By: Eliza Hess
This time of year, the cellar is quiet.
Barrels line the walls. The wines from the last harvest rest in place, slowly settling and slowly becoming themselves. There isn’t much to do but taste and wait. It’s one of the few seasons in winemaking that allows for stillness.
And stillness makes you reflective.
That’s why we host the Retrospective now.
David always envisioned it as our one formal event of the year. It grew out of evenings spent with his Wine Wizard friends, opening older bottles, telling stories, and realizing how opening a bottle can viscerally transport you back to that year, that vintage. After all, our taste and smell receptors are closely connected to the brain’s memory centers.
The Retrospective is built on that idea: wine as a marker of time.
A bottle tastes like the year it was grown. It also carries everything that followed, the vineyard decisions, the harvest call, and the choices in the cellar. With age, those early decisions do not fade. They come into clearer focus.
When I taste older vintages now, I am not just evaluating structure or balance. I think about what we understood then and what we understand now. Each vintage reflects the mindset of that year: the confidence, the uncertainty, and the lessons we did not yet know we were learning.
That is what makes opening older wines so compelling. You are not just tasting fruit. You are tasting evolution.
This year’s dinner returns to David’s original focus: ZinStar. His flagship. The wine that quietly traces the story of this winery from 1978 forward. Instead of exploring multiple varietals, we are going deep and allowing one wine to show how it has changed across decades.
This March will also mark our third dinner honoring 20-year wine club members. Twenty years of harvests. Twenty years of shared bottles. Twenty years of choosing to grow alongside us.
I still remember my first Retrospective dinner. I did not have decades of stories to contribute. My timeline references were things like, “That was the year I started junior high.” But I remember the rhythm of the evening, the pause between bites and sips, and the way conversation unfolded as the wines opened.
It changed how I saw this work.
David and Heather believed deeply in sharing those experiences with our team, not for prestige but for perspective. To slow down. To listen. To taste with intention. The more we experience, the more thoughtful we become as winemakers, as stewards, and as hosts.
The Retrospective is not just about opening older bottles.
It is about honoring the time that shaped them and the people who have shaped this place alongside us.
