Michael Ros Winery: Starting From Scratch

by Andrew Chalk

New Owner Pairs with Old Hands in the Hill Country

Michael Ros Winery is an example of the newest breed of wineries coming to US-290 in the Texas Hill Country. Named by combining the first names of the married couple that created it, Mike and Rosann Mitrione, it started in 2018 when they planted their first vines in Brownfield, on the Texas High Plains. Mike and Ros had each had successful careers in corporate America, their children had flown the coop, and the chance of a life change to fulfill an ambition and own a winery floated tantalizingly in front of them. 

A little research and they were convinced it was financially doable -- they could become the next couple to make a small fortune in the wine industry by investing a large one!

In 2021 they bought the land in the Hill Country that would become their winery and tasting room. It is set back from the highway on the south side just a few miles outside Fredericksburg. It was a build-from-scratch situation that has led to a Napa-quality tasting room and winery. 

TEAM

Separately, they ran into veteran winemaker Tim Drake in Brownfield and asked him to join as Head Winemaker. The owners split the responsibilities with Ros being essentially the COO, and Michael currently learning winemaking through courses and deputising to Tim. I remark to Tim that it's great having your boss as your intern, right? He replies “Yeah. Are you kidding me? He's going to scrub every tank and all the drains.”

Tim, Ron, and Ros

More recently, Ron Moore joined the team as tasting room manager. He has managed tasting rooms in Texas for 7 years. 

On a visit to the area I sat down with Ros, Tim, and Ron (Michael was out-of-town) to find out more about Michael Ros Winery with a special emphasis on the types of wines they are making. 

ON LEAVING DALLAS 

Ros describes the steps in the two big decisions: change careers and moving.

“We both loved wine. We also were ready to get out of Dallas. But we thought, do you open a winery in Dallas? Do you open a winery down here? Do you do it out of state? There was a whole bunch of stuff, and we just decided we were going to commit to Texas. We were doing 100% Texas.” 

Mike Mitrione

Did they think about moving to other places?

“At one point we had thought about going to Oregon because we both love Pinot, and we think that wine region has really come so far. It's not quite California, but we were really loving that it's come very far. And so we looked into doing that, and we're like, no, we don't want to do that.”

Why Fredericksburg?

“Our kids are grown. They're here, you know. And then we talked about doing other places in Texas, but I love that people come to Fredericksburg to experience wine and to get away and relax and enjoy and treat themselves. It's a different experience. When you go to a winery in Dallas it's okay, it's date night. Let's go here, right? It's a, you're going to one place to experience it. Versus here [Fredericksburg], people are coming to experience the whole thing, and they're doing a couple. It also makes it so the wine community, I think, is really nice and supportive because I know my customers are going to ask me, where should they go? And I want to know who the wineries are that make wine similar to me because if you like my wines, I can send you to something I think you'll like. And so you kind of end up naturally supporting each other versus coming from corporate America where it's very competitive.”

A CODA FOR THE FIRST SEVEN YEARS

Ros started with her personal experience of the early winery history. “My number one piece of advice [when starting a winery], keep doing your day job that pays the bills for at least two years. When you think you should quit, work for two more years.” 

Rosann Mitione

MIKE AND ROS MEET TIM

I ask Ros how she and Mike met Tim?  “So our place is in Brownfield and we were doing a custom crush at Texas Wine Company. And there's two of them up there. I always get the names mixed up as far as which one was it. And he was taking a break. He had left Slate Mill and was doing some consulting and was up there filling in as the winemaker at the custom crush facility.” 

“And we met him and started talking and then we got him on as a consultant. And then when we were ready to build this building, he came on full time and really helped. I'm like, look, we've never built a production facility, right? A cellar. So let's not make all the same mistakes that you've already seen made 15 times. And so he, you know, changed a couple of things on a design, did some stuff from his experience, which was fantastic. So he actually just got to build his own space. You know, obviously there was a budget, so he couldn't have everything he wanted. And he could go through the list of things he didn't get on this round, but he wants for the next round. I definitely messed up the budget. But I mean, it's helpful, right? Like he's like, you know, little things that we never would have thought of. Like drains and catwalks. Well, even like something like putting the electrical, the wiring on the outside of the wall in a metal building. We were like, have you lost your mind? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? And he's like, how many holes would you like me to put in your metal building? And I was like, oh, yeah.” 

