As an agricultural enterprise, we are in synch with our culture’s calendar, developed when the vast majority of people still lived and worked on farms. It’s quiet in the winery and in the vineyards now, so there is time to celebrate the holidays and to reflect both on the past year and the one to come.

Kenneth reports that all of the wines are good and stable, so he can relax. We carefully watched a couple of our Russian River blocks that were hard hit by frost and then ripened quickly with the heat. Something happens when fruit is stressed that increases the chances of getting a stuck fermentation at the end. Because we are very hands-off and gentle, we try to nudge through and we succeeded.

Fruit from other blocks also went through some weather extremes but had enough time to recover and ticked along ripening slowly. That fruit was very … More…

It’s been raining off and on this week. We only have a day or two of pruning left, but we’re not working. The cover crops are so high and wet in the rows that we quickly get soaked to the waist, and that’s miserable.The rainfall has been pretty evenly distributed this winter. Although the soil is pretty saturated, the cover crops have done a good job absorbing excess moisture. We haven’t seen a cover crop of this size in years. The vigorous growth is welcome, because the roots penetrate the soil. When the roots die back, they leave room for oxygen and water to move down deep, and the plants also break down into fertilizer and organic matter in the soil.

The vines look relaxed, in great shape … More…

KJ: Someone asked at a tasting recently about the benefits of spontaneous or native yeast fermentation. I said that they create little “flaws” in the wine. They are slower building cultures — not the quick, clean commercial yeasts of the 1970s and 1980s — and they produce more complexities, including higher volatile acidity (acetic acid), which merits our attention.

There are usually multiple indigenous yeasts present that start fermenting and add complexity, and then the strongest yeast cultures finish the wine. One facility we know used to be a sparkling wine cellar, so there is a strong bayanus resident yeast population there.

Such resident populations cause us to be very … More…