Enology Part 2 (HOW TO MAKE WINE) with Tara Gomez & Mireia Taribó

Wineries vs. vineyards. Metal vs. oak. DIY wine. Carbonic fermentation situations? Enologists Tara Gomez and Mireia Taribó – co-owners of the boutique California winery Camins2Dreams – join us to chat about how grapes are harvested, why some are juiced with the stems, Indigenous perspectives on wine making, weird balloon chambers, wooden teabags, labcoat envy, tips for making your own wines, how they met and the surprising story of how they became a married duo in life and work. This couple needs a rom-com made in their honor. Raise a glass.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey. It's the lady who never unpacks her toiletry kit because you never know when you got a jam. And welcome back. You're here for wine, part two. Last week, we chatted with the very charismatic, encyclopedically informed Andre Houston Mack, who gave you an in-depth and a very spirited discussion of all the different wines, how to drink them, so-called old world versus new world wines, what gives a wine its taste, label drama, the rise of the sometimes hit or miss funky kombucha tasting, organic or biodynamic wines, how to order in a restaurant, what to look for. That was a great start there. This week, we're so lucky to talk to a pair of indie winemakers and analogists from a

• 0:41Alie Ward?

  family-owned winery in California. And one was born and raised in Spain, the other is a member of the San Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, and was the first Native American to own and operate a winery in the United States. And together, their winery, it's called Camin's Two Dreams, meaning the path to our dreams. They make wines with this low-intervention, natural yeast, low sulfites. We'll talk about what those mean later, as well as what got these two into winemaking, how grapes are harvested, why some are juiced with the stems, some weird balloon coffin chambers, wooden teabags, lab work, tips for making

• 1:23Alie Ward?

  your own wines, how they met, and the surprising story time on how they became a married duo in life and in work. But first, thank you so much to patrons at patreon.com/ologies for supporting the show for the last nine years and submitting questions that are smarter than mine. Thank you to everyone out there marching around in Ologies merch at ologiesmerch.com. And for folks who need G-rated, kid-friendly episodes, we have a spinoff show called Smologies, and you can find that just by searching Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, in your favorite podcast app. Subscribe, tell friends. Also, thank you to everyone who leaves reviews for the show, which helps so much. I do uncork. I enjoy them all. I promise. And thank you

• 2:07Alie Ward?

  for this unaged, fresh one from Science adjacent who wrote dang it, Ali, not 10 minutes after listening to your recent secrets episode, I'm sitting in my car, enjoying an iced beverage and sploosh right down the front of my shirt. Sure wish I had a dish towel right now. And ologies is the lingering ember in their campfire pit that warms their morning coffee. Science adjacent. Thank you. Grab a car towel. Everyone, no wine in the car, but I pray to all that is holy and unholy that you know that. Also, thank you to sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate every week to a different cause that is related to the ologists. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is

• 2:52Alie Ward?

  off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code 25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Father Ward, you say, there's no way you would need a career coach. You have it all together. That's a lie and you know it. I actually hired a career coach and without them, I wouldn't have started ologies. It was one of the best investments I've ever made. And if you're like, I don't know

• 3:34Alie Ward?

  where to find a career coach, I can help you. You need an experienced pro who asks the right questions, sets you down a path where you're most likely to succeed. And that's what you can expect from a coach at today's sponsor, strawberry.me. This is so cool. They match you with a certified coach who's been vetted to work closely with company founders. And yeah, sometimes I'm like, oh, wait, that's right. I am one. And if you're founding a business, even if you're along the way and you're maybe stuck in a rut, or you have to make a decision about expansion, or what direction you want to take your company, that's what I did. I went to strawberry.me and I was like, okay, can you help me pare down some stuff? I think I have too much on my plate. I'm not sure what to say yes to, want to say no to. And then we're super helpful in helping me streamline. And

• 4:18Alie Ward?

  now I get to sleep more and I enjoy that. So get the help every entrepreneur needs. Go to strawberry.me/ologies. That's strawberry.me/ologies. You're the boss.

• 4:31Alie Ward?

  Okay, anology, it comes from the Greek, onios for wine. As we mentioned last week, if you are spelling like the Brits, it's with an O in front. It looks like oanology. Unfortunately, I am American, so that's just no O in front. So let's dive into a barrel of facts about wineries versus vineyards, what a winemaker does all day and year, what wines have skin in the game, metal versus oak, carbonic, fermentation situations, DIY in wine, vinegar, cap versus cork for winemakers, indigenous perspectives on winemaking, why this couple needs a rom com deal,

• 5:13Alie Ward?

  and how every year is a surprise with winemakers, wives, and anologists Tara Gomez and Mireia Tarib.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Do you hear right now the cat or no? Uh-uh. Okay, good. Because she's wanting to get out, so she's crying at the door. That's why I was asking.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, mid and.

• 5:51Alie Ward?

  Luckily, I don't hear it.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, good.

• 5:53Alie Ward?

  But the first thing I'll have you guys do is if you could say your first and last names. And do you both use she/her pronouns? Cool.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Tara Gomez.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  And Mireia Tarib.

• 6:06Alie Ward?

  And Tara, I was wondering Tara or Tara, but to be in the wine business with Tara in the name.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. I know, has so much meaning.

• 6:17Alie Ward?

  Now, y'all have been anologists for a while too, and you seem like you came about it from slightly different paths. And Mireia, you were born in Spain and you have kind of an influence of wine from. Was that from an early age? Was wine just so part of every meal and culture?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, basically, growing up in Spain and also from a small village. Everybody has a little vineyard there and a cellar and yeah, wine for, I always say, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

• 6:47Alie Ward?

  Everyone has a vineyard and a cellar? What, how, I mean, not everyone, but like, what happens if you have a small vineyard out there? Do you just pick the grapes?

• 6:54Speaker 01

  It's just to make wine at home. Since I was a kid, there was a vineyard at home that my great grandparents had planted. But it's just like, small amount, like, just to make a barrel or two a year, just to drink at home with family and friends. And yeah, all the neighbors there in the village where my dad is from, which is in the bottom of the Pyrenees, back in the time, everybody had like, you know, olive trees, animals and vineyards, because that's what they would eat, everybody. So, so yeah, when I was a kid, I totally remember going to the vineyard and picking the grapes and foot stomping. And it was nothing technical at that moment, because it was just like made at home. And but after a month or so, you had wine to drink. And that's

• 7:38Speaker 01

  basically what you do there. But I never thought about becoming an analogist or winemaker, or like, to me, wine was just, you know, drink at home and make at home and didn't need to do anything else for that.

• 7:50Alie Ward?

  Sounds like a movie that you're just like, oh, yeah, we just pick our grapes, we stomp on it. Okay, side note, if you're like stomping grapes in a bucket, sounds like an absolutely impeccable way to craft fungus wine. I got good news, I got bad news. So the yeast that ferments your favorite glass of pinot, it's a fungus, all right? But that's the bad news, I guess. But the good news is that if you foot stomp grapes, you're going gently enough to express the juice, but not hard enough to crunch the grape seeds and give the wine a bitter flavor. Also, the tannins, the alcohol in it that ferments, it's gonna, it's gonna kill the foot stuff. And if that is disappointing, you should listen to our

• 8:32Alie Ward?

  fermentation episode about cheese to learn about what's growing in your cheese. That's delicious. Another point of good news, no one uses feet anymore for this, unless it's a very niche label of wine, or maybe it's a kink drink, no shame. But we're going to talk about how these two make grape juice in just a little bit. And Tara, can you tell me a little bit about what got you interested in wine? Was that a big surprise for you to wind up and go, oh, this is where I'm supposed to be?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  No, actually, it was pretty easy. I mean, I got my first Fisher-Price microscope set like at the age of four, and I just love looking at nature through a microscope. And then from there, it just kind of grew into chemistry sets. So I was kind of a little bit of an odd child of really just like wanting to play with my microscope and chemistry sets. But yeah, I just love looking at nature through the microscope. So I knew by like elementary school that, yeah, this is what I wanted to do. And none of my family ever, you know, were in the wine industry. They just like to drink wine. And so when we

• 9:43Speaker 02

  were young, like I remember my parents always, you know, on the weekends going wine tasting up and down here, the central coast. And I just remember going on one of the tours. And I mean, back then, it was more acceptable for the kids to, you know, go along with the parents and, and go on these wine tours and everything. And so for me, stepping into the cellar and seeing like these huge stainless steel vats and bumping into the lab and seeing them actually doing like titrations and in their white lab coats. I mean, like, I remember going home and telling my mom, like, I want a lab coat.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  And so by high school, I, I started researching it. And there was, at that time, only two schools that offered it. It was either UC Davis or Fresno State. And so I chose Fresno State because I wanted the hands-on experience. There was already a winery on campus.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Oh my gosh, I could hear her now.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  I can hear her out again. And she's a mischief maker.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, she's very mischievous. Yes.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  So whatever, she's fine.

