Dan Garver, Owner and Winemaker

I made my first batch of wine when is was a teenager -- it turned out terrible. So bad, in fact, that I didn't make another batch of wine in the forty years that followed. However, during that time, I learned a lot about wine, and I learned to love wine -- the differences between varietals, the different wine regions, and how all this effects and impacts the wine world and ultimately what ends up in our glasses.

I spent all of my adult life working in the medical microbiology field. Wine making seemed to be a logical extension of microbiology, a creative next step. Crafting wine is nothing more than putting all those tiny microorganisms to work for you, and I'm all for having something else do the work. All in all, you could say I'm a lazy person, I am all for an easy way to do things. Which works out perfectly because the wine makers job is nothing more than supervising nature; to push it this way and manipulate that way to result in a wine style that you find to be pleasing.

Did you know that wine is the only naturally occurring alcoholic beverage? Grapes or other fruits, left on their own in nature, will ferment by the wild yeast and sugars found within them, making wine a completely natural process. The same cannot be said about beer or distilled spirits. The wine maker's job is simply to supervise nature, to give it the helpful push it needs once in a while, to steer it in the right direction resulting in something your pallete will find pleasing.

Ultimately, the wine maker's job is to make sure your glass is never empty, and what's a better job than that?

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