Draisine is what emerges from that calling: deep friendship, decades of shared work and shared standards
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Draisine takes its name from an early human-powered rail vehicle — a small machine moved forward by hand with intention and effort, before the Industrial Age fully arrived. The name reflects how the wine is made: disciplined, self-propelled, and grounded in long familiarity with place.
For years, fruit from Borderlands Vineyard gave voice to other people's wines — wines that, across vintages, carried the Rocks District's signature savory, mineral character as an accent rather than the argument, with the fruit itself leading.
Borderlands Vineyard sits in the south central part of the appellation, planted to five clone and rootstock combinations of Syrah, Grenache, and Viognier across multiple farming blocks. The soil is heavily cobbled basalt — the stones not scenery but structure.
The stewards of Borderlands spent those same years building careers elsewhere — shaping site-driven wine, building relationships, getting serious wines into the right rooms. But intimate understanding of a singular place eventually becomes responsibility, and the work of shaping Borderlands into wine became less a decision than a calling. Draisine is what emerges from that calling: deep friendship, decades of shared work and shared standards, and the decision to finally build something of their own, together.
Zach Rasmuson has spent more than two decades shaping site-expressive wine across Napa and the Anderson Valley. Early years at Stag's Leap Wine Cellars, Robert Sinskey Vineyards, and Husch Vineyards led to two decades at Duckhorn, first as winemaker and general manager of Goldeneye, the company's Anderson Valley Pinot Noir estate, and since 2012 as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of The Duckhorn Portfolio. Along the way, he helped Goldeneye earn early California sustainability certification and build one of the state's first LEED Gold winemaking facilities.
He studied the history of science and philosophy at St. John's College — a background that shows up in a wine style built on patience and a refusal to rush to conclusions. At Draisine, that instinct finally has a home of its own: Borderlands Vineyard, in the Rocks District, ground he's known for years and is now working on his own terms.
Pete Przybylinski spent three decades at The Duckhorn Portfolio, beginning in 1995 as the company's first salesperson and later serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer with nearly two decades of that career running alongside Zach's. His career has been built on relationships and conviction.
A lifelong wine-industry veteran, and, away from wine, an avid skier and ski patroller, Pete brings to Draisine a deep belief in the future of Borderlands Vineyard and the singular fruit of the Rocks District of Milton-Freewater.