Our 2023 Impact: Fostering Life & Building Community

we believe our farming, our wine, and our work can change our world one farm, one bottle, and one conversation at a time.

With our third annual impact report, we are thrilled to share the myriad of ways that we’ve grown in alignment with our values over the course of a year. In 2023, we instituted a number of initiatives to further stewardship, sustainability, resource conservation, community, and our guest experiences. These contributions are made possible by your support, allowing us to continue making transparent, expressive wines that speak to the unique terroir of the Gorge.

Stewardship & Sustainability

At Analemma, we strive to operate within the rhythms and cycles of the natural world as we foster vitality on our estate through regenerative farming.

“Ninety percent of our job is creating the conditions for life.”

Kris Fade, Co-Founder, from The New YOrk times

In 2023, we:

• Tested Monarch’s 100% electric tractor technology. In 2021, we placed a deposit on one of these tractors, and we have followed their development with great anticipation ever since. Despite our enthusiasm, this first-release model is not yet ready for integration with enough of our farming applications. Some of the primary concerns for its use at its current stage of development on our site include: no cab – making spraying applications challenging with the digital interfaces in our windy location, no second brake, autonomous functioning that will not operate on our steep slopes or with our under-vine weed control attachments, and several safety concerns for our field team. Though we didn’t take the opportunity to purchase one of the first Monarch tractors brought to the State of Oregon, we are eager to track their technology development with hopes of further reducing our fossil fuels in the future.
• Hosted ecotourism experiences in partnership with Backroads Active Travel, a travel company that offers the ultimate minimal-impact approach to biking excursions, and First Nature Tours, a leader in Pacific Northwest sustainable travel. This included offering our first regenerative experience for members of the press (check out this video of the experience here!), which we plan to continue in 2024. 
• Planted even more trees through Ecologi as a result of your wine purchases!

• Explored new closure options for our wines by transitioning one-third of our 2022 vintage to Diam Origine corks, which use a beeswax emulsion and a binder composed of 100% vegetable polyols in lieu of plastic. Ultimately, this created production challenges with our hand-corker, so we will likely discontinue their use, but we are committed to be in constant pursuit of natural and sustainable materials across all channels of the business.

Resource Conservation

Our little corner of the world is precious to us. At Analemma, we believe that our wellness – and yours – is interconnected with the land, plants, and animals living around us. We invest in the vitality of these living systems by focusing on ecosystem health within our estate through conservation and minimizing resource consumption.

In 2023, we:

• Partnered with ReCORK to recycle corks. Going beyond repurposing corks to replace petroleum based foams and plastics in consumer products, ReCORK also actively plants new cork oak trees across the globe. We’re thrilled to serve as a drop-off location for North America’s largest natural cork recycling program and proud to share that we donated over 45 lbs of cork this year!
• Encouraged the return of pick up boxes for reuse. Inspired by our members’ enthusiasm around reusing the boxes from their club allocations, we formalized a drop-off location in our Cellar Door.
• Invested in domestic glass wine bottles to reduce our carbon footprint, a significantly more expensive commitment than alternatives made overseas.
• Relied upon our reusable pallet cover, which reduces our consumption of disposable plastic.
• Continued use of our ground source heating & cooling system to moderate the winery’s temperature from ambient soil temperatures, resulting in reduced energy requirements.

At Analemma, we compliment our highly focused attention on producing fine wines with broader goals of improving soil health, building stronger communities, and not externalizing harm to the planet. It is not enough today to be a business that has narrow, traditional goals. A regenerative business embraces the bigger cultural contexts and implements solutions to the challenges relevant to our time.”

Steven Thompson, Co-Founder

Community

Analemma exists through the support of our community, and there’s nothing more fulfilling than watching it grow. In alignment with the regenerative principles of holism, we endeavor to support and promote the health of our community by creating conditions for engagement between the humans we touch.

In 2023, we:

• Continued to partner with like-minded entrepreneurs & businesses nationwide, including Beckon in Denver, The Commerce Inn in NYC, Seabird on Brainbridge Island, and some of your favorite Portland restaurants, like Nostrana, Kaan, and Laurelhurst Market. One particularly memorable collaboration was in the Rockies with Outstanding in the Field, a Slow Food inspired dinner series that travels the country showcasing farms, food, and wine in wild and beautiful places.
• Created an opportunity for members to gather during midsummer’s golden hours, an experience known as “Sunsets.”

• Collaborated with talented partners in the Gorge, including Chef Mark DeResta of Riverside Hood River, Stamboom, NW Fish Hogs, Haylift Garden, Hood River Organic, and Good Medicine Tea.
• Donated to a number of impactful and meaningful causes in our community, including: The University of Washington Autism Center, Doernbecher Children’s Hospital, HOSA Future Health Professionals, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, Farmworker Justice, Sound Equine Options, Thrive Hood River, The Gorge Discovery Center, and Fly Fishing Collaborative.

Enhanced Guest Experiences

Our vision is to foster life and build community through a soulful approach to winegrowing, and with every visit to our farm, you help make that a reality.  

