Bravium Winery

Derek Rohlffs is Bravium’s proprietor and winemaker. Derek graduated from UC Santa Barbara’s trailblazing Environmental Studies program, where he was honored with the Distinction in Major award as the High GPA student.  He also completed winemaking coursework at UC Davis, including its Wine Executive Program.

Derek employs simple, traditional winemaking techniques – gravity-moving wines and bottling his red wines unfined and unfiltered – allowing the source fruit to remain at the forefront, vine to bottle.  His travels to notable winemaking regions in Europe, including France and Italy, as well as Australia, helped him hone his winemaking approach.

Derek was greatly influenced in his early winemaking days by a retrospective tasting he had at Mayacamas Vineyards during his first visit to Napa Valley. His father Duke attended High School with Bob Travers and had remained friends with him and his wife Noni, who invited Duke and Derek to join them for a tasting of their 1970′s and 1980′s era Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. The structure and vitality these wines possessed and their renowned ageability captivated Derek and led him to research the role of acidity in winemaking. It also led him to eschew full malolactic fermentation in producing his Bravium Chardonnay.

Later, when Derek was launching into his Pinot Noir winemaking, he had the good fortune to meet Kevin Harvey and Jeff Brinkman of Rhys Vineyards who were making their paradigm-changing wines at a nearby temporary facility in San Carlos while their Skyline Boulevard Winery was being built. Their belief in the primacy of the vineyard provided a great example of what California Pinot Noir and Chardonnay can be when grown in the proper sites and handled minimally in the winery. Jeff’s generous input led Derek to focus on mountainside, cool-climate vineyards with relatively shallow soil, and gave him the confidence to produce Bravium Pinot Noir in a traditional and balanced manner.

Vineyards are located in the relatively cool areas of Mendocino, Napa, Santa Cruz Mountains, and Sonoma. Roger Scommegna’s Signal Ridge Vineyard, Mendocino Ridge’s highest elevation planting and Brad Wiley’s eponymous site straddling a naturally sculpted ridgetop in Anderson Valley’s “Deep End” highlight Bravium’s growing Pinot Noir program. Muns Vineyard in Santa Cruz Mountains is Bravium’s newest source and Derek has also partnered with the Abbassi Family to produce Chardonnay from Robert Young clone vines planted in 1975 in Sonoma Carneros, as well as three new Pinot Noir blocks that were planted in May, 2013.

Bravium Winery is located on Treasure Island, in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The cooling fog and breezes that are a regular aspect of the summertime climate on the Bay, coupled with the marine influence, provide ideal temperatures and humidity for aging our wines in barrel. Unlike most wineries, we use no air conditioning and instead have fans that draw the cool outside air into the winery. This effectively makes the winery an above-ground cave. Our San Francisco location also makes it easy to bring the night-picked fruit into the winery from our vineyards to the North and South.

Bravium wines are produced in small quantities [96 to 448 cases per wine] and are sold direct to mailing list members. They can also be found in select retail and restaurant placements, primarily in the Bay Area and on the East Coast. Bravium is Derek’s flagship brand focused solely on the production of vineyard designated Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and a Rosé of Pinot Noir. He has also created a roster of Artisan wine brands, from Proprietary White and Red Blends – White Wedding and Lucky – to varietal wines from North Coast vineyards.