The Almanac · Paso Robles
One climate, and two crafts raised beneath it.
Lavender & the Vine
Kindred plants shaped by sun, season, and vintage.
Shaped by the Mediterranean sun of the Paso Robles Wine Region, on the Central Coast of California, the lavender and the vine share one climate of warm days, cool nights, and long summer light. The winemaker has long held a language for the way a place enters what is grown, and the lavender belongs to that same conversation.
Along the Salinas River
The estate lies on the eastern edge of the Adelaida District, in the Paso Robles wine country, where the land rolls in oak-studded hills down to the Salinas River. Our property line reaches fifty feet into the riverbed. The Salinas runs north here, and mostly underground, its wide bed carrying little water on the surface. Vineyards reach for miles on either side, across the river to the east and through the rolling hills to the west.
This ground is what remains of our family's homestead, first patented in 1877 and held within the same extended family through the generations that followed. At its greatest reach it ran west toward what is now the Running Deer area, and in 1955 the highway was cut straight through the larger holding. Parcels were parted with over the years that came after. What remains still meets the Salinas where it always has.
The lavender is cut by hand at first light, in the high heat of summer. Weeks later, as the nights begin to cool, the vineyards take their fruit in the dark, between midnight and dawn, the way Paso Robles gathers its grapes to keep them cool and their aromatics whole. Across the riverbed, neighboring vineyards work those same hours, and the sound of harvest carries on the night breeze that settles over the lavender. Ours is a harvest of the morning. Theirs is a harvest of the night. The same river valley keeps them both.
What the vine knows of place
Paso Robles is not one ground but many. The region is drawn into distinct districts because the vine reads its surroundings closely, and a change in the soil, the elevation, the exposure, or the reach of the afternoon sun becomes a change in the fruit. Even within a single region, place alters what is grown.
Here, at the district's eastern edge, the same logic reaches the estate. Lavender does not carry an appellation. But it does carry place. The forces a winegrower knows as terroir, the soil and slope and sun taken together, do not stop at the vineyard fence. They shape the lavender no less, and make what is grown here distinctly of this place.
Grown in the Adelaida District of Paso Robles, along the Salinas River, on ground first homesteaded in 1877.
One ground, two harvests
An oil holds several things at once: the plant, kept true to type from our own motherstock; the place it was grown in; the season, with its own character; and the hand of the maker, who reads what the year has given. The plant is where it begins. Our motherstock has been carried down through growers who kept the original Grosso lineage true to type, a lineage not easily come by. The land provides the material, and the maker interprets it; the winemaker is given that same trust with the grape.
The lavender is taken by hand at the height of its oil, and steam distilled in a copper alembic pot still. Distillation has long belonged to this ground, part of the estate's own rhythm. The distiller reads the season, and the oil is released only when its character has settled and opened.
A winter's rain, a run of summer heat, the cool of the nights, the hour of the cut: the plant records the year in which it grew. No two seasons give quite the same oil. Like the vine, the lavender has its vintages.
The eye and the nose
No two pieces of ground are quite the same, no two seasons arrive in the same way, and no two makers make every decision alike. Once the plant is true and the growing and the distilling are sound, what remains is not a ranking but a character. Another place, another season, another hand, and the oil will be different, not better and not lesser, only itself.
A painting need not defeat another painting to matter. One speaks to one person and another to someone else, and the pleasure lies in the choosing. An aromatic oil can be met in the same way. The eye chooses the painting, and the nose chooses the oil.
Some traditions are chosen. Others quietly choose you.
