July Newsletter: Mathematics and Spiritual Gasoline

July Newsletter: Mathematics and Spiritual Gasoline

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the playback above. You can also listen for free on Spotify or by adding our Substack podcast to your RSS feed. Hey folks, This month’s newsletter is about the creation of something very special…our first dry vermouth. Dry vermouth has been a moving target for years. With a little inspiration and a lot of help from our friends, we’ve found it. A little late but not quite overdue. Read on to learn how. A Lot of Dandelions “I want it dry!” I exclaim. It is eight o’clock in the morning. I’m standing barefoot in our farm kitchen in a gray waffle bathrobe. I’m on my second cup of tea and I am very, very awake. To my left, Andrew chokes on his coffee. He sets the mug down on the kitchen counter with a little clink. This is not the invitation he expected to receive first thing in the morning. “I want it totally and completely dry,” I continue, oblivious. I can see Andrew’s cogs turning, him wondering what totally dry thing I’m asking for. He looks over at me only to find me talking to the ceiling, hands gesticulating wildly. A faint whisper of terror passes over his face. “Yes,” I repeat. “Totally dry and full of dandelions.”“My love,” Andrew says with a shake of his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about but I’m not sure it’s a good idea.”“A dry vermouth!” I say, turning my attention to him. “Totally unsweetened. Based on wild dandelion blossoms rather than dried leaves.” I can see it in my mind. No one’s done this before. Andrew visibly relaxes and takes a reassuring sip of his coffee. “That’s a lot of dandelions,” he says, ever the pragmatist. “Yes, yes.” I wave him away with my hand. “We can deal with that when we get there. Think of the sales potential!”Andrew pulls off his glasses and presses his fingers to the bridge of his nose. This is the remark that always elicits low-key alarm bells. When sales potential comes out, what remains of my rationality quickly evaporates.“I agree about the sales potential. Unsure about the blossoms,” he says. “But, I like the idea overall. Try it. See what you can do. We’ll see if it works.” Never tell me to try it. Andrew should know that by now. Because I will try it. Consequences be damned. And I do. I spend the next few months collecting wild dandelions, blossom by blossom, from anywhere I can find them: the garden beds, the backyard, the vineyard, and then some. I enlist friends to help me in my quest. We comb the hills for dandelions, filling gallon Ziploc bags to the brim. Anything small and yellow becomes a target. I decimate a swath of Appalachian dandelion lineages in a matter of weeks. Then, I infuse them into anything remotely alcoholic: grape brandy, apple brandy, high-proof grape distillates, Vidal wine, fortified Vidal wine, and endless combinations of the above. I rebuild my botanical extract library with botanicals of a certain energetic quality: lithe but powerful, savory but weightless, playfully rude but unerringly verbose. Home-grown wormwood and Greek oregano. Common thyme and German chamomile. A kiss of apricot for that certain je ne sais quoi. I build my prototype in the galley of our kitchen bar. The base is a blossom-infused wine, shouldered with aromatic and bitter tinctures. I titrate the latter with a tiny glass pipette, working like a mad perfumist into the late hours of the night. A painstaking procedure, but it’s the only way I know how to do it. Eventually, after many false starts and countless trials shoved into Andrew’s complicit hands, I get it. I sit Andrew down at our kitchen table and present the mason jar of my final draft. “I’m going for Basque,” I say. “Basquey. Basque-adjacent. I mean, not entirely Basque, but taking some notes.” What the actual hell am I saying? Andrew ignores my frenetic explanation and takes a sip. Swishes it in his mouth. Does not spit it into the supplied second mason jar-turned-spit bucket. He sighs. “Oh,” he murmurs. “This is very pretty,” he says. “Very, very pretty.” “Can you help me scale it?” I ask. Andrew and I have a reciprocal winemaking relationship. I bring raw creativity. He structures it into something replicable with meticulous spreadsheets. Together, through mathematics and spiritual gasoline, we create beautiful things. “Yes,” he says. “Yes, I absolutely can.” I bow my head. Clasp my hands together. Thank him. At the end of a making, when the creative spell subsides, and we step away from whatever storm took us there, giving thanks is all that’s left. My storm is over. Now, it’s Andrew’s turn to create. In the Basque Style And what is a Basque-style vermouth, you ask? The Basque Country (also known as País Vasco or Euskadi) spans part of Spain’s Northern coast along the Bay of Biscay and the western Pyrenees mountains. The Basque people are one of Spain’s few surviving indigenous groups, and the region continues today with semi-autonomous governance. Basque vermouth draws heavily from the foodways of Northern Spain. It’s traditionally made with a base of native Basque grapes (Hondarrabi Zuri, most commonly) and infused with aromatic herbs. Of these, knapweed, wormwood, dittany, gentian, thyme, rosemary, and citrus are all local to the region. The style is aggressively savory. Unabashedly herbal. Intensely aromatic. Ours keeps this template, but makes it fuller, rounder, more floral. A foundation of Vidal adds brawn and breadth, while the fresh dandelion blossoms add a bitter, satiny backdrop. It smells like spring, and tastes like abundance, and cuts like the gentlest kiss of night, and finishes with all the sunshine and verve of an apricot plucked freshly from the tree. It’s entirely Appalachian. Sultry and spry. Sharpened and soft. Dark and light. A place and a thing somewhere in the gray space between opposites. The vermouth and I have that much in common. Naturally. A Name that Makes No Claims Months later, I’m on the phone in our shared office, fighting with the TTB (the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau). I put down my phone and sigh. “They won’t let me call it Dandelion Dry Vermouth,” I say to Andrew.“What?” He spins around in his chair. The neat stacks of paperwork on his office desk flutter dangerously.“They say I can’t use both ‘Dandelion’ and ‘Dry’ to describe the vermouth on the front of the label.”“But that’s what it is!” He says, irritation slipping through his otherwise calm demeanor.“I know,” I sigh. “But apparently, there can be only one descriptor, and it has to be either ‘Dry’ or ‘Dandelion.’ We can’t have both.”“Why?” Why indeed.“I have no idea!” I drag my hands over my face. Nothing frustrates me more than a creative process interrupted by outdated bureaucracy.