2026, a Year For Focus
Before the new year, my mom has all of her kids pick a word to set a theme for the next twelve months. We present the word and use it for setting goals. For 2026, I picked the word strategy.
Looking back on 2025, it was a year of embarking on new projects that provided our winery a new set of parameters for our traditional winemaking practices and business operations. It was a year of putting what we learned into action, being creative, and acclimating to our new endeavor of becoming a Kosher winery. Our style and practices of winemaking didn’t change, but our cellar operations had to conform to the Jewish calendar and we had to balance three separate productions. Some of our non-Kosher wines produced in the 2024 vintage were (and some still are) in tanks and barrels awaiting for the 2025 harvest and mead making to be over so we could properly blend and get ready to bottle. It became a complicated game of Tetris—utilizing three separate pumps, hoses, and other equipment to ensure everything remained separate, compliant, and true to our quality standards.
As we prepare to blend and taste through all of the wines remain from the 2024 vintage and the ones that we created in 2025, we’re quite proud. The 2024 red wines are boasting concentration and complexity, while remaining balanced and elegant. It’s ironic—the 2024 harvest was the toughest harvest I ever experienced physically, so I would imagine the wines would show toughness and grit as they did a year ago in the barrel. I guess it shows that anything can become elegant with a bit of rest and maturity. The 2025 wines are electric. During harvest, we had some of the best chemistries that I’ve ever experienced as a winemaker even though the yields were lower than we’ve typically seen. It required some improvising in the cellar, and over the next few years when these wines are released, you’ll be able to taste these wines as bottled history.
We became more equipped in 2025. We hired Christian Orr as our tasting room manager in the beginning of the year, allowing us to increase our production bandwidth, focus on new projects, and run our tasting room much more successfully. Our tasting room team expanded and we have been able to create experiences for customers that truly honor our family history and best showcase our wines. It is one of our goals this year to improve our tasting room as a physical space, to reflect all of the hard work we put into each of our wines and meads.
2026 is going to be a big year for us, and it will require a lot of focus and strategy to ensure that we can accomplish all of our goals. Christian and I have already started the year with multiple brainstorming sessions—mapping out tasting room operations, wine and mead releases, events, and more. Strategy, for us, means being intentional: about what we do—producing the highest quality wine and mead possible, and ensuring the best experience for our customers while showcasing our family history in a way that brings memory to life on a daily basis.
2026, we’re ready for the next phase of our winery and we can’t wait to share that with all of you.