Cowhorn Vineyard

Open: Year-round

Like our farm, our winery is Demeter-certified Biodynamic®. That means we are always attempting to make the finest wines possible with the least amount of intervention, in the form of manipulations, chemicals, additives or ingredients. Our goal is to allow the grapes to develop into wine as purely as possible. Though we agree with this in principle for the Earth (consuming less chemicals and products), we also think that a pure process allows the essential flavors of the vineyard to be expressed most clearly. We work in the vineyard to create perfect conditions so that the fruit we produce is as pleasurable as possible. We want our process in the winery to protect the flavors that have already developed. We believe this is how truly wonderful wine results!

In the winery, our practices are focused on prevention, cleanliness and gentle guidance. Specifically, we believe that grapes know how to become wine - they've been doing it for thousands of years! However, if left to themselves they might not become great wine. Therefore, we turn to the intention of blending cleanliness and technology with a gentle hand. To begin, our wines develop using only the native yeasts that came in from the fields. Using native yeasts guarantees that our wine is a unique expression of our farm and fruit. The complexity and vitality that we encourage in the fields comes into the winery in the form of grapes and yeasts. 

Because native yeasts are gentler than manufactured yeasts, we keep our winery very clean in order to encourage the good bugs and discourage the bad bugs, so to speak. During the fermentation process, we use our lab to monitor the progress of the wines. If we watch and monitor them, we hope to stay in front of the wines, thus protecting them from conditions that can cause them to lessen in quality. To that aim, each room in our winery is individually temperature controlled and each tank is individually controlled allowing us to provide the specific conditions that the juice needs during fermentation and storage. When ready, we bottle on site using our own state-of-the-art bottling line. By controlling all of the functions from the growing of the grapes through the bottling of the wine we allow each wine to achieve its own unique perfection!