In ancient Rome, decisions of consequence required the gods to weigh in. But even then, the gods were… a little slow on the uptake. Second-best messengers: birds.

Here’s how it worked. A priest—an augur—would climb a hillside and watch the sky in a ritual called taking the auspices. Certain birds mattered: hawks, vultures, eagles. From the number of birds to the direction of their flight to the precision of their timing, everything was a sign and read as language.

In The Aeneid, twelve eagles appear to affirm Romulus’s fate as Rome’s founder. In Livy’s History of Rome, when a young shepherd asks the gods to confirm his prophetic gift, a bird lands on his left, aka the “good” side. The king takes it as enough.

The world is full of signs, if you want to see them. The message arrives. The sky speaks. The bird crosses your path. The meaning lives in how you choose to interpret them.

I keep thinking about that augur on his hill (barefoot, surely? I cannot imagine shoes). Even in ancient Rome, before he had to check his Instagram DMs or get a constant drip of horrifying news alerts, he was maybe the only person willing to pause long enough to receive what comes.

People ask me sometimes to explain this work; what happens here, what it is we actually do. And while I can offer the words, the process, the metrics—I can talk about elevation and pH and fermentation kinetics—there’s always a part I can’t quite describe. Sometimes it just…feels right. A harmony reveals itself and all we can do is nod and follow.

These two wines emerged in exactly that way. Beautiful on their own, but not easy to place. They didn’t belong until they did, to each other. And when that happened, it wasn’t invention, it was recognition.

We named them Nuntius and Litera. The messenger, and the message. Signs made visible because we allowed for the possibility that something we hadn’t planned might show up.

To let something be meaningful is a choice. The shape of a hawk looping, creating patterns overhead. A line you scribbled in the margin of a book four years ago that somehow knew more than you did when you wrote it. A wine that speaks a new version of a familiar language.

We don’t control what appears. We only get to decide how we see it. And if we’re paying attention…sometimes, we get to send a message back.

~ Maggie