Hot Winter

In 2009 at Mountain Home Farm, we discovered a rogue hot pepper in a field.  Biting into the fruit, we found it immediately sweet, but with a slow-building heat that launched a three-year obsession with breeding the ideal  pepper.  Hot Winter sauce blends our very own Hot Winter pepper with a variety of organic heirlooms grown with love by our friends on small-scale farms.  Together we are saving seeds and savoring the taste of simple food done right. Enjoy

 

I started making the hot sauce when I was working at Mt. Home Farm, which is a 5 acre mixed veggie farm that catered mostly to farmer's markets.  The farm was in Orleans, CA, which is in eastern Humboldt and very rural.  The farm had a lot of botany nerds, and we all had several seed saving projects, which is why I ventured to isolate the Hot Winter pepper when I first discovered the off type. I had been making hot sauce based on a recipe from the farmers mother, and when I eventually decided to leave the farm, it seemed like a worthy experiment at least to try and scale up the recipe and see what it would take to bring it to market. By then I'd been growing out and selecting the Hot Winter pepper for several years, and it was beginning to feel more like a distinct variety, so the whole experience had a feeling of natural development.  I did some research and batch testing and received a lot of favorable responses, and have just been growing ever since.

 

At the core, my company is an effort to make people care about organic farming.  To show that supporting organic farmers has a real taste benefit and to show them that it's worth paying farmers a living wage to support their efforts.  

I think that since you have a wine focused site, it would make sense to talk up the varietal nature of the sauces, and the unique terroir of each batch.

 

Hot Winter offers radically different flavors than other hot sauces, because I'm using different kinds of chiles.  Moreover, while I do work to maintain a certain consistency from batch to batch, there are subtle differences, especially year to year, depending on the growing season and conditions of the particular farms where each batch of chiles originates.  Hot Winter is made in small enough batches, that you can taste these differences, and I think they are a thing to be relished.  

 

 We are also using chiles as our Primary ingredient, which I think is worth stressing.  There is just a LOT of (high quality) chiles in each bottle.