How Do You Find a Female Winemaker?

She Found Us!

…and spearheaded our journey into sparkling wines.

 

 

I’ll never forget the day (December 2, 2010) when Ashley said, “I would like to be your winemaker.” I was honored and thrilled to hear her question and knew my husband Mike would feel the same. We had been working with Ashley in her role as assistant winemaker for several years at the winery where we custom crush our grapes. Custom crush refers to making wine in a facility with equipment and resources provided by the facility under the direction of your own winemaker. It’s a great way to make wine without the overhead and capital investment of a dedicated winery.

Ashley had decided to strike out on her own and become a consulting winemaker so she would have more flexibility to start a family. She identified us as potential clients because she liked the quality of our fruit, both from our own estate and that purchased from our Dry Creek Valley neighbors, and she enjoyed working with us – go figure! We didn’t hesitate to say “Yes” because we felt the same way about her.

Little did we know that when Ashley joined us, we wouldn’t just get an amazing female winemaker, we would also get two delightful children in training. From the time her kids were very little we would see her walking our vineyards holding one by the hand with the other in a baby sling. They have grown up in the vineyards and have become experts in knowing when to pick. Ashley brings her talent and unbridled enthusiasm to everything she does, from leading our shift in focus to Rhône varietals and sparkling wines, to being an incredible mother, gardener, and friend.

On the Sparkling Wine Trail in Sonoma

How Does Amista Make Sparkling Wine?

Do you know how sparkling wine is made?  Our friends at the Winegrowers of Dry Creek Valley created a brief and informative explanation. Best of all, they featured a beautiful photo of our Blanc de Blanc!

Check out their Intro to Sparkling Wine in the Dry Creek Valley blog.

 

Sustainability in Action at Amista

"The artisan, family-owned winery and beautiful, estate vineyards of Amista Vineyards showcase the gorgeous grapes of Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley. Set off on a self-guided Vineyard Adventure Walk and you’ll learn more about grapes behind the award-winning wines and the extra care Amista dedicates to preserving its enveloping natural beauty, including efforts to restore the natural fish habitat in the onsite Dry Creek," wrties Amy Bizzari in Upscale Living Magazine. 

Find out more about Sustainabilty in Action at Amista Vineyards and neighboring wineries.

5 Fabulous Pairings with Sparkling Syrah

I’ve had such fun learning to pair wine and food

Impress your friends with these great pairings!

 

Our Sparkling Syrah is a Rosé. I call it “joy in a bottle” because its shimmering cranberry color makes it festive. When we first launched Amista Vineyards, the only thing I knew about pairings was that Cab was good with steak. Then we started making Sparkling Syrah! You might be surprised how versatile this wine is and how much fun it is to try it with a wide variety of foods. Here are five of our favorites.

1. Thanksgiving. There are so many assorted flavors on the Thanksgiving table, it’s hard to find a wine that works. Enter Sparkling Syrah! Because it spends several hours on the skins, it has added heft that enables it to work with the bigger flavors of roast turkey and stuffing. At the same time, its fruit characteristics pair well with the cranberries and sweet potatoes. The bubbles cleanse the palate and the wine’s effervescence is a welcome counterpoint to the richness of the Thanksgiving feast. Added bonus – the brilliant color turns any meal into a celebration.But don't take my word for it. It comes highly recommended by the Jetsetting Fashionista.

2. Taco Salad. This is a casual summer meal for us. The combination of spicy taco meat coupled with garden fresh lettuce, tomatoes and cilantro makes this a challenging pairing. Sparkling Syrah comes to the rescue. Plus, it is so refreshing on a warm summer evening.

3. Cranberry Brie Phyllo Cups. This is a delicious and beautiful appetizer that is spectacular with Sparkling Syrah. The tartness of the cranberries, the creamy brie, and the crunchy phyllo cup come together with the Sparkling Syrah and everything pops! This easy appetizer is sure to impress your friends.

