Category: Summer Skin

There is no doubt that many of us love wine, of course, including myself.  Every year in our town of Riverside, California I would produce and submit a different facial cream that would be given to each individual  as a gift for our ‘Taste of the Town’ event.   As you probably may know, ‘Taste of the Town’ is an event  emphasizing great local food and of course great local wine.  One year I thought, my submission should be wine, red wine of course, because it had more anti-oxidant properties than white.  But on the drinkable level it didn’t matter to me.   This would be great I thought, people eating great food, drinking great wine and receiving a great facial cream made with real napa valley red wine, from “Trader Joes”.   Yes, ‘Trader Joes”.   That year it was such a great hit, but it just didn’t seem complete for me.  This was because,  ‘Taste of the Town’ was all about local food and wine, and the theme of my cream should correspond to just that…..that, my friends, was the beginning of the tradition of using local wines in my product to produce the yearly facial cream for this event. 

For the last twenty year I have been studying, testing and incorporating every type of ant-oxidant berry and related food into cream product. Of course, our friends were our guinea pigs, and they definitely told me if it was effective or not.  In researching about the benefits of Red Wine, I realized it wasn’t a new discovery.  I found out that Hippocrates, one of the founders of modern medicine, was the first to highlight the virtues of wine over 2500 years ago, claiming that wine is something beneficial to humans, as long as it is administered in reasonable quantities.  In the eighties, the scientific community tried to explain why the French suffer less from cardiovascular problems. Today, researchers explain that this “French Paradox”, is directly related to red wine consumption, thanks to the antioxidant and free radical scanvenging properties of the polyphenols and biphenols contained in red wine. These polyphenols have been shown in test performed on live cell cultures, to protect cells against the effects of oxidative damages. Therefore it helps skin tissues fight against the damaging effects of free radicals, therefore ensuring protection against extrinsic aging.  Extrinsic aging are those elements such as pollution, sun and weather etc. that just challenge our skin so much that it may not be able to respond and recover properly leading to aging skin by damaging our own skins elastin and collagen supply.

The search for a good wine to be in our product and to carry the BioKorium name came quite incidently, when our good friends Chris and Denyse Olsen,  from Cambria, California invited us to come to their harvest celebration.. Now, this was no ordinary winery, they built their winery from the ground up and planted each varietal syrah vine into the ground.   No easy feat, and you could tell from their final product.  That’s when I thought as a gift I would process their Syrah wine and incorporate into a handmade facial cream.  Well, when I was done I felt it was the best wine product that I ever incorporated into a facial cream, and so did they. I new it was exceptional because the end concentration of that wine did not smell “winy’, it had an overall clean smell for being highly concentrated.  So, from La Montañita Winery in Cambria, I distilled and condense there 2004 Syrah Wine to produce the wine extract used in this product. It is concentrated six times to increase the amounts of protective polyphenols, to be much more concentrated and effective that what is found in the market place. I then infuse the cream with vineyard field botanicals such as pomegranate extract, chamomile extract, sunflower extract, calendula extract, comfrey extract, sunflower and ivey extracts. It was now that I felt absolutely confident, of the true protective anti-oxidant properties of this concentrated product, now name BioKorium’s  La Montañita California Syrah Facial Cream.  So, I now tell tell our customers that if you like what it does for your skin, you may want to indulge in the real thing by visiting La Montañita Vineyard. 

In response to October Vineyard Harvest Month, BioKorium has substantially reduced our prices of our La Montañita Vineyard Line.