It only takes an hour or two at the blending table to realize that the tiniest addition to a wine will have a startlingly profound impact; a half a percent of this, two percent of that – a different wine altogether.

Yet how do we account for the additions to each barrel we make each week, long before we get to the blending table?

We harvest fruit from ten different vineyards, more than sixty different blocks. We siphon the wine from one barrel to top up the rest, pulling the bungs each week, refilling the barrels to replace the wine lost to slow evaporation through the staves. This can account for up to ten percent of the wine in the barrel during élevage; a quiet, weekly revolution.

And so we come to understand what more we’ve lost than wine.

Intimacy. We came to Antica Terra to learn and are learning, to pay attention, to write more of the story of this place to pass along to whomever comes next, our kids or yours, and their kids after that.

If, every week, we allow the wines to change how can we ever get to know them?

The inspiration came from Burgundy where small producers would have often only one barrel from a small plot of Grand Cru vines and couldn’t bear to top it up with village level wine. With nothing to break down for topping, they used small rocks to displace the wine, raise the level and eliminate the headspace in the barrel.

We park our cars at the No Parking sign and slip past the gate that reads No Entry. We walk along a riverbed and pick buckets of rocks from the clear, newly melted glacial runoff. The barrels topped with these rocks remain the only wine ever made purely and wholly from the Antica Terra vineyard.

Intimacy regained.