GAEA Cellar journal

My thoughts while drinking bourbon

What the cellar carries

The technical record explains how a wine was made. These are the lines that explain why the work matters—and what a bottle can carry long after the cellar work is done.

A thought on aging

“That is the kind of stillness I respect. Not the stillness of giving up. The stillness of becoming.”

Lines worth keeping

Notes from beyond
the tasting glass.

Collected over time.
Kept for what comes next.

01

Curiosity before certainty

“I don’t know yet.”
A cellar answer is rarely permanent. Measure, taste, look it up, and stay willing to learn.
02

Keep improving

“Stagnation is the kiss of death.”
The phrase began in business and became a winemaking rule: every vintage must teach the next one something.
03

What aging really is

“That is the kind of stillness I respect. Not the stillness of giving up. The stillness of becoming.”
A barrel may appear still from the outside, but time, wood, oxygen, and wine are quietly changing one another.
04

Keeping the faith

“The wine continues. The work continues. The bottles continue. The labels continue. The story continues.”
The cellar carries forward a friendship and a craft that began with Gordon, Troy, and Elias in 2012.
05

The essence of a legacy

“Legacy is not just what people say about you after you are gone. It is what continues because you were here.”
A shared bottle, a name on a label, and a tradition kept alive can make memory tangible.
06

More than a bottle

“A piece of her dad at the wedding, poured into every glass.”
Haley chose GAEA Sauvignon Blanc for her wedding and kept Gordon’s initials present in the name.
07

Return after the first heat

“A good thought, like a good bourbon, needs time. It needs to sit. It needs to breathe. It needs to be revisited later.”
The same discipline applies to a barrel sample, a blending trial, and a thought worth keeping.
08

The prototype worth keeping

“When we found a repeatable formula for a specific vintage that we liked, we set aside the prototype blend and called it Good Chit.”
A blend was not complete because it worked once. It became Good Chit when the formula could be repeated.

The story beneath the label

Friendship,
kept in motion.

GAEA

The name is personal: Gordon Armstrong & Elias Amireh.

Gordon, Troy Bunnell, and Elias began making wine together in 2012. After Troy passed away in 2016, Gordon and Elias continued and took the craft further. Gordon passed away on January 28, 2022. Elias kept the faith.

The work still bears both names because GAEA is more than a cellar mark. It is a record of friendship carried forward.

Good Chit

During blending, Gordon and Elias would work until they found a formula they liked—and could repeat. They set aside that prototype and marked it Good Chit. It meant the blend had moved beyond a lucky glass. It had become a result worth preserving.

Years later, Haley found a hand-labeled magnum of the 2018 Cabernet Sauvignon marked Good Chit. The bottle had become a message from the past: part technical record, part shared joke, and part legacy.

Wine at the table

For Michael and Grace’s wedding in 2024, the table carried the 2019 Cabernet Sauvignon—which had won Best in Class and Best in Show at the 2023 California winemakers competition—along with the 2023 Sauvignon Blanc. The wines were called Happily Ever After.

For Haley and Jacob’s wedding, the 2023 Sauvignon Blanc was chosen for cocktail hour and the 2025 Sauvignon Blanc for dinner. Haley kept GAEA on the label and added Jacob & Haley Reserve Sauvignon Blanc.

That is the cellar’s deepest measure of success: not only what the wine tastes like, but where it is poured, who is gathered around it, and whose story remains present in the glass.