• 10:57Alie Ward?

  Their cat did have a lot to contribute, but unfortunately we lacked interpreter onward. Tara, you're saying that Fresno and Davis both had programs. Was that tough to choose between them?

• 11:08Speaker 02

  It wasn't because Fresno State had already the winery on campus. And for me, like, I tend to learn better hands on. So yeah, it was a pretty easy decision for me.

• 11:20Alie Ward?

  And you're from California.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yes, I am from California.

• 11:24Alie Ward?

  Can you tell me a little bit about your history with the Central Coast? What is it about California and the Central Coast and Napa that is so good for wine as well?

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm from Santa Barbara County. And what I really love about Santa Barbara County in general is just like all the different microclimates that we have within our county. I mean, we have over 70 different varieties. Within a 35 mile radius, we could be enjoying like Bordeaux varieties, Burgundy varieties, Italian varieties, all the varieties. And so I think that's what draws a lot of the winemakers to our area, especially the women winemakers. I think the women winemakers represent a larger percentage that is based here in Santa Barbara County itself.

• 12:13Alie Ward?

  So when Tara was at Fresno State studying enology, she was one of only two women in her whole program. And according to this 2020 study out of Santa Clara University, only 14% of California wineries are women owned. But in Santa Barbara County, some figures estimate that's 20 to 30%. That's amazing. I never realized how much microclimates must influence it as well. And not to mention, as a microscope person, I've got a microscope when I was eight and it changed my whole life.

• 12:46Alie Ward?

  It's like, there's so much going on between the soil and the yeast, and also the culture and the history of what you're making. And I'm wondering, in an enology program, you know, you both went through separate ones. Maria, I know you were in Spain when you did yours. You were in Fresno, Tara. What do those programs look like? How much of it is culture, history, types of wine? How much of it is agriculture, pest control, harvesting? Like, what happens in an enology program?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so anology is kind of divided into two separate areas. You have anology where you're specifically learning the wine making process. And then you have the viticulture aspect of it, which is you're learning more about the vineyard and the soil and all of that. So combining the two together, you learn the best of both worlds. And that's very important for a winemaker too, to learn the viticulture side of it. Because like for us, for example, like we're outside a lot. We're out there in the vineyards, really just like trying to find that connection to the land, to the vineyard, learning about the soil. So all of those aspects are important and play a big part in winemaking.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say when you go to school and study anology, you really kind of like study a little bit of everything, as Teres say. But like, there's a lot of chemistry involved. And yeah, you have some engineering. You have, you know, a lot of physics in terms of like conversion of heat to cold. And because we use all that for the tanks and sensory analysis. So it's not just like, oh, I put grapes in a tank and I ferment them. There's like a lot more involved to it, so.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:28Alie Ward?

  And if you're an aspiring anologist, you can focus on an agricultural school and you can find just a dazzling course catalog. Like Fresno State, for example, offers programs in viticulture, which is the study of the grapevines themselves. Anology, the study of winemaking with those grapes. There's the business of marketing and selling wine. The distribution in the US is a particular headache. We'll talk about that later. There are also courses in advanced sensory evaluation of wines. Wine microbiology, there's one on regulations. Introduction to vine, grape and yeast biochemistry. As you can imagine, there's enough to where the society would be very lengthy.

• 15:10Alie Ward?

  But in the US alone, winemaking industry generates nearly $400 billion annually. So grape juice plus science times some patience, that's your bottom line. But some things, if I may pair this wine with a little cheese, are worth more than money. Like, did you guys know you're in love the whole time? Uh, no.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:32Alie Ward?

  Really?

• 15:34Speaker 02

  No, it was a little, it was the opposite, actually. I don't even have time for that, but yeah. I wasn't a fan of her.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  I wasn't a fan of her either. It's fine.

• 15:48Alie Ward?

  You guys were like a rom-com where in the first act you were like rivals or something?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Not rivals, but not 100% friends either. Nah, it wasn't, it wasn't like that.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we both worked at the same company.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  In Paso Robles and she would always come into the lab and disrupt. And disrupt the lab and like, you get everybody like, oh, you know, stop doing their work and everything. And I always used to be like, what the heck? Get out of here. You're off of work, go home.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Oh my God. And you know, there's two sides of each story, but I'm not gonna bring mine.

• 16:30Alie Ward?

  Were you in there flirting or?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  No, not at all. I, I, um, I was an intern. I, uh, when we met, Tara was working at JLR and I came to do a harvest. It was my first time in California doing a harvest here. And I was living with two other interns and there are three other interns, but the other ones were working with Tara in the lab and I was working in the cellar. The cellar would start earlier, but also finish earlier. And we only had, as interns, we only had one car and we all had to wait for each other and things like this. So I would go to the lab because there was the only place where there was computers. And we're talking about 20 years ago, so there was no social media, no cell phones. So the only way to communicate with my friends at home and everything was like, I don't know what it even was in that time.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Some messenger, I guess.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, she would check her emails, turn up the volume and so when she opened up her email, it would just like disrupt the whole lab because everything just, all this music start playing and everything go off and.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  So one day Tara takes me and I am in the lab checking my emails and trying to send emails to my friends and family. And Tara's like, you, come with me. And I'm just like, oh God, like now I'm really in trouble. Like she's sending me back to Spain. What's going on? She just walks me to her car.

• 17:47Speaker 02

  You're out of here.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  She takes me for a ride and I'm just like, where are we going? Like, I was like all scared and. I mean, it was also like, I didn't speak English as good as now. So communication was a barrier too. And anyway, she takes me like she was at that moment making wine. Basically, the, I don't know, like a mile down the street from where her friend had a winery and she was making her own label there. So I remember her taking me there and she's like, hey, this is where I make my own wine. And she takes me into this kind of like garage winery and opens a fridge. And she's like, you like beer? I was like, yeah. So she gives me a beer and she's like, all right, start making punch downs.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had like 20 punch downs to do.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  So I was like, all right, well, if you give me beer, I'll make punch downs. That's fine.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  And then after that, every day she would come.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Put her ass to work.

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. She would come and pick me up at 4:00 AM at home and help her making punch downs in the morning. And then when I was done with my work at the winery, she would take me back there.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  And that's how we got to meet each other and became friends.

• 18:59Alie Ward?

  That's so sweet. That's so sweet. You guys need your own wine making rom com. You need to somehow sell the rights to this. The cutest.

• 19:11Alie Ward?

  I'm so glad that you guys got together. And I know you're wondering, so was I. So doing punch downs in winemaking is when you push the floating grape skins back into the juice to extract more flavor and more color. So picture like a giant potato masher squishing around a cranberry bog, but it's grapes and it's baby wine in a huge trough. And this surprised me, but the average winery only has four or five employees. I pictured dozens, like factory setting. But most of them, no. So with teams being just about the size of a family, how are the chores divided? Well, I'm not sure like who does what roles when it comes to wine, but.

