By the Glass: Herrmann York Wine
Herrmann York Wine is a Redlands based winery focusing on place based Southern California fruit. They make their wine intentionally and naturally. Recently, we were able to visit their facilities, taste their latest offerings from their 23’ harvest and interview Taylor York about the origin of their wine and how it has evolved over the years
We hope you enjoy!
How did Hermann York start?
I was doing beer for quite awhile and my brother Garrett and friend Dusty met in Italy and got really into wine there. They brought their love for wine back here to Redlands so we thought that we would explore it.
I thought it would be a lot more similar to beer and it is not. It’s completely different - it’s night and day! Beer is really sort of like cooking, I think. More like chemistry. Wine is really beginning to end. A lot of the wines that we work with start in the vineyard. We’ve helped people everywhere from planting vines to drinking wine. It’s a whole ecosystem.
How many harvests is Herrmann York in?
We are going into our fifth harvest.
What is natural wine?
Natural wine is kind of a spectrum but at its core and for us it’s clean and it’s intentional.
We work with vineyards that are responsibly farmed and maintained - organic bio dynamic, very little input from us. We are very hands off. We start with vineyards that are grown responsibly with no pesticides using very natural ways of controlling pest and weeds. We bring it into the winery and do very little. We try to let the grapes express the character of the place that they came from. And so that means native yeast fermentation.
Letting it ferment from the regional yeast which is a huge thing for beer in my experience. Letting the regional yeast kind of give it that quality and then we use very little sulfites - just enough to kind of stabilize things when we have to and make sure its not going to go sour on us. We don’t fine or filter. We do settlings so we can get a nice bright wine - a lot of our wines are bright. Sometimes you’ll see stuff at the bottom but that’s what happens.
““Wine is really beginning to end. A lot of the wines that we work with start in the vineyard. We’ve helped people everywhere from planting vines to drinking wine. It’s a whole ecosystem.””
What type of varietals do you have?
We work with quite a few varietals. One of our major varietals that we work with is Zinfandel. We work with a range of Zinfandel from really old stuff to kind of newer stuff. One of our more special vineyards is our Okneski Vineyard in Redlands in a small quarter acre in a backyard. We harvest the whole thing - on barrel! It will only ever be one barrel and it makes excellent wine.
What’s the story behind your labels?
Our friend Rita, she’s Italian, lives around Puglia in Apulia, Italy. She is insanely talented and we realized early on as we started the winery that her stye and aesthetic really matches ours - she also has similar ideals to us.
So every year we explain to her what went on in the vintage - here’s the wines that we have and where we made them. Some of them have stories some of them don’t. Then she sketches them out for each one and nails it. We’ve changed our labels every year. We’ve changed the drawing styles. The meaning behind them and the story.
This year we have twelve wines for our 23’ vintage and each one is a chapter in a bigger story that follows a woman traveling from the Antelope Valley down to Rancho Cucamonga then into San Bernardino, Redlands, Yucaipa area and then slowly down into Southern Riverside county and into Northern San Diego in our Southern most vineyard in Ramona.
What would you recommend to someone who is not familiar with Herrmann York?
I like lighter reds maybe with a little chill in it or not. The wines that we make from our Lopez ranch vineyard was not a light wine. This year it is kind of like the Zinfandel and it just goes all over the place. We really explored Zinfandel in a way that I don’t think a lot of others have - in terms of making it a lot lighter, fresher, younger and it has really worked out. It has provided this sort of complex flavor profile.
For us it really speaks to Southern California wine making. We’ll make a Zinfandel from 120 year vineyards at in Lopez in Fontana and some from Okneski which again is in Redlands with a hillside vineyard that’s nine years old and they taste vastly different but they share DNA and you can tell that in the glass.
I am partial to Okneski wine. It’s very rare. Its very special but our Lopez Ranch red wines are really excellent too.
Join us for a special
Behind the Bar w/ Taylor York
featuring Herrmann York Wine
DATE
Wednesday May 15, 2024
TIME
5:00pm - 7:00pm
Taylor York is one of the founders of Herrmann York Wine along side his brother Garrett and friend Dusty Herrmann.
Follow Herrmann York’s wine journey @herrmannyorkwine
