In 1979 I bought west-side ground nobody wanted because it carried no water rights, and I told the bank I'd dry-farm it out of pure spite. I wanted to see how far Grenache roots would travel if I never gave them a drop.
Visitors always asked where the irrigation lines were, and I'd point at thirty feet of dirt and tell them that was it. Most laughed the first time and believed me by the second glass, once they'd tasted what those roots found down there.
Côte Ouest — grenache from the smallest, most stubborn lots, the ones that made me argue out loud with a hillside.
One October lunch under the oak, a hawk dropped a dead rabbit onto the table between the bread and the Grenache, certain nobody would notice. My daughter was six at the time. Forty years on, it's still the best harvest story in the family.
The view west at seven o'clock, the oak, the well — the things that don't fit in a bottle. If a few hundred bottles keep saying our name quietly for a few more years, that's more than most vineyards get.
