Scenes from the 2025 Garagiste Festival

And this is the final day of the 40%-off sale of our most-awarded wines!

It is splendid. It has great fruit. It is really rare, this… It’s the terroir that gives you this. I am so happy… It’s so good. I could drink it right now. ~ Denise Capbern-Gasqueton, elderly owner of a Saint-Estèphe estate in Bordeaux, France—with a twinkle in her eyes.

Today—Sunday, April 27— final day of 40%-off sale

So many of you have already taken advantage of this unprecedented sale over the past three days—thank you! But in case you still might not have known: As announced in my last newsletter posting four days ago, today will be the last day to take advantage of 40% savings on mixed half-cases and mixed full-cases of my 2022 Vino Tinto Rustico and my 2024 Vermentino—two wines that just recently have collectively gathered 99-point and 95-point designations, two Best of Class awards, one Best Micro Winery award, two Double-Gold Medals, one Platinum Medal, and three Gold Medals. That’s crazy!

Visit www.tinyvineyards.com before midnight tonight if you want a piece of this.

2025 Garagiste Festival: Northern Exposure

The first time we participated in a Garagiste Festival was about two years ago. Our first commercial vintage had just been bottled and wasn’t really ready for prime time. We had no game yet in how to market our wines, and we came off like the newbies we were when we talked about them. But we were dying to put them in front of folks we didn’t know and see if we could get an unvarnished appraisal on our first professional effort that had already taken us nearly two years to produce. I wrote all about it here, and I explained the libertarian concept of “Garagiste.” Go back and read that posting of the newsletter. It’s revealing.

Yesterday, we participated in another Garagiste Festival, for many of the same reasons. Only now we’ve got a lot of grape stains under our fingernails and we’re far more savvy about the how and why of what we’re doing. And we’ve got those two breakout wines described above that, once again, we want as much feedback on as possible before we present them to the buying public. Here’s a quick look at our day:

Sonoma Veterans Memorial Hall was once again the venue for Garagiste.

Inside, a few hundred wine aficionados, industry hucksters, and wannabes tasted the wares of 40 or so boutique winemakers.

Now a seasoned old pro at all of this, Deb stands ready at our table as the doors are about to open.

Then we get down to the business of describing alchemy.

Deb constantly draws them in and her smiling pitches look a whole lot more fun than my mansplaining.

Midway through the afternoon I get pulled aside for a live and feisty wine interview with Sonoma’s own KSVY. Good fun!

We auctioned off one of only six remaining magnum bottles of our completely sold-out 2021 Eclipse Malbec. The eventual winning bid of $150 came from Mario and Veronica Rubio, with the proceeds going to the Garagiste Scholarship Fund at Cal Poly. A feel-good moment all around.

And I don’t think it would be overstating it to say that our 2022 Vino Tinto Rustico and 2024 Vermentino were highlights of the show. Folks kept coming up to our table saying that someone had told them we had a couple of good wines they should come taste.

True, unfiltered word-of-mouth!