Well we started making wine for ourselves as freshman at Cal Poly. We quickly found out selling it in the dorms was way easy. Every year after that we made a little more wine, and got a little better at making it... Which by now means it tastes good. Our sophomore year we met a rich old guy who wanted to retire with a vineyard on his ranch. We took that summer to Tom Sawyered all our friends into helping plant a vineyard of Syrah in Santa Barbara. 5 years later those grapes make up 25% of this wine.
So one of us went to study abroad in Australia to see how they make wine over there. Nothing to different, but he did learn that his roommate’s dad had a vineyard in Napa, and that they had very very very low security at night. After OZ we would sneak to Napa and fill trucks full of the grapes for the dorm wine. We were poorer then, so we literally cellared our barrels under a bridge sophomore to senior year. Once we graduated, we got up the courage to ask if we could actually buy the Napa grapes, and that’s how 75% of this wine came to be Old Vine Zinfandel from Howell Mountain. The day school ended SLO Down Wines started our first small legal vintage. We have been slowly growing since then, dig in. -Winery