Charlie Barra on his estate, organics, and Mendocino

Sixty four vintages ago, the now eighty-two year old Charlie Barra skipped out on his high school classes to go pick grapes.  Today, he and his family own and operate Barra of Mendocino and Girsaole Vineyards, farming two hundred acres of grapes organically and making a line up of well priced, well made wines. 

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Charlie and filming nearly three hours of conversations about everything from his choice to move to organic farming to his efforts to break the monopoly that controlled grape prices for years in Mendocino.  There will be more videos with fragments of that conversation, but here, the talented independent videographer and musician Steven Stokes of Stoked Studios was good enough to condense our conversation into a four minute overview.  This is a departure for Askawinemaker as the video is not aimed at answering one question, but I think the content justifies the inclusion of the video on this site.  Many thanks to Steve for his good work - he composed and performed the music as well.

The video is posted here.