Farming the Difficult Fruit: Why We Do It the Hard Way

If you love great wine, you already understand something most people don’t.

You understand that wine isn’t just grown, it’s earned. Not with shortcuts. Not with convenience. But with choices that take longer, cost more, and demand more.

We grow grapes in one of the most unforgiving places in Napa—at the top and base of a mountain. And we do it on purpose.

Because in a world full of easy fruit, we choose the difficult fruit.

Not All Grapes Are Created Equal

Yes, grapes can grow almost anywhere. They’ll climb a trellis, wrap around a fence, burst with fruit. But those grapes? They don’t make wine worth collecting.

If they can even make wine at all, they make wine that’s forgettable. Predictable. 

What makes great wine is struggle. Elevation. Lean soils. Extreme conditions. Grapes that grow in places they’re not coddled, but challenged.

That’s what we farm. On Stags Ridge, where water is scarce and the soils are volcanic. Where the vines fight for every inch. Where what we get isn’t quantity, it’s character.

Farming for the Long View

Every decision we make in the vineyard—when to prune, when to replant, when to let a vine go fallow, these all ripple into the future.

This is farming that looks beyond the season. That sees the cellar five years from now. That understands this year’s labor becomes next decade’s vintage.

There is no rushing this. No perfect formula. Just strategy, observation, and the kind of relentless commitment that never makes headlines but shows up, unmistakably, in the glass.

We Grow Wine, Not Just Grapes

We’re not farming for sugar levels. We’re farming for soul. For grip. For age-worthiness and depth and length and texture.

Because we don’t just want to make wine that impresses. We want to make wine that stays with you.

The kind you open with intention. The kind you collect because you trust what’s inside. The kind that makes you pause mid-conversation, mid-sip, just to say—this is why I love wine.

This Is Our Creed

We farm the difficult fruit because the easy fruit was never the point. 

Because we don’t want to make more wine. We want to make better wine.

Because farming on a mountain teaches you patience, humility, and how to read a vine the way others read numbers.

Because a bottle of Seven Apart should feel earned by us, and by you.

Because you don’t collect what’s common. You collect what has a story. What speaks of a place. What was fought for.

Because if you’re going to raise a glass, let it be something that came from the kind of farming most people wouldn’t dare to attempt.

Let it be something rare. Something real.

Let it be Seven Apart.