“Okay, what about Lion’s Tooth?” Andrew says. Lion’s Tooth is the folk name for dandelion, and our backup if the first submission doesn’t make it through the approval process. It’s not a common name. It’s the kind of esoteric information an herbalist might have, but not a TTB nine-to-fiver. We try it. Send in a revised electronic copy of the label with Lion’s Tooth Dry Vermouth printed at the base.Within an hour, the agent assigned to our submission spits back a rejection. They know the folk name. And it won’t fly. Somewhere along the line, the TTB label approval team raised their hiring standards. “Ah, f**k,” I mutter under my breath. Across the room, Andrew sighs. I don’t need to explain a thing.We discuss. Dry Vermouth communicates too little. Dandelion Vermouth suggests something sweet (or at least off-dry), and that wouldn’t be true to form. We need a name that makes no claims. A name that is purely energetic, can precede Dry without legally competing with it. After brainstorming an obscenely long list of potentials, we arrive. Its name will be Aura. Aura Dry Vermouth.Aura, because there’s something intangible about this vermouth. Something that speaks but barely touches. Shrouds but does not oppress. It shifts the energy of the room in a way that no one can quite understand or pinpoint. It glows, glows like the first drop of sun on the horizon. Glows like the first wink of a star at dusk. Glows the way the late summer light hangs over the body of a steel-flat lake, the way a July breeze tucks itself around you like the barest brush of a kiss. That kind of glow.This is Aura. Our first dry vermouth. I’ve never made anything like this before, and I’m holding the new shape of it in my hands like an errant comet that I’ve somehow managed to capture in its route across the night. I’m not sure where it came from, but here it is.At the time of this writing, Aura is resting in bottle, recovering itself after the chaos of the bottling line. We’ll release it into the wild in a few weeks. This initial release is a pilot, a little toe into shallow water. If you’d like to reserve a bottle of this special creature, you can pre-order one on our website [https://shop.artemisia.farm/products/aura-dry-vermouth-2025]. You won’t be disappointed. I promise. Thanks for reading, Kelly Feedback Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us? We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm [contact@artemisia.farm?subject=Newsletter%20feedback]. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/arnito/avant-la-pluie License code: RHIKKASKD1WFMM4W This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

March Newsletter: The Problem with Glass

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the playback above. You can also listen for free on Spotify or by adding our Substack podcast to your rss feed. Hey folks, This month’s newsletter explores the tension between sustainability and marketability. It turns over a question that we’ve long struggled with: what to do about the weight of our glass bottles? How can we make a sustainable product within the parameters of common market aesthetics? Is it possible to produce a sustainable bottle of vermouth? What kind of sustainability are we actually selling? These questions and more. Read on to hear them. Should we Put It in a Box? Andrew and I are standing on the long side of our little kitchen table. On the other, there are three members of our wine distribution team, here to tour the winery and sample our wares. Most wineries would use their tasting room or a nice portico for such a visit, but we have neither. It’s either the kitchen, the winery (which is technically a garage stuffed to the gills with wine tanks), or I suppose the field where we grow our botanicals (as an obligatory third option). I chose the kitchen to be our all-purpose business and entertainment center. We’ll have a cursory visit to the winery later, where we can relish in its rusticity for exactly the appropriate amount of time. Visits from distributors to wineries are standard in this industry. It’s a way for the distributor to more deeply learn a winery’s story, taste the upcoming vintage, or visit library bottlings (if available). In a word, it shows goodwill. This is just one of many ways in which distributors and winemakers build trust with each other: an essential thing in a sometimes volatile industry. There are two men, one tall, one average, and one short woman. The three of them listen with an acute, receptive intent that I know very well. Before I made vermouth, I worked in sales with a different distributor, and pouring samples for prospective buyers was part of my pitch. I met with restaurant sommeliers, wine shop owners, boutique foodstuff purchasers… you name it. Whether winery-distributor or distributor-purchaser, both dynamics are an exercise in trust. A tasting doesn’t just showcase the flavor profile of the wine. It’s an atmosphere of human connection. A handshake, if you will. I’ve done this thousands of times. The difference, in this case, is that it was always someone else’s wine, someone else’s story. Now, the wine is my own. We are the story. Andrew stands at my side as I pour small sips of plum vermouth into their waiting glasses. The bottle is heavy enough that I have to pour it with both hands, a minor industry faux pas. There’s about a half-inch of solid glass at its base. It’s functionally useless but aesthetically indicating. High-end products have more glass. That’s what the market dictates. That’s what the consumer understands. More glass means better flavor, higher prestige… all the trappings and associations with value that are inexorably woven into our cultural identity. I think it’s silly. But it does make an impression. The distribution team swirls, smells, holds their glasses to the light. I dictate the barest synopsis of last year’s vintage. Then I wait. If I learned anything selling wine, it’s that the open space of silence allows for far more discovery than an overabundance of verbiage. Learning how to wait was the hardest part of the job. I still don’t like it. A portfolio of my work stands in a neat line on the table between us, a rainbow of brightly colored aperitifs. I designed the inside, Andrew drafted the labels. In the slanting light of our kitchen window, they glow like fae potions from another time. We work our way down the line, visiting each bottle in turn. Pour, speak, wait, repeat. All the while, I find myself chewing on a question, but I just can’t bring myself to ask it. Vulnerability is a tricky thing in this industry. It’s a hyper-competitive, highly social arena populated almost exclusively by empaths. Reveal too much, and you might find yourself ostracized. But… I can’t help myself. I take a slow breath as I cork the last bottle, angling it towards our guests. “What do you think about a lower-glass bottle shape? There’s a lot of unused glass here,” I say, tapping my finger against the heavy glass foot. “We’re considering the idea of a more eco-friendly bottle.” The tall man shrugs and nods at the same time, betraying multiple, conflicting answers. “We always support a more sustainable direction,” he begins, “but… these look nice.” At this, he gestures to my vermouth. “The heavy bottle imparts a certain