January 1, 2009 The Vinegar Master

Time in a Drop

Timing may seem odd for introduction of expensive traditional balsamic vinegar, right in the midst of a severe recession that now threatens to gain in severity.

"Why start now?" some have asked us. In short, we aren’t starting now.

When we began about 14 years ago, organizing to produce our rare cask-aged vinegar – locating unique grape rootstock, organizing and certifying our organic farm, preparing to build our new acetaia (vinegar barn) to house casks we planned to order from the finest maker in Modena, Italy (Francesco Renzi), etc. – the nation and world economies looked mostly stable and healthy.

Also, having just moved from northern California’s Bay area, we were full of energy and a strong desire to do something agricultural, unusual and well. We were newly minted back-to-the-land farmers who wanted to find a way to add value to crops we grew, starting with making them be organic. We knew adding value to be an important key for our success, just as wide crop diversity is a wise strategy for farmers.

Wine making is a common expression of agriculture made into a premium product, but balsamic is far more rare, especially that produced traditionally and from organic grapes. We knowingly elected to follow the classic Italian model for traditional balsamic vinegar (aceto balsamico tradizionale), including using a variety of small, rare wood casks, selected old Roman grapes, and, most pertinently, we committed to a minimum of 12 years of initial ageing.

You can’t be in a hurry to do that. And you have to be prepared for a dozen years when there will be virtually no revenue for your investments and your intervening years of work. It soon becomes an act of love and dedication, a meditation with each day of pruning grapes or any of the endless related agricultural events, which slowly fill the year.

Our climatic environment is much more arid than that in Modena, home of traditional balsamic classics, and our natural balsamic vinegar development process. We knew from this that our ageing process would be more rapid than that in Modena or other places. Still, we annually affirmed our intent to wait till our 12^th year of ageing. (Even the Dot.Com market collapse two years after we started was still a distant decade from our first ‘for sale’ batch date of 2009.)

So, while the timing may seem odd, our traditional balsamic vinegar and we are on a different and longer calendar. When economic things are robust again – in what is likely to be a largely reconceived world – and our balsamic is 25 years old, our timing will look perfect.

Our original and continuing focus is to make our balsamic as perfectly as possible, no matter what else is happening. It is and will be as good as it can be made in our terroir.

Classical traditional balsamic vinegar is possibly as old as the Romans or nearly so. Though even with such a long history, it possibly suggests the future too. It seems certain to us that many in our world will be looking increasingly for things to be “less rather than more”, “handmade rather than industrial”, “organic rather than conventional”, “best rather than mass”, and “nuanced rather than blaring”.

We cannot yet guess what the calendar holds or accurately estimate where things in our society are going. Our balsamic, we find, is a better, more delicious keeper of time – in its thick drops.

We start now because it is time. Our traditional balsamic vinegar is ready. In turn, we trust that the market will speak for itself, one balsamico aficionado at a time.