The Vineyard, the winery and beyond. How Hedges wines eventually make it to you!

January Recipe of the Month: Textures of Mushroom by Eric Dohrman of Statement Catering

Let’s all raise a glass and cheers to this moment.

It’s hard to know what to say about this past year. For some, it was a normal year of uncertainty. For others, it was the first time they had to deal with not knowing what would come next.

Your first step in becoming a wine Jedi is to know exactly what "dry" means because it is often misused. When many people call the wine dry, they're trying to say that the wine's texture feels dry on the tongue, but the term is landing incorrectly.

You know what I miss? Restaurants. Long amazing lunches and dinners with my wife where we can reconnect as a couple over a glorious bottle of wine, a meal that doesn’t require us to wash plates afterward. I miss the fancy dishes prepared by classically trained chefs, and I miss my go-to comfort food. The next time I’m able to sit down at a table and have a server take my order, I’m going to...

SPONTANEOUS: Having an open, natural, and uninhibited manner.

“The key to everything is patience. You get the chicken by hatching the egg, not by smashing it.” - Arnold H. Glasgow

There few things that are still truly spontaneous. Everything is planned and on the calendar. There are laundry days, grocery days, food prep days, hair wash days, and gym days. We need self-care days, “me time”, vacations to escape life and all the planning because we are so exhausted from it all.

Intention. An aim or a plan.

I read something this morning that really struck a chord with me. “Food and culture cannot be separated, and how we access food creates culture. The industrial agriculture of the twentieth century, which carries over to our own time, has no heart. The heartless agriculture does not honor or value the life forces in any being-soil, plant, animal, or human.” This was written by Karen Davis-Brown, editor of the Biodynamics journal. It’s time we sit down with our wine and get to know it more, really feel it instead of just mindlessly drinking it.

Tasting Room Magazine interviewed our lovely winemaker Sarah recently, and we thought you'd enjoy and learn from her fascinating and thoughtful answers.

For those who haven't had the pleasure, Sarah is the kind of person you want to share a long lunch with. She holds three passports, as she was born in Buenos Aires, her mother is from Champagne, France, and her father is from Washington State.

It all started with Van Halen's legal rider where they demanded the brown M&Ms be removed from the backstage M&M bowl during their tours. We thought it might be appropriate to create a rider for our ridewiths. (A ridewith is when winery representatives work with a distributor rep out in the field.) In beautiful response, an east coast rep (we've changed his name for legality/safety reasons) created a rider for his visit to our winery on Red Mountain! Enjoy this brilliant document by one of the greatest comedic minds in his very small town.

Can we make a confession? All of us at Hedges have at one time or another compared our wines to our European counterparts, to their land, their wine. We've all been guilty of saying something like, "If you blind taste our Red Mountain syrah, you could easily think northern Rhône."