The sun is low in the sky, the ground is damp, and the vines are sleeping. Winter in the vineyard is the only time we ask the question “what would we like to do today?”, rather than “what absolutely must be done by day's end?”. Lest you fear that this lack of a deadline has caused us to grow soft, the pruning must be done by spring, and we have a winery to build. Many years in planning, we spent the winter months in design finalization and digging the foundation.
Now, we hope to put a roof over our heads before the spring frenzy of bud break. Once we have a rainproof space, we'll construct and plaster the straw bale walls (in our spare time) during the warm, and dry (hopefully) summer in order to ferment the 2023 vintage on Mount Alto soil. We’re building this project largely by ourselves, so please wish us luck!
Speaking of non-concrete deadlines, the 2020 Manteo-Nason blend has been, shall we say, relaxed (or maybe uptight?). In our first vintages, we released the wines in December and January about 2 years after harvest, but this wine asked for our collective patience. It’s a cabernet sauvignon heavy wine, and cabernet from our vineyard is ordinarily quite slow to show itself as wine, and the 2020 vintage was even slower than usual. But recently it has begun to coalesce into something… delicious. A release email will come out next week; first to previous buyers and then to the mailing list in general. If you’re not on the mailing list and you’d like to be, you can sign up here.
