He just came in and did the same thing every day, all day in the same vessel.
It would be, I think, I think over time it might feel like a job.
It's that ability to get creative and to play and to experiment and be willing to take the
responsibility that says, this may not turn out good.
And having the opportunity to see what comes out of it, you know, a lot of times I find
that people in this business do things because that's the way they've always done it, that's
because someone else is doing it that way or because that's what they think they're
supposed to do.
But yet, I always want to question why.
In the beginning, it was like this thing, this label, this name that was very separate
and I think in the last couple of years especially, I'm becoming it as much as it's become me.
It's not only a noun, it's become an adjective and a verb.
It's almost like the F word in that way.
It's the female version of a desperado, which I don't even know if that's a real actual
Spanish word, but in our society it means someone that is an outlaw, an outlier, someone
that marches to the beat of their own drum.
And I think in creating this brand and this name, you know, I think we try to embody that
idea and also to really embody the masculine and the feminine.
And that, I think, comes through in the wines and in the labels and the design and everything
that goes along with it.
You know, my parents weren't in the service, they weren't gypsies, they just like to move.
And so from the time I was very small, we traveled a lot.
And I have done that as well as an adult, but I always had these certain things that
were stable.
My grandmother was one of them.
I always went to see her no matter where she was, no matter where I was.
She was this kind of stable rock in my life.
And so perhaps I've always been looking for, you know, the ability to be free and to travel
and to be a free spirit and also looking for that stability at the same time.
And I think that's, you know, one thing that perhaps this gives me as well.
It's like, you see it like in music and you see it like in, I want to say in cooking,
not as much in baking, but in cooking in music.
And it's just those, if you don't understand the science of the things that are happening,
you cannot, you cannot perfect it as an art.
Perfect example.
Like when Velia gets in Sol Blanc from one vineyard, she says, hey, you know what?
I'm going to take some of this and stick it in Amphora, take some of it and stick it in
stainless steel.
I'm going to go neutral oak.
I'm going to go new oak and I'm going to go acacia wood and I'm going to see what happens.
And then afterwards, just because I want to, I'm going to, I'm going to bottle them all
separately.
And so when it's, it's time to start playing around with things with different oak profiles,
with different means of fermentation, with extended fermentations, with extended macerations
and those sort of things and pressing early and pressing late and, and techniques to play
around with, it's cool because it's like, it doesn't, it's not cookie cutter anymore.
You know, it's, we can, we can try new things and we can play with new things and we can
see how they work and we can do controlled experiments and if it works this year, we'll
do it again next year and, and kind of, kind of understanding the science behind those
things is able to let us express ourselves as artists.
So these three vessels that you have here are terracotta emphora and they are a very
old and ancient way of making wine.
In fact, I believe it's the first way that wine was made was in terracotta emphora back
in Mesopotamian times, buried in the ground.
There are so many people that make wine, hundreds of thousands of wineries and producers and
everyone is looking to reinvent a wheel that really can't be reinvented.
It's wine, it's fermentation, it's very simple.
You take fruit, you put it inside some sort of vessel, the wine, the fruit ferments and
then the wine is done.
So there's really, it's hard to set yourself apart and the thing that I love about these
is not a lot of people are using them and it provides an opportunity to try something
a little bit different.
This comes from a place where they were making wine since we were on all fours.
Like this is older than us, it's bigger than us and it will outlive us.
We didn't invent this, we're just trying to, we're just trying to grasp a little piece
of it, hold on for dear life and enjoy the hell out of it.
I think it's one part magic, I think it's one part just instinct or intuition and I
think the rest is just the site.
You know, you look at the farming, you look at the soil, you look at the age of the vines,
the canopy, you look at the fruit, you look at the climate, you look at all that stuff
but I think it's just more of a gut feeling, just feels right or it doesn't.
It has to taste good.
It has to feel right, you know, from the fruit through the fermentation, you know, all the
way through the life of its barrel and when you blend it and go into a bottle, you know,
you have to go with your gut and what tastes good.
Like in any profession, you have people that learn from doing and people that learn from
going to school and one isn't any better than the other, they're just very different approaches
to winemaking and my entire adult life has been in the wine business, it's been drinking
and it's been in sales and when I moved to Paso eight years ago with the intention of
doing production, I feel like that's a pretty good background.
It's not the most technical, it's not always the most chemically savvy but you learn that
stuff as you go.
I was lucky enough to be able to live on a vineyard that I bought fruit from since 07
and it's out on the east side of Paso and it's one of the more topographically interesting
and just really beautiful vineyard and learned the kind of really rough and dirty aspects
of making wine and learning all the other sides of this business too, you know, from
the accounting to the compliance to the branding and like everything that it took to really
make a successful brand and to really get to know the Central Coast too and all the
diversity of all the different areas and you see such a diversity of grapes that are grown
here, there's so many different varietals that people are trying to see what works and
what works well and it was really grown heavy for many years, that's what the Central Coast
is known for but it's certainly not the only thing here and it's certainly not in my opinion
even necessarily the best, you know, I think they rock Italian varietals and Bordeaux varietals
and there's so many amazing, like you can grow anything here.
It's amazing, you know, it is like the Wild Wild West, you know, people use that analogy
a lot and it's true, so.
I think if you look at the labels, I think that's the most obvious visual.
And you know, there's so many things in there that are so incredibly feminine, the dresses
and the naked women, then you have this incredibly masculine side which these very disparate
backgrounds, these photos that are very industrial or very harsh or they don't at all go with
a naked beautiful woman or this beautiful dress and then you have this font that's very old
and you know, taken from a Mexican flyer back in the 1800s or whatever and the whole label
to me is very like Yin Yang, it's very masculine feminine and I think the brand kind of is
like that too for me and that's kind of embodies me as well.
It's that kind of like dark, inappropriate joke, like oops, I said that in front of
people at the dinner party kind of feeling which is really fun and naughty, like you
didn't have sex in public but you could have and I think that everyone loves a little bit
of that side and to me one of the things about owning a brand is I can do whatever I want.
I think if you talk to someone that does a job after you know two or ten or twenty years
they're tired of it but in this career it's a lifestyle, you know people are in line and
wine for their lives. I think you know if you see something that's incredibly beautiful
or delicious or thought provoking, I don't know that your first thought is I want to
redo that or I want to do it differently, it's that oh my god that's amazing, I want
to try that and so it was never the effort to do something different or better, it was
just I want to do it, I want to try that, I want to do it myself and get my own hands
ready. It gets in your blood and it's your lifestyle.