• 19:53Alie Ward?

  You guys are winemakers, but then there's winery owners. So those are people who grow the grapes. There's the people who get the grapes and make the wine. Are they the same people? Like, who does what when it comes to making wine?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends on the winery, I would say. It depends on the size of the winery. We are a really small winery. So basically, we wear all the hats, Tara and I. We do have a little bit of different roles just because we have our strengths in like different areas and what we like to are different things. But yeah, depending on the winery. I mean, bigger wineries, normally you have, yeah, you have the owner, which is actually at the end, the one that makes money and pays money. But, but you have a winemaker or you have like a general manager. You have a marketing person. You have a lot of different people that's involved. But for us, it's just Tara and I that we do everything together, so.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And as Mireia said, like, we all know our strengths and weaknesses within our own winery. And so Mireia, for example, she's more in the cellar. She's the one that does a lot of the tank movements, barrel movements. And I'm the one hauling the, because we work out of a few different buildings. So I'm the one that goes and picks up the barrels or picks up whatever she needs to get the work done. And I'm always like in the truck, like hauling things from one building to another or, or I'm doing the analysis. So we know within ourselves what our strengths and weaknesses are. And so it makes it easy to kind of fulfill those roles.

• 21:27Alie Ward?

  When it comes to, let's say, a winery, I think what I was confused with is I thought a winery was only a place and not a business. And so I always thought that whatever wine you made only came from the grapes that you were growing outside. I like, didn't know that that's something that winemakers did because I haven't been on enough wine tours. But as a winemaker. Sourcing the grapes is, I imagine, a huge part of it. Can you walk me through it a little bit?

• 21:56Speaker 01

  I mean, there's estate wineries that they have their own grapes. And sometimes they source also grapes from outside, but sometimes not. I would say like in Europe, there's a lot more estate wineries than here. You know, we don't have vineyards ourselves. I wish we could, but we purchase grapes and that's, it has good things and bad things. I mean, you have less control, obviously, over your grapes. And it takes a lot of like research. But in other way, also, it has a lot of like advantages and it's a lot more flexible. And you can play every year with a different variety if you want, or you can just try something. And if it doesn't work, you change the vineyard. Then you don't have as much pressure in terms of like, you know, always having to work with the same variety. And in Santa Barbara County, we always say that we're like kids in a candy store

• 22:41Speaker 01

  because we have all these varieties. So it's really nice when you are able to purchase grapes from different vineyards and different areas every year. So that's cool.

• 22:50Alie Ward?

  I always thought a winery and a vineyard were synonymous. Didn't realize that those are very different words and really different roles.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  I'm sure you're not the only one.

• 22:59Alie Ward?

  Yeah, like it didn't occur to me that those were two different nouns. I thought, which is so interesting that so many of us experience wine from a bottle to a glass to our mouth. And that there's so much and so many people and knowledge and history and science and art that go into it. Can you give me some like basic process steps? You mentioned tanks. I thought they were in barrels. What's the deal with that? Do they age and think like, how does the magic happen?

• 23:27Speaker 02

  So we'll start from the very beginning of it. I mentioned, we're out in the vineyard a lot throughout the growing season. And so, you know, with the two winemakers, I actually go out to the vineyard on the nights of the pick. We're bringing our bins that they pick into, out to the vineyard. We're out there doing quality control in the back of the tractors as the pickers are picking into our bins. And then we haul the fruit out back to the winery. So when the fruit arrives to the winery, depending on what time of the night it is, it could be, I mean, like, We get scheduled to picks anywhere between like 7:00 PM all the way to 5:00 AM.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  They'll tell us what time to kind of go in there and when we'll begin. And so it makes it a little bit easier for us though, because like we have our own bins. We have our own equipment to be able to pick into and, and we haul in and haul out. But the fruit comes in, we pick, the fruit comes into the winery. Sometimes it just goes directly into the cold room and then we'll go to sleep that night and then wake up in the morning and then begin processing. We have a sorting table, we have a destemmer, we have an elevator to get it to the destemmer, onto the sorting table and then into the final vessel. And so, once we process the fruit, depending on if it's red or white, white goes directly

• 24:52Speaker 02

  into the press, whereas red goes through the destemmer to the sorting table, to the final vat that we're using to ferment in. And then the fermentation begins. We do everything all native yeast fermentation, so we're not using commercial yeast. And everything that we make is no additives, so unfind and unfiltered as well. With just a little bit of SO2 added right up bottle, but that's pretty much about it. So it's like just grape juice going through fermentation and then goes into barrel for aging and, and then depending on however many months you're, you're aging the wine for, and then it goes into bottle.

• 25:34Alie Ward?

  And why at night? Is it just cooler weather?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so nighttime allows us to bring the fruit in already cold and kind of, you know, frees you from any sort of like bees coming in to play, coming to kind of like make their marks into the grapes or any sort of microbial bacteria that could happen when you're picking during the daytime. It prevents all of that from happening and you, you already have the leg up with it being cold. So yeah, that's why we pick at night.

• 26:06Alie Ward?

  Either at night or early morning, basically.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  I would say it's also a little better for the pickers, for the workers itself. Because picking during the day here, like in Santa Barbara County in September and beginning of October, it's still pre-warm. So it's not the same picking at 50 degrees that, you know, you're all night picking, you're tired because it's night, but during the day you would be picking at 80 degrees. So it's definitely a lot better on them to pick at night. Yeah.

• 26:35Alie Ward?

  And why does the white wine go one way with stems and all getting crushed, but the red wine grapes get de-stemmed?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  So white grapes can also go both ways. But traditionally, let's say, white grapes go directly to the press because you want your white wine to be clear color. What give color to wine is the skins. If you open a grape that it's red or white, the pulp is always clear, basically. So if you direct press, you're going to have a juice that is really clear. So for white wine, you want that. For red wine, you want to have a lot of color, dark. So you're going to ferment it with the skins. Because if you would go directly to press, you would have like a really light rosé, basically. White wine now, or not now, it's since the beginning of history of wine, but you can also ferment it with the skins.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And that's when you get a wine that has a lot more tannin, a lot more color. And it's where nowadays, a lot of people knows as orange wine or a skin contact wine, which is a white wine fermented the way that we make reds.

• 27:41Alie Ward?

  Okay, so just imagine eating just the skin of a conquered grape, right? You can taste the acid, you can feel the dryness. And we talk a lot about tannins, compounds that plants make to say like, hey, don't eat me. In part one with Entree. Also, is there more than one way to skin a grape? For a moment, I was like, I feel like surgeons.

• 28:04Alie Ward?

  Practice on grapes to test their dexterity and learn precision by like peeling the skin and then suturing it back up. And I was like, am I hallucinating this? But a cursory Google not only confirmed that they do, but it sent me to a whole Wikipedia page titled simply "grape surgery," which told me, who's now telling you, that grapes serve as a cheaper and more readily available alternative to animal eyes, artificial model eyes, or human eyes sourced from eye banks or donated cadavers. If you listen to our ophthalmology episode with eye doctor, friend, and surgeon Dr. Reed Weiness, you can hear

• 28:45Alie Ward?

  about the time that he mentioned a ruptured globe as part of his workday, which almost made me like block his number. How about in this context? And so how are they getting the skin off of the white wine grape? I always wonder because it's so hard to skin a grape. I'm like, how do they do this?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  No, we don't skin them by hand, believe me.

• 29:03Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  That would take forever. We put the grapes in a press. There's different kinds of presses, and I'm not going to get technical on that. But basically, our press is a pneumatic press, and it's like a tube with a hole on top. You put the grapes inside, fill it all, and then there's like a balloon that inflates and deflates, and it presses. And then it has some drains where the juice comes out, and the skins stay inside the press. So.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, the skins and seeds stay inside, and just the juice comes out.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, through some drains and stuff. So, yeah.

