What’s in a Name?

PLENTY OF TIME

While we started making our inaugural vintage in the fall of 2022, we had plenty of time to come up with inspired names for the  winery and the individual wines – we wouldn’t be bottling that first vintage for nearly a year-and-a-half!  Our legal name for our vineyard operations up to that point didn’t require much imagination – “6860 Vineyards” was simply our street address on the west side of Paso Robles with an “s’ added in case we got more ambitious in the future.  

We started talking to friends and family about possible names but nothing was jumping out immediately, or if it did have possibilities, a quick Google search would show it already being used.  We looked at how other wineries came up with names – many were based on great (past or future intended) family legacies, current family members, mythical or literary figures with special meanings related to farming or winemaking, or philosophical or psychological references.  In about 2 seconds we concluded  “Ulrich Family Wines” didn’t seem quite right for our Rhone-inspired wine focus, nor did terroir references like “Landslide Wines” or “Rock and Clay” stick for long (mostly used already).  Nothing literary or philosophical was coming to mind either…….

THE CLOCK IS TICKING

What seemed like a lot of time early was quickly eroding away.  We didn’t really have 16 months post-harvest because there were details after we decided on a name that would use up a lot of time: trademarking, designing the labels, getting approvals from the Tax and Trade Bureau of the U.S. Treasury (aka the TTB) and the lead time to print the labels before the bottling could actually happen.  

1ST, 2ND AND 3RD DERIVATIVES

Having been born left brain oriented (a “natural with numbers”), I started to default in that direction.  Specifically, I liked the fact that our 5-acre micro vineyard was home to just over 10,000 vines of Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre varieties.   I began to promote this bit of brilliant thinking – “10,000 Vines Cellars” has a nice ring to it and it’s tied to our specific plot of land, don’t you think?”  Not getting much traction (and finding that there was an establishment in Buffalo, NY using this name!), I searched for a derivative.  Could a roman numeral could be used to depict 10,000?  Which, as a bonus, would be a nod to the Romans who helped develop the wine trade in the early Rhone Valley days.  Again, Google got us the answer quickly, and “X Vines” (with a line over the roman numeral to designate thousands) was born!  In circulating this new name among friends, one astutely came back and warned me that “X” itself could have some negative connotations, but I was focused entirely on 10,000!

Undeterred, we kicked off the trademark and fictitious business name legal processes, then turned to securing our social media addresses.  Since it’s not really practical to enter a roman numeral with a line over it in a Google search, the entry of “X Vines” came back (not) shockingly with numerous sites associated with that other “X-rated” meaning .  Obviously, this sent us back to the naming exercise!

We decided we’d need to spell it out.  “Ten Thousand Vines”??  Not compelling even if I am left brained.  But wait, I took a couple years of Latin, and the Romans spoke Latin, so we decided to figure out how they would have spelled out 10,000.  The word for ten was “decem” (of course!) and the word for thousand was “mille” (thousands was “milia”).  Taking a little naming liberty, we combed the words and trimmed a bit to arrive at “Decemil”.  Not only did it tie back to our vineyard of 10,000 vines, but it also had a  French-sounding ring to it (“deh-seh-MEEL”).

KEEPING THE DESIGN!

We solved our problem in an elegant way!  But our designers at Kraftwerk Design really liked the clean and bold look of that original roman numeral “X”.  So it stays as our stylized icon for Decemil – knowing that it also means “ten thousand”!