Cante Ao Vinho

Cante Ao Vinho is a family-owned winery which enjoys making wine in the old world style. The winery is owned and run by the Farinha Family near the old Camp Far West outpost along the Bear River. We make a variety of wines that include Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Italian.

The name, Cante Ao Vinho, means sing to the wine. We love to play beautiful music while making wine, hence the name. Some say when you try our wine you can hear the music, and better yet, sometimes make some beautiful music of your own! And of course, we’ve been known to sing a little from time to time.

Frank and I (Tom) started making wine when he turned 21, I am younger. Our grandparents always made wine( being from Portugual) but our folks never did. So when Frank turned 21 we went down to Lodi ,bought a barrel, had it filled with juice. We took it home and let it ferment. It was terrible, but we drank it because it was the best wine we had ever made, and hey, we were young!
Over the years we have learned a few things about making wine and about ourselves.
After a few years of bad wine we learned that picking the grapes was better than buying juice.So we bought some grapes from Wally Allan and the wine got better. We found that every time we learned something about making wine it got better. Now, hungry to learn more, we joined the Sacramento Home Winemakers Club and learned a lot. We bought college textbooks picked up information anywhere we could to learn more.

Now 40 years later what we learned about ourselves is that we like all the parts of making wine and we love variety. To this day we are still learning, and the wine is still getting better. We will never stop learning, so it will always be interesting…just the way we like it!

We now grow our own grapes, and with some great friends, we do everything in-house.But the most important thing we learned is that we love sharing our wines with people. It is so much fun and makes all the hard work worth it!