ABOUT US
This is a story of unlikely vineyards, a story of romance and hardwork, a story of the way the light falls across the valley in the heat of summer, or how the moon rises over the hill and sparkles on snow.
This is a story of two people who fell in love with a place of deep bedrock made of limestone and shale, clay. This is a story of volcanoes that once moved across Time to plow the earth into a tumble of granite, schist, and garnet.
This is a story of forgotten grapevines twining up into maple, ash, and pine, their feet deep in streambeds. This is a story of their cousins who grow in these unlikely vineyards and whose voices are written in the green of their leaves and the black and golden, or copper skins of their fruit.
This is a story of meadow and forest. This is a story at the edge of the forest. Where golden rod and purple aster and daisy fleabane live beneath the vines and fox dig dens under the apple trees at the cusp of the vineyard.
This is a story of scent, and taste, and clouds and rain, and sun and intuition, a story of stags, and wolves, and rabbits, and crows. Of flowers, and fruit trees, and wild plants, and vines. Always vines. This is a story of lost causes,, frosts and floods, of desperate cases. This is a story of hope, resilience, resistance and courage. Of adaptability and evolution. Of magic.
This is the story of us, the vines we tend, the wine we make, a story of hunger and love.
Deirdre Heekin
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Deirdre began her journey into wine unconventionally and in an unlikely manner. After a stint living and working in Italy, co-directing a performance and dance company, teaching English, and pulling beers and espresso in a piano bar, she opened the much-lauded bakery Pane e Salute and restaurant Osteria Pane e Salute in 1996 with her husband Caleb. Caleb was chef and Deirdre was the wine director. Over time they focused only on the restaurant and farming fruits, vegetables, and livestock for the kitchen, and then planted their first vines in 2007. They ran both the osteria and their wine label from 2010-2017, when they closed the restaurant to focus solely on growing and making wine in the burgeoning wine region of Vermont. Currently, she farms and makes wine in both the Chateauguay mountains and the Champlain Valley in Vermont.
Deirdre is passionate about wholistic and regenerative agriculture, exploring the botanical diversity of hybrid grapes and their various wine expressions, simple and honest winemaking, and the creative narratives of place. Deirdre is a graduate of Middlebury College and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from The Vermont College of Fine Art. She is the author of three books, the most recent An Unlikely Vineyard. She is at work on a fourth, The Vineyard of Lost Time, to be published in 2026 with Timber Press. She and Caleb co-direct Domaine La Garagista, farming, fermenting, and running their two pop-up tasting rooms in West Addison and Barnard.
Caleb Barber
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Caleb grew up in southern Vermont, and his journey to farming grapes with Deirdre is one filled with detours. He was a reluctant weeder in the family's vegetable garden. His first on-farm job at 16 was driving a pair of Belgians, cutting and raking fields, and loading haybales.
On his way to graduating from Middlebury College (Philosophy, German, Dance) he worked in dairy farming, building and renovations, and landscaping. Afterward he found his way into restaurant kitchens, washing dishes, and then advancing under the tutelage of several amazing mentors. At the end of a year spent in the Val di Chiana of eastern Tuscany, his cookery course was set on a new mission, and after more US training and an Italian apprenticeship, Caleb and Deirdre opened their own bakery, Forno Pane e Salute, in Woodstock, VT. Over the next 20 years the bakery evolved into an Osteria, and Caleb continued his studies in the kitchen, deepening his sensibility and appreciation for old ways of cooking and eating as expressions of hospitality, a way to connect people, all while the winery was slowly coming into being.
Even after they closed the osteria in 2017 to focus on La Garagista, Caleb has maintained the kitchen as the place where he composes his love letters. In addition to being the general manager of the domaine, Caleb currently develops and writes recipes for the Wednesday food section of the Boston Globe, and he has begun to contemplate a second cookbook. He also aspires to some day bring a respectable crop of chicories to full maturity in a Vermont growing season.
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