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Pretty Pictures

A collection of 342 issues

Near-End-of-Harvest Assessment: A Furious September, Moderate Yields, Quality High

In the vineyard, things are starting to look genuinely fall-like: And in keeping with the visuals of the season, we're on the tail end of our harvest craziness, something like 85% done. As of the beginning of this week, we'd harvested 386 tons: 237 from our

Drying Mourvedre Grapes for Vin de Paille "Sacrérouge"

We don't make our vin de paille dessert wines every year. First, the grapes need to be in great shape before they're put on the straw, or they rot rather than drying, making some vintages unsuitable for the technique. Second, Americans don't buy large

Photo of the Day: Bounty of Harvest

Today we were given a glorious reprieve: a cool, overcast morning with even a little drizzle, courtesy of a cut-off low pressure system currently meandering down the California coast. Given how much fruit is ripe on the vines or nearly so, this cool day (and the similarly cool day forecast

Harvest 2014 at the Midway Point: Very Like 2013, which is a Good Thing

We finally feel like we're in the middle of harvest. Every day brings a mix of new fruit coming in, sample teams going out, both presses running as we press off fermented red lots and newly-harvested whites, winemakers on the sorting table and de-stemmer processing newly-harvested reds, and

Harvest 2014 slowed with a cool second half of August, but is picking up speed

It often happens in harvest that you get your first burst of fruit and then enter a lull, where it seems like half your vineyard is sitting there almost-but-not-quite ready. Because you're into the routine of daily punch-downs, and you've broken out your harvest equipment, it

Photos of each Rhone grape as harvest approaches, and an updated vintage assessment

I returned this week from two and a half weeks on the east coast to find a vineyard landscape transformed. In what was a sea of green we now have new colors: pinks, reds and purples in our red grapes, as well as the first hints of gold in our

A first timer's visit to Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Château de Beaucastel

By: Lauren Cross I arrived in Paris with two bags. One small bag was full of camera equipment. A second large suitcase held a few clothes and lots of packaging material. I had come with the intention of taking France home with me to California, bottle by bottle and image

Veraison two weeks early suggests a late-August beginning to harvest

This week, we've seen the first hints of veraison in our Syrah and our Mourvedre. One of the most advanced Syrah clusters is below, alongside other clusters that like most of the vineyard are still totally green: Veraison is an exciting time visually, but its implications in the

Veraison in June? Not so fast, in Paso Robles at least.

In his blog this week, the Wine Spectator's Tim Fish reports that regions as diverse as Contra Costa, Santa Lucia Highlands and Santa Maria Valley are already seeing veraison: the point at which red grapes start turning color, and all grapes stop growing in size and turn to

With an early flowering, we start the clock on the 2014 harvest

There are annual milestones we look at that help us gauge the progress of each harvest, of which flowering is the second. Budbreak (when the buds sprout) is first, but unreliable in our climate as an indicator of harvest time because of the frequency of spring frosts. Veraison (marked by