FINE WINE, GOOD TIMES
Pali Wine Co. is about good times, an essential ingredient to health and wellness. It's impossible to imagine our favorite nights with friends and family, our most memorable meals, and our fondest memories without a glass of fine wine.
NEIGHBORHOOD WINERY
To introduce creative, playful natural wines.Neighborhood Winery specializes in interesting, zippy, fun cuvées–both daring and traditional–that push the boundaries of conventional wine flavor profiles. The brand focuses on natural winemaking practices, refraining from including any additives, chemicals, or applying conventional winemaking tools, and spotlights the fresh Central California-grown grapes. The grapes are intentionally harvested early in the season, producing youthful and lively wines with whimsical textures and a fresh essence. Neighborhood Winery’s rainbow of varietals and crafted blends are truly alive, intended for each bottle to uniquely evolve.
PALI WINE CO.
To craft world class, critically acclaimed, site-specific Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays.Our original Pali brand produces premium Pinot Noir and Chardonnay sourced primarily from vineyards in the Sta. Rita Hills and neighboring wine-growing regions. The region’s terroir, including its transverse ranges, limestone rich soils, and cool ocean fog, is ideal for growing Pali’s poised Pinot Noir and Chardonnay wine grapes. Pali produces a wide-range of bottlings from entry-level to esoteric vineyard and clonal-specific, from still to sparkling, and from white to pink and red. While most of our grapes come from our Sta. Rita Hills estate ‘Pali Vineyard,’ Pali partners with a handful of other family-owned and world-renowned vineyards in the area among the likes of Fiddlestix, Rancho La Viña, and Bien Nacido Vineyards. Most recently, Pali has introduced its ‘Wild Series,’ natural wines made using only wild, naturally occurring yeasts that remain unfined and unfiltered.
TOWER 15 WINERY
To produce powerful, small lot, nuanced wines.Tower 15 Winery produces limited bottlings of bold, inspired, varietally-driven wines with grapes purchased from small, family-owned vineyards across California’s Central Coast. Our vineyard partners share our commitment to the region, as well as our values for healthy and sustainable farming. From the Central Coast wine-growing region, we are able to source a wide range of high-quality grape varieties resulting in an unprecedented diversity of bottlings for Tower 15. Our customers are able to expand their passport of wine drinking, experiencing diverse and scarce wines typically associated with the wine-growing regions of Europe, all in one sitting. Each Tower 15 wine presents an expert balance of power and nuance.
From Grape to Glass
Always done the Pali way
The Vineyard
Every Pali, Tower 15 and Neighborhood wine comprises sustainable, organic or biodynamically sourced grapes, grown with exceptional farming standards that result in ultra-high-quality wines that uniquely express the grape’s variety, vineyard and vintage.
Harvest
Catch Pali’s Associate Winemaker John Schultz during harvest-time in the Fall and you’re guaranteed to hear him say … ‘we must nail the pick!’. That’s because the delicate dance of choosing the perfect balance of ripeness and acidity will determine just how amazing the new vintage’s wines will be. Every grape, region and vineyard are different, so we avoid using a one size fits all strategy, and instead rely on our intuition and experience to guide us on picking times.
Sorting
To guarantee only the good stuff makes it into our wines, we manually sort every single picking bin before the grapes begin their fermentation. Overripe and underripe berries, leaves, sticks and bugs have no place in Pali’s wines! Usually, we remove the stems from the clusters too, except for certain wines that benefit from the added aromatics and profile of stem inclusion.
MACERATION AND FERMENTATION
This is where our red and white wine making practices diverge. While our white wines are (usually) immediately pressed off their skins and juiced into fermentation vessels, our red wines remain in contact with their skins to soak and extract color while we wait for fermentation to kick off. Fermentation is when the yeasts, alive in the air and on the grapes, begin to convert the natural fruit sugars into alcohol. There are many different fermentation techniques, and naturally, every fermentation is alive and different. Guiding the wines through their fermentation is our job, and how we can impact the flavor of each wine.
AGING
The wines that began fermentation with skin contact are pressed into an aging vessel, where the wine continues to mature and develops more complex flavors. French oak is most common at our winery, but other options include stainless steel, clay amphorae, cement tanks and more.
BOTTLING
Once our wines have aged appropriately, they are bottled under one of our three brands: Pali Wine Co., Tower 15 Winery, and Neighborhood Winery. Some wines need to continue to age in the bottle before they’re released, while others can be released immediately.