It was bubbles, that much I know, because bubbles are how Amista Vineyards starts every visit and there is a glass in your hand before you have decided where you want to sit. Which bottle it was I could not tell you now, and that is the honest place to begin, because what I do remember from that afternoon in 2020, our first year in Windsor, has almost nothing to do with the wine. We took a table out back where the chairs face away from the building and the vine rows run off toward the ridge, and a bowl of seasoned popcorn came out the way it comes out for everyone who walks in, and I have thought about that bowl more in the years since than I have thought about most of the flights I have paid for.
Ron and Leslie were sitting a few feet away, and I do not remember who spoke first or what any of us said for the first twenty minutes, only that it kept going long past the point where two sets of strangers would ordinarily have gone back to their own tables. By the end of the afternoon the four of us had made a plan, and we left together and drove up Dry Creek Road to Saini Vineyards, where the same family has been farming Dry Creek and Alexander Valley for five generations, and then over to Mauritson, and then to dinner. That was six years ago and they are still our friends.
We joined the wine club before we left, sitting right there in those chairs, without going home to think it over.
The name is Spanish and it means making friends, which Mike and Vicky Farrow chose deliberately, because the winery came out of friendship well before it came out of grapes. Their friends helped them make the first wine and were standing on the property with them the day they took it on, and the idea is worked into the label as a swoop that curves around the word and is meant to be a pair of arms opening. The handles on the front doors are made in that same shape, so that everybody puts a hand on it walking in and hardly anybody registers what they are touching.
Almost everything about the place is arranged to keep people sitting down longer than they meant to. The chairs point out at the fields rather than back at the building, the popcorn keeps arriving, and there is a half-mile walk through the estate with signposts for anybody who wants to stretch their legs before settling back into a chair, which sounds like a small thing until you have spent an afternoon at a property that would rather turn the table.
The wine holds up on its own terms. Amista is the only sparkling wine house in Dry Creek Valley, on a road that made its name on Zinfandel, and the whole program started because Mike stood out in the rows during a night harvest of Syrah in 2005 and came away with an idea that nobody sensible would have had, since sparkling Syrah is not a wine anyone sets out to make. They released it in 2008 anyway and it worked, and it turned into a house that now runs to Blanc de Blanc and Grenache and Mataró and a blend called Fusión, all of it off an estate that went certified organic in 2024.
The one I always came back to is the Rockpile Cabernet, which is not even from the property but comes instead off a terraced hillside at eighteen hundred feet, above the fog line, picked by hand at daybreak. The 2016 is where Cabernet and I became friends. It was young when I drank it, young enough that I should have waited, and it was good from the first sip anyway. This year they stopped making it, so there are a few vintages left to buy and then there will not be.
There is a story Vicky tells sideways, dropped into the middle of a piece she wrote about repainting the barn, where she wonders aloud whether the building knows who came onto the property one night and took two tons of Mourvèdre off the vines when the fruit was nearly ready to pick. She says it is a story for another time and goes back to talking about paint colors, which is a remarkable thing to do with a year of somebody's work and a wine that never got made.
What I remember of Mike and Vicky, and I saw it often enough that it has stayed with me, is the two of them walking back through the vineyard toward the house at the end of a day, holding hands, not hurrying. Mike died in December of 2023 and Vicky runs the winery now, and she is one of my friends, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a woman whose wine I first tasted as a stranger sitting on her property.
Wine attracts people who take it very seriously and a good deal of that is earned, because the farming is hard and the margins are thin and the distance between a bottle worth keeping and a bottle nobody remembers comes down to a thousand small decisions somebody had to get right in the dark. But the seriousness has a way of climbing up out of the vineyard and into the tasting room, where it turns an afternoon into an examination, and scores get quoted and vocabulary gets deployed and everybody ends up performing a little for everybody else.
I have forgotten which bottle was in my glass that day and I have not forgotten a single thing about the people who were sitting near it, which is something Mike and Vicky understood well enough to name the winery after it before they had made a bottle of anything.
We drove up that afternoon new to the county and knowing nobody, and we came home with friends.