2021 Poison & the Antidote
We ship in quantities of 4, 6, 8 or 12 bottles. Flat rate shipping is $29 in BC and $35 for rest of Canada. Mix and match is totally cool.
“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” ~ Rumi
This is the first wine produced from vines we planted and grew ourselves on our home vineyard site in Okanagan Falls, BC. Moving from being total city slickers in Vancouver to aspiring farmers and winegrowers in the country has been quite a confronting experience, exactly as one might expect. We have been bumbling along on our farming journey, taking two steps forward and one step back, looking outside of ourselves for “answers” regarding how best to farm our small plot of land more often than we have remembered to look inwards and trust our own ideas, abilities, and intuitions. We have become accustomed to telling the story of how “difficult” farming is, when really, this is probably just an expression of our degree of confrontation with the complexity of working directly with the natural world, and our struggle to fully own the responsibility we have chosen.
October of 2021 brought the first crop of our vineyard, which we planted with a crew of friends and family in the spring of 2018. The day we harvested was bittersweet, and inspired the name for this wine. Our picking crew didn’t show up, and it was left to us, Costa’s mom and sister, and some incredibly devoted friends (one of whom was 8.5 months pregnant) to harvest the vineyard on our own. As we moved, slowly, through each row of the vineyard, our attention was brought to the many sections of the vineyard that are still struggling to thrive. We also learned that our initial attempt at installing bird netting to prevent the local starling population from devouring the literal fruits of our labour had fallen short, and we realized that we’d probably lost about 50% of our first crop to the birds.
The day was ripe with stark contrasts and overwhelming emotions. The beautiful sunny weather, and the sections of bare earth with struggling or dead vines. The smiles and support of our friends and family, and the frustration and disappointment that the trusted labour we had hired to help us didn’t show up. The joy and satisfaction of harvesting our very first grapes, and our failure to protect the crop from the birds due to our own inexperience and inattention with installing the nets. Hence the name for this wine, Poison & the Antidote.
As Rumi reminds us so succinctly, “the cure for the pain is in the pain”. The intensity of our contrasting experiences on this harvest day brought our own successes and failures into crystal clear focus. The gift of this focus - the poison - is the clarity of who and what we need to become on the next phase of our journey - the antidote.
This wine loves the excruciating pain of witnessing the ways your best efforts don’t measure up, and the self-compassion to be able hold space and grow through this experience
Drink this while listening to Alan Watts explain why in every explicit duality there is an implicit unity
One word pain
Winemoji ☠️ x 🧪
Specifications
- Alcohol 12.7%
- Acidity 6.975 g/L
- Aging Aged in used French oak barrique on lees for 5 months.
- Bottling Date April 25, 2022
- Country Canada
- Farming 1 inorganic spray (Pounce) for leafhopper
- Harvest Date October 25, 2021
- ph 3.72
- Producer Rigour & Whimsy
- Region Okanagan Falls
- Residual sugar 1.40
- Sulfites Added 44 mg/L
- Type Red
- Varietal 50% Gamay · 50% Chenin Blanc
- Vineyard Apeiron Vineyard
- Vintage 2021
- Winemaker Costa Gavaris
Production Notes
This wine has been a long time in the making. All of our efforts, both triumph and failure, over 4 years of farming are now bottled and represented in this wine. That’s a big weight for just 300 bottles of wine to carry.
This wine is a field blend. It represents all the grapes from our vineyard fermented together as a single expression of terroir. We had said we would only do this once. To commemorate and make extra special our first harvest from Apeiron Vineyard (first of its name). Upon reflection, we will have to retract the statement that we will only do this once – because in this first harvest, we are marked by a significant event that tarnished our ability to experience this field blend in all it's glory. The Thomas Creek wildfire started in early July with reports of a 500 hectare wildfire hitting local news outlets by July 11, 2021. The fire burned for almost 2 months reaching over 10,000 hectares in size. This is our closest relationship with a wildfire to date. Our vineyard site was on evacuation order. We helped neighbors evacuate livestock to a safe location in West Penticton. We worried about the homes of our neighbours and our own vineyard while watching a daily parade of water bombers and helicopters fight the blaze.
It has been an emotional spring this year as we have watched our friends at neighbouring wineries make very tough decisions about which wines they can release and which wines may be too affected by smoke to be enjoyable to their customers.
This has been made even more bitter by knowing that this particular fire (like many wildfires) was human caused – and likely involved negligent behavior by individuals choosing to light a fire during a fire ban. It makes me feel angry that so much damage was done to the health and economy of our community by such careless actions. I am hopeful that as investigations move to a conclusion that responsible parties are held accountable.
This wine is affected by smoke, but luckily not too much. We decided not to release this wine to restaurants or retail or to our agents in other provinces. We are releasing this wine exclusively to you, our Wine Weyr, at a reduced price compared to what a wine from our estate fruit would usually be priced at. We hope that because we have been able to communicate all of this to you that you can take this opportunity to appreciate the wine for what it is. You can lean into the smoke. You can pair it with smoky BBQ fare like a smoked whole chicken or smoked pork chops and find the harmony between the food and the wine. Hopefully in a years time we will be able to deliver you the next vintage of this wine absent the smoke taint and you can reflect on the differences that the environment and the unintended consequences of our actions can have on agricultural products. We hope you enjoy this wine!