We celebrate the holidays with a vertical tasting of Panoplie

Over the last few months, I've gotten several questions on how the Panoplie was tasting, and I realized that this isn't a wine I'm fortunate to open enough to know what to tell people.  So, on Friday, the last day before our offices closed

In which we dig ourselves a hole, on purpose

By Levi Glenn It's been a little over a year since our purchase of our new parcel.  The property is just to our south: 150 acres of rolling oak woodland, a walnut orchard (now removed), and a fair amount of the creek from which we take our name.

Making Olive Oil In-House For the First Time

Our last harvest of the year is olives, which we typically pick in late November or early December.  In an ideal year, we might get some frosts before the olives are ripe, but we won't get any hard freezes, because if the olives freeze then they rot and

Photo essay: the vineyard's new green winter coat

It's beautiful out here this weekend.  Last weekend's rain has passed through, and a week of sunny weather has meant that the cover crop and the natural grasses have exploded out of the ground.  I can't ever remember as fast a transformation in the

Enjoying the "Atmospheric River" of Moisture

It's wet out at the vineyard. So far today, we've received over an inch and a quarter of rain, with the heaviest, according to radar, still to come.  This is the fifth day in a row we've received significant rainfall, more than five inches

A Flash in the Pan

By Darren Delmore The mood on Election Night was as tense as a cold vintage Condrieu inside the dank, red velvet-lined interiors of Bern's Steakhouse in Tampa, Florida. Home of the largest private wine collection of the world and any cow’s worst nightmare, the windowless, carnivorous version

What a difference two weeks makes

Two weeks ago, I posted a series of autumn foliage pics, one of which is below: I walked back past that spot yesterday, on an ultimately fruitless quest to take some good sunset pictures. I was stunned by how much more fall-like the vineyard felt after two weeks that included

Harvest 2012: The End of the Beginning

By Chelsea Franchi And so it appears, just like that, harvest is over and it is time for a season-end wrap up.  While I wish I could tell you there was a wonderful celebration as the last cluster was ceremoniously placed in the last tank, I can't.  Because

When wine tasting, step away from the carafe

I spent most of the last week on the road, making stops in New York, Portland, and Seattle.  At each stop, I found myself confronted with tasters whose first action upon reaching my table was to pour water into their tasting glasses so as to rinse out whatever was in

Harvest 2012 concludes, and we couldn't be happier

We finished the 2012 harvest yesterday, with the last "clean-up" pick, where we go back through the late-ripening blocks where we left the clusters that weren't quite ready on our previous time through.  Typically, these pickings are a little ugly, with fruit not in the best