be called The Paniolo, named after the cowboys of the Hawaiian Islands and our brilliant designer, Brian Woodard's label. This wine will be featured in our first wine club release and will be available exclusively to the loyal Vino Stachies (members of the Minus 90 Degrees Wine Club). Hopefully Montepulciano will be coming in next week and we can make Harvest 2022 a wrap. Each year is so different with the weather conditions, the fruit loads and the overall experience that is harvest. I am thankful my back and hip made it through another year and am appreciative of our growers and wine buying supporters. We are officially sold out of all our 2019 wines as of this week and I am super excited to share new wines and fun new labels with you!
Oct 13, 2022 at 12:11 PM
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Shingles Made Me Do It
Let me paint the two people who will read this blog post with a picture. The year is 2014. I have a 2 year old, 3 year old, 10 year old and 14 year old. I am a VP of Marketing at a mobile payment processing company that also has a couponing app. I have been working in technology since 2005 as a New Media Director for a renewable energy company, in marketing for an Digital Ad Agency, I was a Marketing Director at an internet radio company etc...you get the jist. Prior to that I was an volleyball player at Saint Mary's College of California (Go Gaels!) where my degree was in Maritime Archaeology (yes that is a real thing) where I spent my summers diving on ship wrecks in the Caribbean and Bermuda. I thought I would get my masters in Archaeology and live the life of academia, but I had the opportunity to continue playing volleyball and moved to Spain to pursue that dream.
Once my body had had enough, chronic stress fractures and hernias being the culprits, I came home and just really needed to work. Ape and Greg (my parents) said "Um no, we aren't going to pay for graduate school. Get a job." So I settled down and started working. Marketing & technology is where I fell. At first, I was all about being a working professional, but life at a computer is just simply not for me. All this back story is to show, I don't sit well, especially for hours and hours a day. It's not in my genetic makeup. I move.
So fast forward to 2014. I'm working 60 hours a week, I have nannies raising my kids (who were/are wonderful and I love so much) and I hated my life. One Sunday afternoon, my 2 year old was on my lap and reared up and popped me in the eye with the back of her head. I knew it was going to be bad...it was really GNARLY pretty quickly. I thought I broke my ocular bone. It hurt and it hurt and kept on hurting, for days. It just didn't seem like it was getting better. So I went to Urgent Care and the NP took one look at me and the odd rash that was forming on my head, cheek and neck and said I had shingles. Son of a b*%$#! I couldn't lay on that side of my head or brush my hair for MONTHS. That's what broke me. I quit my job. Told my husband I wanted to do something totally different.
We have a painting of a vineyard on our wall in our bedroom I look at every night and morning. It's a farmhouse on a hill with the beautiful rows of vines in the foreground. I looks like it's in Italy or Croatia, somewhere around the Adriatic. I brings me peace to stare at it. Plus we had always wanted to buy some acreage and live on a farm. Maybe I could take some classes on viticulture and we would move to Oregon or Washington and have a little vineyard and farm. So I started researching programs and learned we grow wine in Arizona! I took some classes online with UC Davis, but it wasn't hands-on enough for me, but the Arizona specific program was a 2 hour drive north in Clarkdale, AZ. After looking at the program I realized I could do all my classes on one day of the week along with my practicum hours. So that's what I did. Packed all my classes into one day/night and volunteered in vineyards & wineries around the Verde Valley in my off hours. It took me 3 years to graduate a 2 year program, but I graduated Magna Cum Laude. My mom said I needed to study wine in order to get grades like that. Ha! So when I think about where I am today, I blame shingles. Shingles broke me, made me reevaluate who I am, what I like to do, and forced me to make a hard left turn, when I could have stayed on a more "normal" road.
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