sense of value.” I give my own nod. The bottles do look nice, but they come with a cost. Their price tag is not insignificant, but more importantly, they’re expensive ecologically. The Price of Beauty More than half of an average winery’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the shipping and manufacture of glass bottles. Producing glass bottles is a heat-intensive process, generating around 86 million metric tons of CO₂ annually worldwide. Between production, packaging, and transport, glass packaging alone comprises 30–50% of the wine industry’s total carbon footprint. An average bottle weighs 500–600 grams, while premium bottles can reach nearly two pounds. Multiply that by a few million, and you can imagine the fuel required just to get it from the factory to our winery. The glass itself is (theoretically) infinitely recyclable, but therein lies a second problem. The U.S. population recycles only about 33% of glass produced, either through lack of intention or improper sorting. That translates into billions of wine bottles lost to landfills each year. There is a very big problem with glass. …but this is all ancillary to the moment. Well, it isn’t, but it feels far enough away not to collapse under. We wrap up the tasting, shake hands, say our farewells. Andrew and I began tidying up the glassware and bottles. The air feels deflated, like a bow string undone. I can guess why. Sustainability has its guardrails. I find myself thinking of a conversation I had with a winemaker I apprenticed with many years ago in rural New Hampshire. He told me that “everything you do in this life will be a sale.” I hated the sentiment at the time. Now… I’m not so sure that I disagree. I lean back against the kitchen table, bracing myself on the palms of my hands. “Do you think we could put our vermouth in boxes?” I want to swallow the question back; it sounds so definitively unsellable. Andrew is elbow-deep in suds, washing the glassware from the tasting. He doesn’t respond right away, but unconsciously starts shaking his head. “You know…” I continue aimlessly, “Those sustainable wine boxes that are super light to ship and fully recyclable? They even make them in bottle shapes.” I dangle that last detail like it somehow makes this idea more digestible. Ex-sales indeed. Andrew sighs. “I mean…” he trails off. The ridiculousness of my suggestion is so obvious that he’s at a loss for words. He sighs again. “No one would buy it. I like the idea. Of course, I want us to use less glass. Of course, I want to reduce the fuel and materials it takes to make our bottles, to make our work better for the planet… but, no one would buy it.” Suds fly as he gestures in frustration. “If people don’t buy it, we don’t stay in business.” I know he’s right. The bottles have to look good, in the most classical sense of the word. The sales part of me understands this. But, the rest of me doesn’t want to. If the environment forever comes second to marketability, then we’ve already lost this game. The very word “sustainability” can’t be trusted. There’s no legal definition, and we need it that way just to make ends meet. Sustainability means “you’ll have to trust that we’re doing the best that we can.” But surely, you say, there must be visually appealing, sustainable glass bottles? There certainly are… and they cost a fortune. Even if (if!) we could afford the per-bottle price, the purchase minimums are prohibitively high: many pallets more than we could ever need or store. It’s not approachable on a small scale like ours. In the end, Andrew and I will find a compromise on the bottle: still glass, still conventional, but with less of a foot at its base and thinner walls. An airy silhouette with a lighter ecological footprint that maintains all the aesthetic principles of proper modern marketing. A happy ending, for all intents and purposes. Our first product to use the lower glass bottle is our plum vermouth: Solstice. This vintage is quite delayed, but it’s finally back, with a second (very large!) bottling en route this summer. There will be no boxed vermouth or compressed cellulose bottles. No recycled plastic pull tabs or aluminum screw caps. It will be glass, because glass is nice and feels old, and real, and substantial, and even these lighter bottles have a psychological weight that somehow tethers their purchaser to another (possibly imaginary) time in which everything mundane felt true and whole. A time that, in a word, felt safe. This is a story about glass, but it’s also a story about what sustainability really means. Simple and Tangible You might say that sustainability in sales is less ecological and more psychological. The target is the customer’s value system. The message: your beliefs are correct, and because they are correct, you are safe within the social hierarchy. For only a few rare people is true ecological sustainability a mean driver of purchasing habits. But, is that so bad? Is marketing psychological safety inherently disingenuous? Is its pursuit unjustified? I don’t know. I just make wine. What I do know is if that bucolic past did exist, where life was uncomplicated and tangible in a way that didn’t feel like a crumpled old newspaper, I want people to know a piece of that. We have our glass-bottled vermouth and our old-time waxed vegetable boxes, and these notes that I keep writing to whoever will read them… all smatterings of palpability in what feels to me like a humanity with its heart hollowed out and dropped somewhere forgettable. There’s a problem with glass. More glass isn’t going to fix it. Less isn’t going to, either. What’s inside the glass is almost inconsequential. Or, is it everything entirely? The problem with glass is that its psychological imprint isn’t deep enough. Like all good branding, it communicates something essential, but the message is incomplete. It’s too brief, a sentence, half-finished. It feels like safety and promise, and then culture steps in to fill in the gaps with how nice it is. Maybe if there are enough bottles, they’ll fill in the gaps themselves, crowd out culture’s insistent message to accumulate, dominate. Maybe a sufficient pockmarking of genuine beauty will tip the scales, and we can meet where unsullied “sales” was always meant to help us meet: as one and another, sharing something lifegiving in a primeval and fathomless world. Maybe with enough glass, we can finally go there together. When we arrive, we’ll keep the glass or leave it. It will be both beautiful and incidental. Then, the real conversation will begin. …and with that, I’ll say: our vermouth drops soon. I hope you like the bottles. Until next time, Kelly Feedback Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us? We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm [contact@artemisia.farm?subject=Newsletter%20feedback]. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/arnito/avant-la-pluie License code: TEMJB2COJDVXB9ND This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

February Newsletter: What is Essential?

