An Intro: Wine + The Outdoors and…Authenticity

If you’ve made it this far, we at least have you intrigued to find out what we’re all about.

Like most stories we need start back at the beginning. Ryan here, and I’ll start the telling for this blog post:

The Start:

We started Polemonium Wines with not an idea but a goal, to fill a need we see in our lives but also within the wine industry. We have both made a lot of wine over many vintages and at a few prestigious places along the way, but something was still missing. We both work hard to make “clean” wines at a very high level.

But what does that mean to people outside the cellars? After all, wine, no matter the category, is a bit of a mystery to most consumers. No matter what price point you buy wine at, when have you easily found things like, the ingredients? Or nutritional facts? How much of the jargon written about ‘terroir’ do you actually understand? Wine is meant as a pleasurable moment, we don’t require it to live. Often for the rest of the time, we pay close attention to what we put in our body when we buy our groceries or decide on lunch. When it comes to wine, that information isn’t required or even easy to obtain.

Made well and done right, a bottle of wine can share its entire existence with you. Who it was that farmed it, how and where it was grown, the exact day of harvesting, every step of the fermentation process, how it’s aged, the people behind it, whether it was made ethically, even how long it has been waiting for you to consume it! So why shouldn’t it include the ingredients? It’s not the sexiest information but we already make this conscience choice with everything else. Where my coffee is grown, how the produce we eat is farmed, how any of the various animal products we eat are raised. It is often not too difficult to find these answers. Why should wine be different?

We set out to create a wine company that offered a transparent view of how the wine you buy is made, something more substantial than aerial drone footage of a pretty vineyard and a stock image of winemaker pretending to blend in the cellar. But more than that we wanted the soul of this project to be based on the quality winemaking standards we’ve honed in our years in the industry, we want to continue to make wines at a very high level, independently, and with a progressive viewpoint. First and foremost, this is not a commercial operation where the ‘bottom line’ and ‘growth projections’ are all that matter. This is hand-crafted, thoughtful, intentional work. We aim to make the types of wine that will share all the stories that came together to make the bottle, with you, as transparently as the glass you pour into.

So what’s the deal?

Make great wine in a traditional way without extra fillers for our customers and try to help the industry as well with a forward-thinking marketing stance? Sure this was a noble and worthwhile goal. After all we had the know-how and the experience to pull it off, but… we asked, “would anyone care?” This was a question Taylor asked me almost on a daily basis. “How do we connect the dots? How do we share what we’re doing and why it’s important? More importantly how do we as a start-up share how and why we’re doing this at a high level?”

All great questions! Not going to lie, I had a few ideas sure, but figuring out how to connect the dots was always something Taylor was the master at. But, this was going to take the both of us. The rest of this blog post is dedicated to answering those questions! …Plus a few more that are needed to explain who we are and why we’re having this conversation in the first place

We’re sharing what we’re doing, but why is it important?

The answer to this question is actually a big part of our foundation. The wine industry is well developed in the United States. Today, there are billion-dollar wine companies that make most of the wines you see on the shelf. Wine has a long history in the Old World dating back multiple centuries and those traditions, including sometimes even the actual vines themselves, were carried over here to New World in America at its inception. Wine, through all kinds of turmoil and change and human cultural boundaries has survived. A lot has been written about it. There is a plethora of marketing content out there- from artistic, to educational, to purely sales-related.

But what is it that is actually in your glass? Sure, you can find out that the grapes were grown organically or conventionally. What does that actually mean though? And what part of making wine that way matters vs. the part lives in the grey and may not actually be what you’re anticipating based on the labelling? There are a few GREAT wine education resources out there like Wine Folly that take a lighthearted, interactive approach to wine. But I have an experiment for you to try. Log on to YouTube. Search whatever flavor, brand, region of wine you want. How many wineries, winemakers, producers are putting out video content telling you aside from grapes, what goes into the bottle you’re buying? Go ahead, I’ll wait. I won’t have to wait long because you’ll quickly find it doesn’t exist in any meaningful quantity. There are a few small winemakers like us, utilizing modern platforms, but most put out marketing content so sporadically that it almost appears like it was on accident.

