No Chains Can Hold You, Red Blend, Paso Robles, 2017

I Know It’s Going Slow, But It’s Heading Your Way

Our minds are conditioned to hold and reinforce arbitrary borders and limits on our ambitions, our feelings and our worth.

When confronted with a lot of Aglianico that wasn't too Vesuvian, we almost abandoned it because it wasn't typical enough. Doubt crept. Stupid amygdala.

Out the window went the definitions, the precedents, the tradition. We used our family as a new blueprint: France, Italy and California. After trials, we had a wine better than we could have dreamed, speaking with a melange of flavors and influences from some amorphous Alpine territory. The wine came from Earth but wasn't too attached to it.

No Chains Can Hold You builds on a firm foundation of glorious Paso Petite, darkly colored and thickly textured. Aglianico delivers a tangy red fruit between kirsch and raspberry jam. Cabernet and Syrah add structure, herbal complexity and a mid-range to link the other two grapes together.