Paso Robles is Ridiculously Beautiful, Unusual Fall Color Palette Edition

The end of this year has provided a different color palette than we're used to in November. Typically, we get our first frost here at around the same time that we get our first rain. That frost means that the grapevines lose their leaves before we get much in the way of green growth from our cover crops. Not this year.

Those colors – autumn golds on the vines and green on the ground – are rare in Paso Robles, and fleeting. Combine them with the deep brown soil from the 3.25" of rain that we received last weekend, and you get a scene of beauty nearly everywhere you look:

What's more, we have clouds. That may seem like a strange thing to celebrate, but we can go months in the summer with nothing but clear blue skies. I grew up in New England, and I love a sky with drama:

Those clouds mean great sunsets over scenes that grow greener by the day:

In my home state of Vermont the fall foliage is an international attraction. People don't think of wine country as providing an autumn color show, but it does. Blocks of Syrah are particularly colorful, with reds mixing into the more typical yellows and golds:

The partial cover of the clouds also gives me the opportunity to take photos looking toward the sun in diffused light. I've always liked that effect, which makes the vines in the foreground look like they're glowing.

In moments when the clouds thicken you get a different color tone, more grey than golden, which is beautiful in its own right. I think those scenes often look best in black and white:

What else do we get when you combine low sun angles, clouds, and precipitation? Rainbows! We got a rare complete double rainbow as the weekend storm passed through on Tuesday afternoon:

I'll leave you with one more shot from a vantage point we return to again and again, looking south from the top of our tallest hill down over our oldest Grenache vines, America's first Counoise planting, and eventually to Las Tablas Creek and Jewel Ridge:

The autumn colors in Paso Robles don't last all that long; all it will take is a hard freeze to start the vineyard's natural progression toward dormancy. And that is beautiful in its own right. But meanwhile, if you're visiting in the coming weeks, you're in for a treat. Don't think of any clouds you might get as a problem. Think of them as a theatrical backdrop.