I designed this label to feature a photograph I took back at Bloodroot, a feminist vegetarian restaurant and bookstore, where I got my start in high school, washing dishes. The things I learned and thought about while there still have an effect on my day-to-day life. The women who worked there would give me tiny half-glass “shift drinks” of biodynamic wine, when I barely even knew what wine was at 16. They’d make me sit around for an hour afterwards, so I wouldn’t risk getting pulled over.

The Sojourner Truth image I found digging around in free-use digital archives. I sell wine to pay the bills, and everyday I’m out there selling an image of myself, of my wines, of my values. It is also a play on words, of alcohol as a “substance,” as well as the substance of one’s character.

The quadriptych is from an old screen print I did, it features the front cover of “A Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway, wherein, “Haraway suggests that feminists should move beyond naturalism and essentialism, criticizing feminist tactics as ‘identity politics’ that victimize those excluded, and she proposes that it is better strategically to confuse identities.”  Along with the Immaculate Heart of Mary, “The Two Fridas,” painted by Kahlo soon after her divorce from Diego Rivera, and a screenshot of “Metropolis” from 1927. Each image is tied to the others in the set. The real versus the machine Maria, connected to Kahlo by their dichotomy, to the Virgin Mary by their golden halos, to the Cyborg Manifesto by their posture.

Whole cluster direct press Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA, from a small, mountaintop vineyard at 700ft on west-facing hillside owned by Bob Farmer, eight miles from the ocean. I pressed the heck out of this because I wanted to get as much tannin and texture as possible, as well as being just curious about what the final color would look like.  

One stainless steel barrel & one neutral oak barrel, 46 cases produced, pH 3.44, RS 0.5 g/L,, TA 6.5 g/L, ALC 13.7% 

Born Isabella Baumfree to a family of slaves in Ulster County, New York, Sojourner Truth sits for one of the war’s most iconic portraits in an anonymous photographer’s studio, likely in Detroit. The sixty-seven-year-old abolitionist, who never learned to read or write, pauses from her knitting and looks pensively at the camera. She was not only an antislavery activist and colleague of Frederick Douglass but also a memoirist and committed feminist, who shows herself engaged in the dignity of women’s work. More than most sitters, Sojourner Truth is both the actor in the picture’s drama and its author, and she used the card mount to promote and raise money for her many causes.

By owning control of her image, her “shadow,” Sojourner Truth could sell it. In so doing she became one of the era’s most progressive advocates for slaves and freedmen after Emancipation, for women’s suffrage, and for the medium of photography. At a human-rights convention, Sojourner Truth commented that she “used to be sold for other people’s benefit, but now she sold herself for her own.”

—From metmuseum.org

Purchase any 12 bottles mix and match, for a 5% off case discount. Use code CASE12 at checkout.