New Release 2021 wines from Hope Well

Hi there, Friends,

It’s been a few turns. You’ve changed. I’ve changed. Everything has changed.

What, in the pandemic, we may have mistaken for a temporary, though massive, perturbation in our lives, may have in fact been the changing of a deeper rhythm of our lives. But that is another post, and today it is spring, and spring is for young thoughts, plunking raindrops and chlorophyll.

It can be a poignant therapy in these times to remember that spring is the time of rebirth, of awakening; to imagine the scales falling off one’s eyes, freeing you of a stale and mundane perspective and letting fresh creativity gush out in waves. Like a spring.

Spring is a saturated season. Sometimes literally, always figuratively, spring pushes through the previous year’s detritus with mechanical, chemical, and electrical forces combining in the most mysterious ways: bud emerging from wood, aroma from flower, lightning from the static charges merging in a cloud. As Dorothy opens her eyes to the Wonderful World of Oz, in rich Kodachrome, so do we blink out of our winter-grey, crystalline shells, and see anew a world washed in vernal color. This is the truest and most precious gift, and yet…

We feel covetous of spring. We want to hold it in our hands, while it gurgles and laughs through our fingers. The purposefulness that we covet leaks from every crevice in spring. Ants pour forth from underground lairs to lay trails to sweet sustenance, hungry queen bees bumble out of their tunnels, and chittering, bustling, quarreling birds positively attack the ground for grub, worm, thrip, and stem, flashing back to a fur-lined nest full of screeching children. There is no choice. There is no time for anything and there is time for everything. The freshness, the appreciativeness, and the aliveness of every organism in spring is independent; it has no concern, it is not a reaction, it is a force that possesses the natural world.

Chlorophyll absorbs the full spectrum of light energy except green wavelengths, and in late spring and early summer, the tender new leaves are as green and productive as they will be, their faces following the sun greedily pulling in energy, harnessing the light energy to incite a chemical reaction to oxidize water, liberating its electrons and forcing them onto CO2 (ta-da carbohydrate!) to produce the food that fuels everything hence. And it is a beautiful paradox to behold the spectrum of colors that bombard our eyes, revealing only that which they do not absorb, and thank goodness! For as intimately as we know the colors of our world, they are the shifting and elusive mysteries of perfect geometry and mingling energy fields that our worldly eyes can only manage in abstract. But let that not deter you. Chasing a point on a spectrum of light is the true desire in our hearts, written before we had words and worries.

Richard Jefferies, a British writer and naturalist said: The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendor of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things so much the more is snatched from inevitable time.

The first cell that initiated this most magnificent invention of photosynthesis passed secrets on through the thousands of millions of turns of this earth, written still in our own cells. And now each spring, the tender leaf, once expanded, turns light into life. Every ripe fruit, every vein in a fly’s wing, every feather on a duck’s back knows the fractal scale, and plays it back in life and death.

We cannot hold it in our hands. We cannot save it for our children. But we can join it with them. We can LIVE it with them in what we grow and what we make. Spring is the gift of again. It is not a guarantee, but a moment to live and make a memory. Not with a camera. With your one life.

With the 2021 Experiment of the Three Children, I strive to tell the story of Hope Well via vignettes of different wavelengths of Pinot Noir. The first two children are, themselves, the blushing cheeks of spring and early summer, and like the seasons, they are best lived and absorbed in their moment. And that moment, my friends, is now.

~ Mimi

All current wines are available for purchase here.