Wine has long been used to commemorate major celestial events, like the upcoming total solar eclipse crossing Texas and much of the northeastern part of the U.S. on April 8th.
“In the case of a total eclipse I think it’s as much about celebrating the fact that the sun came back and the world didn’t end,” laughed filmmaker turned winemaker Joseph Daniel. “Wine is the perfect beverage to toast the extremely beautiful but admittedly alarming spectacle of the moon turning day into night, and then hopefully back into day again!”
Daniel, a 5-time veteran eclipse chaser with “shadow time” in the U.S., Mexico, Africa, and Argentina, first discovered the wine/eclipse connection while filming the 2017 Great American Eclipse in Oregon.
“We stayed at this wonderful little winery that had really committed to celebrating the eclipse with a 24-hour party of great food and wine, live music, singing and dancing.” Daniel recalled. “And they released an estate Pinot Noir with a graphic rendering of the total eclipse on the label. The wine was delicious — they must have gone through hundreds of cases — but that bottle with the eclipse label was fantastic. It was the perfect souvenir of the event, which I still have today.”
The following year Daniel would begin his own personal indoctrination into the world of wine when he relocated from Boulder, Colorado to Sonoma, California to make a feature-length documentary film about the rich sub-culture of home winemaking there. The movie, called Tiny Vineyards, was a hit, playing to sold-out audiences and winning awards at film festivals across the country.
“When I started making the film in 2018, I actually knew nothing about wine other than I liked to drink it. But in the act of following a dozen different home winemakers and backyard grape growers through an entire year of their hobby, I was completely smitten by the winemaking bug.”
He joined the local home winemaking club, pestered established winemakers endlessly with questions, helped out with the farming at several small vineyards, then planted one himself, and even spent two years painfully reacquainting himself with college-level chemistry to earn the advanced Winemaking Certificate from UC Davis, considered the preeminent school for viticulture and enology.
“Most people who get into winemaking professionally usually start when they’re young by volunteering during harvests, interning at different wineries, getting a degree in enology, and slowly building a career. Otherwise, it’s really just a home winemaking hobby for retired folks,” explained Daniel. “But I jumped in with both feet, totally obsessed with the process and keenly aware that I no longer had my whole life ahead of me. Somehow, I successfully navigated all the legal requirements to qualify for an official Winegrowers License, and suddenly found myself fully credentialed as a commercial winemaker,” All the while he had been making gold medal winning wines every year — initially in his girlfriend’s laundry room, then in a tiny backyard winery, and eventually in 2021 (his fourth vintage) he made his first commercial wines at a custom crush in Sonoma, where he formed the Tiny Vineyards Wine Company (tinyvineyards.com).
“Sure, it’s a little unsettling that this late in life I started a business as longterm as a wine company,” Daniel admitted. “I mean, wine is the ultimate slow food. Those first commercial wines I made in 2021 considered the epicenter for Daniel’s favorite wine, Malbec. A full-bodied red wine that originated in France as a blending grape in Bordeaux, Malbec now grows mainly in Argentina as a varietal, and is a favorite wine of the country’s nomadic gauchos (cowboys). It has a deep purple color, dark fruit flavors and a smoky finish. Because of this it has historically been known as 'black wine.'
Malbec can be very aromatic and powerful, but smooth and velvety on the tongue. Some winemakers in Argentina call it the “velvet glove”—all power with softness. Hoping to learn some tricks in Argentina for making Malbec in California, Daniel visited several of the top wineries in and around Mendoza. Then he headed north for the eclipse.
Daniel filmed and photographed the event from a high, windswept plateau at the foot of the Andes near the tiny town of Bella Vista. Hundreds of people — perhaps thousands — had gathered there, having collectively come to the same conclusion that it might offer the best chance for clear skies and dramatic scenery. It didn’t hurt that the Argentine government had also picked the site for the same reasons, and had arranged for public bus service from surrounding towns and a large outdoor jumbotron screen But just like the eclipse we witnessed in Oregon, it was really great to be around a lot of people and experience it together. It’s especially powerful just to listen to the unbridled emotion of folks seeing a total eclipse for the first time. There’s a collective gasp of ‘oh my God!’ as the sun disappears, followed by lots of excited cheering and laughter — maybe even a little nervous crying — and finally growing applause as the sun peaks out again.”
Through it all Daniel had to try hard to keep his composure, and focus on the multiple cameras he was tending, firing shots every few seconds for a time-lapse image, removing then reapplying filters, making sure with the telephoto shots that the sun stayed in his frame as the earth rotated, and zooming in for video close-ups.
“It became a conflicting exercise in multitasking while trying to watch the most beautiful and spectacular natural phenomenon you’ve ever seen,” Daniel lamented. “I think this year in Texas I’m just going to bring one video camera and one still camera, set them up, and then sit back and enjoy the show.”
However challenging it may have been, Daniel ended up shooting one of the best total eclipse photographs he’d ever made—a remarkable time-lapse composite image of the sun descending through partial eclipse stages into totality and then back out through partiality before disappearing behind the Andes at sunset. The photograph was so striking that it ended up on the label of an Eclipse Malbec Daniel made in 2021 (with tips he learned in Argentina!) and just released this year to commemorate the upcoming April 8th eclipse.
“It is so exciting for me to combine several of the things I truly love — total eclipses, photography, winemaking, and the combined cowboy ethos of Argentina and the American West — into something delicious, beautiful, collectible and geographically significant for a once-in-alifetime kind of event,” said Daniel nostalgically (Daniel was also co-author, photographer, and designer of the legendary Texas cult cookbook Texas on the Halfshell, Doubleday, 1982). “That all seems very worthwhile today.”
As a very discerning, hands-on winemaker Daniel and his Tiny Vineyards Wine Company produced just 78 cases of the 2021 Eclipse Malbec. It is only available direct from tinyvineyards.com on a first come basis, with special discounts and free shipping for larger orders.