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the playback above. You can also listen for free on Spotify or by adding our Substack podcast to your rss feed. It’s been a while since our last update. Andrew and I caught a particularly bad bug this winter, and the newsletter has suffered for it. This post is about that bug, and the silver lining it had. A Very Bad Bug In late December, Andrew and I caught this winter’s super flu at a family holiday party. There were lots of little children with lots of toddler-grade touchy-sneezy energy stumbling around. We washed our hands and slathered them with sanitizer between brushes with each potential patient zero, but it was all for naught. In ways unseen, infection was inevitable. I developed a cough that eventually became so severe that it withered my voice down to a rasp. It would remain as such for the next two weeks. Andrew followed suit, although in true resilient form, he recovered much more quickly than I did. This is why I call him my better half. He’s just built better. Most curiously, losing my voice put a stop to my writing. As above, so below: I was wordless in all directions. A monologuing well, gone dry. I went quiet, and my internal world went quiet with me. There was simply nothing to say. I think of myself as a words person, and this sudden mutism was at odds with how I experience the world. I had to be selective about what I needed to communicate because words were, quite literally, painful (and at the rate I was running through cough drops, getting expensive.) Extraneous words were a strain, so I accommodated my injury the way one does when they stub their toe or strain their knee: I changed my gait. I spoke only when necessary, augmenting with expressive but often confusing hand gestures, lots of pointing, and the occasional typed iPhone missive. In my unscheduled retreat into monastic silence, I was loosed from the pull of social media, a place where I (in better moments) use short-form to share business updates and (in less ideal times) share my own indulgent earmarks with the unsuspecting world. Instead of all that, I refocused inward. I put my need to communicate on unpaid leave and, in my quieted, fluey haze, I started to really listen. On Listening I listened. I listened to the creaking frame of our old cottage, to its groaning pipes and squeaky hinges. I listened to the sparrows and wrens at the feeder outside our kitchen window. I listened to Andrew in work and life with a stillness and presence unmuddled by my own need to speak. I listened to the sound of life gently ebbing around me in its soft, meandering tide. Then, I listened to the digital world, to emails pinging the iPhone in my back pocket, to the explosive reels and photo carousels of social media, to my jaunty, always-overflowing to-do list app. It was loud. When my words quieted, my mind quieted. With my mind quieted, I could better hear just how loud modernity can be. At the time of this writing, I now have my voice back. In some ways, my old gait is back, too. I have too much screen time. I interrupt and interject more than Andrew probably likes. I sometimes forget about the sparrows at the feeder, or the grumbling of our old cottage’s bones. I have things to do. Very important things. But something has shifted. There’s this nagging question that won’t go away. What words are worth saying? What ideas are worth communicating? What is essential and what is superfluous? These questions aren’t just about words. Reader, have you read Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince? It’s one of my favorite books. I have it in both English and in French. At one point in the story, a tamed fox tells the protagonist, a young prince, “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” or “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” When I lost my voice, I was unceremoniously reacquainted with the essential: that soft clockwork of the heart that we all share. This business that Andrew and I are building began with the search for a gentle and peaceful life. Many years later, it has become something broader and more encompassing. Just before the flu propelled me into existential reverie, we received a barrage of holiday cards and emails from our CSA members. There was so much gratitude. Short notes. Long ones. Little gifts. Holiday treats. Sometimes, just a wave, a nod, or a smile. We have delivered hundreds (maybe thousands at this point) of vegetable boxes. Our CSA members have prepared innumerable meals with our produce. Untold numbers of leftovers have been repurposed for breakfast, hastily packed for lunch, or reheated for a second go at dinner. Our weekly recipes, recreated in homes throughout Virginia and the District, improvised and improved, have slowly taught people how to eat seasonally. In countless small ways, our humble CSA has done good work in this community. It’s perhaps the best kind of work anyone can do: we’ve made life just a little bit better. We found our gentle and peaceful lifeway, and we’ve helped others to find it as well. Fate Intervenes It’s taken me two months to pen the loss of my voice and the perspective that loss gave me. Two months to process how I’ve reintegrated into the louder world. Maybe this newsletter is just the fallout of billions of flu virions inflaming my brain. Humans have a long history of mind-altering experiences unveiling philosophical truths. I want to believe that it was a natural and convenient nudge back in the right direction. In December, I caught the flu. A few weeks later, I remembered how to be a better person. Fate intervenes in its own way. Losing my voice helped me remember that life-building isn’t just big ideas and grandstand posturing. It’s in the small things: how we talk, how we love, how we eat, how we work, and how we rest. These are the essentials of life. You won’t find them on a screen or in your inbox. What happens from here? Like our CSA, our pace of life is seasonal. Our story continues from winter to spring: wine bottling on the near horizon, planting schematics for new berry plots and herb beds, a pale vermouth and native fruit aperitif in the works, a vineyard to prune before the spring thaw, and of course, our step-by-step journey to remember how to live peacefully, together. I’ll be back with my words to share it all with you. Until then, Kelly P.S. Our CSA runs year-round. If you want to learn more about it, check out our website [https://shop.artemisia.farm/collections/memberships]. Feedback Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us? We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/arnito/avant-la-pluie License code: FX75BLUZXKLTLLFU This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

