45. January: Rest, remember, reinspire

January 26, 2025 / patrick taylor

Something fun we have been doing at the bar is bringing in fresh, raw oysters from the east coast. They are shipped overnight all the way to far west Texas. The quality is exceptional and the reception in town has been really positive, so we are planning to continue having oysters about every month or so. Come visit us and have some!

Rinsing the oysters thoroughly is very important. They can have mud, seaweed, sand etc. on the outsides of the shells. By washing it off we can minimize the chance that any of that stuff ends up inside the oysters once we open them.

Amaro

Also included were lime leaves, bay leaves, fennel seed from our garden, and also hawthorn seeds and fruit that we foraged (with help from some friends) in the Davis Mountains.

Once all the different botanicals have spent enough time steeping in a mixture of wine and brandy, we pump out the liquid and leave all the solids behind.

We call this piece of epuipment the “snorkel”.

This mixture of slightly boozy fruits and sticks and leaves will make great compost. Look out for this new Amaro (Amaro 002) in 2025.

Soil

This sensor will measure the moisture levels at different depths in the soil profile, every 6 inches down to 40 inches deep.

Another soil related project. I am slowly spreading the giant pile of compost over the vineyard.

The vines are young, so their roots haven’t spread out much yet. The most useful place for the compost at the moment is directly under the vines where the roots are. The compost adds organic matter to the soil, this increases the water holding capacity of the soil, improves the soil environment for microbes and also makes the heavy clay soil more hospitable for a diverse ground cover to establish itself. Soil microbes need roots in the soil to survive and thrive. Plants exude sugars (produced by photosynthesis) from their roots and exchange them with soil microbes for minerals and other compounds that the plants would not be able to uptake on their own. Our grape vines can do this too, but only if there is a healthy population of diverse microbes for them to exchange with.

We are trying multiple different things in order to build a diverse population of soil microbes for our vines to live with. This is a picture of one of them. This is winter rye and crimson clover that we seeded under a vines row and then covered with compost. Both of these can germinate at relatively low temperatures, which is why they were chosen for winter. You can see brown grass directly adjacent to the rye and clover. You might ask, “why is rye and clover better than whatever that brown grass is?” Great question, and one I think about all the time. My thinking right now is that that dry brown grass, which is some sort or turf grass you might have in a lawn, is certainly better than bare dirt, but what we really want is as diverse as possible a mix of different species as part of our ground cover. Each species exchanges with slightly different microbes, so more diversity above ground means more diversity below ground. Also, the more species there are in the ground cover the more resilient the ground cover is as a whole, they exchange with each other through the microbes, making the whole unit stronger.

This is another experiment. Instead of removing the grass and seeding something else. Here we have removed the grass and left the ground bare. We have allowed space for wild seeds in the soil to germinate. We see some veery interesting things come up. I don’t know what species these are, but I like the look of them. Had we done this experiment in the summer, rather than winter, we would no doubt see a different set of species come up.

Here is an update on the first experiment we did, which was removing the grass and seeding a set of 7-10 species during the summer. The cover is now well established and looking really healthy.

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.

Bubbles

Sparkling wine, it’s fun to drink and a real pain to make, especially when you do everything by hand as we do. We made two new sparkling wines in 2024 for your sipping pleasure!

Traditionally, sparkling wine has bubbles because the wine did some part of its fermentation inside a sealed bottle. The C02 produced during fermentation has no way to escape and becomes dissolved in the wine.

Yeast are responsible for this fermentation that happens inside the bottle. When the yeast have eaten all of the available sugar they become dormant and eventually die. We store these fermenting bottles upside down, so when the yeast die, they settle to the bottom, or in this case the top of the upside-down bottles.

We then open the bottles, and the trapped pressure causes the sediment to erupt out of the bottle. We then quickly top up and reseal the bottles, leaving a clear wine (mostly) without sediment.

We explode the bottles under this upturned bin in order to contain as much of the mess as possible.

This is Lauren, Katie’s sister. She is the crucial third member of our team. Lauren has been with us now for 3 harvests and manages the front of house at our new bar. Before moving to Marfa, she was a professor of photography at Montana State University. When she’s not making wine or tending bar, you might find her driving a team of mules around town or developing film in her favorite dark room (the winery bathroom). We are so lucky to have her as part of our small but mighty team.

Here Katie is pulling a sample of a new wine from a puncheon. The process of making and then eventually selling wine is a strange combination of excitement, as we start to see glimpses of the new wines as they develop in their barrels, and the need for incredible patience as we know we will have to wait another year or maybe two before the wine makes its way into a bottle and onto a table to be consumed.

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