FALL 2025
Explore our Fall Bottle Club
We’re excited to introduce our fall releases! Below, you’ll find Andrew’s winery update and the stories behind each of our wine club selections.
The never-ending roller coaster ride continues in Paso Robles…
It has been a great season here. The wins have far outweighed the losses, and as we finish up 2025, we’re looking forward to seeing what this latest crop has in store for us. If you follow us on Instagram @fieldrecordingswine, you might already be up-to-date on our year so far. But I want to highlight a few of our highs and lows in 2025:
Field Recordings Tastes America
Over a harvest lunch last fall, Jack and Pete pitched me the idea of hitting the road to share our wines with customers across the U.S. I’d always considered doing a tour, but logistically, it wasn’t possible logistically with my family of six’s busy schedule. To their surprise, I was fully on board, and what came about was really special.
They threw events in 11 states over 7 weeks, hitting some of the far reaches of America. We went as far north as Traverse City, MI, and as far east as Virginia Beach, VA. It was an aggressive plan, but they absolutely crushed it, and I think the tour demonstrated one of the really special things about this wine project. We truly craft these wines as a team — an exceptionally young team — and that was fully showcased along the route.
We did happen to blow a head gasket on the truck in Raleigh, NC, but that didn't stop us. We made every single event happen. All gas. No brakes.
Summer press
We had an amazing run of press this summer on a wide variety of our wines. When it rains, it pours, and for our small operation without many resources, the PR exposure was unbelievable. Over a two-week span, we were featured in a few of America's top wine publications:
USA Today - America’s Top Boxed Wines - BOXIE Orange
NBC Today Show - Top Wines for the Summer - BOXIE Red, White and Orange
NY Times - Top 20 at $20 or less - Pet Nat Rose
SF Chronicle - California Wine Defying Trends - Freddo, Loomis #2
Unpredictable harvest seasons
The past few farming seasons have been wild. Some extreme highs and lows. 2022 had an insane heatwave that consolidated the harvest into ⅓ of the time. 2023 was super cool (pretty much perfection) but that presented us with a whole new set of circumstances. 2024 was warmer but relatively cooperative, but it also gave us a fit with some sites. We’ll see what 2025 has in store for us. It was a relatively cool summer, and we hope things go more in the direction of 2023 or, worst case, 2024. You’ll get to hear more about the randomness in the farming cycle as we cover the club wines.
I have a few other tidbits, but we can save those for the Preview Party or sometime in the future at the tasting room. Let’s get into the stories behind the 5 wines that are getting into your hands this fall.
Now, onto the wines…
We’re starting off with three new emerging whites for our lineup. The white wine revolution has been much appreciated by our production team (which honestly consumes 3-to-1 bottles of white to red these days). We’re all white wine junkies, and it’s been a pleasure testing the waters with grapes that are relatively new to California for commercial use.
2024 OUILLE
100% SAVAGNIN
$35 REGULAR / $28 BOTTLE CLUB
Technically, our Savagnin is on its second release, but this is the first vintage we have enough to offer our wine club. We only had 2 barrels from the 2023 vintage, so only a few of you got to try this one. Savaginin is a relative to the Gewurztraminer family, but it makes a wine more like Chardonnay. And not that big, heavy, creamy type of Chard — it’s the super bright, high-acid type you typically find from European producers. The grapes are sustainably farmed down on the SLO Coast at Greengate Farms in San Luis Obispo.
Super simple process behind this one: We pick it at the right balance of sugar and acidity, then whole cluster press the grapes to neutral barrels that we let run wild. The three-year-old vineyard yielded a mere 16 barrels on this special grape.
2024 SIGNIFICANT OTHER
100% ALIGOTÉ
$35 REGULAR / $28 BOTTLE CLUB
Significant Other is made with Aligoté farmed at the Orcutt Road Ranch in San Luis Obispo. Largely unknown internationally, Aligoté is the “other” white grape farmed in Burgundy. Known for a blast of fresh citrus flavors, this medium-bodied grape is having a major resurgence as growers look for varieties that can thrive in our extreme coastal vineyards. We only yielded 6 barrels of the three-year-old vineyard this past year, and although the vines are super young, we’re very optimistic you’ll be seeing this one from us for a while.
2023 NINE BALL
65% GROS MANSENG, 35% PETIT MANSENG
$35 REGULAR / $28 BOTTLE CLUB
This is a blend of the two white grapes farmed historically just on the French side of the Pyrenees: Petit Manseng and Gros Manseng. Both hold their acid very well. We essentially have to wait until the end of the season to harvest them, otherwise we might get complaints of damaging everyone’s tooth enamel. Petit gets super ripe too! We can have 18%+ potential alcohols with acidity levels higher than Champagne. The Gros luckily brings the alcohol level down substantially, but we still need to arrest the fermentation and leave a slight amount of residual sugar to alleviate the sting of the wild acidity. We call this one Nine Ball because this oddball grape just doesn't make sense! Trust us though, if you only stick with the drier wines typically, this one will surprise you. Take this one down to your favorite Thai joint upon arrival.
2023 KOLIGIAN
FIELD BLEND
$55 REGULAR / $44 BOTTLE CLUB
A pair of 2023 Koligian bottles will round out this fall’s allocation. In 2023, the cool season was just perfect for those dry-farmed vines: No rush to pick things, and the acids fell in line much faster at Jeff’s vineyard vs Armory up further northwest. As always, this is our mentor Jeff Koligian’s personal farming project. He planted this vineyard a few years after we stopped working together at Sunridge. The vineyard is planted in a bowl on the west side of town, and we chose the varieties and rootstocks specifically to harvest all together at once. The 2024 vintage had the tiniest heat spike just prior to our harvest date, and it left the grapes super dehydrated upon harvest. The high octane wine was still a phenomenal blender in Fiction, but it just didn't live up to something we wanted to force. For those that have been with us for the long term, you know what to expect from Jeff’s vineyard, and it just wasn't right to bottle some alone for 2024. This probably gives all of you a great opportunity to stash a bottle for a special occasion in a few years. I think you’ll be stoked on the outcome.
2020 ARMORY
100% CABERNET SAUVIGNON
$75 REGULAR / $60 BOTTLE CLUB
We hoped to store this library release a little longer, but the cool 2023 season got the best of the dry farmed Armory vineyard. 2023 was such a long and cool season, the acidity never came down in our blocks of Cab. By the time it started getting into the sweet spot, the grapes had already reached 18%+ potential alcohol, which got it all out of whack and made it extremely tough to ferment with our native yeast. We were still able to use the fruit as a great blending component in 2023 Fiction, but it just wasn't up to our quality of standalone, single-vineyard offerings where I could look all of you club members in the eyes and say it deserved its premier status in the lineup.
The 2020, on the other hand, thrived because of the hot season that year. The heat balanced out the acidity in the end wine, and it really gave this wine legs for the long hall. I know most of our wines are not cellared, but after you try this one, you might be asking yourself why you don’t stash a few bottles away in the wine fridge for years to come.