As winemakers, we have to use our platforms to talk about how we make our wine and let consumers decide what’s meaningful and important to them and ultimately, to vote with their dollar. What was a monumental task of education through winemaker dinners or seminars to myself in the past, has been made much more simple in the present by utilizing tools like YouTube. The wine industry in its current state of connection with people is in the stone age. Very few winemakers utilize their platforms and most of the content out there is about the brand, branding, or the estate, and it does not allow for much meaningful connection to the people and place and methods. In a modest way we’d like to change this. As much as we love sharing our wine over a meal and telling you exactly how we made it and why the, ‘nuanced technique we use in the cellar makes the aromatics pop’ that’s not realistic. But sharing that same information directly from us-to-you over social media, will allow us to give great detail about what exactly it is in your bottle. And if you decide that’s something important to you, you hopefully try the wines and follow us over the vintages.

We’re a brand-new start-up with few resources, how are going to pull this off?

This is a question I’ve pondered since before we started in July 2023. I’ve also wondered how we would do it in a way our audience would want to connect with and would find interesting. There are a lot of ways we can share the extra steps about how our wine is made and highlight the steps that we think are meaningful.

When I think about it a little more though, what we’re really trying to share is the kind of people we are- we want to connect with our wine consumers the way you would if we were your local wine shop downtown. So as interesting as it is to tell you about the wine (and we winemakers could do that all day long, we love the stuff!) why stop there? That would be an incomplete picture. No matter what industry you work in, no matter your craft, and no matter what you do for fun you can appreciate someone ‘doing their thing’ at a high level. It’s a life philosophy for us and one that extends into what we do outside of making wine.

Striving in the ultra-competitive wine industry is the ‘why’ that helps drive our wine quality standards but that degree of precision, focus, and sensitive artistry touches many of our other life experiences as well. So when you log on to our online platforms to learn about the wine don’t be surprised to videos or media that show us climbing, working out, shooting a bow, gathering really tasty ingredients to go with our wine. There are plenty of natural tie-ins to the winemaking (Simple Paring Saturdays that feature ingredients we thoughtfully selected to pair with our wine) and showing those overlapping themes from other areas of our life we hope, will allow us to better connect with our customers. We often find parallels between our craft and our activities and we’ve decided we want to share those insights as a sort of ‘literal metaphor’ to what winemaking means to us. It is something we can do today, genuinely and authentically, without a million-dollar marketing budget that we hope others can organically relate to and will want to take part in

What to Expect:

Expect us to use our website blog page, YouTube, and Instagram to tell you about our wines. We’ll do behind-the-scenes content, educational videos specific to how we make our wine and what in our opinion, is important. We’ll debate and talk about news topics or trends related to wine. Or, make silly totally non-serious commercial-type videos that we crack up to while we edit the scenes. While it’s easy to find how a news outlet or columnist feels about an industry topic how often do you get to hear long form directly from a winemaker? We’ll mix in what we’re doing outside of making wine, what drives us every day, and how it all relates. Don’t worry, this will also include fresh ingredients to offer unique takes on how to elevate that Tuesday night dinner (we get lots of asks to do pairings!). Most importantly though, keep in mind we’re winemakers first! Creating content is new to us! If there is something you want to know about drop us a line and tell us!We love hearing from folks and there are lots of ways to contact us. Email, our website, or our social media outlets. We run them all ourselves so you can know that those notes are coming directly to us.

What’s up first?

We’ve released wines from our first vintage! If you check out our store, you’ll find a Sauvignon Blanc and Rosé. The most common adage repeated about wine is it only gets better with age! Well that’s MOSTLY true but super fresh aromatic white wines and rosé explode out of the glass in their youth! We’ve already started sharing content on how to take advantage of this time of year. Fresh seafood and these aromatic wines are made for kicking back on your porch in the warm evenings. Whether you’re following us or trying another quality winemakers’ wines, during spring and summertime is when those fresh style of wines from the previous vintage are ready to drink!

Until next time,

Ryan & Taylor