2021 Poison & the Antidote

We ship in quantities of 4, 6, 8 or 12 bottles. Flat rate shipping is $29 in BC and $35 for rest of Canada. Mix and match is totally cool.

“Don’t turn away. Keep your gaze on the bandaged place. That’s where the light enters you.” ~ Rumi

This is the first wine produced from vines we planted and grew ourselves on our home vineyard site in Okanagan Falls, BC. Moving from being total city slickers in Vancouver to aspiring farmers and winegrowers in the country has been quite a confronting experience, exactly as one might expect. We have been bumbling along on our farming journey, taking two steps forward and one step back, looking outside of ourselves for “answers” regarding how best to farm our small plot of land more often than we have remembered to look inwards and trust our own ideas, abilities, and intuitions. We have become accustomed to telling the story of how “difficult” farming is, when really, this is probably just an expression of our degree of confrontation with the complexity of working directly with the natural world, and our struggle to fully own the responsibility we have chosen.

October of 2021 brought the first crop of our vineyard, which we planted with a crew of friends and family in the spring of 2018. The day we harvested was bittersweet, and inspired the name for this wine. Our picking crew didn’t show up, and it was left to us, Costa’s mom and sister, and some incredibly devoted friends (one of whom was 8.5 months pregnant) to harvest the vineyard on our own. As we moved, slowly, through each row of the vineyard, our attention was brought to the many sections of the vineyard that are still struggling to thrive. We also learned that our initial attempt at installing bird netting to prevent the local starling population from devouring the literal fruits of our labour had fallen short, and we realized that we’d probably lost about 50% of our first crop to the birds. 

The day was ripe with stark contrasts and overwhelming emotions. The beautiful sunny weather, and the sections of bare earth with struggling or dead vines. The smiles and support of our friends and family, and the frustration and disappointment that the trusted labour we had hired to help us didn’t show up. The joy and satisfaction of harvesting our very first grapes, and our failure to protect the crop from the birds due to our own inexperience and inattention with installing the nets. Hence the name for this wine, Poison & the Antidote. 

As Rumi reminds us so succinctly, “the cure for the pain is in the pain”. The intensity of our contrasting experiences on this harvest day brought our own successes and failures into crystal clear focus. The gift of this focus - the poison - is the clarity of who and what we need to become on the next phase of our journey - the antidote. 

This wine loves the excruciating pain of witnessing the ways your best efforts don’t measure up, and the self-compassion to be able hold space and grow through this experience

Drink this while listening to Alan Watts explain why in every explicit duality there is an implicit unity

One word pain

Winemoji ☠️ x 🧪