• 29:36Alie Ward?

  What happens to all that stuff? Are there like hogs sitting by being like, "Give it to me"?

• 29:40Speaker 01

  I mean, if you have your own vineyard, you can take it back into the vineyard and use it as a compost there, or like you ferment it first and compost it. For us, we put it in a big container that we have outside the winery during harvest, and then it gets picked up by a recycling company, and then they use it for compost, or recycle it, take it somewhere else, and that's it.

• 30:01Alie Ward?

  Okay, so I was curious about these balloon machines, and I looked up a video taken with some sort of GoPro in a tank of grapes being mushed. Wow. Imagine like a giant water heater cylinder on its side, or better yet, like a small submarine. It's filled with grapes, all right? Bunches of grapes are tossed in from a hole at the top, like a submarine hatch, and then it's sealed shut. And the thing spins this way. It spins that way. It tosses them all around. And then suddenly, half of the tank starts to inflate, like a big clogged artery, and it smushes the grapes against each other and the side of the tank. Then it gets spun more.

• 30:43Alie Ward?

  The juice is drained off, and then the big balloon inflates again. And then spinning, smushing, draining, spinning, ballooning. I was mesmerized. I was just watching this thing like a toddler with an iPad. It's like seeing thousands of bubble wraps popping all at once, or like sugar cysts bursting. It's so gratifying. It's a little gross. It's beautiful. But once they've squeezed all the juice out, what happens to the leftover stuff? Like the pulp and the seed and the stems? Okay, that stuff is called pumice. And yes, it can be used for fertilizer, for animal feed, biomedical treatments they're looking at, or increasingly, in the making of food. From chicken meatballs, I read, to pasta and cereal.

• 31:28Alie Ward?

  And according to the 2024 paper, "The High Value and Sustainable Utilization of Grape Pumice: A Review" in the Journal of Food Chemistry. It's like grape pulp. It's what's for dinner, after making the thing that you drink with dinner.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  Very clever.

• 31:44Alie Ward?

  And so, the difference between the big vats, the big stainless steel vats, and the barrels to age. How long does wine stay in one of those big metal silos versus off to barrels?

• 31:59Speaker 01

  I mean, it depends a lot of the winery, but in our case, we ferment.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  In tanks, in stainless steel for the whites, and actually in beans or sometimes in stainless steel for reds. And that may last like a month at the most, or a month and a half if it's a longer fermentation. And then after that, the white wine, it's racked, so it's transferred to the barrels, either a stainless steel barrel or oak barrel. And then the reds, you press them because you still have the skins. And then the same, the juice, you transfer it to barrels. We use for our wines all neutral French oak, meaning the barrels are used for another winery before we use them. So they've been used several times, or one time, or we use them for a few years and then we resell them too.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  So it's barrels, they're barrels that they don't have that much oak influence. We want the barrel to give us more like stability and give us some texture and help us with that. But we don't want to have oaky wine. We want to showcase really what it comes from, the vineyard and the fruit and everything. So and then we have it in barrel for the whites around six months. And for the reds, depending on which one of our reds, but between 10 and 18 months. But there's also other vats or other materials that you can ferment, like you can ferment in concrete. This year, we've been experimenting with a concrete egg as a tank for one of our varieties. You can ferment in clay. So each material is going to give you different aromatics and different texture to your final product.

• 33:32Alie Ward?

  I would also like to direct you to our mycology episode on fungi and our zymology episode about beer brewing. And if you just cannot get enough of yeast and you'd like to break bread with your Cabernet, you can enjoy the gastro Egyptology episode all about making sourdough with ancient Egyptian yeasts sourced from several thousand year old pots. That's a real thing. And the yeasts are in there. These are natural yeasts that are just environmental, right? And then they're just doing their thing, gobbling up the sugars. And do you know kind of what it's going to be like until you taste it? Or is it like, this is a pretty dependable yeast that likes this grape and it likes this

• 34:14Alie Ward?

  area. So we're pretty sure what it's, how do winemakers know what's gonna happen?

• 34:19Speaker 02

  So typically, the way we do it, it's called P. de Cuv. So when we go out there and sample for each vineyard site, we sample each variety, we pull whole clusters of them, we bring it to the winery, we crush it, we run the analysis on it. But that juice that we've collected, we save. And that's how we multiply and build up our yeast culture. And so by the time that the fruit is ready to come in to harvest, then that's what we use to pitch to the tanks. So it eliminates the lag time of going through the cold room, trying to warm the fruit back up, and then waiting for fermentation to kick off. Like, we've already got the fermentation already active

• 35:00Speaker 02

  and ready to go and kind of like migrate and have fun. And so, and so that helps a great deal with just eliminating, you know, just that lag phase point.

• 35:14Alie Ward?

  Oh, that's so cool.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  The interesting thing to me of, of working with natural yeast, with wild yeast, is that each vineyard is different, and each fruit, and each year, it's a little bit different. While with commercial yeast, basically, it's more knowing what you're gonna have. So say you want a wine that it's gonna have a lot of like fruity characteristics. There's other yeast that are created to give you a more mouthful, other yeast that it's created. So you can go to all these companies that sell yeast and say, I want to ferment Pinot Noire, and I want it to be more earthy or more fruity. And they will sell you a different kind of yeast, right? But that, to me, makes also wines more similar in

• 35:58Speaker 01

  Between different wineries, so it's less interesting in some way. It's safer though, because you know you're not going to have issues with your yeast. But I think it's less interesting and we want to be sure that it's a little bit different every year.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  So that just adds to a little bit of the mystery of it, I guess. But yet it's fun for us.

• 36:18Alie Ward?

  And remember from part one with Andre last week, that in general, Old World wines, mostly European, are named after the region of origin because the climate, geography and soil contribute to the character. And also what kinds of yeasts would be present. Now, New World wines, like from the Americas and Australia, tend to be named for the type of grape. New World wines also tend to grow in warmer climates, so they yield more sugar, which makes a higher alcohol content, while Old World wines tend to be less sweet, more dry and less fruity in taste. Now, natural wines are sometimes called biodynamic or organic, depending on the farming of the grapes and the level of intervention after the harvest.

• 37:01Alie Ward?

  Those tend to, or can have a funkier flavor, sometimes a cloudier appearance, and they can vary greatly from harvest to harvest. Some wine drinkers have staunch preferences, and I suppose that's why there are wine menus, instead of everyone in the world having the same favorite bottle, which would be boring. And can you tell me a little bit about your personal preferences? Because y'all knew each other for years before you went straight into business with each other, before you got married too. Did you have really different tastes in terms of where you wanted to go visit and travel and try things? Or when it comes to y'all are going to go to a winery and check something out,

• 37:45Alie Ward?

  or when you were first getting to know each other, what were your different tastes that you guys had?

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, Mireia, of course, has more of a European, you know, attribute flavor profile to it.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Whereas I have more of like a California flavor profile to it. So yeah, it was, it was a little bit of variance in the beginning. But for me going to visit, I started developing and learning more about wine in general. And you know, the, the history of it all. And I feel like I'm the one that started changing my palate up. And we started drinking more European wines. And so my palate kind of adjusted more than I would say Medea's palate. But yeah, luckily, I mean, we love the same wines and we love to make, you know, the same wines. And we don't just focus on mainstream varieties. We focus on the more of like the underrepresented varieties.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  So with like Gruner Veltliner and Cool Climate Syrah's being our flagship wines. But yeah, we make like a wide variety, maybe too much, too much than we should. Because as Medea said, we're like little kids in a candy store that can't decide on what variety. Oh, I want to play with this variety or I want to play with that variety.

• 39:03Alie Ward?

