Brenna, Alex, and I completed the adjudication and blending of these wines about a week ago. We could hardly have been happier. I just this moment (at noon on July 3), I have just finished writing the notes on the wines below. I am struck—even after the days and months and years that we have spent making these wines, even after living with some of them through two and even three harvests—I am struck by how many amazing wines there are in this release. There are triumphant versions of wines that you know well (The Prince!), but also several wines that have never appeared before—a Pinot Noir, a reserve wine from Wolfskill, a red wine from 110 year old vines in Lodi … I am rather ebullient.

We were so fortunate last year: we got 2 tons of Verdelho from Lost Slough, and it never ripened better. The lead-up to harvest was early—but slow, graceful, unhurried. The fruit was in perfect balance on the vines, and well shaded, but not hidden, by the canopy. We could wait for perfect ripeness and made many visits to the Delta to marvel at the dignity of the vineyard. The quality of the fruit allowed us to make this special wine this year for the first time since 2009. It bears the same name as a blended wine that we released last year; you will have to pardon me for the confusion. This is the ORIGINAL Gemella; 100% Verdelho from Lost Slough; fermented and aged in barrel for one year on its lees. The wine is deep, musky, and perfumed. Not subtle, but delightful. It is such a pleasure to release this wine again.

This was another fantastic year for Farina, the rocky, east-facing Sauvignon Blanc vineyard high up on Sonoma Mountain. The vineyard produced a third more fruit than it normally does—and we were offered more rows by Joe Votek, who farms it. This allowed us to make the most LSB that we have ever made—and to make Camilla for the first time since 2007. For reasons that I can barely divine, this wine often takes a year to ferment; sometimes more. We bottled the dry barrels of the wine as LSB in March, and have let the remaining barrels finish fermentation gently. They are now gradually reaching completion; the additional months in barrel and on the lees changes the character of the wine substantially: this wine is darker and less fresh than LSB, more broad, less etched. I have studied the 2007 wines carefully; they age better than the fresher LSB; in some ways, they take longer to show themselves.

It is hard to speak about this. I will limit myself to good news: our farming of the vineyard was never more successful, we somehow managed to win 70 gallons of juice from the old Sauvignon Blanc vines in their last year. This was our second biggest harvest of Glos ever. The wine is deep and noble. We fermented and aged all of it in a single 70 gallon stainless barrel; the wine, sealed off from the atmosphere, has gone through many twists and turns and in the end will be darker, deeper, and more structured than any previous vintage of Glos. We are reserving half of the vintage for magnums and other large format bottles.

We hit superb heights with our red wine from this 140 year-old vineyard in 2012. Our only hope in 2014 was to approach this success. We can only thank Kevin Phillips' farming, and (even more propitious) growing conditions in 2014—the 2013 vintage is even better. Delicate, perfumed, focused, with great length. The nobility of Cinsault founded on ancient vines own-rooted in beautiful, sandy Lodi soil.

The fruit from the Prince's section of Farina Sauvignon Blanc has never been richer or ripened with more leisurely pace. It is as if we were waiting for the berries to blind us with their complexity in 2013: they ripened early and deepened in the cool, dry air of mid-Fall, without adding sugar. Still somewhat abashed by the ferocity of the 100% whole-cluster wine that we had just bottled from 2012, I decided to back off the stem inclusion to 80%; but we made every fermentation the same: all 80% whole cluster. Brenna performed foot-treading at most once a day; we kept the fermentations cold, and aimed for subtle, not forceful, extraction. We are rewarded with a wine that is dark like the 2009, but the opposite of fierce: powerful, of course, but deeply subtle, long, evanescent.

We were so fortunate in 2012: our rows in this crazy Chardonnay rockgarden yielded twice as much fruit as they did in 2011: 1.77 tons—less than 2 tons per acre. We have decided to denominate this wine anew with this release. Here is the story: Steve Matthiasson farms this vineyard in conjunction with the Idell familiy, who own the land. They have wanted to call the vineyard "Michael Mara" from the beginning, in honor of their children. I had said, "Fuck that; I am calling it after Steve, who created the vineyard, farms it, and brought me into it." I was happy with this position, until Alex, Brenna, and I went to a tasting hosted by the Idells at the vineyard this spring. Steve now doles out fruit to about 8 different winemakers. All of them were present, with samples of their 2012 and 2013 wines. We tasted everything, and were overwhelmed with the way that the site—a very young vineyard—completely trumped the strategies and intentions and practices of the many different winemakers and wineries. Even in such immature wines, the vineyard shone through, and proclaimed itself not just a powerful site, but a grand one. All of us felt bound together by the honor and privilege of working with the vineyard, and from that moment on, it felt only right to use the same name as the other wineries, so that you could compare our work, and see the vineyard through it. And it is a pleasure to respect the wishes of the family who were partners in making this amazing thing possible.

The wine is less ripe and rich than the sun-drenched 2011 vintage, and not as funky and Jurassic as the 2010. The wine was affected by flor during its maturation in barrel, but is much more like one of Ganevat's vins ouillés, or a very rich and surprising Meursault.The most striking feature of the vineyard is its ability to convey minerality and ripeness at once. The wine is stony and strutured to the highest degree.

This is our greatest experiment in years. Two things are behind it: our recent success with 1MN has given us the confidence to try our hands with some other grapes that (seem to us) to demand gentle and subtle treatment. It is part of our learning to move beyond the somewhat monstrous and exuberant reds that we are sort of good at. The second factor was Bill Brosseau offering us some fruit from the Antle Vineyard, and the recollection that Robert Dentice had become interested in the vineyard a few years before. Antle is an extremely interesting property in the Chalone appellation in the Gavilan mountains, very high up—a kind of rolling desert a few thousand feet above the valley floor, and directly facing the Pacific. The soils are marine in origin and really wel drained, all of the vineyards slope, the vines are old and embedded in struggle. We could not resist.

