As we move into a new year, it’s a good moment to spotlight some up-and-coming new American winemakers and projects that are just coming into view.  All of these producers have but one or two releases under their belts. And all of them already show tremendous skill, even as they’re just breaking out of the gate. They’re definitely winemakers to watch, and following them as they develop further will be fascinating—in 2025 and beyond.

Apollo’s Praise
Rock Stream, NY

We’ve previously written about Kelby Russell and Julia Rose Hoyle, the husband and wife team behind Apollo’s Praise, and for good reason: they have been a not-so-quiet force for good in New York’s Finger Lakes region for more than a decade. Hoyle makes wine at Hosmer Winery on Cayuga Lake in Ovid, and Russell made wine for many years at Red Newt Winery on Seneca Lake. Russell, with Oskar Bynke of Hermann J. Wiemer, is one of the organizers of FLXcursion, the biennial Riesling-centric wine festival that has drawn much deserved international attention to the Finger Lakes as a source for cool climate white wines, especially Riesling. 

Last year, as they were formulating plans for a new venture, Russell texted Ken Fulkerson, the grower for the Seneca Lake vineyard Lahoma, to see if he could get a bit of Chardonnay. According to Russell, Fulkerson called him back saying “No, the Chardonnay is spoken for.” But, he asked, “would you like to buy the vineyard?’” Suddenly plans for Russell and Hoyle’s new project were on a fast track.

Apollo’s Praise draws from this 20 acre estate, including that elusive Chardonnay, as well as Grüner Veltliner, Scheurebe, Riesling, and Cabernet Franc. Russell had been consulting on the last decade of plantings at Lahoma, not knowing he was planning his own future. Nor was he prepared for the 2023 vintage, in which the team lost nearly half their crop to a May frost. Nevertheless, Apollo’s Praise produced nine bottlings of that vintage. 

Russell has always had a penchant for Finger Lakes Cabernet Franc; he makes two. His Cabernet Franc bottling exemplifies a crunchy bistro style. The Lahoma Reserve is slow to rouse, and opens up with haunting florals, a filigree of herbs and olive leaves, laid lightly on a core of red fruits; it’s that delicacy that’s a hallmark of the best FLX reds, though at present the Reserve closes with firm, persistent tannin. 

Hoyle and Russell have teased out an exceptional warmth in their Rieslings. The Dry is angular and edgy even as it gives off a peachy, tropical vibe. The straight-up Riesling bottling, a Kabinett-level of sweetness at 8.5% alcohol, is a flavorful rush of tree fruit that gives way to a vibrant riff of acid. The Knoll bottling ($75), meanwhile, from a sandy parcel at Lahoma, is a showstopper, somehow more generous and fulsome while remaining focused and dry, with astonishing length and persistence. 

2023 Apollo’s Praise Cabernet Franc ($28)
2023 Apollo’s Praise Lahoma Vineyards Reserve Cabernet Franc ($30)
2023 Apollo’s Praise Dry Riesling ($20)
2023 Apollo’s Praise Riesling Lahoma Vineyards The Knoll ($69)

Rockhound Wine 
St. Helena, CA

Rockhound’s label illustration is a rendition of diatom exoskeletons, an ancient lifeform, magnified to where we can admire their wild geometric patterns. These exoskeletons compose the soil in the Sta. Rita Hills by the trillion, and contribute crunch and structure to the Pinot Noir grown there—especially in places like Radian Vineyard. A vineyard designate from Radian is the principle offering from Rockhound, a new wine project from second-gen Napans Reed and Megan Skupny. He is the Reed of Lang & Reed, the nonconforming Napa Valley winery founded by his father and mother, John and Tracy Skupny. They’ve devoted their thirty-odd vintages to Cabernet Franc, alongside which they’ve added a relatively recent addition, Chenin Blanc. 

For now, Rockhound isn’t trucking in Cab Franc, or Napa fruit for that matter. A colleague at Reed’s day job at Napa’s HQ Winery told him about Radian, and the Skupnys jumped at the offer. In 2022, this cool, windswept bench in the Sta. Rita Hills allowed them plenty of hang time for their Pinot Noir. This is a bold wine from that vineyard, a dark, full-bodied red with scents of cocoa and black plum, sumptuous and yet balanced. That demonstrative oak component should integrate with some time in the bottle.

2021 Rockhound Wine Sta. Rita Hills Radian Vineyard Pinot Noir  ($90)

Junichi Fujita
McMinnville, OR

Junichi Fujita just debuted his first wines. There are two from the 2022 vintage: one from his neighbors, one from Juna, his estate. The latter is a parcel he’s tended for nearly a decade. The use of the word ‘tend’ is deliberate: Fujita is an acolyte of several innovative agricultural practices. He’s taken courses on permaculture with the late Bill Mollison in Tasmania,. He’s also been a student of the principles of Masanobu Fukuoka, whose book, The One Straw Revolution, is a kind of primer for natural farming. With his own vineyard, Fujita employs Fukuoka’s principles in its design and practice. That includes not tilling the soil between rows, which, Fujita hopes, will sustain a vineyard’s biome beneath the surface, the magical realm of transference between roots’ filaments and the mycorrhizal network.

Fujita’s found his parcel while seeking deeper resonances from the land itself. He was put onto this by none other than Jacques Lardière, the ruminative former winemaker of Louis Jadot, who also helped to found Resonance Winery in Oregon. Lardière is one of our most articulate, not to say heterodox proponents of biodynamic principles, a thinking man’s vigneron who overlays his own philosophies and prescriptions upon the practice. 

For Lardière, and now for Fujita, wine and winegrowing is an almost cosmological enterprise, and terroir an almost spiritual concept. Lardière urged Fujita to find a spot where the land spoke to him, and after a long search, Fujita came upon his parcel in the McMinnville AVA in the Willamette Valley, a parcel of marine uplift studded with zeolite, natrolite and other unusual minerals. 

Not only did it stand out in a sea of Jory and Willakenzie soil series sites, it spoke to him, just as Lardière said it would. “Jacques would say that the vineyard should be like a field of energy,” explains Fujita. “You should feel the vibration of it.”

Fujita’s vines are head-trained, and arranged in a triangular pattern (there are no rows per se). It’s planted to multiple clones of Pinot Noir with other varieties constituting ten percent of the estate: Pinot Gris, Aligoté, Chardonnay, Gamay Noir, and Pinot Meunier. The 2022 from Juna is a co-ferment with all the plantings, a practice Fujita derives from nineteenth century accounts of winemaking practice in Burgundy. 

His two current releases, Sonomama and Juna are exquisite, and wildly different.

The Sonomama comes from the Brittan and Morning Mists Vineyards in the McMinnville AVA. Right from the start this is dramatically perfumed but distant, like woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney, along with potpourri, pine tips, red flowers and cedar. Its flavors are direct, savory, delicate and light, growing more pristine and pure with each passing day.

The Juna is billed as a red wine, but reads very differently, thanks to the addition of the estate’s other varieties. Its whole cluster spice organizes the aromatics around nutmeg, horehound, pine, and leaf litter. Its flavors are insistently savory, its fruit very much secondary, with a texture that’s somehow supple and assertive at once. Even after several days open this wine is hard to pin down, in the best sense of the term. Unique, and incomparable. 

2022 Sonomama McMinnville Pinot Noir,  ($65, sold out)
2022 Juna McMinnville Red Wine ($100, sold out)