AmericanWinery.com

I sat down to write a brief description about us and our winery for a tasting book the other day and became stumped. Just how can you describe a winery that barely makes a thousand cases a year in twenty words or less? “Boutique” first came to mind, we sure hear that word thrown around a lot. It does conjure the idea of a small family owned farm and vineyard at the end of a winding country road. Truth is before the name “boutique” became mainstream it literally meant under 10,000 cases. Now wineries producing 100,000 cases or more are using “boutique” as their catch term. Well there’s still “artisan” right? Artisan even seems more quaint, wine produced out of nothing larger than a chicken coop and sold out of a tasting room that’s not much more than a lemonade stand. Once it meant the winery produced fewer than 5,000 cases a year. However, now the term is applied much more liberally. There’s always “Family Owned” which we are, but then so is G@llo. Home winemakers or “Garagistes”, are just that, making wine out of their garage (which we have been known to do). But generally speaking it’s pretty difficult to get your garage bonded. We are more “Homeless” winemakers in that we rent a little corner of a larger facililty in order to make our wines. And finally, there it was, thanks to a little article on the Sheldon’s. Where we are referred to as a … “Micro-Winery”. “Micro-Winery;” it’s fresh, it’s new, it’s not overdone, just like us.