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WINEMAKING filtration unit from Paso Robles, Calif.- based Electrotec Services. While all this processing is going on, barrel sanitation is handled by a combina- tion of a McClain ozone generator and a Hotsy pressure washer with a Gamajet barrel cleaner. The facility has a basic in-house lab setup for routine testing. For more complex juice panels, YAN analysis and the like, both use Vanalytics, and Dragonette uses Vinquiry as well. Work, who has a bit of an IT back- ground, is particularly proud of a set of interlocked spreadsheets that automate the zillions of little calculations that go into winemaking—how the addition of some acidulated water affects the pH of a wine, and what that translates into grams of sulfur dioxide to add at some point. Both use the mobile bottling line services provided by Castoro Bottling in Paso Robles. Dragonette gets its bottles from Demptos, Encore and Trilogy; Dragonette is looking for a new source of recycled glass now that Wine Bottle Renew is no longer in business. Both go for cork- TECHNICAL REVIEW finished packaging, with Ampelos using DIAM stoppers and Dragonette choosing M A Silva. Dragonette hand-waxes all of its bottles, except for its rosé, which has no capsule at all; Ampelos is moving its entire line to a "naked" non-capsuled finish. The Ampelos labels are each built around a character from the Greek alphabet that corresponds (at least to the winery folk) with the character of the wine, by way of the meaning of the char- acter in math and physics notation. The Syrache (Syrah-Grenache), for example, gets a Sigma (∑) for the sum of its parts; the Lambda (∆) Pinot Noir connotes the wine's magnitude. Through a string of connections, the Works once got a room- ful of brainiacs at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara to debate the best character to represent for a particular wine they were drinking. Pe- ter and Rebecca's wedding took place on a Greek island where they eventually also bought a small tourist hotel and named it Ampelos, Greek for the vine. The hotel name replaced the original winery label name, Worx, which ran into some copy- right complications. Dragonette's label concepts aren't quite so complicated, and they involve no clas- sical Greek alphabet. They do, however, prominently feature a vintage alchemy symbol for the "elixir of life," or "drink- able gold." Moving product Peter Work recalls that when he and Re- becca started making wine, the marketing plan consisted of putting exactly 33 cases into the backseat of their pickup truck, driving toward somewhere in Los Angeles and making the rounds till they sold the wine. Drive home, refill the truck and repeat the cycle. "After a while," he says, "not only did that get really boring, but we realized it was not a scalable model." Ampelos' main Southern California distribution goes through Wine Ware- house, and a lot of that goes into res- taurants. They have at least a sliver of distribution in 15 states—five of them through Winebow, including 150 cases or so per year into the New York/New Jersey market. Like most small producers, the folks at Ampelos think distributors are a necessary evil, critical for broader distribution but usually more focused on larger accounts and often needing in- person prodding. Beyond California, Ampelos has its second-biggest market in no state at all, but in the Works' native Denmark. They 48 WINES & VINES OCTOBER 2012