Andrew Jones spends his days planning and planting vineyards across California as a vine nursery fieldman. That job hands him a map of the state's quietest, most underrated parcels, and Field Recordings is the catalog of the ones he could not stop thinking about.
Backstory
Jones launched Field Recordings with the 2007 vintage. The work he already did for growers, walking sites and planting blocks, gave him access to small fruit lots from farmers most people never meet. He built the brand around those relationships rather than around an estate, treating each wine as a field note from a specific person and place.
The Region
Field Recordings is rooted on California's Central Coast, with Paso Robles as its home base. Jones sources broadly across the Central Coast, chasing sites he considers undervalued for what they can give. The winery and tasting room sit in Tin City, the cluster of working wineries and makers in Paso Robles, at 3070 Limestone Way.
Vineyards & Farming
Field Recordings is a negociant-style operation built on sourced fruit. Because Jones plants and consults on vineyards for a living, he selects blocks with an insider's eye, favoring older or overlooked plantings and unusual sites over prestige addresses. The wines are organized as single-vineyard bottlings alongside blended projects that pull from several growers.
Winemaking
The Field Recordings house style is low-intervention and unfussy. Jones makes red, white, orange, and sparkling wines, and his approach has helped popularize skin-contact whites and easy, honest bottlings on the Central Coast. The Fiction and Wonderwall labels round out the range, the former a rotating blend and the latter focused on cooler-climate Pinot Noir.
The Wines
Expect a deliberately wide span from Field Recordings: structured single-vineyard reds and whites, juicy skin-contact orange wines, sparkling cuvees, and crowd-pleasing blends. The ethos is stated plainly by the winery itself, that these are bottles good enough for a special occasion but made for a laid-back crew who will happily open one on a Tuesday night. Current bottlings include the Skins orange wine and the Freddo Sangiovese.
