Marginalia

Marginalia exists to explore styles of wine that lie outside the dominant big red/crisp white paradigm.  I focus largely on lighter red wines and amber wines, but I always leave some room for experimentation in each vintage.  My practices draw inspiration from winemaking traditions kept alive in small pockets of Eurasia or documented in classical sources, from the creative work of those in the modern natural wine movement around the world, and from breakthroughs in modern oenology.  For better or worse, I have a research program more than a business model.

Marginalia is based in Walla Walla, WA and I source fruit only within the Walla Walla AVA so that I can maintain close relationships with growers.

A note on the name

Marginalia are the annotations we find in books and manuscripts. To a scholar, these scribbles, notes, and doodles are concrete evidence of the lives and ideas of previous generations of scholars or students who preserved and transmitted the texts of the past to their present and now to us in their future. Marginalia document each generation’s interaction with the ideas of generations past: a fossil record of a very long conversation.

My wines, though inevitably more ephemeral, are offered in the same spirit. I am always responding to an idea about grape growing, wine, or winemaking from the recent or ancient past, and each wine is offered as a small contribution—an annotation on the margins of wine and winemaking.