We are located on Mount Hunger at the edge of the forest in the Châteauguay and in the Piedmont chain of hills in Barnard, Vermont. Here we grow alpine wine and ciders. Our land has been part of small homestead farming for over two hundred years. On the farm, we attend to the care and observation of our native terroir, a whole-farm and diverse agriculture where we are not only growing wine, but also vegetables, fruits, flowers, and herbs for ourselves and our tiny kitchen and for our spontaneous, always last minute pop-up tasting room/wine bar, Hart: tavernetta forestiera + bar a vin, and Boîte: supper club. We farm four parcels of vineyard: the homefarm vineyard les bonnes femmes, a joint project just across the road, les forestières, and two older parcels in the Champlain Valley, les carouges and i selvatici. The work we do at the farm and winery, both in the field and in the cellar, is guided by regenerative, permaculture, and biodynamic thought. We try to let all elements of the farm speak for themselves accompanied by our stewardship. Our mission is to care for our land in creative and natural ways, make way for the honest narrative told by the wines and ciders that express our unique landscape and each vintage year, and share in and support the spirited food and agriculture of our community. We began creating La garagista Farm + Winery, this farmstead landscape, in 1999 with first efforts at restaurant gardens, as the sister and backbone to our long-standing osteria pane e salute which ran for twenty years in the village of Woodstock, Vermont; the winery opened its doors in 2010 with the first vintage. We closed the restaurant in 2017 in order to focus our attention solely on the farm and winery and our pop-up projects. Deirdre Heekin is winegrower, organizer, writer, photographer, flower farmer, would-be designer. Caleb Barber is gardener, cook, designer, builder, mechanic, factotum, philosopher, farm manager. Camila, the assistant winegrower, is grower, organizer, creator, systems manager, right hand. We are farmers. Just like the garden spills into the vineyard, and the roses spill into the orchard, we always have a flow of creative people who lend their skills, thoughts, and energy to the project at hand whether its pruning, planting new vines, turning new beds, or harvesting. For them, we are forever thankful. These are the hands and hearts that make La garagista. Our wines are an expression of the season. Each vintage may herald slightly different bottlings, and even wines that we tend to make every year will show variation from vintage to vintage. This intrigues us. We work in the field and cellar as minimally as possible, as guides and companions. We believe that terroir encompasses geology, geography, microclimate, varietal, culture, and the human hand. Wine cannot make itself just like a dish of roasted carrots or an aged cow's milk cheese cannot. Our job is to accompany and support the wine throughout its life in the vineyard and our cantina. Our fruit is handpicked and sorted, foot crushed through pigéage. We employ glass demijohns and old barrels, flex tanks and an anfora. We rely on the wild yeast found on our fruit, the result of a happy marriage of field and fermentation. We use little to no sulphite at bottling. It depends on the wine and the season. We do not have a set schedule for releasing each vintage. Our wines release when we feel they are ready and that may differ for each bottling, each year. Typically our pétillant naturel wines release any time from late spring through the winter of the following year after their vintage, and our still wines typically begin releasing in the summer through the following new year. Typically our wines release solo or in pairs, so there is something coming out just about every month or couple of months. We currently make about 34 different cuvées, including several ciders. All wines are farmed by us and with domaine fruit.