Region: Vermont
Grapes: La Crescent, Frontenac Gris
Alcohol: 12%
Notes on the Wine
Harlots and Ruffians is a white wine field blend from our vineyard in an open meadow replete with Queen Anne's Lace and red clover. The name is inspired by a medeival recipe that we like to cook in the winter called An Orange Omelet for Harlots and Ruffians, created by a German chef for an Italian pope in the 1400s, a cook who shaped recipes for both harlots and princes. Likewise, we believe this wine is suitable for both ascetics and debauchees but rest assured it can be enjoyed without risk of moral curruption. Hand-harvested and unfiltered, this wine speaks of our alpine vineyards here in the valleys and hills of Vermont.
Notes on the Producer
We are located on Mount Hunger at the edge of the forest in the Châteauguay and in the Piedmont chain of hills in Barnard, Vermont. Here we grow alpine wine and ciders. Our land has been part of small homestead farming for over two hundred years. On the farm, we attend to the care and observation of our native terroir, a whole-farm and diverse agriculture where we are not only growing wine, but also vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for ourselves and our tiny kitchen and for our spontaneous, always last minute pop-up tasting room/wine bar, Hart: tavernetta forestiera + bar a vin, and Boîte: supper club. We farm four parcels of vineyard: the homefarm vineyard les bonnes femmes, a joint project just across the road, les forestières, and two older parcels in the Champlain Valley, les carouges and i selvatici. The work we do at the farm and winery, both in the field and in the cellar, is guided by regenerative, permaculture, and biodynamic thought. We try to let all elements of the farm speak for themselves accompanied by our stewardship.
Our mission is to care for our land in creative and natural ways, make way for the honest narrative told by the wines and ciders that express our unique landscape and each vintage year, and share in and support the spirited food and agriculture of our community.
We began creating La garagista Farm + Winery, this farmstead landscape, in 1999 with first efforts at restaurant gardens, as the sister and backbone to our long-standing osteria pane e salute which ran for twenty years in the village of Woodstock, Vermont; the winery opened its doors in 2010 with the first vintage. We closed the restaurant in 2017 in order to focus our attention solely on the farm and winery and our pop-up projects. Deirdre Heekin is winegrower, organizer, writer, photographer, flower farmer, would-be designer. Caleb Barber is gardener, cook, designer, builder, mechanic, factotum, philosopher, farm manager. Camila, the assistant winegrower, is grower, organizer, creator, systems manager, right hand. We are farmers. Just like the garden spills into the vineyard, and the roses spill into the orchard, we always have a flow of creative people who lend their skills, thoughts, and energy to the project at hand whether its pruning, planting new vines, turning new beds, or harvesting. For them, we are forever thankful.
These are the hands and hearts that make La garagista.
