This will be brief; think of it as the abstract of a much longer discussion. After all, the point of this email is to announce and enflame your for our release. In order to do this,  it is right to share these thoughts with you.

Alex and Brenna and I began working together in 2012; Dani joined us in 2014. In 2012, we harvested 2 tons of white fruit for every ton of red. And some of the red fruit, we made into white wine anyway. Sometime in the Summer of 2014, I thought: we should make a lot of red wine. We have great vineyards available to us, the fruit is cheap, and we can sell the wine. So I bought a shitload of Cabernet, and more Petite Sirah than ever. In 2014, we brought in one ton of red for every ton of white, even including what we harvested for Blowout. If you exclude Blowout, we had become a red wine winery.

What do we love to do? Brenna runs the presses to make white wine with absolute focus and devotion. The quality of the juice that she extracts from the fruit is, without exception, superb. When we brought Dani into the winery and tried to introduce him to the thinking of the Project, we spent a late afternoon tasting white fermentations together and looking deeply into the effects of the yeast on each one. When Alex found a new vineyard for us last year and I said: "do what you want with it, it is yours," he took magnificent Old Vine Zinfandel and made a stunning Cerasuolo from it. A wine that looks a light and bright cherry red, but tastes and feels like white wine in the mouth.

What we love to do is make white wine. Sometimes the two activities of making red and white wines seem as different to me as whales and sharks are—we might confuse them, group them together, because, after all, they both live in the water and share many habits, structures and activities. There is something lax and thoughtless about the expectation that a given winery or winemaker will make both red and white wines. The skins are everything: to make wine with the skins, as you must do to make red wine, is to commit yourself to a different set of tasks, and a different biology, in the winery, and a completely different set of flavors and aromas in the finished bottle. I realized only a few days ago that changes we have made recently in our red-wine protocols simply bring the two activities closer and closer together, as if we were seeking to elide the differences between the two … Four years ago, we would return to the winery in the middle of the night to make sure that every red wine was punched down every four hours; now, we follow the “Courier Protocol,” and aim never to touch the caps, but to leave the skins floating above the wine as it ferments.

This has great implications for the shape of the winery. Already, in 2015, we made only a third as much red wine as we did in 2014; in 2016, we will refine further. In the future: only small or tiny quantities of very special wines, most of them white in color or at least in spirit—and Blowout, a very different adventure that amuses and delights us.