The Fizz #74: Todd Cavallo, winemaker at Wild Arc Farm, is focused on sustainability in production and in business.

I spoke with Wild Arc Farm winemaker Todd Cavallo on making wine in the Hudson Valley, striving towards sustainability, and what it takes to build a successful wine business.

I’m thrilled to share this issue of The Fizz with a winemaker I really admire, Todd Cavallo of Wild Arc Farm in the Hudson Valley. I went to college in the Hudson Valley and the area stays close to my heart. The Hudson Valley has incredible wine history in the United States, with the first grapes being planted in 1677 by the French Hugenots. Experimentation with native labrusca vines was well on its way by the early 1800s. Today, the Hudson Valley thrives with local cideries and wineries like Wild Arc Farm.

You may know Todd, his partner Crystal Cornish, and Wild Arc from their piquette, a project that had a big hand in the piquette movement of the last few years. They also make vinifera wines, hybrid wines, co-ferments, ciders, and lately amaros—an incredibly diverse and exciting lineup. In this issue, Todd and I speak about what got him into winemaking, the Hudson Valley community he is supported by, his experimental backyard vineyard, and what it takes to build a successful wine business in today’s fast moving market.

Todd Cavallo, image from J+F

Margot: Can you give me a better sense of where you are in the valley?

Todd: We’re in the mid Hudson Valley. We're 25 minutes from the river between Middletown and Newburgh, in the northern tip of Orange County—the real heart and soul of the Hudson Valley is like Sullivan, Ulster County down the side of the river, and we're kind of in this little zone. We're in farmland here.

Margot: I love that. I went to college in New Paltz, so I've spent a lot of time in that region, it’s beautiful. You moved up in 2016, you're coming up on eight years. What was it like when you started Wild Arc and what has changed over that time period?

Todd: The wine scene in New York has developed pretty significantly since then. We had this idea when we were coming up here that no one is making the kinds of wines that we were making in the closest region to New York City, whereas like in the Loire valley, they've been making wines for the cafes of Paris for 100 plus years. It seemed weird that there was this wine growing region, the oldest wine growing region in the United States, so close to the city where we were for most of our adult lives eating and drinking. We thought hey, we should do that.

Of course, there are a few people doing natural wine in New York in general. Andrew and Jen from Eminence Road are about an hour and a half from us, and they were mentors for us early on. Of course, up in the finger lakes, Kim and Debra have been doing stuff at Bloomer Creek for 20 years, but it seemed like the Hudson Valley didn't really have that kind of thing going on.

We were taken in very easily by the local winemakers. They thought we were lunatics for trying to do what we wanted to do here. Since then, we've tried to start the seed for other people who wanted to make wine by saying, hey there's this region where land is undervalued. Grapes are undervalued. We want more people to be here and it's slowly started happening here and there. There's a few other producers who have moved in the more natural direction. There are some new producers who are on and off making some wine up here. We've been lucky enough to help some of our friends make a few barrels of wine here a couple times.

You can make these wines here and they're great and you don't have to buy wines from Europe or California or whatever to make your wine list amazing. Of course, that's still a challenge we're working on, but I think on the wine side that's been the biggest development—that community and camaraderie has come up here. All the other northeastern states are doing the same thing. We've been able to come together around events like ABV, which has been amazing. Meeting all the people growing and making wine in Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire has really shown that this development is not in isolation. It's not just because we're here in New York, closest to this big wine drinking region. It's happening all over the world.

Margot: That's inspiring. How did you decide to do this in the first place? You're coming from Brooklyn, you didn't have any viticulture experience. How did you get to where you are?

Todd: We were wine drinkers and enthusiasts for a long time. I have family who have been in the industry. My two youngest brothers who moved to New York shortly after me worked in restaurants and wine shops for ten years there. Through them, I met a bunch of people in the industry and came to realize that's the life that I want for myself. I wanted to be working in, you know, not necessarily wine, but hospitality, food and beverage. Over the last five or ten years, we all came to realize that our whole family on my dad's side were bar owners, butchers, grocery store owners, restaurateurs. So it was in our blood.

