About Us

The objective of our business is to grow really yummy Zinfandel grapes and to bring delicious wine to the people at a reasonable price. We leave the art of wine making to people who know what they are doing, but we enjoy marketting wines (made only from the grapes we grow) under the DAMAS label, with our Fiddletown vineyard designation proudly displayed.

We bought the Fiddletown property in 1991. It was a hobby farm then, with a variety of crops, including 250 "training vines." In 1997, we ripped out the old vines (and lots of fruit and nut trees) and prepared the two-acre DAMAS Vineyard for replanting. Our Zinfandel vines are of the Deaver clone, grafted onto phylloxera-resistant 110R rootstock.

Our first harvest was in 2000, and our early grapes went to Grapeleaf Cellars in Berkeley, where Tom Leaf produced award-winning Zin from them. Some of our 2001 grapes went to Eno, where winemaker Sasha Verhage turned them into Small Town Hero Zinfandel. Every year we reserve some of our crop for home winemakers, because we believe high-quality fruit should be made available to the non-commercial guys, too. In 2005 and 2006, some of our crop went to Charles Spinetta winery, a fourth-generation winery in the Shenandoah Valley (yes there is a Shenandoah Valley in California!)

In 2005, we began selling our own wines under our own DAMAS Vineyards label, with assistance from the folks at Drytown Cellars in Amador County. Our 2006 vintage is also getting assistance from wine maker extraordinaire, Mark McKenna, who is actively involved in making several award-winning Amador County wines.