4. Hot and Spicy Baked Crab is a favorite of our winemaker, Ashley Herzberg. It has long been a tradition on Christmas Eve and serving it with our Sparkling Syrah has become her family’s new tradition. In fact, Sparkling Syrah is a fabulous choice with all kinds of spicy cuisines, like Thai, Szechuan, and Indian dishes.

5. Panna Cotta with Raspberry Coulis. We served this at one of our annual Sparkling Holiday Soirees and it was a homerun! The Sparkling Syrah was dazzling with the tart, sweetness of the raspberry coulis and the silky panna cotta.

Have fun pairing this unusual bubbly with your favorite dishes. I’d love to hear what you discover.

 

---

 

Why A Blog?

As a woman winery owner, I have been asked lots of questions about what it’s like to be in the wine business and live the wine country life after spending decades in the corporate world. Here are my stories about the wonderful world of sparkling wines – which I love – and owning a vineyard in Dry Creek Valley. I am grateful I get to live near the charming town of Healdsburg, California, in the heart of Sonoma Wine Country. As with any endeavor, there are glorious moments and difficult moments. For me, each of them brings new discoveries and learning, which is why I call them “sparkling moments”.

About Me

I started with an education in psychology - pretty much useless for getting a job - which led me to explore breakthrough leadership and a career as an executive in several global corporations. Following my corporate career, I became an executive coach helping CEOs and their teams build the leadership skills they need to achieve top performance.

Getting into the wine business wasn’t exactly a plan. As I look back, I believe it was a dream that my husband Mike and I didn’t know we had and didn’t know we shared. When we started out together, we never knew we'd end up living in Sonoma's beautiful Dry Creek Valley surrounded by our own vineyards. From planting our first vineyard in Silicon Valley, to tasting our first “garage-made” wine out of the barrel with friends in our basement in New Jersey, to eventually moving to this beautiful property in the Dry Creek Valley, the creation of our winery, Amista Vineyards, unfolded over many years and in several locations.

Owning a winery has catapulted me into a leadership role that is both challenging and exhilarating. I love crafting our business strategy, meeting our guests, and nurturing the growth and development of our team. I also love living the wine country life – farm fresh foods, beautiful wines, good friends – all in a stunning setting surrounded by vineyards and rolling hills.

About Amista Vineyards

We are dedicated to crafting distinctive wines that inspire you to celebrate the special moments in life and experience the friendly spirit of wine country living. We are proud to produce the best sparkling wine and Rhône varietals in Sonoma wine country, the perfect collection of wines for making everyday moments special and special moments extraordinary.

We are Michael and Vicky Farrow, co-founders of Amista Vineyards. Since we released our first wine in 2005, our goal has been to provide an exceptional wine country experience of Sonoma County's Dry Creek Valley.  It is a dream come true to live in this special place and we’re excited to share it with you. We will remain small, and family operated, offering our wines through a personal connection with each guest, whether in person or on-line.

We are local. Our grapes come from our estate vineyards just outside the charming town of Healdsburg, California, and from our neighbors in Dry Creek Valley and Rockpile. We want to be able to walk the vineyards, taste the fruit and have a personal relationship with the people who grow our grapes.

We are sustainable. In August of 2018, our estate Morningsong Vineyards became Certified Sustainable by the California Sustainable Winegrowing Alliance.  This certification is only one part of our commitment to our land and people. We were part of project to restore the incredible beauty of Dry Creek and at the same time recreate a vibrant habitat for endangered Steelhead trout and Coho salmon. We built our tasting room with energy efficient insulated concrete forms (ICF's) and constructed a solar structure that powers the tasting room and vineyard irrigation. We believe a vital part of our business is to provide extraordinary learning experiences to people on our team who aspire to be leaders and innovators in the wine business and to impact others in lasting and significant ways.

We are friendly. Amista, loosely translated, means making friends in Spanish and we want your experience to be welcoming, engaging and fun. If you visit us in person, you can look forward to a friendly welcome in a beautiful setting surrounded by vineyards. We are also known as the best dog friendly winery in Healdsburg, California.

 

How do you Press Syrah in Your Garage?

With just a little pressing and a lot of cleaning!

