I’ve always been one to wonder why things are the way that they are. Obsessed with mythology as a child, I started college studying microbiology, assisting in yeast genomics research that sought to better understand alcohol excretion pathways in the cell. My philosophical musings about yeast were somewhat out of place though, and I found the art history department more willing to indulge my questions. Art history concerns itself with asking “why does it look the way it does,” and “what does it mean.”
Like art, wine is a human product, the result of social and cultural movements, but it is also a product of nature, shaped by the weather and geography, and yeast turning grapes into wine.
Growing up in California, red table wine was a common fixture at dinner. It was utilitarian, mass-produced stuff and hardly inspired one to think about where exactly it had come from. As a 19 year old living in Paris, a bottle of white Burgundy raided from my boyfriend’s father’s cellar was my turning point. It wasn’t until I took that first sip of white Burgundy that I got it: that wine could speak to a place. That it could inspire aesthetic reverence and wonderment. It wasn’t until a few years later that I even considered that winemaking could be a vocation. A glass of Eric Texier’s Saint-Julien-en-Saint-Alban was the moment I decided that I wanted to make something beautiful too, to be the reason something magical existed.
I worked my first vintage in 2014 at Unti in Dry Creek, Sonoma, before moving to Rhys in the Santa Cruz Mountains for the 2015 harvest. In 2016, I started pruning at Mount Eden Vineyards, also in the Santa Cruz Mountains, before heading off to France to work with Éric Texier in the Rhône Valley. From 2016 through 2020, while launching my winery back home in California, I worked for Farm Wine Imports where I had the absolute honor to learn from my winemaking idols in France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and here in California.
I seek to make wines that have something interesting to say, from vineyard sites in California that are unique, historic, or simply magical. And I paint all of my labels to relate back to something about the site. Casa’s label shows redwood sorrel, a common sight in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Grist’s pomegranate references not just the trees that grow there, but also the tannic juiciness found in the wine itself. Del Barba’s olive branch relates back to the line of olive trees lining the front drive to the vineyard gate.
- Claire
