Guests at the Healdsburg launch tasted the estate’s new Collage wines from five distinct appellations
Words by ELIZABETH VARNELL
“This is the next chapter,” says winemaker and Aperture founder Jesse Katz as he gathered guests and neighbors at his Healdsburg winery in May for the years-in-the-making launch of Collage. Each of the two new blends, one red and one white, contain portions of the best vineyard lots of each vintage year. Both the 2022 Collage Proprietary White wine and 2021 Collage Proprietary Red Wine — created by Katz and Hillary Sjolund, the winery’s director of winemaking — combine fruit drawn from more than 200 acres across five Sonoma County appellations. “Collage is taking the greatest pieces of them all and layering them together,” Katz says. “Hillary and I have worked on this, not only looking at our unique vineyard sites, but we have over 300 different lots that we looked at to create these two unique blends.” He credits the land and the spirit of innovation in the valley for this latest addition to Aperture’s roster.
“When we started Aperture in 2009, we very intentionally came over to Sonoma County for the community here,” Katz says. Indeed, Kyle and Katina Connaughton’s lush Single Thread Farms is just a few miles down the road, as is the couple’s Michelin three-starred restaurant and inn. Douglas Keane’s Cyrus is now set amid some of Aperture’s Alexander Valley vineyards nearby, while Jay Jeffers’ debut hotel The Madrona and Montage Healdsburg, with private label wines Katz crafts, are also in close proximity. “There is still a level of discovery, diversity, and curiosity within the land here,” he adds. “I had spent most of the early part of my life seeking out some of the best wines in the world and seeing how these wines can be made in vastly different climates, soil types, conditions and regions.” In Sonoma, Katz can still push limits and be a pioneer, noting that all the while he’s “standing on the shoulders of the folks who have done it before us.”
The new blends combine aspects of the various single-origin wines Aperture has produced since its founding. Katz and Sjolund sorted through the harvest to create ideal mixes, putting portions in barrels. “Over the past 15 years, we have searched throughout these unique soil types and microclimates here in Sonoma Country, which is so diverse, and married together sites that have created the entire Aperture portfolio,” Katz says. “It was purely an insane exercise in the art of blending.”
Katz and Sjolund credit the diversity of grapes from different sites for the white wine blend’s layered composition and complexity. “The Proprietary White wine from the 2022 vintage is from vastly different sites from vastly different areas, all barrel-aged for 18 months. Then we put that final blend together and aged it in porous concrete vessels for an additional six months,” he says. The Proprietary Red was aged in barrels for two years and also spent six months in concrete vessels.
To illustrate the collaborative origins of Collage, from diverse vines to the growers tending them and the artisans mixing the blends, Katz tapped his father, photographer Andy Katz — who has shot all the images on Aperture’s labels since its inception — to gather compilations of hundreds of images taken through the years. The images are arranged in the geometric motif of a camera shutter, at once evoking the winery’s tasting room built in the shape of a camera lens aperture and the diversity of the grapes included in each blend.
May 29, 2025
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