Tiny Vineyards

synopsis

Beneath the increasingly sterile and mechanized monoculture of grape growing and wine production in Northern California exists a subculture of private viticulturalists and home winemakers dedicated to producing small batches of wine for all the right reasons, not the least of which is self-consumption. Blending science with alchemy, agrarian zeal with ingenuity, these amateur enophiles can sometimes make wine rivaling that of the best commercial wineries . . . and, sometimes not. As uncomplicated as it can often be winemaking is still a craft fraught with disaster, an art subject to the vagaries of nature, weather, terroir and human endeavor. Tiny Vineyards is a feature-length documentary that follows a dozen such hobby vineyard owners through their annual winemaking ritual in Sonoma, California.