Compost Tea: a Power Shake for the Vineyard

By Levi Glenn A few years back we started to make and apply compost tea in the vineyard. It was an effort to try to improve our soil, a central theme in organic farming: improve the soil and the plant will follow. Compost tea contains two important soil improving components:

Reflecting on a decade of Esprit de Beaucastel

This week we're bottling the 2010 Esprit de Beaucastel.  About 2000 cases are going into national distribution. Another 1000 will go out to our wine club. 1500 will be allocated to our tasting room.  500 will go into our long-term library for later release.  Some of the

Selecting the library wines for the 2012 Collector's Edition

One of the treats we get each summer is to choose which older vintage of the Esprit de Beaucastel and Esprit de Beaucastel Blanc we will include in the VINsider Wine Club Collector's Edition shipment in September.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Collector's Edition,

The power of print

Last weekend I noticed a small flurry of online wine club signups, as well as a surge in online orders.  We hadn't sent out a recent email (we do that at the very end of the month).  We hadn't gotten any particularly noteworthy press.  It wasn&

In defense of expensive rosé

A few years ago, I was out to dinner at Villa Creek with friends.  Dining at Villa Creek is always a treat because not only is the food terrific, but owner Cris Cherry and GM Erick Cadena always put together a great and reasonably priced wine list that showcases not

An outstanding Outstanding in the Field dinner

In the last decade, the farm to table movement has gone from avant-garde to squarely in the mainstream. (Cue the spoof by Portlandia.) And of course, there are excesses that deserve to be pointed out, and pretense that deserves puncturing.  But, at its heart, it's about wanting

Flowering 2012

Now six weeks into the growing season, it's clear that 2012 is going to follow a different path than 2010 or 2011.  As opposed to being en route to a harvest roughly a month behind normal, as we were last year, we're on a normal track.

Is 2010 our best vintage ever? Perhaps...

This is bottling week.  We're mostly done with putting eight different wines into bottle: the 2011 Cotes de Tablas Blanc and seven of our red varietal wines from 2010: Counoise, Grenache, Mourvedre, Syrah, our two Pinot Noirs and our first-ever Cabernet.  Most of these are small production

Celebrating May 15th: the unofficial end to frost season

I've been delaying writing this post so as not to jinx our progress, but I think that we're far enough into May that I can do so safely.  So, here goes. We seem to have made it through spring without any damage from frost. This achievement

Nine lessons the Kimpton Hotel Group offers wineries

Last week, Meghan and I escaped for a night down to Santa Barbara to see David Sedaris perform.  We stayed downtown at the Canary Hotel, a few blocks away from the Arlington Theater where he would be performing. When we checked in, it was during the evening wine hour that