…and it’s all faster with friends

 

 

Our dear friend, Juergen, was visiting from Germany and got roped into helping press the Syrah grapes for the first wine Mike made from our Healdsburg vineyard. The grapes were crushed and then sat on the skins for 10 days in our garage. We used a basket press (seen at the right of the photo above) loaned by one of our neighbors. The press extracts the juice from the crushed grapes leaving behind the skins and seeds. The grapes are pressed gently to avoid crushing the seeds and releasing undesirable tannins.

It’s strange that this step in the wine-making process is called pressing, when much less time is spent pressing and a lot more is spent washing barrels! The importance and amount of time spent on cleanliness in winemaking is often a surprise to beginning winemakers.

Mike and Juergen did a great job! This 2002 Syrah turned out to be delicious. It eventually came to be called Garage Syrah and was responsible for seducing us into starting a winery. Like most things, we just didn’t know it at the time!

Amista, Sonoma, Sustainable!

"Since 2013, Amista Vineyards in Dry Creek Valley has been working with the Sonoma County Water Agency to recreate a thriving habitat for endangered Steelhead trout and Coho salmon", writes Karin von Berg, Editor of Luxelife Magazine. Von Berg was a part of Sustainabiliy Camp, hosted by the Sonoma County Winegrowers, where participants saw first hand the many vineyards and wineries who are working to make the county a model of sustainability.

Read how Amista Vineyards and many of our neighbors are working to achieve the goal of 100% sustainability.

Amista Vineyards is Part of Sonoma's Goal to be 100% Sustainable

"Sonoma tends to operate much like its own planet...as pretty much everything you eat and drink here is grown off of the land within the county," writes Shauna Farnell about her recent visit. 

"Wander through the vineyards of Amista, Dry Creek Valley’s only producer of sparkling wine, and arrive at the actual Dry Creek. Amista has resting ponds for spawning salmon along their upstream journeys, and cover crops keep the soil healthy and foster microbial activity," adds Farnell.

Read all about Sonoma's - and Amista's - mission to become 100% sustainable on Matador Network.

 

How do you Punch Down Syrah in Your Garage?

Make Sure You Have Friends Visiting!

…because it's a lot easier and more fun!

 

 

Mike had harvested 3 tons of Syrah grapes from our Healdsburg vineyard, and they were soaking in bins in our garage to develop color and flavors. While the grapes are soaking, a cap of grape skins rises to the top of each bin. That cap needs to be “punched down” daily to reincorporate it with the juice. Punch down is hard work, which why it’s best to entice friends to help. Enter our long-time friends Meg and Dale who came to visit from our home state of Colorado.

Dale helped Mike 8 years earlier with punch downs in another garage at our home in Silicon Valley when Mike made his first wine from Cabernet grapes. They had just as much fun then as they did in their long-awaited encore performance! Meg and I once again made sure we had something else to do – shopping, lunch, sipping a glass of wine.

That’s probably why I didn’t recognize that Mike was becoming captivated with making wine and that we would eventually find ourselves in the wine business with our friends cheering us on every step of the way!

How do you Crush Syrah in Your Garage?

With Help from Family & Friends!

…and a little help from John Deere

 

 

We were finally able to move to our Healdsburg vineyard in June 2002. We had replaced half of the Chardonnay vines with Syrah in 2000 and the young vines were just starting to produce fruit. A true viticulturist would have advised dropping all the fruit and letting the vines mature another year. This is so the fruit will not compete with the vine reserves needed to develop the vines and root system. Well, Mike had other ideas. He wanted to MAKE WINE!

He harvested 3 tons – which sounded huge to me – to make wine in our garage. Mike’s brother Bob and wife Anne came to help. Our neighbors also came to lend a hand and loaned us a small crusher/destemmer. Having a machine that crushes the fruit and removes the stems in one step not only saved us a lot of time but also results in better wine by making sure all the stems are removed.

We learned right away that Healdsburg is a friendly place and neighbors are always willing to pitch in. The friendly spirit of Dry Creek Valley turned out to be one of the most wonderful aspects of living in this special place.