Onysko WineTech
Napa Valley, California Sign In

About

Jeff Onysko

I'm a Napa Valley winemaker. Onysko WineTech is how I make wine for other people's labels, from the fruit to cased goods on the dock. That is the business.

See the private label work →

Further down are things I make and do outside the cellar. Not services, just part of who does the work.

Jeff Onysko standing in a mustard cover crop between vine rows in the Napa Valley, in work clothes.

Outside the cellar · Casting, STOMP 2025

The icons of 2025.

It was a vision and it became reality. Copper wire from the winery, tin from wine-bottle capsules and aluminum from leftover scrap, melted into an alloy of my own and cast into the icons of 2025: the STOMP longhorn skulls.

Rows of cast longhorn skulls, the finished run, laid out on a red tool chest.
The finished run.

Every skull is a lost-wax casting. Start to finish, it goes like this:

  1. Four cast ingots on a wooden plank, each marked in pen with its weight in grams.
    The metal. Winery scrap melted down and poured into ingots, each one weighed and marked.
  2. A white 3D-printed longhorn skull pattern held against a tape measure, its horns spanning about six inches.
    The pattern. The master skull, 3D-printed, about six inches from horn tip to horn tip.
  3. The opened blue silicone mold, with the skull cavity and the STOMP lettering pressed into it.
    The mold. A silicone mold taken from the pattern, with STOMP lettered into the cavity.
  1. Blue wax skull patterns joined to a central wax sprue and pour cup, standing on a work table outdoors.
    The wax tree. Wax skulls from the mold, joined onto a wax sprue under a pour cup.
  2. The same wax tree after dipping, coated in a sand-textured ceramic shell and hung to dry.
    The shell. The tree dipped in ceramic slurry and coated in sand, coat after coat, until it is a shell.
  3. A stainless-steel electric kiln with its control panel, set up outdoors for the burnout.
    Burnout. In the kiln the wax melts out and the shell hardens, leaving a hollow the shape of the tree.
  1. A caster in a face shield and heat-resistant jacket lifting a glowing crucible out of the furnace with tongs.
    The melt. The crucible comes out of the furnace glowing. Filmed by Kendall Hoxsey-Onysko
  2. Molten metal pouring from a glowing crucible into a white ceramic shell set in a steel bucket.
    The pour. Metal into the hot shell. Filmed by Kendall Hoxsey-Onysko
  3. The raw casting with the shell knocked away: metal skulls still joined to the tree, flecked with white shell.
    Knockout. The shell broken away. The same tree as the wax, now in metal.
  1. A line of cast skulls still joined along the sprue, resting on a cinder block among shell fragments.
    Off the tree. Skulls still joined along the sprue, before they are cut free.
  2. A finished, polished longhorn skull held in an open palm.
    Finished. Cut off, cleaned up and finished by hand.

Thanks to Rio Grande, my supplier for about 20 years and clutch every time, and to Remet for the shell materials.