French winemakers use the term élevage (from élever, meaning "to bring up") in their winemaking to describe the care involved in guiding a wine through its evolution towards maturity. Although there is no direct translation in English, we like this term because it reflects the ideal we believe to be the ultimate responsibility of a winemaker. Winemaking begins in the vineyard. It is our responsibility as winemakers to bring each wine up to what the vineyard ultimately has determined it can be.
To respect a wine's attributes and potential, we believe that it should be made slowly, with as little intervention as possible, using gentle, non-mechanized techniques. These techniques include harvesting and sorting clusters by hand, fermenting red wines in small lots and white wines in individual barrels, punching down by hand, moving wine primarily with gravity, and minimizing or eliminating fining and filtering. We think these are important considerations for thoughtful, gentle winemaking.
Although our fundamentals remain largely consistent from vintage to vintage, each vintage provides an opportunity to look at familiar vineyards through the lens of what's happened in the vineyard that year, and in some cases to explore the potential of new vineyards. In every vintage, we walk our vineyards many times in order to understand the defining attributes to project in our wines. In the end, when we say each wine must reflect the vineyard from which it came, what we really mean to say is that each must reflect the vineyard at that specific point in time.