R. O'Neill Latta
Saturday Tasting. July 13th, 2-5pm. $10.
Riley makes wine up and down the coast of California, from Mendocino to the Anza Valley, and Corralitos in between. Like his wines, Riley is very Californian. I mean that in the best way possible. I grew up on the East Coast, but I have come to call California my home. I love this state for its natural beauty as much as I do for its history of radical humans who have dared to love, think and be differently. Riley’s wines spring forth exuberantly from this fountain of aesthetic freedom: at once radical in style but traditional in their allegiance to the land and the people that have cultivated it for hundreds of years.
Before Riley was a winemaker, he was “an artist, primarily sculpting and creating three dimensional art. He graduated from N.Y.U.”1 I think it would be jejune to draw a straight line between his artistic practice and his winemaking, but surely both derive from a sensibility that is alive to chance and a willingness to encapsulate that chance in a more or less stable form. I say “more or less,” because his wines are strikingly kinetic, still-in-motion even though they are locked up in a bottle.2
When I asked him what has changed over the last couple years and how his vision has evolved, he replied: “i don't think i had a vision to begin with, but my heart is becoming more focused now. one step at a time, slow growth like an apple tree. i will continue to walk the mountains to pick tunas and im planting more passion fruit vines.” A more typical and completely reasonable response from a young winemaker might have been along the lines of “buy more tanks, find a more stable fruit source, and increase production.” But the logic of this domaine runs askew to typical rationality, in favor of an approach more akin to the elaboration of an aesthetic ideology or the construction of a series of sculptures.
The wines range from deftly macerated mixed-fruit wines to BIG REDS. When asked to describe his fruit and process, Riley often starts with the human element. “The apples for my ciders come from Mary Warshaw's house in Corralitos. She was my friend's grandmother, a fabulous artist, local educator, and environmentalist.” At other times, they veer into descriptions that belie his artist eye for the particular as it comes into contact with the universal. “Zpc comes from the site i've been farming in the hi desert, in Anza. Its located south of Thomas mountain and east of Cahuilla mountain, surrounded by redshanks and teeming with horned lizards! the sky is huge out there and the clouds move fast.” And no matter what, he is humble enough to admit that he is still figuring things out, enthralled by the process of learning and excited whenever things fall into place. “B4M is a crazy cali blend, muscat from bill in hemet, riverside county, and barbera from campos family in contra costa. a bit of a scatter brain wine.” In my view, these are some of the most exciting wines being made in California. Somewhat randomly, I am writing this from Chicago, where there were a few stray bottles from Riley’s last release. They were perfect antidotes to the mid-summer heat.
On Saturday, July 13th, from 2-5pm, Riley will pour five new wines behind the bar. The price is $10. We hope you can make it.
2023 Gu (sparkling apple & guava cider from Corralitos)
2023 Pippi (sparkling field blend apple cider from 100+ yr old vines in Corralitos)
2023 Zpc (a blend of Zin, Petite Sirah and Cab from Horny Toad Vyd in Anza)
2022 B4M (Barbera and Muscat from California)
2022 Syr (whole cluster Syrah from Poor Ranch)
xo,
Bradford
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/fashion/weddings/zoe-latta-riley-oneill.html
About four hours into the 9th Brumaire, I found myself feeling very thirsty. I was tired of tasting wines. What I wanted was a drink. So I made a beeline to Riley’s table, hoping he still had a bit of “Pasi,” his passionfruit-grape wine from Southern California. He poured me a fat glass. I could smell its exuberant tropicana from a yard away. Drinking it made me think of swallowing whatever is inside of a yellow glow stick. Wine is a social beverage, but everyone once in a while a wine creates its own solitude. I spent a few moments trying to remember this line from Adorno about how movement can become immanent to a static work of art. I looked it up the next day. “Through contemplative immersion the immanent processual quality of the work is set free. By speaking, it becomes something that moves in itself” (Aesthetic Theory, 176).