Recent Posts

Gold Medal!

Super happy that our 2021 Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains won a Gold medal at the 2024 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the largest competition of North American wines.

2021 was a great year. We picked the grapes on September 25, which is late for the Santa Cruz Mountains. However, the extra hang time allowed the grapes to develop fully and reach optimal phenolic ripeness. We fermented the wine at 25-27C for about ten days and left it on the skins for another seven days before pressing. We pressed the wine of the skins and transferred it to new American oak barrels (228L), where it was left for 14 months before we bottled it.

The taste is true to the Santa Cruz Mountains terroir with high acidity, balanced by the rich red fruit and silky, smooth tannins. It has a pronounced red cherry flavor that I absolutely love, with notes of herbs and spices. The oak is well integrated, creating an elegant wine with intensity.

Read More

Harvest 2022

Another fun week making wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The yield was down about 1/3 compared to last year due to heavy spring rain that damaged the flowering (we call it “shatter” when a grapevine’s delicate flowers don’t pollinate and develop into grapes). The Chardonnay grapes suffered from excessive powdery mildew also due to the early rain, so we got a limited crop this year. However, the fruit we did harvest was outstanding and of high quality.

This year, we decided to focus on making sparkling wine, rosé, and Port-style wines. We have so much Pinot Noir red wine in the cellar, and it’s always fun to focus on other wine styles. We pressed the Pinot Noir grapes whole-bunch (no destemming) in our new horizontal press, and the juice was rich in sugar, acidity, and flavors (yummy). We let the juice settle overnight and then made a 100% Pinot Noir sparkling base wine (Blanc de Noirs) and a 100% Pinot Noir rosé. The acidity was higher than last year, so we expect both wines to have a fresh fruit profile with a crisp and zappy edge.

We dried about ½ ton of Pinot Noir grapes on our drying racks in a cold space to further concentrate the sugar, flavors, and acidity. This is a similar technique to how you make Amarone wines (known as Appassimento), and I learned to use it for Port-style wines when I failed to make an Amarone-style red wine five years ago, as the grapes got so concentrated I couldn’t ferment the juice. The fermentation is still going and will probably take another 30 days before it reaches the right alcohol/sugar level. More to come!

