For this issue of the Fizz, I spoke to Alejandro Fargosonini of Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini in the Central Valley. Alejandro and his partner Andrea are doing something special in today’s wine industry—they’re rescuing fruit. The team work with would be wasted non-grape fruit from large California farms such as plums and nectarines, turning out fantastic and interesting wines in the process. In this issue we talk about how the team finds fruit and working with local farmers. We touch on their approach to securing grant funds from organizations like the USDA, and their approach to vinegrowing, winemaking, and trading cuttings.

What really excites me about Alejandro and Andrea’s work is the community element of how they participate in the wine industry, focusing on sustainability and trade, which would not be possible without the connections they cultivate. I’m happy to see more delicious and inspiring non-grape fruit wine out in the world, especially when it means rescuing fruit that would be turned into mulch or simply thrown away.

Margot: You’re making wine in California. Did you grow up in California?

Alejandro: I'm originally from Texas. I grew up in northeast Texas on a ranch. I had my own baby cows when I was a kid. This project has been about returning to that kind of lifestyle. When I was fifteen, I moved away to a bigger suburb with a much nicer high school, much better education than where I had been. Then I moved to Europe for a couple of years and lived in Austin, TX after that. Then I lived in New York for a couple of years where I started making films and studying art.

That's where I met my partner Andrea who's the co-owner of the winery and also the co-winemaker. We met in Berlin at an MFA program called Trans Art Institute in 2012. We met studying art and we would go to Berlin for a month and take all these courses with these crazy artists and philosophers. But yeah, originally I grew up on a farm in Texas and I was always an alien there. I still feel like an alien in California a lot of the time. Now I'm back in a small farming town, so I'm back to my original alien farm.

Margot: When you moved back to Austin, did you know at that point that you wanted to make wine?

Alejandro: No. I got into wine because I like to cook a lot and I like to ferment food and I was making beer and mead and unclassifiable fruit wines and stuff. I was always doing it in the background of my kitchen. During the pandemic, that's when I really decided to start making large volumes of wine and making it into a business.

Margot: Was that part of your family history? Did your parents ever do something like that?

Alejandro: No. My father and his brother were all firemen and EMTs. My dad also ran the ranch I lived on. He had to have a lot of energy—we had a lot of horses and cows. Then every third day he would go run into burning buildings, work on the ambulance. I feel like I do have a lot of energy, but I'm not in the same field. I watched how hard it was, that line of work. It's amazing, but it's also really hard on you emotionally and physically.

Margot: Why did you choose to move to California? Why not stay in Texas? There's some wine activity in Texas that people are really excited about.

Alejandro: Yeah, I actually had some people that wanted to invest with me if I would come and make wine in Texas, but that was after I had already gotten a vineyard out here. I was trying to show my films around in LA in 2019, and I was living there driving a cab. The pandemic started. No one cared about my weird art films at all in LA either, which was funny. I'd been doing it pretty successfully in New York City for years before that.

Before the pandemic started, I got into a PhD program called the European Graduate School which has a bunch of famous artists and philosophers there, and my partner later got in too, so I got to go to Malta and take all these courses with these world class philosophers and thinkers. It was very cool. That was in October of 2019 and then I came back and the lockdown started shortly after that. I found out that I was getting unemployment from being a cab driver.

I took some of that money and moved to the Santa Cruz mountains and started making wine in my yard. I convinced my landlord who thought it would give her property some kind of pedigree or something—I could give her wine and she could give it to her guests.

The grapes in Santa Cruz Mountains are really expensive, like 3 or $4,000 a ton. I found the place I currently live at in the middle of nowhere where they were $400 a ton. That's just what he saw wine grapes sell for in the Farmer's Almanac that year. Amazingly, he was ignoring the vineyard. He wasn't spraying it. It was not pruned and very wild. So the grapes were already what I wanted, they were already weird. They were old. They didn't have pesticides on them. The old thing was just bonus thing. I would've never expected to get 40-year-old vines ever in California. Once you leave the vanity wine areas, it's a lot more affordable.

Margot: Did you buy this property from him? Are you leasing these grapes? How does it work?

