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Wine consulting

Wine Consulting and Special Projects
I've spent 15 years working in vineyards, wineries, and building two wine brands, and I'm excited to help with a wide variety of wine projects. I've worked in wine retail, restaurants, and on the wholesale side, giving me unique insights into navigating the challenging path of bringing a small label to life after the fun part of getting grapes into the bottle. This experience has included basic branding, web design, tasting room operations, PR relationships and even zoning, ABC and Health Department compliance, and general budgeting to restaurant consulting and opening a wine bar. I can source bottles and labels, help choose rootstocks and manage oxygen levels at bottling time, or help find distributors. In addition to business consulting and detailed help of all sorts for small wineries, my real passion is rolling up my sleeves and spending time in the vineyard and working towards a clear stylistic goal with the winery.
 

Winemaking

  • Picking and sorting decisions

  • Fermentation decisions 

  • Élevage options

  • Blending (and when not to)

  • Unfined/unfiltered/low SO2 practices

  • Bottling protocols

  • Making it all work with minimal expense

Sagrantino wine consulting

Viticulture

  • Planting and trellising decisions

  • Irrigation tuning

  • Best pruning practices

  • Canopy management and crop assessment for intended wine styles

  • Rootstock and clonal decisions - specializing in Italian cultivars

  • Picking decisions

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Prima Materia also has some room for custom crush and wine consulting projects up to 12 tons in size. Contact me to talk about creative arrangements if you have unsold fruit, private label interests, or have custom winemaking needs. We provide hands-on, detail-driven winemaking and can help guide projects from picking to bottling (and beyond) with consistent 90+ point results.

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We are particularly good with:

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  • Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon

  • Rhone Reds and textured Whites

  • Italian cultivars and low-oak styles

  • Pinot Noir in the Burgundian style

  • We are fine with whole-cluster fermentations, orange wines, and low/no SO2

  • We are not set up for reductive whites (SB) or whole-cluster pressing however

Private label

Private or custom label wines
Prima Materia can also create custom labeled wines for your restaurant, retail wine shop, or private business or event use.
This can be in the form of a fully custom project from vineyard sourcing through labeling, or simply purchasing unlabeled bottles of Sangiovese, Barbera, or a red blend and putting your label on the bottle. We can help with TTB label approval and label printing with a minimum purchase of 20 cases or a barrel quantity.

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