Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Vineyard

A collection of 402 posts

Harvest, Week of September 15th: Watching and Waiting

Last week saw continued moderate temperatures, with most days peaking in the lower 80s and nights in the 40s. This is perfect ripening weather... as long as you're not in a hurry. The grapes are gradually accumulating sugars, and the cold nights mean that acids are remaining intense.

Some nice photos of ripening Mourvèdre

We're not harvesting today, but I took a walk through the vineyard to see the state of things. We'll be bringing in more Syrah, our Marsanne, and perhaps starting the Grenache and Roussanne next week, but there is a lot more of the vineyard that is

A Symposium on Roussanne (AKA three days spent with an infuriating, unpredictable, enticing, lovely grape)

Don't be fooled by this Roussanne cluster's innocuous appearance. It's a relentlessly challenging grape. Last month we hosted a producers-only symposium on Roussanne. Roussanne has tremendous potential, and at its best makes wines with richness, striking minerality, ageability, and balance. Robert Parker has called

Harvest 2008 (Week of September 8th): Viognier, Syrah, Vermentino, and Chardonnay

After a hot stretch in late August and the first few days of September caused several varietals to race toward ripeness simultaneously, last week saw more moderate temperatures and a much slower harvest pace than we'd feared. We actually had a few foggy mornings out at the vineyard

Harvest 2008 Begins!

Well, we've finally begun this year's harvest. Yesterday and today, we've been harvesting our Viognier, which as usual is our first varietal in the cellar. 2008's harvest started about a week later than the 2007 harvest did, consistent with a slightly later

Veraison 2008 Photos of Syrah, Grenache, Mourvedre and Counoise

We're seeing veraison in most of our red varieties. Our timing is nearly identical to last year, when I wrote my post on Veraison on July 27th. Veraison (sometimes anglicized to verasion and pronounced vuh-rey-zhun) is the time of year when berries stop increasing in size and refocus

July Vineyard Photo Album

After a couple of weeks of seasonably warm weather (days in the 90s or low 100s and nights in the 50s) we had a break in the heat from a cut-off low and a resulting deep marine layer. Sunday and Monday we had fog in the morning, breezy, cool days

Not an Easy Life...

When I was out the other day taking the photos of the strange smoky weather, I hiked up to the new block of vines to the extreme western edge of the property. We planted about 6 new acres here earlier this month, divided fairly equally between Grenache Blanc, Vermentino, and

An excellent beginning to the growing season, strange smoky weather notwithstanding

With two big fires burning to the north of us in Monterey County over the last few weeks, including the Indians Fire that has burned nearly 60,000 acres in three weeks and the Gallery Fire (just south of Big Sur) that has burned over 13,000 acres since Saturday,

A bullet dodged: only minor vineyard damage from a serious California-wide frost event

California was badly zapped last week by a deep trough of cold air that spread south from Canada and brought freezing nights from Mendocino to Santa Barbara. The perils presented by this frost were made more severe by the fact that it followed a week of unusually warm weather, where