We decided to leave our lives in the city and we had broader intentions of what we wanted to do on the farm, which was a more generalized food focus. When we started, we were doing market vegetable farming, selling vegetables to a friend's restaurant in the city working very hard, making very little money. The wine thing was as hard of work to do, but the returns were a lot better. When people started responding to our wines, we decided to focus on that a little bit more and it was really trial by fire from the very beginning.

Andrew and Jen from Eminence Road let us press our first vintage with them up at their facility and then held my hand through any questions that I had. Other friends like Deirdre at La Garagista and our friend Zach who made wine in Western New York were there anytime I had questions. I was able to work my way through the first couple of vintages with the help of friends. Deeply nerding out and researching, reading as many books as I can, listening to every Levi Dalton podcast that interviewed one of my hero winemakers, where he asked them all the questions that I would ask them and just trying to figure it out.

People were doing native ferments in New York. People were trying to grow organically and biodynamically. Making connections to those people and getting to hang out in those circles and contribute to that growing community was big. Those ideals really helped us develop in tandem with the growth of the organic natural wine industry here. We're still learning and I'm still making mistakes and we've started a spirits brand underneath Wild Arc too.

Margot: I'm gonna ask you about that. When you bought the property that you're on, did you look for properties with viticulture potential? Was that part of your process?

Todd: It was yeah, it was a part of it for sure. Originally our idea was that I was going to keep my day job for five years and slowly develop this thing into a business on its own. Our first criteria was two hours within commuting of NYC, because I was going to commute to my job. We wanted around ten acres so that we could grow into some kind of farming, including planting an orchard and vineyard at some point. When the wine thing proved to be something that could be profitable, we said all right, let's get more orchard and vineyard planted. Let's focus on developing that.

Then my old business partners from my tech job kind of fired me after a couple of years because they said, you seem to be really focused on this farming thing. So we think you should go and do that. Then we had to turn it into something that could pay the bills so we scaled up from there.

Margot: What do you grow currently on the farm in terms of grapes, and what are you purchasing?

Todd: So we're still only growing maybe five or ten percent of our production—actually more like five percent because we had a big crop loss with the freeze this year. We have about an acre and a half of vineyard planted, but it's very dense. It’s Itasca, Aromella, Arandelle, La Crescent, and a little bit of Pinot Noir that I'm trying to keep alive, because I really want to make it at some point. We expected to get a ton this year. We got about a quarter ton.

Next year, barring any major freeze disasters, we’ll get up to two tons. We're still going to be buying 90 percent of our fruit and we've kind of shifted our ideals a little bit. We could clear another three acres and plant it on our property here. But we started to feel like it was better to find other growers who are willing to move away from conventional farming towards organic. That would be more of a net positive than clear cutting more native grasslands and trees down to plant a monocrop here on our property. We're treating this more like our farm experimental vineyard where we learn what works and what doesn't work. Then we can pass that knowledge on to other grower partners that we work with.

Margot: That makes sense. For those growers that you're working with, are they local to the Hudson Valley? Are they mostly on Long Island?

Todd: A little bit on Long Island and a lot in the Finger Lakes. Locally, there haven't been a lot of people willing to make that leap. It is a tougher region to do it in. I've got one acre in the backyard and three acres total under vine and tree and I can get out there and spray it in an hour or two, and having to spray every 3 to 5 days for me in my backyard is a lot different than someone with 40 acres to farm. Until we get to the point where we know what kind of spray program works here and how you can kind of taper off the amount of spray needed—I've got a very small tractor that doesn't use a lot of fuel. To consider how much diesel fuel a larger grower in our area would have to be burning to spray organically or biodynamically makes it not as clear cut black and white an issue.

We have found a few growers in the Finger Lakes who are eager to get off of herbicides already and took that step with us the first year we worked with them. Since then, we found other growers in Long Island who are very close to organic and then a bunch of certified organic stuff up in the Finger Lakes as well. Then a few little weird backyard organic vineyards that aren't certified, but I love and will always continue to support.

Margot: It's tricky for folks like you who are not growing most of their fruit because you have to end up doing some of this sustainability math, like, okay, I'll truck over to Long Island and that's how much fuel I'm using to get the grapes and, what about the people spraying? How do you think about that? Is that a part of your process?