December Newsletter: Little Victories

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the playback above. You can also listen for free on Spotify or by adding our Substack podcast to your rss feed. Hey folks, Running a business is a bumpy road, and we’re not shy about sharing those bumps here. We spend a lot of time talking about the hurdles in our journey, but this newsletter tacks differently. It’s a list of little victories that fell through the newsletter cracks. Think of it as a one-time gratitude journal. Happy reading/listening, K Close Angle This newsletter is a camera lens. Sometimes it’s wide-angle: big picture, long game. Sometimes it’s a macro lens: close up, hyper-focus. The camera can’t capture everything. There’s just enough space in the frame for the occasional, notable render. I collect these moments and write them down here to share with you, like chapters in a book. This month’s newsletter is a retrospective. It’s a collection of moments too small for their own chapter, but that nonetheless shaped our story. Here, at the precipice of winter, is a good place to stop, rest, and remember the small wins that made this season possible. Without further ado, the little victories: The Wine Fête In late April, we received an invitation to participate in the [ABV] x Oenoverse May wine fête [https://ticketstripe.com/avirginiafete#:~:text=About%20ABV%20and%20Oenoverse%3A,Acosta%20(they%2Fhe).] at Waynesboro’s Common Wealth Crush [https://commonwealthcrush.com/]. [ABV] Ferments, or Anything but Vinifera [https://binbinsake.com/collections/abv-anything-but-vinifera-wines] is, in their words: “…a nonprofit events + education platform, and host of travelling wine summit ‘Anything but Vinifera’ where artisans, land stewards, and local communities gather to share resources around hybrid grapes, native agriculture, regional fruit, and solidarity economics. To keep our messaging true, we rely solely on peer-to-peer fundraising, resource donations, and a dedicated network of volunteers and activators. Through a decentralized approach, [ABV] will encourage a people-first, planet-first wine industry by facilitating workshops and seminars around experimental ferments made from hyperlocal and sustainable ingredients. Our messaging will build across events, ultimately becoming a think tank aimed at achieving the liberation we dream of.” Oenoverse [https://blenheimvineyards.com/oenoverse/?srsltid=AfmBOooAr4JITEGr3ouOto82zuea-IjWOtNZx729--HQPzIXWSbyQasl] is “an access and opportunity initiative dedicated to building a more inclusive Virginia wine industry through focused outreach to people from historically excluded and underrepresented communities.” Together with [ABV], they’re pushing for a more culturally and environmentally sustainable mid-Atlantic wine industry. [ABV] has a fast-growing reputation in the U.S. for its emphasis on minority winemakers and hybrid or native grape varieties. Their Virginia wine fête was a gathering of local pioneers shaping the future of our state’s wine industry. With open discussion panels on wine and culture, and a ticketed tasting for the public, it invited its participants to rethink what independent, diversified winemaking looks like. We were (and are) long-time devotees of their mission, but assumed that we were just too small to ping on their radar. We were wrong. When they announced their plans to host a fête here in Virginia, we were among those invited to pour. All of our industry friends and colleagues were going to be there, as well as out-of-state producers whose work we’d admired for years. It was an incredible opportunity for a small winery like us. There was just one problem: the buy-in. To pour at the fête, we needed to supply four cases of wine. This might not sound like a lot, but for us, well… it was. Our production volume is pretty low, and every unsold bottle takes a bite out of our overall profit. We hadn’t budgeted for an extra four cases of unsold wine. We couldn’t afford the loss. I emailed the organizers to say thank you very much, but we wouldn’t be able to attend. Then, I put it out of my mind as best I could (which is to say, not at all). About a week later, an email landed in my inbox. The fête organizers talked it over. They felt so strongly that our products should be included in the lineup that they were willing to drop the case requirement down to just two cases. We went to the fête. There are so many happy memories from that day, but the one that stands out is walking into the tasting room at Commonwealth Crush and seeing our bottles in a lineup of like-minded makers along the bar. It was the pre-fête tasting for the participating winemakers and organizers, a space for us to connect and explore each other’s work. Bottles from winemakers physically present at the event were stickered with a little yellow circle. In the middle, it read, “I’m here.” I found our bottles with their yellow stickers alongside Demarcation Wine Co. [https://www.instagram.com/demarcationwineco/?hl=en]’s soft-launch vermouth, R.A.S. Wines [https://raswines.com/] Maine blueberry spritz, and Patois [https://www.patoiscider.com/]’ extended élevage cider. For the first time in this strange and wonderful journey, I felt like we’d finally made it. I’m here. The rest of that day is a happy blur. Somewhere between the symposium on diversity in fermentation and the open public tasting, I realized that creative entrepreneurship need not be a lonely path. We are surrounded by other makers, each on their own unique journey to leave a small mark of color on the canvas of humanity. It was a very special day. The Upgrades A Few Big Tanks If you tuned into our October newsletter [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com/p/maximalist-terroir], you probably read about our first major winery investment of the year: new fermentation tanks. If you haven’t, it’s worth a look. The October installation is a snapshot of our very garagiste grape crush (the good and the difficult). In total, we added five new 600L variable-capacity wine tanks to our lineup. They arrived the day before the start of the crush. We put them together at the last minute with the help of neighboring CSA members. It