Here, in “The Boons of The California Bardos”, we leave fragments of stories, characters, and symbols that come to us while making cider. These “boons” are metaphors for something we can’t always explain. For example, when we taste wine, cider, and other spirits, we express our experience through metaphor:–apricot, vegetal, bandaids, feijoa, saline. We are not literally drinking apricots nor ocean water, and yet we are transported via our imagination, like a story, as though we were. When we drink, we feel transported too, intoxicated. Where do we go and what trickster spirit takes us there? Where are we being taken by the nuanced ghosts in the cider?

Making cider, we are visited by a chorus of characters from the past. Music rises from the underworld through the terroir. During winemaking, visionary visitations,–costumed as the plants, fruit, and soil, conjure the figures of history simultaneously long dead and resurrected. We encounter these characters in a living way. Most frequently they visit us in songs or stories. Other times they pay us a visit as elders, historic martyrs, bandits, or artists. 

We are honored and excited to be visited by these characters, disclosed to us, unexpectedly through winemaking and storytelling. Winemaking is myth-making! Myth is universal, regardless of creed or background, it bridges our psychological life and our personal emotional life with our collective history. Our interconnectedness is intimated in these embodied stories; through myth, we discover that all of these influences intersect in us, for which we are grateful. Below, these stories, martyrs, symbols, and songs are what we are calling the “Boons from The California Bardos”. We hope that you enjoy.