  And if you would like to see this variety with your own eyes or grapes, you can head to their website, Camins2Dreams, C A M I N S two dreams.com, which has more info about their Gruner Veltliner, which is a light, lower alcohol white wine with a little fizz. They have a Grenache Rosé, a Cabernet Pfeffer made from this obscure grape, which has kind of a cherry spicy and peppery taste. They offer a medium bodied Carignan, which is a grape used mainly in Spain and France. But theirs is from Santa Barbara and it's made via carbonic maceration, which we'll talk about in a minute.

• 39:42Alie Ward?

  They also offer a red blend wine that's pride themed, which warms my heart well over cellar temperature. And all their bottles are in the 30 to $50 range. And they have an order page on their site in case you want to take a gather. Many of the wines I had never heard of and it's clear that they do enjoy doing something a little different.

• 40:02Speaker 02

  But we just love, you know, trying to teach the consumer that there are other varieties other than your mainstream varieties that they're so used to tasting.

• 40:12Alie Ward?

  You guys, I'm sure have seen Sideways 5,000 times, right?

• 40:16Speaker 01

  I actually haven't.

• 40:17Alie Ward?

  You haven't?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  I have to say that every time I try to watch it, I fall asleep.

• 40:22Alie Ward?

  You're like, been there, done that.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  Now I wanna watch it again because it's been filmed here in Santa Barbara, Cali. So since I moved here, I've been wanting to watch it again, but I haven't yet, so.

• 40:32Alie Ward?

  It's one of my mom's favorite movies and I just remember like the Merlot versus Pinot Noir debate.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  If they wanna drink Merlot, we're drinking Merlot.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  No, if anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  Okay, okay, relax, Miles.

• 40:48Alie Ward?

  If you have seen this 2004 movie, this scene and Paul Giamatti's very sentimental, rambling monologue, which was an ode to Pinot Noir, is permanently stained in your memory. And you're not alone. Decades after its release, people are still pondering on it. And a 2021 study titled Sideways: Supply Response in California Wine Grapes, which was out of Cambridge University, found that the positive supply response for Pinot Noir is stronger than the negative response for Merlot after this movie. So, yeah, it did have an effect, but it really just bumped up Pinot Noir.

• 41:31Alie Ward?

  It didn't mess up Merlot's reputation too badly. But yeah, if you're ever just sitting around wondering about stuff like this, you can go gather data, crunch the numbers and answer it for other people, including myself. So, thank you. I feel like it really did a number on Merlot, but it really oversaturated Pinot Noir. And it's so interesting how much these pop cultural things can have influence, but.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  I think it's more important to see if you like it or not. At the end, it's just like, it doesn't matter which wine it is. It's if you like it, you like it. And then, once you find a wine that you like it, try to remember it. And when you go to a store, say, hey, I like this wine. Or it was, you know, you have something similar. And from there, start trying different things.

• 42:13Alie Ward?

  And when it comes to mouthfeel, some of them feel drier. The tannins in red wine are higher than in white wine. But what are these properties chemically that give a different kind of mouthfeel?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, tannins come mostly from the skins and the seeds, but also from the oak. So either barrels or you can add. Artificial powder oak or chips or whatever it's allowed in this country to add to. So basically from oak. So in general, yes, red wine has more tannin, which is gives you this, yeah, dryness on the palate. So that's just basically a sensation of like, I know, like the proteins basically in the wine precipitate with your saliva. So that's why you feel like that precipitation, it just puts like a cover in your tongue.

• 43:02Alie Ward?

  So yeah, as we touched on with Andre last week, some wineries use oak chips or even sawdust tea bags. They've been doing it since the 1800s. And according to the history and the science behind it, which was discussed in the paper, Review of Quality Factors on Wine Aging in Oak Barrels. The oak chips can create greater intensity of wood aromas, which are like coconut and vanilla and a greater taste impact of bitterness and astringency than oak barrels. So those, those chips can create more of it. And individual winemakers can evaluate what their flavor and texture goals are when choosing between barrels and chips and, and dust and such. But how does Bradley Cooper feel about all this?

• 43:48Alie Ward?

  I know we're wondering. My guess is resentful because a barrel maker is called a cooper. And people bearing that surname, Cooper, probably descended from people who craft barrels and would say that oak chips are cheating and that you should buy more barrels.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Don't worry, I won't tell anybody. And if you decide to do, which is something totally different, which is like carbonic maceration, that's putting the whole cluster intact into the tank and closing it off. So in an anaerobic environment for however long it takes for the fermentation to take place. Generally speaking, it's between like 20 to 30 days that we leave it on, you know, in the tank without opening it up. We just taste it from the tasting valve and see like how it's progressing and checking the sugar level in it. And that gives you a little bit more fruit forward, a little bit of spiciness to it because it has stems intact there as well.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  It'll give you a little bit of that spiciness, but also just that lighter sensation. So those are considered chillable reds as well.

• 44:55Alie Ward?

  Carbonic maceration, who? I don't know her, but this is when, I looked it up, a bunch of grapes, usually red, are put in a big tank. Uncrushed, okay, so they're whole. They're put in a tank and then carbon dioxide is pumped in to fill all the airspace. So what happens is the grapes start to ferment on an intracellular level. And when they have about 2% alcohol, they're just ballooning, ballooning. They burst, they release all that juice on their own, which develops into a lower acidity wine that's drinkable when it's really young, like a Beaujolais Nouveau. Just exploding berries popping away, making dinner juice. Just a side note too, sulfites in wine are naturally occurring as part of the fermentation

• 45:40Alie Ward?

  process, but most winemakers also add like a little more sulfur dioxide as a preservative, unless it's a wine labeled organic, which is not allowed to add sulfites in the bottling process. So organic wines, they have so many rules, I mean, naturally.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  And we do add SO2 just to help because it's the first time it sees SO2. And that's just such a minimal amount that I'm sure it just dissipates out by the time it gets over there. So we just do it as, you know, preservative to help get it to bottle safely. And for Mere and I, our stylistic preference is to make more, kind of going in the traditional way, but yet still natural with native yeast, so more on the cleaner side. But that's just the style that we like. Everybody else is different and everybody likes different styles. But this is just, in particular, the style that we like to make.

• 46:34Alie Ward?

  When it comes to wine trends, does it ever exhaust you to see like, oh, this is the summer of rosé and then next summer it's going to be cava and this time it's funky and then it's going to be, you know, like, does it? I imagine when you get together with other winemakers too, you guys must talk such great petty shit. The, the tea that you guys spill, oh my God, is it, I bet it's the best.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  I mean, it's interesting to see the trends in the market sometimes. Luckily, they don't change from one summer to another one because like wine takes time to be made and to be released. So if not, we would be like totally screwed here.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  And a lot of them are really just like head scratchers that you just can't figure out because it's like nowadays, people just don't go by, you know, the quality of the wine. They go by how cool the labels look and, and if it's clear glass or if it's dark glass. And everybody loves clear glass, but clear glass is obviously not as good for the wine. And so it's just like the trends that people go through is just, it, it's mind boggling for me. I don't get it.

• 47:48Alie Ward?

  I imagine too, because I know that so many people pick based on labels. And are there certain graphic designers that just specialize in wine labels? And God, I bet there's going to be so many AI wine labels. It's going to be weird.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  There's a lot of designers that specialize in wine labels. There was a wine in Spain back in the time that actually a distributor, a really famous distributor in Spain released. It was their own label and they call it Perro Verde. So like the green dog and it has a green dog on the label. That wine was all over Spain and in all the restaurants by the glass and by the stores in like, I don't know, in like six months, like it took over. And it, to me, it was like the beginning of these labels like this, like Spain is more traditional, the same that France. And we had like this really all traditional Chateau winery labels. And then this label came to the market and everybody was buying that wine. And it was for me, the first time that I remember seeing like something happening like that.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  It didn't matter what was inside the bottle, people would just buy it because

• 48:50Alie Ward?

