Technical Data

About Our Wines

Broc Cellars

At Broc Cellars, all of our wines are made using spontaneous fermentation, a process that means we only use native yeasts and bacteria that exist on the grapes in order to make wine. This is unlike many of the wines you will see in grocery stores or on wine shop shelves and in restaurants. We don’t add anything – this includes nutrients, yeast, bacteria, enzymes, tannins or other popular fermentation agents. Sulphur is a naturally occurring element in all wine, the amount found can vary. We add little to no S02, depending on the wine and style.

“Our goal in making wine is to bring out the natural expression of the grape. We decide on a wine by wine basis how we want to do that. We have more freedom now to make the choice not to add Sulphur. There is a bigger market for us to go in the direction we want to go. To counter that we are doing more to insure our vineyards are using the farming practices we support. We’re also committed to detailing exactly what decisions we make during the course of our winemaking process.” – Chris Brockway

Over the past few years as the natural wine market has evolved we have been working with our partner vineyards on a plan to insure by 2019 over 95% of the grapes that we work with will be grown without using synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers. The decision to keep sourcing from the 5% of vineyards that have some exposure to these things is complicated and has a lot to do with how much we value the beauty of the fruit, the varieties that come from these vineyards, and the unique challenges of farming the areas where those grapes are grown. We have detailed any exposure in the specific wine’s notes.

Love Wines

We started making our Love Wines because we want to provide a more affordable everyday drinking wine to a larger market while still espousing the key tenets we believe in --- minimal intervention and sustainable farming. The Love wines are larger production blends by design. We still use only native yeasts and bacteria for fermentation with no additives or adjuncts, but we do choose to use trace amounts of SO2 at bottling. Each of the Love blends contain grapes from vineyards with varying degrees of intervention and the vineyards and blends can change with each vintage. The farming practices can also vary with the blends and include vineyards that are farmed entirely without the use of synthetic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, or fertilizers and can include grapes from vineyards that have some exposure to these products. The technical data sheets for each wine detail the farming practices of the vineyards that produced the grapes in the blend.

Brea Wines

We are also partners in Brea Wine Company. Brea focuses on bringing mainstream varietals into the fold of low intervention and site specific. The Cabernet Sauvignon we source is certified sustainable and the Pinot and Chardonnay are farmed using the growing practices of Rudolf Steiner. You can learn more about our Cabernet, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay by visiting the Brea Wine Company website.