Our first effort is very good. It is masculine, with deep earthiness and a nearly rough muscularity. There is no fruitiness or any form of sweetness—this was not our aim. The wine is subtle for all of its strength, and complex, yet it is neither as delicate as we would have liked, nor as simply expressive. It is somewhat brooding. I know so little about Pinot Noir—I know that there are some excellent wines that have the same brooding character. Is this wine excellent? Is the vineyard by nature muscular and brooding? It is too early for us to tell, but we are going to devote ourselves to making something excellent from this very compelling site.

(I have about a week to get a name and a label design the printers. I am thinking of something from the Iliad. This site is more Homeric than any I have worked with!)

This wine marks another moment of great excitement for us. We have been working with Tegan Passalacqua's Kirschenmann vineyard, situated in a cool bend in the Mokelumne in Lodi, since he bought it in 2012—but he had no red fruit for us the first year. 2013 was the first year that he could get us some of the Zinfandel, planted in 1915, for which he bought the vineyard. We were honored and but also felt humility and caution in our breasts as we received the fruit. We had to do well with this.

We put the fruit directly, without destemming, into two puncheons, with the same protocol in mind that we use for 1MN—emphasizing gentleness and subtlety. One puncheon fermented superbly and has produced a beautiful wine, everything that we wanted; the other is recalcitrant and somewhat ungainly. We will bottle only the first. Severity is everything.

"psamathos" is the Homeric word for "sand"—especially for grains of sand, used as a metaphor for an innumerable multitude. It is a beautiful word, and we wanted to add it to the name of this wine to signify the very special soil that determines the character of the grapes.

We have sustained the excellent decision that we made in 2012 to base this wine on two Suisun Valley vineyards farmed by Steve Tenbrink. This year, we took a step to make the wine even more interesting: most of the wine is the result of cofermentation of Petite Sirah and Cabernet, not blending. There is also Hudson Syrah cofermented with the Suisun grapes. The final wine is about 50% Petite Sirah, 43% Cabernet, and 7% Syrah. The wine is more burly than the delicate 2011 and a little more muscular but also more layered and complex than the elegantly balanced 2012. We are delighted.

You will recall the difficulties we had with our red wine fermentations at the end of harvest in 2012—nearly every stuck, slammed to a biological halt, and remained unmoving through the summer of 2013. We lost the possibility of making a first quality 2012 Chuy and 2012 Pergamos—our two most prestigious and precious red wines. In 2013, we used very small portions of healthy red fermentations to restart the stuck 2012 reds and have had nearly complete success. We saved almost all of the Chuy and all of the Pergamos—but the price is that we have had to blend them together, and blend them with about 5% 2013 wine. Thus this red wine—"Anastasis" is ancient greek for "resurrection." Each one of the 2012 refermentations got new names in 2013; Anastasis, Walking Dead, Romero, DMZ … This is the most successful, worthy of being bottled on its own. It is about 50% Chuy Cab, 40% Vanderkous Merlot, and 10% Wolfskill Cab.

This is a powerful red wine made from partially desiccated Petite Sirah from Steve Tenbrink's vineyard in Suisun Valley. In order to make this wine, we had to cull the very small number of intact clusters from the nearly totally botrytis-affected harvest of 2011. All of the remaining fruit went into the beautiful and amazing floating-cap fermented Gardens of Babylon; we made no Bricco that year. The 1000 lbs or so of clean fruit that we scavenged for Babylon went into a single puncheon, stems and all. We somehow achieved a cold soak of more than a week, which imbued the final wine with a deep foundation of fruit. The fermentation, with foot-treading four times per day, took nearly a month. Even at its birth, the wine was beautiful, rich, and pure. It has been in barrel for 3 years without topping or SO2. The wine is big and powerful—somewhat Amarone-like, as always—but is also marked by the graceful delicacy of the vintage.

The Fall of 2012 was glorious in Lee Hudson's Widowmaker Syrah block. The catastrophe of 2011 was still present in everyone's imagination in September 2012, as the fruit ripened early, and in perfect conditions of dry, cool air. The wines that we made from it are both intense and animal, with Androkteinos showing the complexity that we have only found recently in the Golgotha, from the higher, northern section of the rows. 2012 is so good that Androkteinos equals Golgotha from previous years, and the Golgotha soars. Gologotha is dense but graceful and perfumed, like the Androkteinos—but it is darker and deeper, even more intense. It shows the whole-cluster character more clearly, and, for all its intensity, it is the most classical Gologotha we have made.

For some reason, nearly every fermentation from this vineyard became slow or stalled in 2012, yet every single one eventually finished on its own. The wine that went into Golgotha came not only from the best section of the vineyard, but from one of the best fermentations. Two thirds of it came from a puncheon named by Alex Kongsgaard for George Frederick "Buzz" Beurling, a great Canadian RAF fighter ace of the Second World War; a third came from another fermentation, named by Alex for Bucephalus, the war horse of Alexander the Great.

The source of this wine is the old vine, dry-farmed, Cabernet that Steve Tenbrink farms on a hillside in Suisun Valley. The vineyard somehow has the character to recapture the more delicate and herbal Napa benchland wines of the 70s; our winemaking emphasizes this, rather than richness or extraction. We are honored and delighted to be working with this fruit.

The reserve wine is a blend of puncheon fermentation, with some whole cluster and foot-treading, and wine from the larger wooden tank, pumped over once or twice per day. All of the wine was selected for the riserva during the summer of 2013, and aged separately in in neutral oak for nearly two years. The wine has more in common with Nebbiolo than most contemporary Cabernet; it is light, even filigreed, and achieves a degree of transparency uncommon in such red wines. Very exciting.