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  there was a green dog on the label and the wine was called Green Dog. Like, how is smart? I don't know what that has to do with the wine, but.

• 48:58Alie Ward?

  And if you're Spanish and you're screaming conozco ese, which apparently I just looked it up, means I know that one. You would easily recognize this green silhouette of a little leaping dog on the bottle. It's very cute. Anyone else? Just think back to the wine aisle, all right? You're going to a dinner party. You don't know what to bring. Oh, that one has a horse on it. Cool, done. Is this a thing? Very much so. Enough so that scientists are like, let's fire up the spreadsheets. So one study titled Wine and Wildlife: An Exploratory Study of the Depiction of Animals on Wine Labels Available in the United States, found that, quote, "animals were depicted on 16.7% of wine labels overall,

• 49:40Alie Ward?

  with birds and mammals being the most commonly depicted animals." I can't imagine like a wine with a slug on it. It's probably not going to happen. But they say, "As predicted, the depiction of animals was less common on wine labels from Europe than other regions." They say likely because a lot of European wines use traditional imagery, they say, like chateaus and hieratic images and fonts. And that attracts consumers that value the wine's heritage. So in a word, stuffier. Fewer goats and dogs and cats and stuff. Now, do the animals actually sell wine, though? Or are they just cute? Let's ask the 2026 paper, Influence of Wine Label Imagery: Eye-Tracking Evidence and Regulatory Implications,

• 50:25Alie Ward?

  in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review. And it explains that 20 years ago, wine labels mostly featured typefaces and fonts, but they conducted an experiment with the use of eye tracking. They write, "We demonstrated that wine labels featuring images of animals draw attention more rapidly and sustain attention for longer than labels with inanimate objects." And it all started, a lot of these papers say, with the explosion of the Australian wine Yellow Tail, which features this little hopping wallaby. Honestly, I never even considered that Yellow Tail was about a wallaby with that tail. I always just thought it was named after the tuna. I never even thought about it. And that's my bad for not turning on even one of my brain cells to consider it.

• 51:07Alie Ward?

  But yeah, the so-called Critter Wine sells more and faster than old-style labels, up to twice as many bottles, some sources say. So next time you're at the store, even if you don't drink wine, just cruise the aisle and report back on what critters you spot. I searched. Wine in my photos on my phone and I found so many pictures that I had just taken of bottles I didn't even buy that I was like, oh, look at that bat. Oh, that one's got a rhino on it, just that I thought were cute. We post a discussion thread on Patreon where we can all chat and I want to hear what you see. Oh, speaking of y'all, so much of it is perception and expectation. And I did get some great questions from listeners. Can I ask you a few?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. Yeah.

• 51:51Alie Ward?

  Oh, my gosh. Okay. Okay, but before we open those up, let's donate to a related charity for Tara and Miria. And it's going to House of Pride and Equality in Santa Maria, California, which works to create visibility and awareness for LGBTQIA+ people and provide safe environments of inclusion and educate through advocacy efforts and community outreach events. And they say, due to the lack of Latinx-focused queer spaces, they've been working toward that and a more equitable Central Coast for all since 2016. So you can find out more about them in the show notes, or you can head to houseofprideinequality.org. So thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform.

• 52:36Alie Ward?

  Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial.

• 53:21Alie Ward?

  And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 53:59Alie Ward?

  Being safer on the road starts with the person behind the wheel. That's Mazda's philosophy when designing every vehicle. Their proactive safety features help keep you more aware, connected, and engaged during every drive, which means your car does more than help protect you. It makes you a safer driver, which helps protect everyone. That's why Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. To learn more, visit MazdaUSA.com. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. Trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises.

• 54:42Alie Ward?

  When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know you Verbo, terms apply. See Verbo.com/Trust for details.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  What kind of day is it? It's a White Claw day. Grab a pack, grab your friends, everything else in life can wait. Your friends shouldn't. Let's go. White Claw, grab life by the claw. Please drink responsibly. Heart's also with flavors. White Claw's also works, Chicago, Illinois.

• 55:20Alie Ward?

  Okay, you had wonderful, full-bodied questions. So let's start with one from Anthony Cherubino, Anna Dillon, Jennifer R., Alia Myers, Josh Waldman, Hester Dingle, Carrie Overall, Mark McPhillips, and Sonoma County Raised Carleen D. H., and Agnes, Live in the U.S.

• 55:36Speaker 06

  Hi, Ally. My name is Agnes. I live in the US. And within the past year, I've visited some vineyards in Delana Good, Georgia. And I was wondering what qualifications does land or an area have to have to make high-quality wine? Is it the soil? What about the weather? What kind of grapes?

• 56:00Alie Ward?

  What makes an area like there's gonna be a lot of vineyards?

• 56:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely that combination that we're talking earlier about terroirs. There's areas that, yeah, because of the orientation that it's, I don't know, towards the ocean sometimes, or like because the microclimate that it has, or because the, yeah, the soil characteristic, the climate, like, all that interferes. And there's sometimes an area that has all the best of the best, so it's gonna make great wine.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  And it's also the variety. It's the soil. It's the climate.

• 56:35Speaker 01

  I think finding the variety, when you go to plant a vineyard, normally you don't plant, it's really rare to see Pinot Noir and Cabernet Sauvignon planted in the same vineyard, for example. So you need to find the right variety for the right place, too, and that's important. So.

• 56:50Alie Ward?

  That makes sense.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, Napa is known for cabs because cap thrives there.

• 56:55Speaker 02

  It's warmer climate.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, if they were to plant a Sancho Vez, maybe it wouldn't thrive that much there. It would have like some good Sancho Vezes, but not all of them. Napa cabs are good because the weather, the soil, it's just perfect for it, so.

• 57:08Alie Ward?

  You know, especially with so many fires in California, do they have to keep testing the soil to make sure that the soil is kind of like the same quality, same components? As so much, I'm thinking, you know, as a Californian mostly, too.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we do test if you have sandy soil or clay soil, or it's been here for years and years, so it's not gonna change that much. So we do sample and do analysis of the soil normally yearly in all the vineyards to be sure that you're not missing the micronutrients, basically. And then you, depending on the way you farm, you can add compost of different kinds.

• 57:44Alie Ward?

  So in 2017, the Atlas And the Tubbs wildfires killed dozens of people. They raged near Napa and Sonoma County, which, pardon the pun, is a global hotspot for winemaking. And I always wondered how the local agriculture and the viticulture was affected. And according to the 2021 paper, Science and Culture, wildfires pose a burning problem for wines and winemakers. Wildfire smoke can contaminate entire crops, and it's called smoke taint. And the resulting wines have an ashtray flavor, it says. And there was a 2017 Wired article titled, After the Napa Fires, A Disaster In Waiting: Toxic Ash. And it explains that wildfires

• 58:25Alie Ward?

  of organic matter, like grass and trees, have very different implications from house fires. And as we saw in the 2025 LA fires, thousands of houses burned, and heavy metals and other toxins can leach into the soil and the waterways. Hey, what if you want to make wine from a doomsday bunker? A few people, Annie G, first time question asker, Josh Waldman, and Carlos Denoy Whitehead, wanted to know.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  Hello, Ally. It is Denoy from Florida. And my question for the assumingly lovely couple is, I have been making wine for quite some years, and I was curious if you have any tips or tricks to make not just wine, but good wine?

• 59:11Alie Ward?

  Correct. You are lovely. So if you are messing around trying to make some wine at home, how do you make it so that it's not bad?

• 59:21Speaker 02

  Well, I think chemistry plays a big part in it. And so as Medea had mentioned earlier, like having a lower pH, a higher acidity, and also too, like keeping whatever you're fermenting in, whether it's a barrel or a tank, free of headspace, because the headspace could impart microbial growth. And so you want to keep everything topped off.