Tim explains “I want access to everything, all the water and electricals all on the outside of the wall, not on the inside.” So, I confirm, “It wasn't something you got from the Pompidou Center in Paris?” “Correct. It was practical. It is a workspace.”

Addressing the tasting room Ros says “So you mentioned this feels Napa-esque, right? We've been to a lot of wineries and we were thinking about the design for this, right? And I'm like, okay, how do they do it in Napa? We went to Washington state, we went to Oregon, we went to New York, we went to the Finger Lakes. So we kind of did. And then, obviously, we had gone to Europe and we're like, okay, we want it to be a little bit different.”

The result is different from anywhere else in Texas, and highly distinctive. It is a very usable space with separate areas for groups and private classes. Outside space is shaded in a defense against the Texas sun.

FINDING RON

Ron Moore

Me [to Ros]: So how did you and your husband meet Ron?

Ros: So I have a lot of sales and marketing background, but I've never run a tasting room. And my husband, we both have a lot of, I'll call it book knowledge on wine stuff. Right. And as a consumer, but not enough to like, we haven't been on the business side of it. So, we wanted to have a winemaker and we wanted to have a tasting room manager to kind of give the expertise that we needed. 

And so we were looking for a tasting room manager and Ron came in and we talked to Ron and yeah, we were like, he's perfect. Because he can help us. He's got a lot of experience. He's been doing it. He's working with different places and when you go to be a tasting room manager or the winemaker in a small operation that has very few people, that is your title, but that is not what you do every day. 

Me: Any startup’s like that. You do all the things.

Ros: Right. And so we do all the things. It's winemaker by day, landscaper by afternoon, all the buildings, all the chairs, owl boxes, worm farm, like all the things. Mowing. Everything.

TASTING

The long, four-year building period means that they have made plenty of wines in the meantime. 

ALBARINO

We begin a tasting with 2023 Albarino, Narra Vineyards, Texas High Plains which  won Best of Show for Texas White Wine at the San Antonio Rodeo in the winery’s first year entering the competition. This wine exhibited classic crispness, citrus notes of lime, and salinity of the albarino grape. 

By way of background, Narra Vineyards is a highly respected grower and that is important in the context of Drake’s philosophy going forward. He wants to be estate-grown, as far as possible, and for grapes from other growers to make it into the mix they will have to be especially good. He will also not sell grapes. The thinking behind this autarky is not philosophical, but viticultural. He wants to control the viticulture, especially yields, canopy management, and picking dates.  “Last year, we averaged just under two and a half tons per acre” he says, an amount  lower than is typical in the Hill Country. “Some stuff, like the rosés and whites, can be a little higher. Some of the reds can cut down even lower. But we can control it all. And that's what's key. When you're buying fruit, you can't really control it.”

SAUVIGNON BLANC

Like magic, the tasting staff have moved us on to the Michael Ros 2023 Sauvignon Blanc, Michael Ros Vineyards, Texas High Plains. 

PROVENANCE

Labelled as Produced and Bottled… it can actually be legally labelled with the stricter Estate Grown as this is 100% from their own vineyard in Brownville in the Texas High Plains AVA. And the Estate Grown designation can be plunked right on the front label as well. 

TASTING

The wine is marvellous. It is tart, with citrus notes in the nose and a minerality on the palate. It conveys itself as a cool climate sauvignon blanc. Tim is even more excited about the coming 2024 vintage. “we just bottled the 24, that one's even more, almost a Marlborough sauvignon blanc. Very grapefruit, huge grapefruit. Just a little hint of the grassiness, none of the, well, let's call it gooseberry. And so I really think the sauvignon blanc is going to be kind of our signature white wine.”

THE ESTATE VINEYARD

This brings us to a discussion of the specifics of the estate vineyard in Brownfield. It is 35 acres and resembles an agricultural research station created by someone with ADHD in that it is planted with no fewer than 18 grape varieties. Wisely, for a young winery, it is experimental, with plots from half an acre to two acres testing what does best. There is expansion room to 60 or 70 acres.  

Explains Tim “But so the expansion is going to be bigger blocks of varieties we want to focus on. And so sauvignon blanc is going to be one of those. And this clone in particular, even though my tinkering and quest for complexity means I want to plant another clone in there also. I don't like just single varietal, single clone stuff. I'm such a blending guy, even if it's a single varietal.” 

DRAKE ON CHARDONNAY

Me: Now, what if people ask you about, for example, growing chardonnay in Texas? How do you think that works? 

Tim: There are some people who have done well. Yeah.