was an afternoon of laughter, and just like the wine fête, a gentle reminder that mountains aren’t scaled in isolation. It takes a village to build great things. At the end of the crush, hands blistered and backs aching, it was the memory of that laughter that got us through our final hours on the winery floor. A Bottling Line This one calls for a little introduction, so I’ll start with some scene-setting: It’s 7 PM in early November, dark, with a full moon rising. I’m just getting home from a day delivering CSA [https://shop.artemisia.farm/collections/memberships] shares. I pull my SUV through the frost-dusted gravel drive and around the winery’s shoulder. The motion-sensing winery floodlights burst into flame at my arrival, illuminating a ten-foot, plastic-wrapped monolith in front of my bumper. I slam on the brakes. It’s a tilting hulk of a rectangle, latched down from four sides with heavy-duty plastic straps. The whole thing leans slightly to the side, the sheer weight of it sagging the panels of the wooden pallet under its base. I stare for maybe thirty seconds, dumbfounded. Then I remember… the bottling line! We ordered it weeks ago. UPS was, apparently, generous enough to drop it directly in front of the winery doors, blocking both the drive and the doors themselves. I text Andrew a photo of the moonlit plastic monolith, “Bottling line is here.” “Great!” he replies instantly, immune to the sight of the unnerving rectangular tilt. We mutually decide that the hour is late and leave the monster to sleep outside overnight. The following morning, we spend three hours shearing through its wrapper and maneuvering the two-hundred-pound steel bulk of the thing off its pallet and into the winery. It’s a six-spout, fully automated mobile line that fills at a rate of one hundred cases per hour. That’s 1,200 bottles. With just the two of us hand-bottling (assuming no equipment breaks), Andrew and I can fill at a rate of about forty bottles per hour. This is a serious step up in efficiency. We’re producing a lot more wine than we did a few years ago, and we plan to keep growing. The more wine we make, the longer it takes to make it. That’s where machines like this enter the picture. This bottling line is more than an investment in speed. It symbolizes the next level of our evolution as a winery, from impassioned garagistes to something bigger. One step, one piece of equipment, at a time. The Very Good Viticulturist Frank Lazarus is wiry and sun-tanned, with bright eyes, feathery gray hair, and a clear, dictatorial voice. In a previous life, he was a college professor, later working in collegiate administration. In his post-academic retirement, he’s a viticulturist in Virginia’s Loudoun County. He meticulously tends a few acres of Vidal and Chambourcin along with his daughter and son-in-law. His vineyard is a mote of quietude tucked back into the woods of rural Hamilton. Frank is our vineyard partner, without whom our wines wouldn’t exist. Our vineyard is still too immature to produce grapes fit for wine. We work with local growers for each vintage, but it’s been a tricky road to navigate. We’re too small to be worth most growers’ time, but big enough that we need a dedicated supplier to support our production needs. Our early vintages were a real scramble, scrounging together contracts for whatever hybrids hit the local grape market. These last few years, we’ve been able to work solely with Frank. It’s made a world of difference. Frank is old-school: kind and courteous, and diligent in communicating the harvest in every detail. From regular Brix updates to seasonal variations in grape disease activity and pests, he’s refreshingly organized and down-to-earth. Qualities that we very much appreciate in today’s wine industry. After he dropped off this year’s harvest, he told us that he was taking a trip to visit old friends in Ohio and beyond. “You know,” he said in his buoyant, professor’s voice, “These are old friends, some of whom I’ve known for many years. I’m not sure how many more times I’ll get to visit them.” He put his hands on his hips and looked from Andrew to me, and then with a chuckle said, “You might say this is a kind of farewell tour.” “Oh Frank…” I stuttered. And then… I didn’t know what to say. To me, Frank looked so strong, so vital, but suddenly, I could see how this trip must’ve felt from his perspective: the question of how many more cross-country travels lay ahead, how many more seasons friends ten years his senior would be around. I hope Frank is wrong about his farewell tour. I hope this is just one of many more trips he’ll take, just as I hope there are many more vintages from his vineyard to come. I handed him a ready bottle of botanical wine in gratitude for his work. We shook hands and hugged, and Frank packed up his truck to leave. By the time of this writing, Frank is back from his not-a-farewell tour. He’ll probably read this, so I just want to say here, Frank, thanks again for everything. We couldn’t do it without you. Happy holidays. We also couldn’t do it without you, dear reader (or listener!). If you’re reading this newsletter, you know our story. You know it hasn’t always been easy. There have been tough times, but there have been more beautiful times than I can ever begin to capture through the lens of this newsletter. Thanks for walking this path with us, for reading our story, and for helping us to remember, “you’re here.” Remember to be grateful for the little victories. Happy holidays. Until next year, Kelly & Andrew Feedback Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us? We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/arnito/avant-la-pluie License code: UVJ9JLMQX17JHUOX This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]

October Newsletter: Maximalist Terroir

