The ‘Barber Cellars’ winery has changed its name to ‘Brutal Hill’
From Winegrower Michael Barber:
After 20 years the ‘Barber Cellars’ winery is officially changing its name to ‘Brutal Hill’ to better reflect what we have become and how we grow our wine!
When we first started our brand ‘Barber Cellars’ in 2007 we were making wine at a Co-op processing facility in Suisun City, living and working in San Francisco, & purchasing grapes from growers in Dry Creek Valley. Lorraine (my wife) and I sold our wines on our lunch breaks at our respective jobs, pouring and tasting with buyers at shops, restaurants, and bars during whatever free time we could muster.
Through 20 years of sweat, toil, babies, fires, pandemic, luck, perserverance, and evolution: we have become something entirely different. We are now one of those rarest of unicorns in the California wine business – a family owned & operated micro-winery who grows all their own fruit and makes their wine entirely at our own small facility. Our ethos has always been the same: great wines are hand picked from organically grown vines, harvested at peak ripeness for a perfect balance of sugar and acidity, and made in the winery with as little intervention as possible and no unnatural manipulations. Most of the work for great wines happens in the vineyard, and these days we handle all of our own farming, only making wine from our ‘estate grown’ organically farmed vineyards.
There is a saying we hear in our industry a lot: ‘In the wine business, to make a small fortune, you start with a large fortune.’ This is a difficult, unyielding industry and we have never had any sort of fortune, so the path to get where we are today has been long and arduous! The passion for our craft, growth of the winery, and relationship with our customers have kept us going, and we wouldn’t want to be doing anything else!
‘Brutal Hill’ is what we call our Zinfandel vineyard– a rugged, steep, almost inaccessible plot of old vines at the very top of Sonoma Mountain. I love this place, even though its broken most of my farm equipment (and my mind on several occasions). I always tell Lorraine ‘if I’m not home before dark, find me on Brutal Hill before the coyotes do.’ It is a savage place to grow grapes, but great things always come from struggle.
We are changing our name to ‘Brutal Hill’ to better reflect our struggles in the vineyard, the estate grown nature of our winery, and the difficult path we have put behind us to get to this chapter in our winery’s existence. With 2 decades of winegrowing behind us, we feel it’s a great change to usher in the decades to-come: more tribulations, more hard-work, more friends, more beginnings, more celebrations, and more delicious wines!