Read More

Harvest 2021 in the Santa Cruz Mountains

What a great week, making wine! I have purchased Pinot Noir fruit from Dale and Bonnie in the Santa Cruz Mountains for several years and really like the quality of the vineyard and the grapes. The wildfires in California in 2021 didn’t impact Santa Cruz, so the fruit was in pristine condition. The bunches were tight (see photo) with no rot or mildew – just pure fruit.
We made the wine onsite – picked and processed the grapes in one go with no wait time or transportation. So super fresh fruit directly into the barrel. We did minimal sorting, as the quality was excellent, before moving the grapes into our fermentation vessels. The fun part was adding dry ice to the tanks – it was perfect for Halloween pictures. We use dry ice during the cold soak phase of the winemaking process to keep the grape must cold. Cooling down the grapes immediately after picking helps inhibit spontaneous fermentation from wild yeasts. The “cold soaking” also helps us extract color and flavor from the grape skins, which is especially important for Pinot Noir. This is the first year we are using dry ice to cool the grapes. Dry ice is great because it doesn’t melt – it turns straight from a solid to CO2 gas. That means dry ice cools grapes without adding water to the mix; more water means a lower sugar concentration in the grape must.
In addition to the red wine, we also made white wine from Chardonnay and rosé from Pinot Noir, so it was a busy but fun and “fruitful” week.
Read More
With temperatures hitting +100F (40C) in the Bay area, the vines are growing rapidly and it is time to do some canopy management. As you can see from the before and after photos, the vines are growing in all directions so we need to trim the top shoots and place the canes within the trellis wires. This is all manual work and needs to be done in the morning to avoid the heat. However, the result is very satisfying and the vines now look like hedges – trimmed and growing upwards.
The berries are growing nicely and the bunches have turned and hanging downwards. The berries are filling the cluster (we call it “cluster closure”) but the vines still make more leaves, a phenomenal array of “solar panels” converting sunlight, water and carbon dioxide into sugars.
The biggest challenges are fungal diseases due to morning fog and constraining the shoot growth. At this point, the season looks good – maybe we get another good harvest!
Read More
Budburst is truly one of the most exciting times in the vineyard and I love watching the growth and development. Grapevines are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female reproductive organs, so they can self-fertilize. In short, they don’t need bees to make grapes… At this stage, the biggest risk in the vineyard is spring frost but with the temperature in California well above 70o F (+20oC), I think we’re in the clear and now it’s time to focus on vine balance.
I’m obsessed with this concept as it’s the scientific approach to viticulture (growing wine grapes). Basically, we talk about the “source”, which is how much nutrients the vines receive, and the “sink” is what the vine does with the nutrients. We want a balance between the “source” and the “sink”. To manage the “source”, we can either increase or reduce the nutrients such as water or fertilizers. In our vineyard, we have clay-heavy soil that retains water and nutrients, so we actually want to reduce the “source”. This year, we’re using more cover crops between the rows (see photo) to reduce the “source” for the vines. For the “sink” there are two ways the vine will use the energy/nutrients: (1) vegetative growth (shoots) or (2) reproductive growth (grapes). We want the vines to focus on reproductive growth but with enough vegetative growth to actually ripen the grapes. At this stage in the growing season, we go through the vineyard and try to determine how many shots to leave on each vine. It’s really really difficult and the only experience will tell you what to do. If you remove too many shoots, the vine will focus on vegetative growth. If you leave too many shoots, the grapes may not ripen fully. If we leave too many shots, we may also run the risk of too dense a canopy, and then we have mildew problems.
Contrary to common belief, we actually want to optimize the amount of fruit on each vine and not reduce it. Some producers argue small yield per hectare equals better quality fruit. Research has shown that is not always the case. For example, Syrah (which we grow) has greater quality with higher yields. That is the same for Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay, but not the case for Pinot Noir. Of course, there is a balance, but we actually want higher yields from our vineyard. In the next weeks, we’ll continue monitoring the vegetative growth and prune, if we need to.
Read More

Spring in the Vineyard

I thought I write a few lines about what is going on in the vineyard at this time of year. Let me start by saying I LOVE this time of year in the vineyard. This is when we create the foundation for the vintage, and potentially next year. First, we need to prepare the soil. As we grow our vines organically, we use horse manure as fertilizer. Our vineyard is on a sloping hillside, so we need to spread it manually and then tiller it into the ground. I’ve included photos of before and after so you can see how nice the rows look now. We also use White Dutch Clover as ground cover between rows. The ground cover looks pretty and is essential to maintaining and improving soil health. The ground cover also helps with weed growth and can be managed to influence vine growth and canopy characteristics, crop size, and fruit and wine quality.
Second, we grafted our young vines. In California, we use a rootstock that is resistant to the phylloxera louse. Today, most modern vineyards are planted on phylloxera-resistant rootstock with the scion or budwood grafted in a commercial nursery or in the field. Our vines consist of budwood (the part that makes it Syrah) grafted on a rootstock. We planted the rootstock two years ago, so I grafted Syrah on those rootstock plants this year (see photo).
Third, we started pruning the vines. This is the most critical task in the vineyard and also the most exciting. We use a cordon spur-pruning system. Basically, our vines are trained in a “T” shape (see photo). Those horizontal arms are called “cordons,” on which are spaced vertical spurs every six inches or so (approximately a hand-width). It is from those spurs that we get new vine growth each season. For each vine, you need to decide how many buds to leave on each spur (normally two buds), which will set up the growth for the following season. I will write about vine balance at some point, but the number of buds helps determine the vine balance and crop yield. So we want to make some smart decisions hence why I find this such an exciting time in the vineyard.
As always, our dog, Cruz, was very helpful in the vineyard. He didn’t miss anything! Sorry for the long note and thank you for reading it to the end. More to come about pruning in the next couple of weeks.
Read More