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  • Monkey Wrench
  • Rock Candy
  • The Trim Stinger
  • Cosmic Scout
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About the Wines

Rock Candy

When I was a kid my mom used to make lollipops for my sister and I to share with our friends. We got to choose the flavor and color, and she had lots of molds that we could pick from for shapes. The smell of boiling water and sugar cooked to the hard crack stage on a candy thermometer has a very sweet and sharp smell that I can remember from back then. Comforting and yummy.

Our grapes are fermented in 2 ton bins that we cover with painter’s drop cloth or shade cloth to keep the bugs out. When we go to the winery to punch down or rack and return the fermentation the first thing we do is take off all the covers and take a big sniff. The day that I took off the cover of this particular ferment and smelled it took me back to the days when I was 12 and my mom would make those lollipops. I wrote in my notes, “Smells like rock candy.”

Fifteen months later we were trying to come up with our blends for bottling. I looked through my notes of the wines we were tasting and saw the rock candy quote. I immediately thought, “What a great name for a wine.” And that’s how Rock Candy came about.

All of the components of this wine are made the same as our other reds. The grapes are destemmed and stowed away in the cold room at the winery for a long cold soak. They sort of start to ferment on their own in the cold room, but when enough time has passed we warm them up by moving the ferments outside during the day and into the main part of the winery, which is a little bit warmer than the cold room, at night. Sometimes they take a little while to get going, but there seems to be a very healthy population of indigenous yeast in the winery, even though it is very new. We press the wines to barrel when they taste like they are ready, which for us is usually somewhere around 6 brix or so,. And they finish fermenting in the barrel. None of the reds are inoculated.