Me: Okay. You're not going to? 

Tim: No. I have no interest in trying to grow chardonnay. There are some varieties you should, you can grow, but you shouldn't in Texas. My biggest problem is I came from Washington State. We did great chardonnay, riesling, Gewurztraminer, you know, the cold climate, more durable stuff. And those are the standards that I would hold them to. And I have trouble hitting those standards. I've made a wonderful chardonnay off of Hill Country for one year. And so it's like, I don't want to actually struggle to go ahead and do that because I also view we're not competing with our neighbors. We're competing with Burgundy and California and Washington. And so … that's the stage I want to compete at. So if I produce, say, a chardonnay, I have to charge $42 for it. And it's not as good as a $10 bottle. Very tough to compete with California. I don't want to go ahead and do it. Why would I try? I'd rather go ahead and do an Albarino or Trebiano. You know, varieties that do really well that are suited. And we have a Roussanne that kind of has some of that buttery component for people who like chardonnay. So chardonnay is not my favorite wine. But when people tell us that they like chardonnay, we give them that, they love it.

PICPOUL

Magic occurs and the tasting room staff have placed glasses of the Michael Ros 2023 Picpoul, Michael Ros Vineyards, Texas High Plains in front of us. Vibrant picpoul is the white Rhône blending grape that keeps so many of the wines of that region up in acid. It is stylistically brave to bottle it as a monovarietal, but one I like. With seafood or chicken it lifts the food and its green apple and lemon flavors compliment the dish. Texas actually has a little-known advantage in growing it which is that, on its own, it tends to be light-bodied. Planting it in the Texas climate results in more body and richness. This example has a perfect fruit-acid balance.

Tim is flexible about bottling as a monovarietal or blending “If there's a year where it's more of a support player, that's how we're going to do it. The other nice thing about being small and never wanting to really be distributed is we don't have to keep a SKU on a shelf space each week, right? You know, so we can vary it based on the vintage.”

 In its first year at the prestigious San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition it earned a Double Gold medal (gold is highest scoring, double-gold means all judges on the panel gave first place). “The fun thing,” says Tim “first time I've ever made Picpoul.”

Ros confirms that she is not seeking distribution. “ I don't I don't foresee us going into retail distribution. I spent 20 years working with major consumer products companies. Retail. So I know what that looks like and what's entailed and all those fun things. And you have to either be really, really big or it costs you a fortune. I self distribute to restaurants.”

SANGIOVESE

One swish of the magician’s magic wand and the tasting room staff have delivered Michael Ros 2023 Sangiovese Rosé, Michael Ros Vineyards, Texas High Plains. “So with this particular vintage we took the vines and we hand harvested the eastern side of the vines” explains Tim ”and then pressed it right away and then let the west side of the vine go ahead and hang out there for another three and a half weeks. So we reduce the crop load. So we want to experiment and see if something like that made a difference.” 

I inquire “That late dropping of the fruit. I was going to ask why you made a rosé out of sangiovese?” 

“Well, one, I love sangiovese rosé. I think it's beautiful. It has that very Provencal style. We also have a fair amount of sangiovese planted and sangiovese is always trying to give us too much fruit because that's just what sangiovese does. And my background was sangiovese man! I made a lot of rosé. I like doing the direct press. You pick it. You grow it and pick it specifically to be a rosé. And different than just doing the sangiovese. And so I think this gives you a lot of nice minerality.” 

“It's very structured. To taste it, you know, it's not as fruity. Our Malbec rose is our fruity one. It'll look about the same, but that is bursting with strawberries and watermelons. And it tastes like it should have sugar in it. Almost. It's so fruity. It's all bone dry. We don't currently have anything that has any residual.”

[Editor’s note: Tim is so detailed and transparent about his winemaking that, from this point on in the article, I am going to just transcribe his words, with others coming in periodically]

Given his enthusiasm, I let Tim continue on sangiovese rosé. “This is the one I drink all the time. It's almost embarrassing. I can come down here just to like drop off a FedEx package that showed up for Ros and by the time I get from the parking lot to the front door, someone on the staff has a glass of rosé for me.” 

“In the 24 vintage, because of the growing season we had a lot more color stability. Which was great with the red wines which are inky dark and everything. However, the rosé ended up being darker than I would have liked it to have been. But I wasn't gonna manipulate and take the color. I mean I can take the color out. But I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna let it represent how it wants to be.”

Me: “So how do you know when to take the skins off?”