You can listen to the podcast by clicking the playback above. You can also listen for free on Spotify or by adding our Substack podcast to your rss feed. This week’s newsletter is a snapshot of the grape harvest. We substantially increased our production volume this season, and we couldn’t have made it happen without the support of family and friends. It was truly a journey in companionship. With the harvest over, we’re left with a new understanding of how human intention impacts our idea of terroir, and what that means for the kind of wine we make. K Pressing Thoughts Crank! Crank! Crank! The greased neck of our basket press whines as Andrew yanks it round and round. A heavy base beat rattles the cement floor: my alternative electronica blaring from an overextended speaker. Red, raw vermouth gushes from the press spout into a catch basin below. There’s a morbid, skittering splash as it stains everything it touches (skin, clothing, concrete, hair) the darkest crimson. Next to him, a squat steel tank full of what appears to be blood-red bracken, stands open to the air. This is our vermouth in process: wine, brandy, and botanicals. No sweetening, no dilution. It looks like a horror show swamp, all shredded leaves and mangled sticks, tinged dark with a healthy dose of rosehips and sumac. I’m crouched beneath the wine press, watching the basins to make sure they don’t overflow. I swap the basins and transfer the wine to a larger steel tank. We’re not fully automated yet. Transfers like this still happen by hand. “It’s maximalist! Maximalist terroir!” Andrew shouts over the music. “What?” I yell back from the floor. “Maximalist terroir!” Andrew shouts again. I barely catch his voice through the screen of sounds around me. Andrew gives the arm of the press a good, long pull. Wine hisses through the holes of the metal basket. A spray of red dots fans all over everything within a three-foot radius. “Okay, muscles…take it easy,” I say. Andrew wrenches back the press arm, and the pressure lifts. The flow of wine through the spout slows to a thin stream. He looks at me sidelong and grins. “You were just talking about how vermouth is the most handled and human wine genre. It’s the opposite of traditional table wine. Traditional wine is about minimalist terroir…terroir expressed just by one plant in one place at one time. It is minimalist art. Vermouth is about maximalism: the terroir of many plants, each in its own time, still reflecting the place as a whole! It is maximalism!” This is what happens to Andrew when he works the press. Something in him wakes up, something brilliant and bright and full of ideas. “I like it,” I say, after a beat. “But, it’s a hard pitch. The wine industry is obsessed with the puritanical. Traditional table wine is defined by the untouched capture of pure, pristine terroir. This isn’t that.” Andrew tilts the press forward using his boot to prop it up on two legs. The basket shimmies precariously. Neon red juice dribbles through the press pan into the basin below. “That doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the norm is or what other people think. What we’re doing is important. There are multiple ways to understand a sense of place. Minimalism is one, ours is another.” I lean back against the horror-show vermouth tank, blades of homegrown wormwood jutting out of its surface like stalagmites. “So, what you’re saying is that there are plenty of good winemakers stewarding minimalist terroir. It’s no less honorable for us to capture it using the medium in which we’re fluent.” “Exactly!” Andrew lets the press fall backward onto all four feet. It screeches into position. He starts unscrewing the press head out of the basket, revealing a compacted cake of spent bitter botanicals: the concentrated remains of our vermouth. Working together, we slough the cake off the press pan and into a plastic bucket. Andrew hoists it up with both hands and slips out the winery door, heading to the compost. In his absence, the room feels strangely still. The music, suddenly too loud. The drip-drip of wine from the press pan, painfully obvious. The winery, which, when in action, feels so full of potential and rigor, suddenly feels like exactly what it is: a very big garage, overloaded with equipment, reaching (uninvited) above its pay grade. My thoughts slide sideways into self-doubt. What are we doing? Is this viable? Is this what success looks like? I shake my head to clear it. There isn’t time for thoughts like these. We aren’t like traditional wineries. Our work is different. Our path is different. The winery door creaks open. Andrew is back, empty bucket in hand. He smiles at me, flecks of sticky vermouth botanicals plastered to his cheeks and glasses. My self-doubt evaporates like fog beneath the sun. With him here, the room snaps back together. The winery is, once again, a winery. Everything is suddenly of a piece. Our conversation resumes without a hitch. “You should make this the next topic of the newsletter,” he says. “Maximalist terroir?” “Maximalist terroir.” My hesitation is brief. “Let’s do it.” Fingerprints Clang! A three-foot-diameter steel tank lid slips from my hands and lands resoundingly on the cement floor. I mutter a curse under my breath and crouch down to dust it off. There are four of us, each sitting in our fold-out farmers’ market chairs: Andrew and I, and two of our neighbors, Ann and Adam. Ann is about the same height as me (which means everything in the winery is just a little too high), but with an atmosphere that makes her feel about twice as tall as she is. In contrast, Adam is tall, with a presence that makes him less intimidating than he could be. For some reason, they find it worth their time to do monotonous manual labor in exchange for occasional free veggies. I think we’re getting the better end of the deal. Behind us is a triplet of shiny new variable capacity wine tanks. They arrived just two days before our scheduled grape harvest. Too much happens from this hip in this winery, but somehow we always pull it off. The tanks come pre-fab, but the lids are piecemeal: a center metal disc, an inflatable rubber gasket, a plastic hose, a hand pump, and a few hose clamps. If we want to crush the 3.1 tons of Vidal currently jammed into our walk-in tomorrow, we have to puzzle these lids together tonight. On the floor, Andrew and Adam wrestle the gaskets around the lips of the lids. Ann knots a tow string to the tops of each lid, while I clamp the pumps to the hose and the hose to the gaskets. When inflated, the pressure of the gasket against the tank holds the lid in place, and the lid can be raised to accommodate multiple tank volumes, minimizing the risk of oxygen exposure at low volume. We crack jokes, laugh, and finally manage to inflate one. Success! Everyone erupts into cheers. I look around the room: Adam kneeling in to help Ann with her knots, Andrew testing the seal on a freshly-clamped gasket pump, and me, slicing open a bag of lid fittings with an old harvest knife. I realize that this, too, is a kind of terroir, a humanized terroir. Laughter and cooperation, all written into the shape of the wine