Horsepower Vineyards The Tribe Vineyard Syrah 2014

Horsepower Vineyards is about tradition, history, and about making history. It’s a connection between a vigneron and his roots. An homage to craft and family. An embrace of the earth that seems at once old-fashioned and new. And at its simplest, it’s a man slowly working the vineyard with his horse, just like generations before him. Tradition isn’t an abstract concept to Christophe Baron, founder of both Cayuse Vineyards and Horsepower Vineyards—he was born into it. The oldest son of the centuries-old Champagne house, Baron Albert, his family has worked their land in the Marne Valley of France since 1677. As recently as 1957 horses still did all of the vineyard cultivation.

Horsepower represents a return to that time, to a simplicity of craftsmanship and purpose that has been largely lost in the modern translation. It’s a window to the Old World —right here in the new. Adhering to biodynamic principles, which encourages the self-nourishing interrelationship of earth, plants and animals, has been a central component to vigneron Christophe Baron’s farming philosophy ever since he pioneered biodynamic farming in the Walla Walla Valley in 2002.

Horsepower is farmed according to an astrological sowing and planting calendar, and entirely without the use of herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, chemical insecticides or fungicides. Five draft horses cultivate The Tribe Vineyard, a 3 acre Syrah vineyard that is planted one vine per stake. Spacing is 3.5 feet by 3.5 feet, totaling 3,555 vines per acre.

At Christophe Baron’s family vineyards in the Champagne region of France, it wasn’t until 1957 that his grandfather’s last horse was finally retired. His name was Bijou, which means “jewel” in French, and his legacy has been reborn at Horsepower. With Cayuse Vineyards, Baron was not only the first vigneron in the Walla Walla Valley to fully implement biodynamic farming practices, but also the first to use horses for cultivation. Zeppo arrived in 2008, and Red followed a year later. They cultivate tightly spaced, 19th century-style vineyards that only they can navigate, using specialized farming equipment created by a blacksmith in Burgundy, France.