Tim: “As soon as possible, almost.”

Me: “So it's a gut feeling.” 

Tim: “Yeah. That's really what it is. Now I mean I could measure it and test it. That takes a lot more time, people, and equipment. That we currently do not have. Eventually maybe we could get that way. But we're too new to spend that money. I feel needlessly. I would rather do it off gut feel. So that all the wines you're tasting are an expression of that year.”

Ron; “And what kind of music he was listening to.”

Tim: “I do that all the time. I do the music stuff all the time. When I blend. When I do blending trials I'll listen to the same music.”

Ron: “His Guns N' Roses.”.

Tim: “The year before the wine was a little too light. And I had pressed it up there [Brownfield] within about an hour and a half being picked. And then brought the juice down. I wanted to have a little more color. Like it looked like water. And so this year I decided to go ahead and pick it and then transfer it all the way down here before we pressed it. So it had eight hours of skin contact. But that'll depend year on year whether I go ahead and press it up there or and bring the juice down. Or if I want to have that little skin contact. Because it does give more character to have that eight hours. And we have a dedicated truck. We don't share our trucks or anything. So as it is getting picked. Because most of the stuff up there is machine harvested. And when it's picked it's loaded directly onto a truck that's set at like 28 degrees. So they're very cold. I'm up there the whole time. That's one thing me and Dan Gatlin [owner of Inwood Estates Vineyards] talk about all the time. Like oh you got to be there and you need to touch everything.”

OUTPUT AND GROWTH

I ask “So how many cases total output right now? What is it at the moment? What's it going to go to? Of all wines.” 

Tim: We are producing everything we sell. Actually right now we're bringing in anywhere from three to five thousand cases a year. We haven't quite sold that much. But most of that is still in barrel. Most of that's reds. So I got two or three years till actually our production amps up. Right now we're hovering right around that two to three thousand cases.

Me: Pretty much a startup.

Tim: Which is actually really good for coming into our second year. 

Ros: We've been open for 18 months. 

Me: That's good. 

Tim: I feel really good. And then and you know, having all these years of experience and a lot of wineries you've opened up with. I feel we are doing extremely well. And then there is what Ross was taught in school and on spreadsheets of what your growth would be. She's like oh it's going so slow. I'm like no you're doing fabulous. 

Ros: So to my defense everybody does say it was an incredibly bad year to open. 

Tim: It was. Which is the perfect time to do it I feel. You're not going to be great anyways. So might as well be great for a bad year. 

Me: Some things in the wine industry compared with other industries will seem glacial because everything is on a cadence given by the annual vintage. 

Ros: Yeah. Well and I think even things like the tools that you have. Right. The POS systems. The integration of stuff is so delayed versus other industries. They're starting to try to catch up. But everything I'm like well you know coming from big corporate experiences you're used to being able to have a bunch of stuff kind of with a click of a button. And I'm like where's this? Why can't I find this? They're like well you can get it but it takes like these five steps. We planted our first grapes in 2018. We sold our first bottle of wine in August of 2023. And you're like the longest, most expensive cycle. It is capital intensive. 

Tim: And the thing is you like if trends change you can't change with it. Like you gotta go oh what's gonna be the wine to be making for us to sell eight years from now? Because I need to work on planting it now. You can't make that decision. It's why merlot, syrah and everything turned into the sweet reds. The Apothecary reds and everything. It's like they had it all planted. They weren't gonna yank those vines out. They just found a different way to market them. 

DOLCETTO

Tim: This is our 2022 Dolcetto, Michael Ros Vineyards, Texas High Plains. I love our dolcetto. because it's done a little differently than your typical dolcetto. Dolcetto tends to be a very early to release wine. It's your money-making wine. But we still give it a year and a half in barrel. Neutral barrels. Depending how much we get we may throw one little new oak. So we still want to keep it a bigger wine for what it is. And so this one here what did this get? It got some nice award. I can't remember. 

Ros: It got Gold at the Lone Star International Competition. 

Tim: Oh yeah. Gold Lone Star was the one. I think it was our first competition. Yeah. That was our first competition win. And just right away we recognized what dolcetto is and we've seen it year after year now. And of course you’ve got stuff in barrel. You know. I’ve got three vintages of it now. And it tends to display a bigger style. It wants to be bigger than what you think of as your dolcetto.

Me: You're comparing it with Italian. 

Tim: Exactly. Like I said, I compete internationally in how I want to approach it. 