Alejandro: I leased the land from him and we've talked about buying it. I'm not sure it'll ever happen. There's some kind of strange issue—they can't sell me the exact amount of acres that it is, so I have to add a couple to make it legal. It's weird, there's a swamp next to it that we could add from very easily that's really has no value. But yeah, we lease it, we live there, and then down the street we produce our wine in a winery that we rent the corner of.

Margot: I’m curious about your fruit. You have grapes and you also work with other kinds of fruit. It seems like sustainability seems to be a major element of your work. You talk about fruit that would otherwise be lost. Are you talking about food waste here?

Alejandro: We have a program where we upcycle organic fruit from farms that would otherwise be basically mulched. Like they can dry a little bit of it in the sun, but they can't sell very much dried fruit. For these farms, which are around a hundred acres, give or take, they're big enough to have some infrastructure on the farm and some cold storage. I'm not sure anybody's buying apricot juice. I don't know if there's a market for some of these things they would have if they did have the equipment for it. They call me when they have their cold storage full of this beautiful organic fruit.

Where I live, we’re kind of in the middle of everything. We're a three hour drive to the Bay. We're a three hour drive to LA. We're a three hour drive to Sacramento. We're a two hour drive to Paso Robles on the coast. The big markets are LA and the Bay for organic fruit. They can sell their fruit there for a lot of money, but they have to dial it in to where the ripeness is a little under ripe or just perfect, or things will go bad at their farmer's market stand. They'll call me and say, hey, we have 5,000 pounds of these plums. Nobody else is gonna want them. They're gonna pop, they're so ripe. Once they're not cold anymore, that's gonna be it. If we put them in our truck and drive them to LA, they're gonna spoil.

So we will take them right then and crush them and make wine.

Margot: That's so innovative. So help me understand this. I think I'm not quite there yet. These big farms, they have all this fruit, and they sell it at the market, but at some point they have too much fruit that they can’t transfer without it getting over ripe. That's when they call you?

Alejandro: They just haven't sold it all, basically. They don't know what's all gonna sell at different times. And interestingly, the plum wine you had is a plum called a damson plum. Which is made into wine in the Balkan area of Europe and Serbia. In America it's not very popular, but it's used usually for pies because it's so tannic that they sweeten it. Actually that wine was undrinkably tannic for a year in the bottle. It settled.

Basically we help these farms. We pay them or trade them. We do lots of different deals with them, but usually we just pay them. One of them likes it so much that they want to be an investor in the winery. We're working on some kind of stake and then they'll be our official partner and we'll put them on the bottle and promote them and everything. They’re a certified organic farm down the road for me.

Margot: I love to see this type of community element in winemaking. I’ve had the plum wine, I also saw something about a nectarine wine you’re making?

Alejandro: Yeah, we have a nectarine wine. That was just wild. It was formerly farmed, but like my vineyard, I don't know how all these things happened economically. A lot of them are just people getting old and having less energy and not maintaining everything because they don't have to or whatever, it just falls by the wayside.

Margot: How do you find these farms?

Alejandro: The main one that I work with, I just went and knocked on their door and shook their hand and gave them some wine and told them I was their neighbor and mentioned my idea about other fruits. How I started making wine, I was making wine from anything I could get. I would have parties and be like, hey, we have 10 gallons of wine. If we don't drink it all at this party, it's gonna turn into vinegar.

I knocked on doors, I called people. Sometimes I email people, but I find that a lot of these farms have somebody running their email and it's all business. You don't really want to do that. You'll occasionally meet a literary fella, like minded kind of person who gets into that, but it's not very common out here, there's one old guy who likes to write me flowery emails. I like that. We started off with just just approaching our neighbors being friendly.

My girlfriend is a grant writer and the co-owner of the winery, Andrea. We got a USDA value added producer grant. Andy has been writing these grants for us. I've probably been turned down for something like 70 grants as an artist. I kept doing it to a point where I had a wall of all the grants that had been turned down. There were also follow up emails on the wall about basically how they hadn't even been read.

Now that I have this business, I'm getting a lot of footing writing business grants about the environment and what we're doing upcycling. If you count the value added producer grant, I think we've got like $80,000 in grants so far.

Margot: That's amazing. I love to hear that you’re seeing success there.