• 59:43Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna say there was like, if you're making wine at home and you are not able to really run analysis because you don't want to, or you don't know how to. Yeah, the two tips to me would be like sanitation. Just be sure that everything is super sanitized and clean. And second, no oxygen anywhere. You don't want oxygen. So if there's a space, a steroase headspace, that's gonna grow bacteria there. So have all your vessels always super, super full. Except when it's the middle fermentation, when you need some space because of the CO2. But after that, everything's super full.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  And temperature plays a big part as well, especially if you're doing it in the garage. Just make sure, you know, it doesn't get too hot in there because that's how you tend to evaporate more of the wine. And so you're having a top more often to keep, you know, that headspace kind of like topped off.

• 1:00:41Alie Ward?

  And a few people, Eric Blumer, Heather Crane, Laura Atkins, and Katie Biardi, on that note, wanted to ask. Heather Crane asked, which came first, wine or vinegar? Katie wanted to know, what is the difference between wine and vinegar? I know wine turns to vinegar when it goes bad, but is vinegar just bad wine? Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  So basically, I don't know if it's first wine or vinegar. You can go straight to vinegar already, actually, before having wine. But what happened is that there's oxygen in contact with your wine or with your fruit. It could be with your juice directly, doesn't need to be already like that you have alcohol. And to make wine, you don't want oxygen. And yeast is able to ferment with no oxygen. And that's the great thing about making wine. You don't need or you don't want oxygen and you don't need it to transform the sugar into alcohol.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  With vinegar, what happened is that you have bacterias there, not yeast. So we're talking about totally different species there. And bacteria creates vinegar or acetaldehyde and volatile acidity. And that's what smells, we call it volatile acidity because it's really volatile and it smells a lot vinegar, right? It's really easy to smell it from far. And that's what bacteria produces. So we're talking about different species like in contact with the wine. And bacteria only grows if there's oxygen. But if there's no oxygen, bacteria cannot grow.

• 1:02:10Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  I think I made a little bit of balsamic vinegar once.

• 1:02:18Alie Ward?

  It's all part of the learning process.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  It happens sometimes, yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  It does happen.

• 1:02:24Alie Ward?

  Well, in preventing that, Plazatron, Jeffrey Bradshaw, Chloe Fanny, Elizabeth Becker, Lindsay Bartholomew, and Chrissy, first time question asker, wanted to know, is there a difference in how long different wines can last after opening? How good is wine, really? And if you wanted it not to spoil, what's the best way to sort of preserve your wine?

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Drink it.

• 1:02:46Alie Ward?

  Drink it.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  Vacuum.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  No, I mean, obviously, if you drink it, it's not going to spoil. So that's the important part. How long can a bottle stay open? If that's the question, it really depends on the wine. But if you want to try to preserve the must, again, the same, no oxygen, so what's your acid? Vacuum. So there's these like little vacuum things that you can put on top of your bottle and vacuum off the oxygen or must of the oxygen. You can try to add nitrogen to the bottle, too. And if you put it in the fridge, it's always going to preserve it more because everything goes slower in cold temperatures. So any problem with this bacteria oxidation, it's going to go a little slower.

• 1:03:28Alie Ward?

  Another thing that is slower is figuring out a corkscrew. So Dave Miller, PhD, Travis Sin, Master Ohm, Alison Gussek, Tom Brody, and first time question asker Chrissy asked, screw it? Well, you mentioned corks and corks drying out. And so many people wanted to know, Elaine Lamarrande, Aliyah Myers, Camelia B., Carol Young, Joy Cuthbert. Elaine says, corks versus screw caps, which is better for the wine? Which is better for the environment? Everyone wants to know, twist tops, corks? What's going on there?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  I guess it depends what you want for your wine. So I like to have cork because our wine is going to change a little bit through the years. And I think that's kind of like a romantic part of winemaking, too. And every bottle is going to be a little bit different. And once we bottle it, it's young and it has a lot of fruit, but the wine is alive still and it's going to change. And the oxygen that goes through the cork helps with these changes of aromatics. So to me, that's the beauty of the cork. A screw cap, it's perfect for a wine that's normally going to be drinking faster, younger. That doesn't mean that you cannot age it. You can age it. It's just not going to change the same way that change with cork.

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  You have to be maybe a little bit less careful with a screw cap in terms of like storing your bottles because that's not that exchange of oxygen and they obviously the screw cap doesn't get dry or nothing. So you can have your bottles, for example, standing while with a cork, you need to have them laying down because you want the wine always touching the cork for, you know, like so it stays in contact with the wine and it gets wet. So yeah, I don't know. It's just the preference of the winemaker, I guess, and what they are looking for in their wines.

• 1:05:12Alie Ward?

  What about thinking outside the box? Wondered Filipe Jimenez and Mark Rubin. What about boxed wine? What are your thoughts? Are they eco-friendly? Is it even boxed if it's really in a bag? Uh, yeah. How do we feel about it?

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it is eco-friendly because you use less material. So the boxed wines normally could be like, I don't know, like five liters or so a gallon or a gallon and a half and you're using just cartoon and like a bag inside.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  An eco-friendly bag, yeah.

• 1:05:41Speaker 01

  It's like less weight. So if you have to ship, it's less CO, it's less footprint. So that's important. I mean, if you put good wine inside a bag, the wine is going to be good. Is it going to change? Are you going to put a wine to last 30 years there? No. Why? Why would you do that? Like, it's not going to happen. Anything. It's going to be the same today than tomorrow, except like you're going to lose like precipitation of compounds and things, right? But if it's for a wine that's to be meant to drink sooner, the same that the screw cap, it's just great. And it's definitely eco-friendly.

• 1:06:13Alie Ward?

  Okay. So it's not going to age. So just live in the moment. All right. I don't even know how things age in a bottle and neither does Camila Gomino, Storm, Heather Crane, Leanna Schuster, Kayla Meyer, Brooklyn Barron, Dave Brewer, Nina and Lisa Gorman. Well, several people wanted to know, how does aging play into it when it comes to being stored? Because you know how there's always that trope of like someone's like, I've got a 55 year old bottle of Cab and I've been saving it for this. And is that necessarily going to be better than if you would have had that 35 years ago when it was at its peak? Or where is the trope of like, I have an exceptionally old bottle of wine and I'm going to seduce you with it, or I'm going to impress you, or I've waited a really long time to open it? What happens in the bottle?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's really difficult to say. Again, I think like a lot of it, it's like through the years, we learn which wines and which varieties can last longer, but also like how the wine, the chemistry part of the wine interferes with it. If you have a wine that's a lot more protected, it's been filtered and stuff, you know, that it's not gonna have problems of precipitation. That doesn't mean that it's not gonna, you know, change aromatically, but there's different things that take part on the aging. But it just depends on the wine. You can never say, oh, I have this wine bottle that I had it 30 years and it's gonna be better. Most of the times it's not gonna be better unless you have an exceptional wine vintage and it's been stored really, really good.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  So my recommendation normally is drink the bottle of wine and if you like it, buy another one.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  And then if you wanna save it a few years, save it a few years, but at least you already know how it was.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  I mean, there are wines that are meant to age for some years, but there's a point that the wine stabilizes and wine starts going down. And the general consumer that doesn't have a way to age and store the wine properly, it's just better to drink it. When you buy it, enjoy it, yeah.

• 1:08:14Alie Ward?

  And also a lot of connections to the indigenous winemaking space too. I'm wondering, Tara, if there's anything you wanna tell us kind of about that in terms of like connection to the land that you're, where the grapes are grown, or how that culture plays into how you make wine?

• 1:08:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so balance. I always talk a lot about balance and it was something that I learned at such an early age. So balance within myself and my surroundings and living in harmony and just really like every vineyard that we go and seek out, just really trying to find that connection to the land and to the vines. And yeah, just all about connections and balance. And as we do everything naturally, you know, without using commercial yeast or commercial additives, feel that that's really important as well. And yeah.

