As the old saying goes: "you’ll find the answers if you know where to look." 

Everything in life boils down to this and grapes and wine are no different. The sites tell you that they are good for vines, the rock formations, the soil structure, the aspect, amount of sun and rain it gets. Just by digging a hole we can learn a lot about what the soil is telling us and what varieties will thrive and how best to plant and grow. By looking and figuring out what the land wants and can support, we find the best sites to grow our grapes.

The vines tell you how they want to be pruned; the evidence is left there from last year. They grow and ask for water, nutrients, and simple adjustments. If you think about it, a vine wants to produce the best fruit so that it can seed another vine. It does this by making the tastiest berries so that the bird (our hand-harvesters) will come and choose it and take the seed away to create a new vine (or Gordenker wines). We help the vine on its quest to be the best by looking at the signs it shows us and interpreting what it wants and needs. Nature does the best job of creating and all we need to do is help out when it needs it.

wonderful Gordenker wine

The wine is the same, the fruit comes in and we assess it and let it follow its own path to becoming the wonderful Gordenker wine. Smelling and tasting the grapes and wine all tell us what will be best for it and we simply follow what the wine wants. Each year, site and grape is different so we have to treat them all individually until they are ready to become the wine that we saw back when we chose the site, simply by following the markers, we can find the answers of how best to express our sites, vines and wine.