Harvest 2014

As the sun sets on the 2014 growing season, it provides us with a moment to reflect on what went well, what went wrong, and what we would like to do a little different.  These points of introspection are essential to improving the quality of our wines, and continuing to keep our winery relevant in today’s world. And it’s also what keeps winemaking interesting, fun, and rewarding. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut, going through the motions of growing the grapes and making the wine, but taking the time to reflect on what you are actually doing is central to insuring our family business thrives for the next generation.  A few thoughts on 2014 -

• Celebrating our 41st vintage as winegrowers it’s never more apparent that the wine business is a long-term endeavor. The decisions and actions of today may not bear fruit for many, many years.
• Seasonality – we are not making wines by a formula. We are making hand-crafted wines from single vineyards that will express the variation of each growing season. And over the course of the past five years we’ve experienced incredible variation, but we think that variation is part of what makes wine special.
• Fine winemaking requires intuition and an intimate understanding of your vineyards. This is only gained by spending time, season after season, walking the vineyard, and making adjustments in your farming to suit your goals.  And it’s why we prefer working with the same vineyards year after year.
• There are no real secrets in winemaking. It simply comes down to execution which requires having a great team of people with a singular goal of making the best wines. We were fortunate to have Joel, our assistant winemaker, Max, our harvest cellar hand, and Todd our vineyard manager on board this season.  Their combined efforts and attention to detail will produce some fabulous wines from 2014.

Check out some of the photos from this year's harvest.

Photo credit to Randy Caparoso