Welcome to Tiny Vineyards

a story about making wine

If you are at all fascinated by wine—the growing of wine, the making of wine, or simply the drinking and appreciation of wine—I invite you to join me on a unique journey. I have just launched a monthly newsletter to chronicle my own unexpected “wine awakening” over a six-year period of my life, three years of which have already passed, and three that are yet to come!

In early 2018 I made a feature-length documentary film called Tiny Vineyards, about home winemaking in Sonoma, California. The movie followed a dozen backyard viticulturists and amateur enologists through an incredible season of grape growing and winemaking. Tiny Vineyards was a big hit with film festival and theater audiences, but for me it was an eye-popping, life-altering event.

The experience ignited a powerful curiosity and passion in me that I didn't know existed and I began making my own wine. My first vintage was only 10 gallons of two red varietals, crushed with my feet on a friend’s patio, fermented in her laundry room, and aged in her bathroom cupboard. Somehow, remarkably, the wines won a silver and a gold medal in two national amateur winemaking contests. That was all I needed to dive blindly into the deep end!

I joined the Sonoma Home Winemaker’s club to connect with like-minded hobbyists. I became an enthusiastic newbie with another group of mostly seasoned old Italian guys who care for and harvest several private boutique vineyards, then celebrate with lavish lunches and bottles of their best. I harassed a private vineyard consultant/winemaking expert I had met while making the movie with an endless barrage of questions (his patience worthy of sainthood). I even planted my own tiny vineyard of Malbec vines to nurture, in partnership with the landholder.

Now in my third vintage I have 200 gallons of five different varietals happily aging in beautiful, expensive French oak barrels in a backyard shed. This year, if all goes as planned, I will make my first commercial wines under legal license in a bonded winery, and I will release them for sale sometime in 2023.

Have I gone nuts?

To be sure, I have fallen under the spell of Bacchus, the Greco-Roman god of grape harvests and winemaking, and I have no desire to be rescued! I plan to take this obsession as far as it goes. Every aspiring winemaker has their own story, but for me this six-year period has so far been—and still promises to be!—a staggering learning curve.

If you’ve ever been curious about what it really takes to make and sell your own wine, you’re welcome to live vicariously through me as I explore all the options for going professional, navigate the confusing license requirements, wrestle with the sourcing and handling of huge volumes of grapes, and take the rigorous two-year UC Davis Winemaking Certificate Program to up my technical chops and understanding of wine chemistry—all of this, hopefully, without going broke!

What you’ll get

The Tiny Vineyards newsletter follows my seemingly improbable journey to becoming a bona fide winemaker with unfiltered reporting of hard-won milestones and painful disasters, fascinating history and culture, and valuable insight from an endless slate of colorful characters every month. I’ll also give you complimentary access to stream the full-length Tiny Vineyards film anytime you like, as I’ll be deconstructing it along the way.

This all comes during a period of great change and introspection in my life—not to mention the unprecedented social and environmental upheaval in our country at large—and as such, I’m primed to pour everything I have into this venture. Life is short and it demands that we engage. As the witty brainiac Clifton Fadiman once put it, “To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.”

Of course, there’s a price. It’ll cost you $36 a year to subscribe. But I’ll give it all back to you in FREE WINE! Click here for details.

PLEASE join me in this very exciting, sure to be humorous and sometimes embarrassing, frequently confusing yet hugely rewarding, highly addictive yet maddeningly slow, delicious experience!

With warmest regards and gratitude,

Joe Daniel