Darling Wines

Tom and Ashley Darling are the couple behind these extraordinary wines. This is yet another first-generation-winemaker project in our portfolio, which is becoming a bit of a fashion for us. But just like their Living Wine peers, they produce natural wines with great craft and precision which transparently displays the terroir of the vineyards they source the grapes from.

The couple met in college in North Carolina and then moved to Washington, DC. They were first bitten by the wine bug while visiting Virginia wineries. One thing led to another, and after a wine road trip through California, Tom took a job at a tasting room in Middleburg, Virginia and Ashley began to incorporate wine tasting as part of her yoga practice.

In 2016, then, the newly married couple, they moved to Napa. Ashley continued to teach Yoga with a side of wine education and Tom worked at wineries in the Valley. Eventually Tom got a job in wine sales. This opened a lot of doors thus making it possible for them to launch ​​Darling Wines in 2017 with just two barrels of Syrah sourced from McEvoy Ranch in Sonoma.

What really sets Darling Wines apart is the prestige of the vineyards they work with. These are some of the most renowned sites on the Sonoma Coast. They work almost exclusively with cool climate, coastal sights and grapes grown in the Petaluma gap or the West Sonoma Coast. It is almost impossible to get wines from these sites that are made in the low intervention, no addition style, with only neutral oak barrels used for maturation.

The couple is self-taught, although well-trained and careful with their winemaking. Grapes are crushed by foot and spontaneously fermented with whole clusters. The wines are then basket-pressed and allowed to rest for a day or so before being moved by gravity into neutral barrels. The wines are bottled unfiltered and unfined with only the smallest amount of SO2 added before bottling.