Nelsen Barter Wines
These wines started as a trade.
If I took enough harvest photos and vineyard drone shots, I could get one ton of Merlot from the most special vineyard in the world to me.
This is the vineyard where my sister got married, where I took friends to show off the 140-year-old vines, where I learned about pruning and soil rehabilitation and cover crops and shoot thinning and partied to celebrate the end of harvest.
And that first ton of Merlot in 2020 turned into great wine. You actually can’t buy that one right now. I’m not ready to sell it. But I kept coming back each vintage, each harvest, to trade filmmaking for more fruit.
And now, after four vintages, it’s time to let these wines out into the world.
I’m planning to sell wine once a year, during the wine harvest. I only make the wines I want to make, so there’s not much to go around. Native yeasts. Unfined and unfiltered. Minimal intervention. Neutral oak. Some whole cluster, depending on how I felt. The vineyards are practicing organic and I join some of the best, most thoughtful wineries in California in sourcing fruit from these sites.
These are my wines, made exactly how I like them. They’re very special to me. And you can drink them too.
Matt Nelsen is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and winemaker. He currently writes and directs deeply researched comedy videos about the climate crisis for Climate Town. His first feature (A Maine Movie) won the Audience Award at the Lower East Side Film Festival, and was called "a powerfully funny, inspired, and incredibly simple ensemble comedy." For the past four years, he’s been filming throughout California for a project documenting the intersection of wine and climate change.