This vintage is pretty amazing. We’ve had no pressures like rot. The canopies are open and healthy. Shoot sizes are in balance. The crop level is slightly low and there is a nice display of fruit.

We have had ideal weather, with temperatures from the high 70s to low 90s, mild nights and adequate humidity (low humidity can hurt us more than heat). All the shoots are lignified (turned brown and woody), the seeds are starting to ripen, and the year has progressed very nicely so far.

This has been a dry growing season, and the soils have dried up quickly. In block 190 at Donum, for example, we dry farmed and didn’t irrigate last year until the end of harvest. After three years of cover crops using up water there, the … More…

We have been asked more “green” questions in recent months – do you grow your grapes sustainably, organically or biodynamically? And the follow-up question may well be, “What does sustainable mean, anyway?”

My simplest answers are “we farm our land as stewards so that one day our children may farm it” and “we put back more than we take.”

We view our vineyard as part of a whole bio-system that needs to sustain a balance or equilibrium. From Rudolph Steiner’s (father of biodynamics) day in the 1920s all the way back to the Farmer’s Almanac in the late 18th century, farmers operated within their own holistic unit, or self-contained system, and they carefully observed what seemed to affect them positively.

As a culture, we tend to denigrate the planting charts and … More…