The Name
Farella Vineyard is located in the Coombsville AVA. The vineyard was first planted in the late 1970's and early 1980's by Frank Farella. Realm began sourcing fruit from this site in 2003. In 2018, we were honored to enter into a partnership with Tom and Frank Farella for the long-term stewardship of this land.

The Label
Introduced with the 2021 vintage, this label is an homage to Frank Farella, a dear friend of Realm who established Farella Vineyard in the 1970s. Frank is a man of many tastes, with a lifelong love of music and dance. One of our early memories of Frank is from a lunch we enjoyed at his home in Marin, when a Leonard Cohen record inspired him to an impromptu dance with his wife, Amy. We subsequently learned that his first date with Amy at the restaurant Don Giovanni concluded with a dance to the car radio in the parking lot!

As a distinguished and successful lawyer, Frank is also a man of letters. So when we discovered Heart of Dance, a work by artist Wosene Worke Kosrof, we felt we were onto something. Kosrof is an internationally acclaimed, Ethiopian-born artist working in Berkeley, CA. He is known for using the symbols of his native Amharic language as a principal motif in his paintings, contorting and lengthening them so they take on a rhythmic, jazz-inspired life of their own. In speaking of his artistic signature, Kosrof says, “On canvas, the script images are divested of their literal meanings to become gesture, dance, music, movement, and stories of the human drama. I don’t pre-sketch paintings; my process is inchoate and exploratory: the interplay of accident and intention, of mastery and uncertainty, of curiosity and discovery.” Echoes of the Realm Paradox.

Kosrof’s work has appeared in the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, the United Nations, and the National Museum of Ethiopia, and others. We acquired Heart of Dance from a gallery in Los Angeles. The complexity, energy and vibrancy of the piece are a fitting reflection of our friend and partner, Frank Farella.

Heart of Dance, a 48” x 48” acrylic on linen canvas, was completed in 2021 and hangs in the Whiskey Hotel.