About The Winery

Hello there.

I’m Tim Doyle.

Marginalia is a winery driven by ideas. I split my working life between the academy and wine making. Once these two lives started to bleed together, Marginalia became inevitable. I started making wine in Walla Walla in 2011 and worked as assistant and then associate winemaker for two local wineries until 2019. Marginalia started as a side project where I could explore unconventional winemaking techniques and became my main winemaking focus in 2019. In my other life as an academic I mostly think, write, and teach about ancient Greek philosophy, the history and philosophy of logic and mathematics, and the ethics of communication and trust.

Ethos

In all cases, I try to offer wines at the lowest sustainable price to give as many interested people as possible access to these wines. 

There are connections between the Marginalia wines and the various conceptions of natural wine, but I don’t identify the wines as natural wines.  I prefer to think of Marginalia as an open source winery: I share the whats and the whys of my process openly and let others decide how they want to classify the wines for their purposes.  In general I seek out growers who are meticulous and minimal in their use of non-organic sprays, and when compatible with qualitative and stylistic goals, I contract organic grapes.  I avoid chemically synthesized additives, process aids, or fining agents in the winemaking process, but I do make use of modern organic oenological additives derived from grapes, yeast, or wood, when doing so helps keep sulfite dosage lower.  This is largely a flavor consideration; sulfites mask aroma and flavor, so I prefer to use other non-synthetic additives when that can help the wine taste more purely of the fruit and reflect the vineyard and vintage conditions to the greatest extent possible. I avoid filtration, and after the end of fermentation I make minimal use of pumps, instead moving the wine mostly under inert gas pressure or gravity flow to avoid cavitation, carbon dioxide loss, and oxygen pickup.

Lighter red wines and amber wines are not accidental points of focus for Marginalia.  I work primarily with these styles of wine because I think they taste good with the foods I tend to eat: rustic breads, strongly flavored vegetables, salty cheeses, olives, lots of herbs and garlic, umbellifer spices, and glugs of olive oil.  The wines taste good on their own too, but the real test of a wine is whether it makes a simple meal into a memorable one. From time to time, these wines do just that.

Vineyards

In recent vintages I’ve worked with fruit from some the most exciting vineyards in the Walla Walla Valley AVA.