Alejandro: Yeah. I got a grant from this small business administration lender. They're called credibly.com and they gave us $50,000 to help us get equipment to upcycle more fruit.

Margot: That is really wonderful to hear. I speak to many small producers who are really good at growing grapes or they're really good at making wine, but they're not really good at the business part or the getting money part or the sales part. That's not where their passion lies. Do you have any advice for folks in that state?

Alejandro: I would say find a good grant writer. I've luckily been partnered with one for nine years. Keep your eye out for programs. There is some farming funding still which hasn't been defunded yet. I know some of it has, which is a nightmare. For the value added producer grant for instance, we're applying for the second stage of it now, and they told us the money's already in the bank so don't not apply.

Generally speaking outside of the USDA, there's a lot of stuff in California you can apply for with the state and the Farm Service Agency, which I have to say is a nightmare, but I would say there's also a lot of private money. Our biggest one was a private lender that just wanted to contribute to something that they thought was doing good in the world. Keep your eye out for grants about the environment or social justice, or farming.

Margot: At the vineyard you're working, you mention you want it to be a home for unique varieties. What does that mean? Are you thinking about opening a nursery? Does that mean some sort of barter system with other growers and how are you getting these varieties?

Alejandro: So we that's actually how I met Chris [Renfro, of the Two Eighty Project]— we traded cuttings. I happened to be in New York during Anything But Vinifera. I loved it. Those are really my people. I feel a lot more at home in that kind of weird alternative wine space than people growing noble grapes in California that are slightly funky or something. I had a mutual friend who told me they were going to see him.

I said, hey, I just got, this dozen different grape variety cuttings and I know that he has a vineyard he works with in San Francisco and collects them. Can you give these to him and just tell him they're from me? Then we became friendly. I'm always asking people for cuttings. I have over seventy kinds. I can't say that all of those are alive in the ground right now, but we do have a map and there are a lot of them alive.

We've got nine acres of these 40-year-old Grenache vines, which are very wild, very vigorous. They're own rooted, they're in sand, and we are about a mile from the Kings River so we have all this groundwater. It's very hot here in the summer, very cold in the winter. We trade we trade cuttings with anybody listening, if we can. I'm down always, and I always have interesting stuff coming in. I've learned who's friendlier about it. Some people aren’t.

Margot: Why would folks not want to trade cuttings or give cuttings away? Is there a reason behind that?

Alejandro: I don't know the answers. Basically the strategy in Napa was say anything but no. They start with saying, actually we have all these diseases and they name a couple of diseases that are so common that you're like, I don't care. Everybody but UC Davis has a little bit of red blotch virus in their vineyard. Then it gets logistical and then the last thing they'll usually do is ask you for money. I've never had anyone from Napa actually give me cuttings, which is pretty funny.

Margot: That's so interesting. Is it a competition thing? They think you're gonna grow the same clone and be more successful?

Alejandro: There's no telling the levels of pettiness it gets to, but it's a weird thing. Now I have all my sources of people and some of them are just like me, collecting and seeing what can live in their zone. I get given all kinds of stuff and some of it lives that people are sure will die, like I have some Pinot Noir I got from Sam Rogers that's from the Santa Cruz Mountains that's still alive.

I have bought some as well. I've bought some from UC Davis before. They're really expensive. They're like three dollars a stick or something, but I understand that they need to fund their program. People trade with me. I've got a bunch of hybrids. I probably have thirty hybrids. The first year we just dug holes and put them in the ground. Now we do this thing where we cut them under a node. We hydrate them for two days in a bucket of water. Then we flip them upside down and bury them with just a couple inches of soil above—upside down. The sun is like a heating mat basically.

Margot: That’s really interesting. Where did you learn that method?

Alejandro: That was from a book called The Grape Grower, it's an organic viticulturist guidebook. He actually shares in the book that there's 200 ways to make cuttings in vines. Any of these can work. As an example, the Victorians, they would use only one nodule and have these super shallow trays. Somehow they had tons of vines. They just figured it out.

Margot: Grapes are like that, right? They're vines!

Alejandro: Yeah, totally. They grow like what people think weeds grow like.

