Mark Moretti Winery

We love making wine. It all started when Mark took his first "Introduction to Wine Making" class at UC Davis in the early '90s. When the instructor in the large lecture hall passed out scented paper strips she asked the class to identify the scent. "Froot Loops" answered Mark from the back of the class. "Exactly" replied the professor. After correctly identifying the chemical aspartame, Mark new he had a knack for wine evaluation.

Since then, we began making wine in our garage using traditional glass carboys. The carboys were replaced by barrels and the garage was eventually replaced by a modern wine making facility. Today, Mark Moretti Winery is a small family winery that produces a limited production of award-winning wines.

We offer our customers alternatives to the everyday styles and flavors you find on the supermarket shelves. Our wines are made to age well and provide a unique style and flavor that truly crosses between varietal boundaries; big, lush, spicy, and great fruit characteristics.

We believe that most wines are too often made to please a large segment of the marketplace and, in turn, mass-marketed. This can force the winemaker to create a wine with generic “mass-market” characteristics. As a result, these marketing practices inhibit the ability of winemakers to maximize the wine's full potential.

That said, we concentrate our wine making efforts around expressing the perfect elements between the grape, vineyard, region, and winery practices.

Our goal is to highlight the truly unique characteristics of each grape varietal, vineyard by vineyard and offer you a wine that emphasizes those regional qualities.

We specialize in making small lots of hand crafted wine. “Hand crafted” means that each lot of wine is fermented and monitored in single-barrel size lots.

How we make our wines

We believe that wine is to be explored and each bottle should leave us with an impressive display of quality and character. We focus on traditional practices that bring out each grapes unique attributes and flavors. We aim to create one-of-a kind single vineyard wines from California's best small vineyards.

On our winemaking practices:
When desired, we ferment using the natural yeasts on the berries. (little or no yeast innoculation). We will practice very little or no filtering of our wines. We will never practice alcohol removal, tannin additions or other practices that affect the core composition of our grapes and wine.
On our vineyard practices:
We believe that higher quality grapes do come from ecologically balanced vineyards. We aim for the best and most non-intrusive vineyard practices possible. We select our grapes from vineyards that practice sustainable agriculture.
On Terroir:
Athough there is much debate about terroir and the influence a winemaker has on the final wine product, we approach this concept with a balance in mind. Simply, the influence of terroir does have an impact on grape - there are unique characteristics of each vineyard and place. With this in mind, we selectively choose the vineyards and regions of our grapes to showcase them in our released wines. We also believe that the winemaking practices we use do impact this. But we rely on the practice of doing as little as possible in the fermentation and aging process (minimal intervention) to influence the qualities imparted from the local vineyards.

For more information on the the regional influences and microclimates of our vineyards see:

Oakville terroir
http://www.thewinenews.com/junjul98/oakville.html

Anderson valley
http://www.mendowine.com/wineries/terroir.html

Santa Barbara County
http://www.sbcountywines.com/SBC/appellations.html