Harvest at Matthiasson is officially over! While much of the country suffered extreme heat and storms, we’ve had some of the best weather in years. Spring brought us ideal conditions for pollination of the grapes and fruit trees followed by a summer of nearly perfect weather, and we harvested some of the highest quality and quantity that we've seen in over a decade.
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Our fruit tree harvest, which began July 1st, went extremely well - demand for the fruit at local restaurants was the highest ever yet we still managed to make a lot of jams. The grape harvest spanned two and a half months and we fermented some exciting new varieties (including Aglianico and our first ever Pinot noir). And last week we picked the first crop of olives from the 55 trees that we planted when we first bought our property five and a half years ago, marking the very end of harvest - it was very exciting to take the olives to the mill for our first estate olive oil!
So this is our life. We mark the passage of time by the agricultural cycle. We grow food and find different ways to process it to preserve the bounty. Making wine is part of that.
In his recent book,
How to Love Wine,
New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov captured the essence of our life in a passage he wrote about us after a couple of visits. He states, “It’s an almost magical feeling to be sitting with the Matthiasson family around their big, wooden dining table at the center of their residence. Platters of vegetables pickled and jarred by Jill whet the appetite, to be followed by lamb raised and now cooked by the family. Alongside, we drink the wines, both white and red.” He goes on to say, “This is chez Matthiasson, a kind of modern-day ode to the sort of community subsistence farming that defined how generations of Europeans lived their life.” And about our life he states, “It’s a do-it-yourself American ethos that we venerate freely in mythology but rarely in real life….”
He crystallized our effort with our wines by stating, “Most of all, they are alive – not denatured products but living, breathing wines that perhaps achieve this quality by sacrificing predictability.”
It is a great honor to be featured in this book about the author’s personal journey and his commentary about the place that wine fits into all of our lives.
We would encourage you to add
How To Love Wine to your winter reading list....we promise that it will make for great reading and will pair nicely with a glass of MATTHIASSON wine!