Margot: What are you working toward with the winery? Is there a business goal you’re looking at, or are you feeling comfortable where you are?

Alejandro: Yeah, we have all kinds of stuff written down—a kind of manifesto that I've never really put on the website about industrialization of farming really ruining a lot of magic. In the last one hundred years, winemaking became really apollonian and very rigorously about math and science which often becomes another form of unquantified myth. People will do these things that they think are scientific to their wine over and over again. It's not necessarily doing anything good for it or making it any better or any safer. It’s just killing the flavor to somebody like me.

I'm friends with this guy Clark Smith, who's like a myth buster of wine science and you can go online and take like an eight hour course in chemistry from him, which is really funny because we don't do any chemistry in the winery. We measure the brix and that's it, so we can bottle things before they're done fermenting and we don't ruin them. Clark wrote us a business plan of projections for that USDA value added producer grant.

I think things went off the rails with wine. Not only has it become a boring product that's mass produced and always tastes the same. It's like a myth of a ghost. A ghost of a ghost. A lot of our best wines, we don't ever open them until we bottle them. We leave them in a barrel the whole time. It keeps the gas on it. We're not jamming something in there every week, risking total spoilage.

Margot: You don't punch down?

Alejandro: We do punch down on our wines on the skins, but once we put it in the barrel, we don't top it up. We don't generally don't do anything to it until we bottle it. All our wines are also made a hundred percent on stems. We just didn't have the ability to stem them at first and we liked the way it came out. We just kept doing it with everything. You get some stem tannins, but you also lose some of the color that goes into the stems when the tannins come out. We have this extra layer, in its best form, of mushroomy complexity.

Margot: Are you racking? You don't rack your wines until bottling? Or do you nto rack at all?

Alejandro: Generally not. That's not always true, but generally we don't.

A lot of what our thinking is really what do we have to do next? Somebody just called us and we have 6,000 pounds of apricots. Now what are we gonna do? We're talking with a distillery about doing some collaborations. I have distilled some, but we're not ready to go with our own distilling license. That's our fantasy is to totally recycle everything. We could sell vinegar too—right now I give it to chefs who buy the wine. It’s a raw wine vinegar—you're never gonna be able to buy anything like that. For some reason that's not a product you see on the shelf, even though it's a great cooking product.

Margot: That’s awesome, that full circle work. Is this your full-time job right now or are you doing something else?

Alejandro: I was working at a bar until recently just as a waiter, but I stepped away from it. Now we're selling wine, so I spend a lot of my time figuring out who wants to buy it and driving all over California, three hours at a time to sell it and taste people on it. We're gonna do some events soon as well on the vineyard.

We do everything ourselves right now. We pick ourselves, we do about ten different picks a year in our vineyard because it doesn't ripen evenly. Generally I don't like to make wine from under-ripe things. That's another thing where we're not very hip. A lot of the stuff we do is not really in vogue. Making wine from under-ripe grapes is really popular right now. I find it doesn't last, it doesn't have the structure I want. It doesn't have the antioxidant level that I want. I have one wine, which was from heavily discounted organic grapes that weren't gonna get to their ripeness—even that wine, we combined it with overripe grapes from our vineyard, like 1200 feet lower.

In an ideal world, people would only drink my wine in my vineyard or at our little art events. I think it would taste better. The reality is nobody knows what natural wine is where I live for 140 miles, maybe more. Out here I can just talk about what's important to me which is organic farming, upcycling. We don't spray. We make one spray out of fermented weeds and water. We do that once a year. It's almost more of a ceremony. I think it helps some things. It's really wild. We talk about how we're rewilding it because we don't pull anything out almost. We'll cut out like blackberry vines if they get to where we really can't traverse. But we also make the blackberries into wine. We make wild mulberries into wine. Those are really fun and kind of climate change proof, and that's the direction I'm interested in.

Margot: I’m excited to try all of your different wines! Thanks for your time with me.

You can support Alejandro and Andrea by staying in touch with their events on their Instagram. If you see their wines in the wild at your local restaurant or bar, grab them! If you’re in San Francisco, visit the wine shop Friend of a Friend, Bay Grape Oakland, Studio Aurora, or Gemini Bottle who stocks them from time to time.