like fingerprints. It’s not a thing you can taste. It’s something you feel when you drink it. Terroir Looks Like This The following morning, I’m back in the winery. We’re mid-crush: the loud churn of our manual crusher/destemmer rattling the bones in my chest, the skid and thump of grape-filled lugs punctuating the air. Everything smells like fruit and leaves. The floor is slick with smashed grapes. Their hardened seeds and stems crunch under my juice-sticky boots. There’s been a character change: today, it’s Andrew’s parents, Kathy and Ron, and a family-friend-turned-adoptive-aunt, Susanna. They’re arranged in a semi-circle around a tower of lugs, meticulously sorting compromised berries from viable ones. In larger wineries, there are mechanized conveyor belts for this work. After destemming, the berries are shuffled down the belt in an even layer, manually sorted as they pass. It’s five times as fast as lug-sorting, but costs twenty times as much (at least). Needless to say, we have no belt. Crush days are brutal. Once harvested, the grapes cannot be held for more than a day or so before they start to break down. The longer they sit, the more unpredictable microbial activity enters the ferment. To complicate things further, we must finish crushing the grapes before our next round of CSA deliveries in three days. For those unfamiliar with our CSA [https://shop.artemisia.farm/collections/memberships] (Community Supported Agriculture) membership, we offer weekly home delivery of fresh vegetables from our farm and other local small farms nearby. It’s a pay-to-play eat-local model adapted for busy lifestyles, and the financial bedrock of our business. Andrew and I deliver the boxes ourselves. If we don’t finish the grapes before our scheduled deliveries, they’ll degrade beyond usability. The five of us have no choice but to process 6,200 pounds of fruit before then. The day begins in high spirits and peppered conversation. Kathy talks about a recent project with Rotary International, connecting students in need to academic scholarships. Susanna recalls her childhood in Austria and how it was so different from the American experience. Ron brings up the discord in Gaza, and the weight of the world beyond the winery sinks in for everyone. Andrew and I listen, and smile, and work the crusher and press. As the hours lag on, however, we grow quiet. Our feet hurt from standing on the cement floor, our backs and hips from lifting hundreds of grape lugs over and over, our arms from churning the crusher wheel around and around. The sun fades beneath the trees, and a chill snakes through the single winery window. There’s no space for levity at this hour. Only sheer determination. I have blisters on both hands from gripping the press handle and a string of bruises on my left arm where it bangs against the crusher base. My back is in a brace. My left wrist should probably be on one, too. A spray of grape juice just landed in my eyes, and it feels an awful lot like lemon juice. A small muscle in my right foot feels like it might be pulled…but I can’t stop. We started this together. We finish this together. If yesterday’s terroir looked like laughter, today’s looks like ragged breath and aching limbs. This isn’t the glorified garage I saw a few days ago. There’s no creeping imposter syndrome haunting my thoughts. This is a real winery. It’s our human grit that takes everything from possibility to reality. Eventually, at the eleventh hour of the third day, we sort, crush, and press our final lug. Our helpers leave for home to recover. Andrew and I will spend the night hours cleaning the winery and our equipment, tumbling into bed sometime around two in the morning. The next day, we will pack and deliver boxes of vegetables to our CSA members as if nothing had happened at all. Notes to the Universe The Merriam-Webster definition of terroir is “The combination of factors including soil, climate, and sunlight that gives wine grapes their distinctive character.” We propose a different kind of terroir, one of soil and sunlight, yes, but also of people, plants, and time. Grape skins continue to breathe well after harvesting. They remain permeable to the air quality of our little walk-in, and to the ambient yeasts and microbes of our garage-winery. But perhaps, just maybe, they remain receptive to delight and desperation, to ease and resolve. Whatever energetics or aura or magic humans bring to the winery, maybe they leave a little bit of that sparkle on the grapes, too. If that’s true of grapes, then why not the wormwood and rosehips from our garden, or the hickory bark from the nearby hills, or the wild persimmon from the farm down the road? What glimmers of our passing echo in the tissues of these plants? What non-human life has left its unseen mark before us? Nature is inherently maximalist. From ecosystems to star systems, it is an ever-changing, always-duplicating abundance of failsafes, a scale of checks and balances that ensures its own continuity. The terroir we bottle, one of grapes and bitter herbs, and aromatic leaves, of the seen human and the unseen nonhuman, is a small homage to the multiplicity around us. Just a small note of thanks left by two little primates on a tiny rock, racing around a giant ball of plasma in the vast darkness of the abyss. …and that brings us to the end of this note, the one I’ve written for you. Until next time, Kelly & Andrew Post Script If the idea of bottling notes of gratitude to the inclusive terroir of the universe appeals to you, I’d suggest taking a peek at our Wine Club [https://shop.artemisia.farm/pages/wineclub]. It’s a twice-yearly drop of our most seasonal aperitifs. Each release comes with production information for the bottles included, as well as recipe cards created by yours truly. Our autumn collection launches in early November. Check it out. K Feedback Community is built when we are in conversation with each other. Was there something you loved in this month’s newsletter? Or hated? Do you have a question about something we said, or a response to us? We want to hear from you! Comment using the button below or email us at contact@artemisia.farm [contact@artemisia.farm?subject=Newsletter%20feedback]. Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/arnito/avant-la-pluie License code: RAGPKMRXHTTJBPPF This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com [https://artemisiafarmandvineyard.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1]