I’m a little obsessed with rosé. I collect as much rosé as I do white Burgundy, as champagne. But if you look at the collection, there’s a lot of wine but from only a small handful of producers. That’s because there are very few producers in the world who make a pink wine with the same level of intention and integrity as the greatest white wines and red wines in the world (Lopez de Heredia, Valentini, Clos Cibonne, Chateau Simone….) Most often, rosé is a by-product of red winemaking. A percentage of juice is bled from a red wine tank within the first few hours to concentrate the resultant red wine. Or sometimes it’s the best result from a challenging site; the blocks not suited for fine wine production are relegated to rosé. They’re cropped out higher, picked earlier, farmed less demandingly; all to make them fit what we little we expect of rosé. Both make easy, refreshing, quaffable pink wines. And it’s not as though I don’t drink wines made in exactly that way. I do. Those wines are temporal, of a moment; the full sun, the out of doors, after exertion, before dinner. They’re like groceries: you buy them, drink them, and buy some more all summer long. And they don’t age well but who cares? That’s not the point. If winemaking was a reasonable place for eclecticism, I would make a rosé like that too. But, at least from my point of view, it’s not. The time-horizon on wine(making) is so long. You get to make each choice, only once, annually. I have, perhaps, twenty or twenty-five chances to make something meaningful in my life and with such limited time and consequence, I can’t choose the frivolous or the temporal. We have to make things that matter.

There are some rosés, like the ones mentioned above, that live a whole different life altogether. Not only wildly age-worthy but, in some cases, well-aged even before release. And those wines kill me. Drinking those wines is like drinking white wine with the soul of red wine. They take a place in the winemaking canon and on the table that is dramatically different from everything else around. With this one life and this little time, I wanted to try to make something like that.

Often referred to as the Food of Angels, the Angelicall Stone was the goal above all goals for the alchemist. It could not be seen, felt, or weighed; only tasted. We take this name and the image of the alchemist’s laboratory to represent our most experimental wine.

Typically, rosé is made in one of two ways: either it is pressed directly like a white wine or bled from a fermenter destined for red wine during the first twenty-four hours. At an average of seven days on the skins, ours is not rosé, in a conventional sense, but neither is it a red wine. We are pulling the wine as far as we can through fermentation, stopping on the verge of tannic extraction. We wait until the aromatics of each fermentation reach a peak of expression, filling the room with perfume, before siphoning the juice from the fermenters; filling the barrels and amphorae in which the wine will finish its fermentation and rest, sur lie, for one year.