“Desire Lines is one of my most exciting discoveries this year. Cody Rasmussen is the Assistant Winemaker at Bedrock. He makes these wines with his wife, Emily, sourcing fruit from a pretty enviable collection of vineyards. The wines, highly expressive of both variety and place, are well worth checking out.”
Antonio Galloni, April 2020
Their Story
Forging our path.
A desire line is a path made by the one walking it. It’s often a path that diverts from the main trail, whether through an empty field to get from one street to another or a straight line up a mountain made by someone too impatient for switchbacks.
We—Cody and Emily Rasmussen— made California our home in 2011, three months after graduating college and two months after getting married. We made the first wine of our very own in 2014, and so began Desire Lines Wine Co.
Our winemaking path is guided by our vineyard sources, spanning 400+ miles across the expanse of Northern California. We go wherever a fascinating vineyard hooks us in and inspires us – these are sites that produce vibrant and singular wines that speak compellingly of place and time. From Riesling in the single-vineyard Cole Ranch AVA to 1890s-planted vines in Contra Costa County, our vineyards are the most important part of our wines: so much so that our labels feature the vineyard name as the largest text on the bottle along with a hand-drawn illustration of the vineyard.
Desire Lines wines are inspired by pioneering California winemakers and their coming-of-age wines from the 1970s and 80s – Cody describes this philosophy as “neo-classical” though Emily maintains that isn’t a sensible way to describe winemaking. What this looks like in the cellar is native yeast fermentations, lots of whole-cluster use in many of our reds, barrel fermentation for our whites, and aging in primarily neutral oak and large format barrels.
It’s a great joy to be able to share these wines with others, like crossing paths on a trail and getting to chat for a minute about how great the view is from here.
In 2013, Cody started as Assistant Winemaker at Bedrock Wine Co. And it was destiny. Well, maybe that’s overly dramatic. But Cody was a learning machine, studying the ins and outs of winery work under the mentorship of Morgan Twain-Peterson. Two years later with one ton of Syrah from Griffin’s Lair Vineyard, Desire Lines Wine Co. began.
We live in Sonoma with our two sons, Caleb and Drew, and two golden retrievers, Kinley and Maya.