Prima Materia Mourvedre 2013

Prima Materia is the product of two decades spent in vineyards, wineries, and cooking in restaurant kitchens that ranged from Michelin starred to hamburger consulting. I planted most of Prima Materia's grapes at 1,450' of elevation in Lake County's red volcanic soils, and every bottle and vine is nurtured with the goal of capturing a distinctive Old-World inflected voice in harmony with California's vast and evolving wine history. Prima Materia is a bottom-up adventure that begins with digging holes, pounding stakes, and constant time spent in the vineyard. Our equipment is minimalist with a focus on guiding the wines through the entire process to bottling with careful decisions made every step of the way. I am proud to work within an ancient agricultural tradition, and that vast, sometimes cyclical history is a central part of the winery's story and trajectory. ? Prima Materia wines are crafted in criminally small batches of two to ten barrels each. The winemaking and grape growing are of the intensive hands-on and sustainable sort, often using stems and time, gravity and buckets, rather than expensive impersonal machinery. Wines are unsulfured for much of their lives, allowing them to evolve as living things and new oak is rarely used. The wines are always unfined, unfiltered, hand harvested and hand bottled and most are estate grown. The alchemical theme of Prima Materia is significant both in the vague sense of food and wine alchemy, or the alchemy of agriculture and growth, but also in the Jungian idea of alchemy being the interaction between between us and the world we are exploring, both internal and external. Alchemy in this sense is the bold-yet-humble pursuit of knowledge through wonder, the natural and the personal, and uncovering hidden essence so that eventually art and craft might one day meet.