Manifesto
Our Beliefs and Values:
NUMBER ONE
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT…
NOT TO BE KILLED.
We believe that grapes should be grown without synthetic and inorganic pesticides, herbicides and insecticides. Wines should be made with no additions; bags of winemaking additives and chemicals have no place in the cellar. Wines should be allowed to ferment with wild yeasts indigenous to the vineyard where the grapes were grown; secondary malolactic fermentations should occur with native bacteria. Wines should never be fined with animal products (or anything for that matter) and never filtered. Sulphur Dioxide is a poison and should not be added prescriptively to wines, and if done so, the amount added and when should be freely and openly disclosed.
NUMBER TWO
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT…
TO FOOD MONEY.
We believe that the wine industry is addicted to exploitative immigrant farm labor. Immigrant labor that is often forced to work outside in conditions deemed unsafe due to fires, smoke, extreme heat, lack of safe drinking water, lack of access to restrooms, and without hazard pay despite working through natural disasters. Most importantly, this difficult labor is paid below living wages, which has resulted in this fragile community owning a disproportionately small amount of assets and capital in the community. As a small wine organization, we understand that we cannot simply make demands and solve these problems, but we are in complete control of our profits. Therefore, 100% of the net profits of Jupiter Wine Co. will go directly to affordable housing solutions for the Latinx community to begin to redistribute wealth towards those that are the most essential to wine’s existence in Northern California.
NUMBER THREE
YOU HAVE THE RIGHT…
TO FREE SPEECH.
We believe that as a wine consumer you shouldn’t have the same eight grape varieties routinely forced upon you. Corporate wine has determined that is all you want, so that is all you get. Ninety three percent of all wine grapes grown in California are these eight intolerable (at least to us) grape varieties (Except Zinfandel… Zinfandel, you’re cool with us.) We choose to focus on the other 7%, specifically the thousands of wine grapes indigenous to Italy, many being grown here in California for the first time. We feel that Northern California, with a dry-summer subtropical climate similar to that of the Mediterranean, is much more conducive to growing the native wine grapes of Italy than the Atlantic climate varieties of Bordeaux and Burgundy.