Todd: It is a part of it. I wouldn't say that it's very systematized right now. I don't have green spreadsheets that tell me what my carbon footprint looks like. I am still trucking most of my fruit from Long Island and about half from the Finger Lakes myself. That’s a pick up and trailer, you know, so it's burning less fuel than a tractor trailer, but a tractor trailer that's fully loaded, of course, would spread that across a much bigger load than I could ever haul.

We do some shared trucking where we do LTL, less than truckload, to move bigger quantities down from the Finger Lakes. But yeah, we're moving a lot of stuff around a lot of times. We luckily can buy most of our glass from Northeastern providers as often as we can. We look for U. S. made glass, so that's not taking that extra trip over here. That's also become catch as catch can for the last five years as the supply chain things have gone wild and I've had to buy some glass that I wouldn't otherwise have bought, because either nothing was available otherwise, or everything else was three times the price.

It's a lot of scrapping to get by and making every decision that we can along the way to make sure that we're having the least impact that we can. If we eventually get to our goal of having some sort of onsite establishment where we can sell a lot more of our wine onsite and direct, we'll be kegging it all and doing draft lines from keg and not doing glass. Right now we’re not able to do that.

Margot: I hope someone at some point does a roundup of options or best practices, because I'm sure that you have to do a lot of that research and figuring it out on your own.

Todd: Yeah, it's part of the fun. Like figuring out canning the first couple of years. It was a lot of well what can we do? And then landing on the best solutions. At first, we were canning almost half of our production. Then we scaled up production and it's not kept parity, but also the cans don't sell as well and we already discount them significantly because people expect cans to be cheaper. Unfortunately, they're not cheaper for us to produce at our scale. At this point, I'm like, do we have to pull stuff that we would put in cans back into bottles because we can get twice the profit for it? That sucks. But until people are understanding of that and see a can and treat it like a half bottle and not like a four times more expensive beer, it's going to be a tough sell.

We still like cans. We're still putting them out as much as we can. We're still using as lightweight glass as we can for everything, or that's available. We’re considering diesel use and freight and trucking and all that, whenever we can cut back on that, we do.

Margot: You have a pretty diverse production—you work with vinifera, you work with hybrids, you work with apples. What does that experience look like? How do you choose what to work with?

Todd: It’s honestly mostly what's available that's organic or close to it. This year we were offered some new organic sources for Cayuga and Niagara. We've worked with Cayuga before. Niagara we hadn't, but we've done the Concord stuff for a couple years so I jumped at both opportunities. With apples, I love cider. Cider, having been close to having its moment for 20 years is a little frustrating for a lot of solely cider producers. We're lucky in that we can do cider and co-ferments and pour and sell them alongside wine to a more wine focused customer. It's important as we move forward with farming and climate change and trying to find the most sustainable way to produce what's essentially a luxury product on this planet.

We're going to have to look at that more closely. Apples can grow more easily here in New York. Unfortunately, they're not as often grown at scale organically. So that's been harder to come by. But it is a lot easier to find non-herbicide-sprayed, non-pesticide-sprayed apples.

There's a lot to be said about the people who are doing foraged only products. I hate talking about the business side of sustainability, but if your business isn't sustainable, then any sustainable practices disappear with you when you go out of business. When you're looking to support a family or pay a mortgage, like we are, I would love to be out foraging apples, but I don't have the time to do that because I have to make so much wine and cider in a season to stay alive. I like to see that stuff happening, but it's not usually a scalable solution.

As the natural wine market opens up to the broader wine market at large, it's only going to be better when people are more primed to stop being so focused on grapes only. There's a lot of stuff planted and it's definitely out there for the taking and usually farmed better. The more of those markets come up and the more people are used to paying what things are worth, the better it's going to be for all of us smaller producers.

Margot: For sure. I think that's important to talk about because for a lot of folks who are just getting into winemaking they don't think about the business aspect of it. They think about their love and joy, which is amazing, but, you know, you have to have the sustainability of the business as well. The amaros and nocinos that you've been working on play into that a little bit too, maybe. I've noticed a lot more of those sort of products popping up in the United States, which is really fun. Why did you choose to embark on that? And why do you think the popularity is growing?