In 2023, we:

• Launched the Winegrowers Series for our members to learn how to make wine from vine to bottle. This new, six-session series offered our community to engage in a hands-on way, beginning with biodynamic applications in the vineyard and culminating in harvest and fermentation management. This March, they’ll bottle their own barrel of Godello!

• Introduced an all-new signature experience, the Winegrowers Tasting. This behind-the-scenes look at our cellar practices aligns with our values of education and transparency, and includes current releases as well as library selections and samples from barrel and/or tank.

• Honored the legacy of storied vineyards that began our wine brand by offering library selections from Atavus & Oak Ridge Vineyards in our Cellar Door through the fall and winter.
• Hosted tastings nestled within the orchard during cherry season. To celebrate the natural bounty on our estate, we moved our entire al fresco set up to the orchard, where guests could leisurely pick cherries throughout their tasting experience.

Goals for 2024: Regenerative Principles in Action

We’re in a continual process of evaluating how we are living in alignment with our values, ever refining and re-designing our processes based upon new information, understanding, and opportunity. In the spirit of continual growth, we have a number of goals for ourselves in 2024.

Stewardship & Sustainability

• Introduce the Grower Exploratory Field Tasting. This will be an experience for farmers and vignerons interested in instituting organic and biodynamic practices at their properties. It aligns with our values of transparency and information sharing and will be hosted by one of our co-founders. Some of you may notice that this is the third time this goal has been on our list; as it turns out, there is quite a bit of work involved with the packet Kris wants to assemble! We hope third time’s the charm.
• Plant fifty Oregon White Oaks & fifteen pomegranate trees on our Mosier Hills Estate.
  We are excited for this undertaking, which is designed to increase biodiversity and create a woodland ecosystem for the vineyard blocks closest to the Cellar Door.
• Improve our soil’s health. From our inception, we’ve been committed to this practice. This year, we will implement a no till weeder into our viticulture practices. We are also working with regenerative soil experts to assess our methods of agronomy and employ enhanced soil testing for phospholipid fatty acids.
• Rotate our jersey cows throughout 26 acres of vineyards and pasture on the south side of the property through quick rotation grazing to increase the footprint of their contribution to our farm. They currently only roam about 10 acres.
• Increase diversity on the estate with new vinifera varieties–Chenin Blanc! As a result of generosity from Nathan Wood, Vineyard Manager at Johan Vineyard and Cowhorn Winery and Vineyard, we’re sourcing Chenin Blanc cuttings to integrate this variety into our bottled offerings in the years to come!

Resource Conservation

• Continue partnership with ReCORK & encourage guests and members to bring their corks with them whenever they visit.
• Reduce packaging by kegging wine for tastings in the Cellar Door. By kegging a portion of our 2023 rosé, we’ll save over 200 bottles of glass. Our hope is to expand this program in the future!

Community

• At the behest of our members, we are bringing back member-guest pick up parties! We heard your enthusiasm loud and clear when we asked in November, and we are thrilled to bring this casual and convivial format back in the spring and fall to connect neighbors and friends.
• We’re going to invite members to help guide our charitable donations this year– we want to support what is important to you!
• Continue partnering with like-minded businesses, farmers, and growers, including Cascadia Creamery, Friends of the Columbia Gorge, and Riverside Hood River.
• Formalize the framework of our private events offerings so that we can offer more custom experiences for our guests and members. Start planning yours here!
• Expand our network at large! Vigneron Steven Thompson is getting out on the road to destinations near you, planning trips to Montana, New York, Colorado, California, and other destinations throughout the Pacific Northwest. For those of you who live in these areas, we will do our best to keep you posted about events you might want to attend in your neck of the woods!

Enhanced Guest Experiences

• Release wines from the Mosier Hills library with a dedicated tasting space in our cellar.
• Offer more opportunities to gather with us during the evening over the summer months, including a partnership with DarkSky Oregon.
• Launch three Regenerative Tourism Experiences. Beginning on Earth Day, we’re going to invite guests to the farm to participate in activities that connect them to our values beyond just wine in the glass, specifically benefiting local non-profit, Friends of The Columbia Gorge.

Organizational Health

• Continue bringing the practice of regeneration into the business of Analemma. Regeneration is about putting forth effort in such a way that we breathe life back into a system and the people involved. When we’re farming regeneratively, we’re creating positive, verifiable, and measurable ecological outcomes – like carbon retention, water holding capacity, or nitrogen fixation. Relatedly, when we’re operating a business regeneratively, we’re looking for reduced turnover, financial outcomes that are a result of value-aligned work, and a culture that is developmental and supports evolved thinking based on the needs of the team. We’re proud to share that we have conceptualized a number of ways to bring these goals to fruition, including retention efforts, the implementation of new programming, and redesigning existing structures.

We write these goals down each year as a guiding light towards value-driven action and continued growth here at Analemma.

We’re so glad you’re on this journey with us, and we can’t wait to show you these things in practice when you visit us in Mosier. Thank you for being a vital part of our community, and the energy that feeds us. Our community is a constant source of inspiration that encourages us to grow and keeps us dreaming of what is possible. A 2024 unfolds, ¡A tu salud!