Our family takes care of every step from vineyard to bottle, including grape growing, winemaking, sales, marketing and label design. Peter Cameron Van Alyea and his wife Marian have taken extensive viticulture classes and grow the grapes. Christopher Van Alyea (the son) is the winemaker and takes care of sales/marketing. Julie Cameron Van Alyea (the daughter) designs the labels. We have always been proud of our Scottish heritage (Cameron clan) and decided to call our wines “Christopher Cameron.”
We will always be the “little guy” and enjoy being hands on. We have been using 2-3 yeasts per lot as each one brings something to the table; i.e. mouth feel, fruit, tannin, earth, spice, etc. when they are blended there is absolutely no lack of complexity. We also use a variety of oak, sourcing barrels from France, Eastern Europe, and Virginia/Pennsylvania. We also insist on at least 18 months in barrel. For more details, please see our crush reports.
The woman on the label is a portrait from 1887 of an early California settler harvesting grapes. It is a wood-block engraving, which probably took 10-12 artists to carve into wood block and stamp the picture. It is a painstaking form of artwork that has been around for seven centuries but today is all but obsolete.
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