Todd: We've been making nocino for fun since we started the farm because we're surrounded by black walnut trees. I was a big fan of digestivos and amari for a long time. We thought, hey, this summer, let's get some black walnuts into a tank and soak them with, I think I was buying Everclear from the grocery store at the start. Then when we wanted to see if we could commercialize it, we bought some organic neutral grain spirits from our friend Leslie out at Matchbook Distilling because they were starting a neutral grain production and we were lucky to buy their first barrel ever put out. We started doing the Nocino with that and then we got our own DSP (distiller’s) license three or four years ago and started making the arak from our leftovers that we couldn't do anything with.

Nocino and Arak from Wild Arc

That was something I wanted to do forever. My grandmother was Palestinian and I wanted to make something connected to our heritage that way. Although, you know, wine also was born in the Middle East. The first time around, I made 40 or 50 bottles on a tiny little hundred liter still. We made about five times that much for the second release. If I have a thousand liters of Merlot that is mousy that I can't in good conscience sell to people because I like all of our products to be delicious, when they're not, we have to figure out what to do with it.

We just started distilling stuff on a at a larger level than when we couldn't sell it. We had some extra grain spirits left over last year from that run. So I started doing all these extractions around the property, which I've been doing for fun for 5 or 6 years now doing it with an eye towards making very specific products. Walk around, taste things, put things in alcohol, extract them warm, extract them cold, smell them, blend them, see what they could do. It's fun for me to do that and then be able to have a small, I think it was seven cases of 12 by 375 ml bottles of this new thing.

The way we’re doing it—foraging things from our own property or things that we're growing here, it’s not really scalable because I can't buy 50 pound bags of herbs and spices. I mean, I could, but I really want it to be more representative of our space here, but it's something that allows me to not take a huge loss on a few thousand liters of unsellable wine every year and turn it into something else.

I also have this existential fear about having to do new things every year or two because of the way that our business started and got a lot of attention from the piquette thing. I have this dread every year that if I don't do something new, then they're going to forget about us and no one's going to buy our products anymore, which is probably based in reality. But that allows me to be driven to do these fun experimental things and also have it be something that I enjoy doing, not feel the pressure so much. It’s something I can do to expend creative energy and then, hey, if it turns into something that benefits the business, that's great.

Margot: Can you talk about your sales structure? Folks can't go and buy Wild Arc on your website, for example.

Todd: We're opening that up a little bit more now. For the first five or so years, we had mailing list only sales that we opened up twice a year for two releases for like a week. Then everything that was ordered either for pickup or shipping was shipped out and then we were done shipping until the next time. This summer for the first time ever we did three on-site pop up events where we did bottle sales and glass pours with some friends. We had a food truck who came. Ideally, we would do more and more of that to try to raise money to build a tasting room here.

But that's still only, at this point, 10 to 15 percent of our sales are direct, and the rest is wholesale. Wholesale, we're pretty much national with Jenny and Francois except we go direct into Washington state and California with a couple other distributors. We're making more wine than can be sold without any effort, which is the first time in our production that we've been at that point, and so now I've got to look at, am I going to spend January, February, March on the road doing market work, which I know is part of the job, but I've never had to do it.

This summer, for the first time, I did a bunch of events in the city to try to move sales. We're looking for a few more little export markets. Because unfortunately our supply has gone up for the last couple years. I mean, we're plateaued at this point. We make about 2600 cases which is a lot, but seems like not a lot for a small producer. We have to make sure that it moves and more of it moves directly than through wholesale because it's like a 60 percent margin cut for those wholesale sales.

Margot: That's what I hear from a lot of producers nowadays is a lot of folks are trying to move the needle more toward direct as much as possible to try and get as much as they can for their wines, but then you have to think about like the shipping and the structure and hiring people and all of that.

Todd: Yeah, I wish we could have people come to us more and more, but we don't have a building for them to hang out. The hope is that we can move that needle enough and get a little bit more margin. We’ve basically been plowing everything into the business for seven years. We're at the point now where we have to start generating a profit so that we can survive. If that profit is enough, then of course that can go into building something or developing the onsite or figuring out other means of direct sales.

I just had a call with my friend, Jas Swan from Germany does Katla Wines. We were both like this sucks. How do we survive? What are we going to do? She had a bunch of really good ideas. There's a lot of us in the same position—man this is tough, how do we make it less tough?

