The Sovereignon Individual.

It takes four years before a new vine gives you a good harvest.
That's also the minimum length of time you should hold bitcoin.

I planted a new vineyard in 2020 and found bitcoin later that same year.
Both are taking longer than I expected.

That's fine by me.

Wine here
Get your wine here!

Low Intervention, High Elevation, TASTY wine here!

The Clean Wine Contradiction: Why I Use the Term (And How You Should Evaluate It)

I need to address something uncomfortable: I market myself as "clean wine," and that term has been completely bastardized.

Anyone can slap "clean wine," "low intervention," or even "natural wine" on their label. There's zero regulation about these terms in the USA and Companies are exploiting wine's unique regulatory gap. Alcohol is the only major beverage category that doesn't require ingredient lists.

That means many producers sell premium-priced "clean" wine while disparaging conventional producers. They're making bank off consumer anxiety about mysterious additives, often while their own wines come from the same bulk market they're supposedly disrupting.

How the Wine World Deals With It (Spoiler: They Don't)

There are people calling out this BS, but there's no grand solution in sight.

The regulatory gaps that allow this nonsense also exist for legitimate reasons - wine isn't a manufactured product with consistent inputs year after year.

Requiring detailed ingredient labels would crush small producers under bureaucratic burden. Many winemaking aids don't actually stay in the finished wine - do those go on the label? And ingredients lists won't tell you if the producer used pesticides anyway.

Meanwhile, there's a thriving "black market" where anyone can buy bulk wine, slap their own label on it, and compete aggressively because they don't have vineyards to maintain.

Unless you want government agents inspecting every winery (and trust me, alcohol regulation is burdensome enough), this wild west situation isn't changing anytime soon.

My Solution: Don't Trust, Verify

So why do I still use the term "clean wine"? Because when done right, it means something. But you can't rely on the label to tell you what that is.

Here's my two-part litmus test for evaluating any wine, including mine:

1. Meet the Producer (Or Get As Close As Possible)
High-quality wine producers are transparent because they're proud of what they do. They want to tell you about their vineyard, the growing season, why their location creates amazing terroir. They geek out over details.

If a producer is vague about where their wine comes from, that's your red flag. Marketing companies selling private label wine keep things mysteriously simple.

Ask questions. Where are the grapes grown? Who makes the wine? What's their approach to vineyard management? The answers (or lack thereof) will tell you everything.

2. Live in a "Don't Trust, Verify" World

After you've done your homework, there are only two questions that matter:

Do I like the wine?
How do I feel afterward?

That's it. That's your quality control.

Your body knows the difference between wine that's been manipulated to death and wine that's been crafted with care. Some people get headaches from certain sulfites. Others react poorly to high tannin manipulation.

The proof is in the bottle

Did you know wine is good?

This is who I make wine for 🫡

Running Peony Lane has shown me how wineries scale and why many do not want to.

With red wine, every production increase takes more than two years to pay off. Early on, you just make wine and figure out sales later because scaling production has no shortcuts. Overproduction is a calculated risk in the beginning and a massive undertaking once you are established.

Sales come in two main forms:
Direct to consumer through a tasting room and online.
Wholesale to liquor stores and restaurants, usually with a distributor who takes a cut.

DTC is the highest margin, but hard to scale volume.
Wholesale is incredibly low margin, so you need huge volume for it to work.

This creates a structural gap in winery sizes.

Small wineries live and die on DTC. If they get a little bigger than their DTC can support, they push the excess into wholesale accounts. Wholesale moves wine, but the real value is exposure. It becomes a marketing play and a liquidity provider more than a profit center.

Large wineries flip the relationship. Tasting room sales become a rounding error for net profit, so the tasting room becomes their marketing play. They use the physical experience to win loyalty, because on a wine list it is easy to look like just another bottle.

There is a massive chasm between these two sizes.

The rough rule of thumb is that being small works up to about 10,000 cases per year. Beyond that, you enter no man's land until you reach the economies of scale that start to matter around 40,000 cases. Without a nationally recognized wine region behind you, crossing that middle zone is nearly impossible.

Colorado's biggest limitation is scale.
We make good wine, but not enough to force national attention.
It is the classic chicken and egg problem.
The region needs scale to get recognition, and recognition to get scale.

Corks are 100% Natural.

They come from cork trees and unless you want polyurethane glue in contact with your wine, you need to choose wine that uses them.

So many wineries cut costs here.