History and story are inextricably bound…the Story is what we tell to make sense of where we came from and from whom. As we know from great literature, the two are very malleable. In America – maybe most especially – if you don’t like the reality of the history, simply tell a different story.
The Lineage Wine Company story is simple: Because of the inherent viticultural excellence of our growing area in general and the magic of our Ghielmetti Estate Vineyard in 
Everything we do in the vineyard and in the cellar is meant to reinforce this true story. Indeed, every effort at storytelling (including this very blog post) is also meant to break down resistance to our admittedly audacious mission.
We’d contend that in the world of great wine, the bar to the “true story” is set significantly higher than real life, and no matter how many different ways a winery tries to tell it (instagram, facebook, twitter), the reality will always and only be found when the cork is pulled. Each successive vintage is another chapter in the on-going, wonderfully complicated tale that is part vineyard, part season, part winemaking philosophy, and part luck.
One of the great truths and part of the essential nature of the greatness of wine as a thing is that it does CHANGE. Wine evolves; it matures; it lives out its life sometimes grandly and over a great many years and sometimes its nature is that of the May Fly. How wine practically changes is for a long chemistry conversation and is fairly well known. But HOW a wine is going to change or AGE is fraught with so many tangential but crucial questions I’d argue that it is knowable only within a range, and not even very well at that.
Certainly not just the fact I’m over 50 now, or a grandfather of two perfect grandchildren, but I’m acutely aware of time passing and all too aware also of the fragility of life – the lives of loved ones and of companies. Success is taking on a different meaning for me now. While it can never, nor should be, uncoupled completely from the inevitability of commerce, it is the pure, more fundamental relationships, that drive me now.
The final piece of my evolving vision of success is the caretaking of our land. There are a multitude of sources available to describe how one can farm organically or biodynamically, and they have profoundly affected my thinking about what we are doing now and where we ought go. The simplest way for me to describe this relationship to the vineyard is embodied in a phrase you see if you’ve ever hiked in the White Mountains.”Pack in. Pack out.” Simple. Don’t leave footprints. Leave things the way you found them if they’re right. Make them right if they’re not. It is crucial – as with every other relationship – to work to reverberate at the same frequency so that outputs naturally come from what has been put into them.
put 1.5 tons of crushed fruit in each box. After cold-soaking for 2-5 days, we start punching down the fermenting must. We punch down 3 times per day (to extract flavor, color, and tannin), and each time we punch down, we taste the boxes to make sure that fermentation is proceeding the way it is supposed to. Each time we taste, we write notes about what we are smelling and tasting because fermentation and maceration (even when the juice has become wine, contact with the skins will move the wine structurally, will add and polish tannins) is a continuum. You cannot know how the end product became the end product without going on and marking this daily journey with it; how can you know when to press the wine unless you know how little or big each daily iteration is?
