When most people hear “winery” they might imagine a bucolic country farmhouse surrounded by hills dotted with grape vines. Maybe there’s a barn out back where, next to a horse and a few chickens, antiquated grape presses and wine-making equipment await another harvest. A winemaker, his children, and maybe a few hired workers go out into the vineyards and pick grapes by hand, hurry them back to the barn, and individually handcraft each bottle to be sold out of the tasting room and maybe, just maybe, poured at a few choice restaurants in town. But that’s not how wine making works–that’s not how the majority of wine was ever produced.

You have winemakers and you have grape growers and it’s only with a small percentage of wines that they are the same company, let alone the same person. In fact, there are more grape growers in California then there are wineries and when you consider the number of estate wineries who don’t sell their grapes, you have a situation where wine makers must buy grapes from not just one but several different vineyard groups in order to produce their wines.

This goes back to a much older tradition, where every farmer in a village might grow a few rows of grapes and then take their fruit to a central wine making facility. There, grapes from all the small farmers would be combined to make wine to sell in the surrounding community and the grape growers and wine maker would share the proceeds. This communal village wine making is the antecedent to modern “co-op” wine production that is commonplace in Spain and Portugal.

In France, a person who makes and markets wine that he or she did not grow the grapes for is called a negociant and negociants still rule the wine world in many parts of the country. Although to the American mind the idea of a wine made from outsourced grapes is tantamount to sacrilege, that doesn’t change that the majority of wine in the world is not made by the stewards of the grapes. And that’s not a bad thing.

When a wine maker outsources grapes, he or she has two key advantages: 1, the grapes can be from wherever the wine maker thinks the best wine can be produced and; 2, the wine maker can take advantage of natural market conditions to source the best fruit for the best price from year to year. We’ve all experienced that great little wine from Anderson Valley or Sonoma Coast that was a great value when you first found it but each year the price crept up and up until it didn’t make sense to buy it any more; when demand for up and coming AVAs increases, so does the price. What was once a great $14 value becomes just another $25 California wine.

With Urbanite Cellars, Vinos Unico’s own neogiant-style winery, we strive to produce quality wines of distinction in the style of the daily drinkers of the Iberian peninsula, but with a distinctly California palate. With Redart we use a blend of many varietals across several vintages to produce a plush, food-friendly table wine that will (we hope) always retail for around $10.99. Our Amplio Cabernet Sauvignon, despite being primarily Sonoma County fruit, bears a humble “California” appellation so that Amplio won’t go up in price just because the fruit we like to use does. With our “Caliberico” Verdelho we use underserved fruit from an emerging AVA and combine it with a close long-term professional partnership with our growers to ensure wines of unique value for many years to come.

So forget your presumptions and uncork a bottle or two of simple, delicious California wine. Enjoy.

by David Duman