Iruai Cosmic Cowboy Cabernet Sauvignon

About Iruai Cosmic Cowboy Cabernet Sauvignon

Iruai Cosmic Cowboy Cabernet Sauvignon isn’t your boomer uncle’s Cabernet Sauvignon that comes in a ten-pound bottle and smells like a freshly burnt oak barrel with hints of douche chills. Born out of a desire to channel the psychic terroir of our new rural home and rancher neighbors: we made some rugged, old-school Cab to pour with them when they bust out the homegrown grass-fed beef. “Cosmic Cowboy” is a reference to the musical ideology of Gram Parsons. It’s the genre he saw as a fusion of the many folkways of Americana: Country, Folk, Soul, and Rhythm & Blues. Unlike the “Cowboy” as a literal occupation or a culturally conservative adoption of the trappings of an esoteric “simpler time” — the “cosmic cowboy” is the free-thinking transcendental jus of the melting pot of America. The marrying of these distinctive vibes can also be summed up as: my conservative Grandpa really loves Willie Nelson, but also Willie Nelson smokes a lot of pot. “Cosmic Cowboy” taps into big road trip energy, taking in the grand evolving landscape of the West and churning out the Great American Novel at roadside diners along the way. This Cabernet trades in the jammy fruit and cedar box of your uncle’s wine fridge, for fresh plums and berries, saddle leather, and wafts of tobacco pouch. This isn’t a stockbroker out for a “power lunch,” it’s a long-haired alien in a nudie suit taking their space Cadillac out for a spin. The stars are shining brightly out on the pasture tonight; as above, so below.

About Iruai Wines

Iruai Winery (“ear-oo-eye” … the artist formerly known as Methode Sauvage) was started in 2013 by Chad and Michelle Westbrook Hinds in Berkeley, CA as a gypsy natural wine project, before laying down roots in the mythical Shasta-Cascade mountains of Siskiyou County.

Trading in the urban winery hustle for the vigneron life, the couple are exploring avant-garde vineyard planting and rehabilitation techniques using the permaculture methods laid out by Masanobu Fukuoka, while formulating their own “chaos organics” method of re-enchanting the land. Truly unlike anywhere else in California, Western Siskiyou County feels like a cross between Switzerland and Montana, cut with a rain shadow from Mount Shasta that divides it starkly between high mountain prairie and dense alpine forests.

Finding themselves in a largely untested grape-growing territory, with high elevations and a continental climate, Chad and Michelle have turned Iruai into exploration and celebration of esoteric varieties that flourish in the Alps of Europe. Together they work to grow Iruai’s Western Siskiyou County estate projects, purchase fruit and lease vineyards throughout the Shasta-Cascade, from the Trinity Alps of California to the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon.

Chad and Michelle seek to make wine with a sense of place by employing no additives and removing no character. Their goal in the vineyard is to let the vines thrive as they would in the wild, and in the cellar, to shepherd each ferment through its own natural development and evolution.