The Big Question
Hey dudes and dudettes,
So as you maybe already saw on social media we have launched our crowdfunding campaign to remodel our building in Köln to get it set up for the squeezing of grapes and the making of wine. We’ve had a pretty good start so far with lots of polarizing feedback. Sometimes they love you and sometimes they hate you, but at the end of the day you got to try and live the dream.
If anyone asks you why even do an Urban Winery my first answer to them would be to bring the appreciation of what farmers/vignerons/agriculturists are even doing to the place where most of their producuts are being bought and consumed - the city-. In our case we break ground with the great city of Köln.
It’s a first step to shine a light on processing and giving people a deeper perspective into how the things they consume, very often without a thought, are made. Allowing consumers to view into the inner workings of your product opens them up to all types of new realizations. They begin to ask themselves questions they never would have thought of by just pulling something off of a supermarket shelf. Is this something I want to put in my body? Do the practices/philosophies ring true to what I would strive for myself? Woaaa…. I can’t believe they make it like that/treat nature like that?
My second answer is connecting as many people as possible to something tangeable and natural. When you work with nature you work with life. Farming and preserving your harvest is a deeply gratifying, humbling, and awakening experience. The more people that get the chance to experience this wonder the better this world will be.
Making wine is a great median to experience this connection, and I could fill many more pages alone in talking about how growing grapes and making wine will change the way you look at the world. This without having even taken a sip to lift your spirit. They say that we are all connected. Well winemaking will take you on a journey that will prove it to you in more ways than one.
My third answer would be that we don’t have 20 hectar, a 300 hundred year old cellar, or the mysticism of high dollar lore to shroud our wines into some noble made by the gods image. We have 3 hectar land in the Pfalz and all work second jobs and are still fairly young. We have the background and love for making wine, and prefer it be made in a certain way. We grow our grapes organically. We do native ferments. We work with low sulfur. We hand harvest, green harvest. We focus on nature and never try to force her. We focus on quality, and in all honesty we love it and don’t want to stop doing it just because we live in the city.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Hollerith