WINEMAKING DOLCETTO

Me: Is that bigness because of the warmer climate in Texas? 

Tim: I think definitely the warmer climate. You know because dolcetto is grown with nebbiolo 

You know you got cool foggy stuff. But I also think it's representative of my west coast tendencies to let stuff hang and get ripe and get their full potential. Okay. I tend to want to make big wines that are going to age no matter what. The hardest wines for me to make are early to release wines because I naturally don't want to make wines that way. I want a lot of tannin, a lot of color, a lot of acid. You know I'm like ah, in 15 years this is going to be wonderful. You know I've left to my own devices. 

Me: Well this is a big one. It is your 2022 but it's a big one. I mean it's got lots of tannin. 

Tim: Do you get that a little bit of like violets? And there is a little floral. That we see across the board in our reds off our vineyard. And it's really something that's kind of unique. I go a mile and a half away and get syrah from Farmhouse. That doesn't have it. The syrah off our vineyard does have it. And so there's this component that's fairly unique to ours, even though we've got vineyards all around us that don't produce that flavor. And I'm not sure if that's actually going to hold on as the years progress. You know, as the vines get older.

Me: It could be your eucalyptus. You're supposed to have eucalyptus trees nearby which inflect on the vines. And that gives the vines a certain utility. 

Tim: Maybe that's what gophers taste like. Our vines are still fairly young.

Ros: Yeah. Right. We planted in 2018. And then we basically took every year you got a bonus. We're like, how much can we plant this year? We'll plant two acres. We'll plant 10 acres. It just kind of depended. And so we've kind of now gotten up there. So not all the vines are even from 2018. We did six acres in 2018. That was our initial planting.

Tim: Sangio Malbec Tempranillo. And so, yeah, it's been fun seeing how stuff is changing. I'm like, hopefully before I retire, we'll know what it is the vines actually want to do. I got another 10 years minimum before that. We know what the vines want to do. 

SANGIOVESE

Tim: So this, here's our 2021 Sangiovese. Like I said, it was planted in 2018. So this is one of our original plantings. So this is third leaf. We didn't do a 2019. We had a 2019 that I got rid of.

Ros: That's a beautiful nose. 

Tim: I have grown to love sangiovese. Um, I have had mixed feelings about sangiovese over the years. I've done a lot but being able to control everything has really allowed it to be able to adapt. And as we go beyond this vintage, it's getting denser and darker and bigger, which is not necessarily what you think of. And you're like, I'm not trying to make a Chianti per se, like a regular one. I'm trying to make Riserva style wines on this. And so by getting that concentration, so like this year of the 21,  I'm going to say is higher yields is anywhere four to five tons an acre.

Me: But that's still very low. 

Tim: Yeah. Not in my opinion. This past year we got down to three tons an acre. My goal on sangiovese is below three tons. And the sangiovese wants to give so much. It wants to just throw on fruit. It's a weed for sure. And so, but when you limit it, you really concentrate the flavors, that energy that's coming up through the vine and just throwing it into, into the fruit. You're getting a lot of density and stuff to it. So I'm really excited how the sangiovese turns out. 

Ros: This is one that evolves really well in the bottle too. So our 20 sangiovese was the first wine we ran out of. So we didn't have sangiovese from November to February. And when we first opened the sangiovese, I think, was Ron's least favorite. And by the time we ran out, it was probably your favorite.

Ron: So when I met with them originally, it was May of 23. And I sat down with Tim and tasted and it was my least favorite. Fast forward to August of 23, I hired a staff. We sat down with Tim again and it was my favorite. Just in that short amount of time. 

Me: What had changed? You or the wine? 

Ron: The wine. Definitely the wine. Yeah.

Tim: Right now. Well, and that's one of our philosophies where we're lucky how we started. We had enough fruit to, to go ahead and give anywhere from two, two and a half years in barrel and to give it at least a year in bottle. On a lot of the stuff. And so you can have that cycle. Cause it's what you start with, right? Like, if you're releasing your wine the day after you're bottling it, you're stuck in that cycle. You know, you, you don't, you're not set up to allow it to spend a year or two in bottle before you release it. So we do a lot of the aging, which builds the character and stuff. So we have a little bit longer barrel times on almost everything. And we will always try to have like at least a year for the reds to go ahead and be in bottle so they can resolve. And because there is such a big change in just that year. 

Me: Yeah. You know, that's a big nose. It's very forward, uh, strawberries and, uh, like almost a confiture type nose. 

