Falling in Love All Over Again With Each Other and with Gozzo

This week Ryan and I had the pleasure of pouring wine for the customers and staff at the Seattle institution, Delaurenti’s at Pike Place Market. Arguably, the market was where Ryan and I fell in love, so seeing our wine at such a place was a romantic thrill. We couldn’t help stopping to say to each other, “Look how far we’ve come!”

At this tasting we poured all 3 wines in our Gozzo collection, and they were a hit! The customers loved how approachable yet complex the wine was, and for $11-12 a bottle, they recognized its incredible value. But in addition to that, they loved that is was organic…and good.

Finca Las Yeguas is the name of the winery that makes the Gozzo wine. (You can see a slideshow of our trip to the winery here.) They began in 2001 with the goal to make a quality organic wine. Ryan and I, being the hippy-dippy Seattleites that we are, went to Argentina with the mission to find a good organic product. From my experience, a large portion of organic wines taste like the weeds the grapes were grown in…grassy, dirty, unrefined, and rustic to a fault. But not Gozzo! Finca las Yeguas hit their goal with this one, and we fulfilled our mission of finding it and bringing it to the States.

Not only is the wine good, but Fincas Las Yeguas is extraordinarily dedicated to organic practices and a product free of undesirable pesticides and containments. In fact, they purposefully purchased their land closer to the Andes than any other winery in the Mendoza region. Why did they do this? If you’ll remember, Mendoza is turned into an oasis by snow run off from the looming mountains. Clean water is funneled into the region by irrigation systems created by the original indigenous groups (wow!). By being closest to the mountains, their land is irrigated first, meaning that their water is not contaminated with pesticide runoff from wineries up stream. Because of this forethought and dedication to organic products, some claim that Gozzo has the least pesticide contamination out of any wine in the region. I don’t know if this is true, but I appreciate the effort!

Understandably, Gozzo has become our best selling wine. This is not to say that our other wines aren’t worthy of extreme praise (they are!), but for good reason, people want good organic. And now they have it.