Call them what you like – desire lines, social trails, cow paths, pirate paths, kemonomichi (beast trails), chemins de l’âne (donkey paths), Olifantenpad (elephant trails) – each represents the natural course of evolution, of user experience over design, a cumulative creation of collective intelligence. Desire lines are unofficial routes, formed over time as the people traversing a space reject the designated paths in favor of a path all their own. Desire Lines Wine Co. is the path that we’ve chosen - we make a small amount of wine from amazing vineyards all over the Golden Coast, our adopted home state of California. Our wines are released to our mailing list by allocation. Please sign up for our mailing list and thank you for visiting our website! — Cody and Emily Rasmussen The 2017 Shake Ridge Syrah is our richest, most intense yet, fermented with 60% whole cluster and aged for 14 months in large-format 500L barrels, including a single new light-toast Taransaud barrel. We attribute the 2017's density and decadence primarily to the growing season (warmer than 2016's), but also in part from the inclusion of 2% Viognier co-fermented with the Syrah. We get fruit from two different blocks on the front of the ranch, from the first vines planted at Shake Ridge in 2003. Both blocks run from the crown of a ridge down into the colder swale, giving us a range of flavors to work with – textbook Syrah game and funk from the top, acid and fresh blue fruit flavors from the bottom. The wine is exotically perfumed with firm tannin and a sweet core of fruit that runs through the center of the wine, fitting for a wine from the foothills. “Desire Lines is one of my most exciting discoveries this year. Cody Rasmussen is the Assistant Winemaker at Bedrock. He makes these wines with his wife, Emily, sourcing fruit from a pretty enviable collection of vineyards. The wines, highly expressive of both variety and place, are well worth checking out.” Antonio Galloni, April 2020