• 1:09:08Alie Ward?

  You're both so hands-on in terms of what you're doing and I think that that definitely shows in. In all of the laurels you've gotten and the enthusiasm about your wine too is you're both so passionate and so hands on.

• 1:09:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I feel like you have to be for all the blood, sweat and tears that we go through yearly. I mean, I've, we've been in this industry for well over 20 years. And so we've experienced a lot of it. And there's so much more than romance that goes into winemaking. There's so much chemistry, so much labor. And, and we say it's a labor of love and passion, being passionate about it. Because that's what gets you through the 20 hour day shifts and stuff like that, of lack of sleep. And for me, it's just like a natural adrenaline rush.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Like, I've been off of coffee for, it's like been like five years now. And it's funny that I just barely started drinking coffee again after harvest, after five years.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  But it's just that natural adrenaline rush that just keeps me going. And, you know, I always say that, that once you stop, you know, learning about wine, maybe it's just, maybe it's time to get out of the industry. And I feel like I'm still learning, learning, learning. And I enjoy it. And I still get those butterflies in my stomach for every pick that we go out for. It's just, it's so fun. And just being out in nature and being able to see the sunrises and sunsets and connecting with all of that is just so beautiful. There's so much beauty there.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  And every year is different. So that makes it also really interesting because you are always thinking like, oh, this harvest is gonna be like this or like that. So I think it's what keeps it like also really interesting. And you never know.

• 1:11:05Speaker 02

  And that's the beauty of each vintage is that every vintage is different. And it just keeps you thinking. And it keeps you on your toes. Yeah.

• 1:11:14Alie Ward?

  So hardest things, would you say were the, the long days? Or if, is there something that is just all winemakers know, like this is the hardest? Is it?

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  To me, the hardest is to sell the wine.

• 1:11:26Speaker 02

  I think every winemaker agrees that.

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  I mean, we can talk about like, yeah, long days or hours because you're doing punch downs and you're tired. I'll take that.

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  But we get over that.

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  Thousand times over having to sell the wine.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  That's the hard part.

• 1:11:44Alie Ward?

  Where can listeners buy your wines? Where can people find them? What's the best way to get them?

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  I mean, the easiest way, say it like this, is obviously online in our website, coming to dreams.com. You can buy directly through us or coming to Lompoc, coming to visit us to our tasting room. Then you can also taste the wine and then purchase some after. But we do have distribution throughout California. So you may find it like especially in LA and San Francisco, San Diego, I guess, like the bigger metropolis, also in New York, Minnesota, North Carolina.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  UK.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  UK, a little bit in UK, yeah, that's true. And I was gonna say, that's it for now until like Canada opens its doors again. Because we have distribution in Canada, but we're out for a few more years, I think. Thank you, Mr. President.

• 1:12:31Alie Ward?

  And if you're staring into the distance and you're wondering, does the distribution system suck? The short answer is yeah, they told me. There's a three-tier system where winemakers have to sell to a distributor, who then sells to retail shops, at least in the US. But you can request that retail shops sell a certain label of wine, or you can get in touch with the winemakers and see where it's available. In Europe, they tell me it's way easier to just ship around, even across borders to other countries. Who knew? Obviously, not me. But if you're in the neighborhood in Lompoc, California, you can visit their tasting room and you can get a case there if you like, which is exciting. I know you've said that, you know, you're always learning and you're always getting to be excited and get butterflies about what you do. Is there anything that you both love the most

• 1:13:15Alie Ward?

  or that you're really looking forward to coming up? Anything you're really stoked about?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  I mean, every year, we're talked about the wines of the vintage. So I think we had like some interesting things and new varieties that we're working with this year. So I'm like really excited to see how they're gonna develop in barrel or in tank, because we don't know. I mean, it's the first time that we make, for example, a Ligote. So really excited to see how that's gonna come, because we've never worked with this variety. So that's exciting. But I think to me, like after harvest, we have this period of letting the wines rest. And then in February, March, we really sit down. Taste every single barrel and start putting in our head how the blends are gonna be and like making a puzzle on our head with all the pieces that we have in the cellar. And that's like a really fun time of the year, too.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:14:02Alie Ward?

  I hope you guys are getting a little bit of rest.

• 1:14:05Speaker 01

  We do, we do.

• 1:14:06Alie Ward?

  In between. Okay, I hope. Cause I know you both work so, so hard. And thank you so much for letting me ask so many incredibly uninformed questions. I love wine and I enjoy wine and I'm not as schooled in wine as my friends who are very into it. So thank you for letting me be like the listener and ask you the stupidest questions possible.

• 1:14:31Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  No question is stupid.

• 1:14:34Speaker 02

  Of course. And thank you for having us.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  Thank you for letting us explain our story and talk about our wines.

• 1:14:40Alie Ward?

  I love it. And two lovebirds. How cute is that? Come on, I mean.

• 1:14:48Alie Ward?

  So ask kind people curious questions. Don't bottle them up. Thank you again, Tara and Mireia from Camins 2 Dreams Winery for taking the time to talk and answer so many basics on wine making. And if you're ever in the Santa Barbara, San Diego area, their tasting room, again, in Lompoc, California, you can tell them Ologies says hi. We'll also link their winery right in the show notes. And you can ask your local restaurants or wine stores, carry their bottles. Their Instagram also is Camins2Dreams. That's C-A-M-I-N-S, number two, dreams. And you can follow them there. You can ask questions on their posts. Say hi. We are at Ologies on Instagram and Blue Sky. And you

• 1:15:28Alie Ward?

  can please tag us in your artwork with the hashtag #OlogiesArt. If you have pics of your merch, yourself in it, whatever, you can tag #OlogiesMerch and we'll repost you. Make some new pals that way. We also have shorter, kid-friendly episodes of Ologies where we get podcasts. Those are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, and they're linked in the show notes as well. Merch is at ologiesmerch.com. You can join our Patreon and support the show for as little as a dollar a month. And we chat on discussion threads about each episode. That's at Patreon.com/ologies. Aaron Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Kelly Ardwire does the website.

• 1:16:09Alie Ward?

  Monitoring our episode aging is scheduling producer Noel Dilworth. Overseeing the planting of ideas to the distribution into your ears is managing director Susan Hale. And at the editing bays are Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio, who work so hard, they never whine. Nick Thorburn poured over the theme music. And if you stick around to the very end, you know I tell you a secret. This week, I never want to make jewelry. I never want to do it. I never want a metalsmith. I get videos, like in my feed, of people doing metalwork and working on these tiny, tiny jewelries and filing things and sawing things. And I'm just like, that looks awful. I know people

• 1:16:53Alie Ward?

  love it and they do it, but I'm like, I just know for me, that looks so hard. But I so appreciate that other people can do it and I appreciate their efforts. I'm like, I could not. That's something I couldn't do. I don't know. My hands would shake. I would be like, this is too small. This is too tiny. Also, I had a dream the other night that my mom invited all of my exes into a surprise party for me. And as I was shocked and addressing the room, I like ripped the biggest fart ever and absolutely everyone heard it. And I just didn't know how to recover from that. And I'm really hoping that dreams aren't like other dimensions that exist, but luckily I'm in this one. So, hey, get some sleep. Love you. Bye bye.

• 1:17:56Speaker 05

  Wine tastes like grapes.

• 1:18:00Speaker 05

  Hey, it's me, Teddy Swims. You hear that? That's life. So go grab it. Grab your old friends. Grab new friends. Grab a White Claw. Grab flavor for everyone in your group. Grab music, laughter, and moments you'll never forget. You'll never regret it. Hey, Teddy. Oh, hey, man. Grab new friends. Grab old friends. Grab life. By the Claw. White Claw. Please drink responsibly. White Claw Celta Works, Chicago, Illinois.