Tim: And this is a French and Russian oak.

Me: The oak is really crucial in this because it's that that makes it. It adds a dimension, that this would otherwise be just a fruity wine. And because of the oak, its got an extra dimension. I'm not a big fruit person per se.

Tim: Like I like the thing I, especially red wines. I like when they talk to that darker side of your soul, so to speak, like you want to think you're late at night sitting around a campfire eating steak off a bone.Is what I think of when I want to do a red wine. And, you know, I want to have that earthiness, the cured meats, the greed, you know, everything to it.

Me: It would be great to do this wine, but to do a reserve of it where you've got more intense, maybe, you know, lower yields or some, some method to concentrate the fruit a little more, put it in, in oak for another year and just make it. 

Tim: Yeah. So that is my plan. For how I'm trying to approach the winemaking to limit kind of the production levels to really 200 or 300 cases for any particular lot. And my philosophy on that, and it's always up for debate, whether me and Ros always match the same vision. But, my philosophy is, you're not buying this at HEB. I'm not like where I started with Chateau Saint Michel, where I need the riesling to taste the same as it did 10 years ago, as it does 20 years ago. 

Me: Thank goodness.

Tim: Yep. And so because you have to come to the winery, I want to give you an excuse. 

Whenever you come to Fredericksburg for a visit, be it every two months or something like that, there'll be something new for you to taste. You know, so if I can do a lot of little lots and even if it's the same variety, like, oh, this is a sangiovese, we did this. And, six months later, oh, this is a different Sangio. And it gives you an experience and gives you a timeline for you to be able to grow with us. And always want to come out and visit and have a good time because the place is designed for you to hang out. We want to have music. We got a little food. We got good wine. It's a communal atmosphere. We want you to feel like, oh, this is my last stop. I'm going to spend an hour or two at the end of the day. Enjoy a little song. Catch the sun, before we go off to the B&B. Just crash on this.

TANNAT

Tim: Okay. So tannat. Yeah.

Me: This is like, this is unyielding. So it's very young. Needs time.

Tim: This one here also from Narra, which they do a great job. . And we picked Narra to be our source of tannat until our own stuff came online. And tannat is one of those where I try to approach with my own vision. Because I either love or hate tannat. So I tried to make it how I love it. It is, it's huge. It's going to be big. It's going to have a ton of tannins. It's going to have a ton of acid. 

Me: Inky monster, as they say. 

Tim: Absolutely. But I still wanted to go ahead and be approachable. You know, I don't, as much as I had a vision at one time to go ahead and make wines that need 30 years before you can drink them. I don't live it down now. 

Me: You've done pretty well. This is very approachable. It's because the tannins are chewy rather than rough.  You know that right now you can enjoy this. With some really big piece of red meat.  Ribeye or something. It's designed for something really fatty. 

Tim: A full prime rib done on a rotisserie or something like that.

Me: But it'll keep.

Tim: It will. 

HARVEST

Tim: It's the fun part of harvest and stuff is being able to, so it's like I have a spreadsheet that lists out my exact plan for the year. I order barrels. I order yeast. Whatever supplies. And then harvest comes and I pay no attention to that spreadsheet. 

Me: Because nature determines everything.

Tim: It does. Everything is different every year.

Me: I bet. If I called you or left a text message during harvest it could be three weeks before you get back. 

Tim: Oh, absolutely. It's like harvest, harvest, harvest. Then when there's a gap, then you deal with something else. Harvest, harvest, harvest. My wife, so my wife goes, um, we're very into travel. Yeah. And she goes on cruises during harvest. You just get out of your head.  Because I'm like, you're actually a distraction for me. Because, and she talked about all the time being a wine widow. And it's because she is the mistress. She recognizes her. Once I got bit. She is like, Oh, the grapes always come first. She's like, it doesn't matter. I have a hundred percent missed out on kids birthdays, her birthday anniversaries. Um, my mother passed away in the middle of harvest and I didn't get up there for three months because the grapes came through first. You want, and, and so it was, but it's, you have one chance a year in which those grapes are giving everything, right? Because to grow good grapes, you need to make the vines think they're dying. And so they're giving everything to their children, which are the grapes. And so they've given everything their life's work as they see it. And so if you just toss it off, it's so disrespectful to everything that has happened. And so you have to take it. You have no other, you don't get a second chance. We're not brewing beer. 

Michael Ros Winery folks, thank you very much.

The Tasting Room