Margot: Do you collaborate or communicate about financials and growth with other makers in the Hudson Valley?

Todd: Not as directly as I would like. I have some other friends who make wine at a small scale. We have a tasting group that I started a year or two ago, and some of the other local winemakers have slowly come on board. It's more of a fun wine study thing and less of a maker thing. We just had an event at one of the other wineries and the winemaker and I talked about business logistics the whole time when everyone else was having a fun time tasting wines. Never into the nitty gritty of like actual numbers or bottom line stuff, more so how are you making this work for yourself? Not that we're guarded or anything, but I haven't haven't gone there really.

Margot: Yeah, this is really interesting to me because up here in Maine we have a few winemakers, and by a few, I mean I can count all of us on both hands, you know? We try and get together every once in a while and talk about our work and how we can lift up the region, and I always think about places in Europe where there are these established regional groups that come together and talk about improving the reputation of the region or sales—kind of like rising tide lifts all boats. We don’t practice that as much out here.

Todd: Not really. Hudson Valley Wine and Grape Growers Association used to have lots of meetings. Then post pandemic, I think no one really picked up the slack to start organizing again. I don't unfortunately have the extra time to, to devote to that, but I do miss that. Then the Finger Lakes has a bio-intensive growers group that does Zoom meetings monthly. I've been on those. The New York Wine and Grape Association is great too.

The problem is that the big players are the ones who drive the conversation there. New York wine and Grape has an export program, but I don't think they're looking to figure out if the market for a piquette in the UK is growing or shrinking. I think they're more like how do we get Riesling and and Cabernet Franc into other European markets from the big producers. I've been involved in all those things peripherally for a while and it would be nice to start to get more involved and help to steer the conversation, into sustainability and how we can increase the market for our wines leaning on those kind of things. There are markets out there that are asking is this organic? Is this sustainable? Is this farmed with a bunch of horses or a bunch of diesel tractors?

Margot: Right. As the new year comes in, have you been doing any vision planning for Wild Arc? What does the future look like for you?

Todd: We started this morning with a meeting asking what does the calendar look like for the next six months for us for our child's school? How can we fill every available space we have with market work? If we’re going up to Vermont in February to spend some time with a friend at a cabin, should I take an extra car and then drive around Vermont and do market work? If I go to RAW in LA again, let's reach out to Amy Atwood and have her plan a week for me of events, then the same for if we come up to Maine for Maine Wild Wine Fest. What other events and sales stuff can we do?

It's been a lot of that since we're pretty much done with the vintage and everything's tucked away. We don't have temperature control in our barn. So basically at the end of December, what's done is done. Everything sits and doesn't get touched again until April or May. I spent all this time doing taxes and paperwork and filings and all that, but on top of that, we're going to try to do a lot more market work. From there, it’s the bigger picture stuff.

We've done all of our own labels and branding and marketing. It's not necessarily time to hire any of that out, but it might be time to focus more on certain parts of it, actually make it a regular practice where we put hours in and figure out how are we going to generate Instagram content? Do we have to start a TikTok? All of those things are constantly bubbling and giving me anxiety and agita, but we'll figure it out. We're lucky that the business pays our mortgage and we can still afford to buy organic produce for our kid and live a life that's comfortable, even though it's stressful and a little bit more work than we can handle sometimes.

Margot: Where do you find the joy in what you do?

Todd: I mentioned at the beginning that the hospitality side of things was really what drew me in and it's still that—if it's inviting Lucas’ friend from school over with their parents and doing a ridiculous spread and opening a bunch of wines and making cocktails. Or if it's what we did this summer where we had pop-ups and I got to have a hundred people come here and serve them. Pop-up events at restaurants where I get to go and pour the wines for people, or even getting to go talk to all the wine shop owners who have been selling our wines and connecting with them at a deeper level. That's it for me. It's the human connection.

Margot: I love that, that’s really special. Thanks so much for your time. I’m excited to try your nocino sometime soon!

---

You can support Todd and Wild Arc Farm by signing up for their amazing wine club, putting in an order for their fall 2023 release, and following them on Instagram to keep up with their releases and events.​ 

Did you know paid subscribers get to ask questions of upcoming interviewees? Sign up for $5/month to get the inside scoop on future interviews, and ask your questions!