A Vineyard and Winery Estate in the Davis Mountains of West Texas.
Five years ago, we had yet to make or sell any wine, we had no winery, we were living in Houston. If we knew then what we know now, blah blah blah. Anyway, here we are, we have built a winery, planted vineyards, opened a restaurant and sold wine all over the United States and Canada, and now we are very close to achieving something that I think is even more impressive
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We will continue with more experiments and continue adding compost. Little by little we are building the soil and hopefully we will start a sort of snowball effect, better soil makes the ground cover healthier and healthier ground cover improves the soil, and so on.
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A fun way to start 2024. Strong winds ripped the roof off our chicken coop in the middle of the night. The chickens hardly seemed to notice.
I wrote my first post on this blog on August 28, 2016. Over the years, updates to the blog became sparse—not because we weren’t working and making progress, and not because I no longer felt it was valuable, but because what began as a curiosity and a hobby had turned into something completely different.
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I find it very encouraging to look backward, though I don’t always remember to. One year ago I was very unsure of the future of Alta Marfa. After two years of searching, we still had no place to make our wine. We had so far been unsuccessful at finding a source of funding, and we were running out of time. I have a few pages in my notebook from January 2021 which contain thoughts like “which things to sell first”, “where should we live?” and “can I get my old job back?” I spent a lot of time that January feeling like the project I had been working on for the last five years would likely come to an end. Now, a year later we have our own winery and we obtained loans that allowed us to make 17,000+ bottles of wine in 2021. We took big steps in 2021, and 2022 will be just as challenging.
The following is a look back at the 2021 harvest season.
A year later and we have our own winery and we obtained loans that allowed us to make over 17,000 bottles of wine in 2021. We took big steps in 2021 and 2022 will have to be just as big.
The following is a look back at the 2021 harvest season.
Read MorePlanting a vineyard anywhere, and in any way, is surely daunting. Planting a vineyard on a frontier is something additional to that. A frontier is a physical place, a place away, on the edge, outside, isolated, disconnected. A frontier is also a cultural place, unestablished, undefined, lonely. A place that has yet to be answered. A place without a recipe and without road signs. Living on a frontier means, not knowing where you are going, and not knowing how long it will take to get there. It also means not knowing who will make it there with you and who won’t.
Read MoreI am very pleased to announce that through the support of a number of individuals who we deeply appreciate, Alta Marfa has secured loans that will fund our project moving forward.
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A big project for the 2020-2021 dormant season will be the removal of every third row of the flattest section of the vineyard. We are making this change for several reasons:
1) Removing some of the vines means more irrigation water is left for the remaining vines.
2) Our rows were originally set up 5 feet wide, by removing every third row we will be creating access lanes that are 10 feet wide. This will make the use of a wheelbarrow or eventually something like a quad in the vineyard more feasible.
3) Because everything in our vineyard is done by hand, the amount of work required is extremely large. Less vines means more attention to each remaining vine.
We are transplanting the vines from the rows being removed to the rows that are remaining to replace vines that didn’t survive.
A big project for the 2020-2021 dormant season will be the removal of every third row of the flattest section of the vineyard. We are transplanting the vines from the rows being removed to the rows that are remaining to replace vines that didn’t survive.
Read MoreThis year has been unlike any before it, for everyone. I hope everyone is hanging in there. This blog post is longer than most, but quite a lot has happened since April when the last post left off.
Read MoreWe at Alta Marfa had a very positive 2019. We had a very successful month of planting in April, Katie and I got married in May, we made our first wine at Robert Clay Vineyards in July, we went on our honeymoon to Japan in October and we sold our first wine (Lazer Cat) in November. We rode this wave into 2020.
Read MoreFirst, some important business! April 23-26, 2020 will henceforth be known as AltaFest 2020. Over the past two years, we have had more than 60 distinguished individuals join us in West Texas to help us plant the vineyard. This will be our third year of planting, but this year will be a little different. This year we will be planting only 1,000 vines (we planted over 6,000 each of the last two years) and with fewer vines to be planted, we will have more time for more wine drinking, food eating, star gazing and general revelry!
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The energy of creative/nothing to lose/fearless/bushwacking adventure is palpable at Robert Clay, not because Dan has the secret sauce or because there is a wizard behind the curtain, but precisely because there is NO wizard.
Read MoreThanks to the hard work of our more than 50 super-human friends and family who came out to help us plant vines in April, I can happily report that the VINES ARE GROWING!!!! So far we see a success rate of about 93% which is excellent!
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A few of the vines we planted last year have started to come out for spring!
Now we are about to embark on another whirlwind of planting another 6,000 vines during the month of April. We are more prepared than we were last year and we are super excited to put everything we have learned into practice, but at the same time we will still have to wait years before we will have any wine to share with you all. Starting to see a pattern?
Read MoreNext April (2019) we will be receiving 6,000 replacement vines to add to our 500+ surviving vines from this years planting. This time around we definitely learned a few things so we are setting things up a little differently this time. We will be receiving four separate shipments of vines, one to be planted each weekend in April. (6th, 13th, 20th, 27th)
Read MoreAt the time of the last blog post things obviously were not great. The fact that most of the 6,000 vines that we had just worked so hard to plant were dead was definitely hard to swallow. Things are looking up though...
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My first time back, three weeks after we finished planting, I arrived past 4am and stumbled around with a flashlight, holding my breath and desperately looking for some green leaves.
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