OUR STORY
A Passion for Wine
Ben and Lori Grable met while attending college in Santa Barbara. Our love and appreciation of wine grew as our relationship grew. In 2001 we started exploring wine together in California’s Central Coast and continued to branch out and explore California wine country from San Diego to Sacramento and Washington State from Woodinville to Walla Walla. In 2003 we took a road trip across the United States and explored wine anywhere that it could be found; including Augusta in Missouri - the first designated AVA in our country.
Shortly after, we followed Ben’s career to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and soon after continued our wine exploration by making our own wine for the first time in 2004, almost by accident.
Ben was glancing through the Pennysaver when he noticed an ad for a wine press. The price was right and it took four of us to haul a giant iron wine press out of an old Italian family’s basement. They weren’t sure how old it was, only that it had been used in their family for multiple generations. The next step was finding a mentor that could guide us through our first “harvest” which is what brought us to our good friend, winemaker Frank Mellon in Freeport, Pennsylvania. For the next 8 harvest seasons we purchased grapes shipped from California and produced a wide variety of wines in our basement. Throughout the process, we met a number of Italian families who had made wine for generations. Their wisdom, history and passion for wine sparked our interest in Italian varieties.
In 2012, we fell in love with the Rogue Valley and settled just outside of Jacksonville. We continued our hobby of home winemaking and now had access to premium wine grapes from local growers.
While we made some phenomenal wines at home, we also had some flops. What frustrated Ben as a winemaker was not yet having the knowledge of how to treat problem wines and preferably, prevent problems from happening in the first place.
With strong encouragement from Lori, Ben completed the oenology and viticulture certificate program through UC Davis in 2017. After much prompting by family and friends, we decided to turn our hobby into a small business to share our passion. In 2018 Remotion was born and we embarked on our first harvest as an officially licensed winery.
oUR NAME
We hope you enjoy the Remotion
Remotion is a synonym for extraction, or utilizing the grape as a tool to stylistically design a wine that captures the character, or terroir of the Rogue Valley.
One definition of Remotion is departure. Within the word Remotion are the words “emotion” and “motion”. Taste and smell are two of our most primal senses which allows them to be strongly connected to distant memories you may not even remember you had. A wine’s sensory experience can offer a departure from your present place and time and remind you of an experience, emotion or even a wine that you have tasted before. Taste and smell are such strong senses that a wine can even bring back a long forgotten memory associated with a particular taste or smell. Our lives, as well as the life of a wine, are constantly in motion. It is this motion that brings us to each other, new experiences and pushes us towards excitement and personal growth. A wine’s life and development is very similar.
Our journey of learning about and loving wine is an emotional one, as we have experienced wines together, created a family together, started a small business together and now we can finally share our creations and experiences with you.