So You Want to Be a Winemaker?
Skye also noted that there’s typically a lull between the harvesting of our warmer eastside estates and coastal westside estates, but there was no catching our breath this year.
“We’ve been crushing grapes every day for more than three weeks straight without a letup,” she says. “For whatever reason, the timing was more compressed between our estates this year, and vineyards are ripening back-to-back. We may be tired, but as we like to say, we can always sleep later!”
Such is the life of a cellar team during the wine harvest. Only the hardy need apply.
Still Going the Extra Mile
You might forgive James and Skye for taking the path of least resistance at this point, but instead they are going the extra mile in our top blocks to pick selectively and create “micro fermentations.”
For example, at our To the Moon Vineyard in the Willow Creek District, they parsed a tiny 1.1-acre block into three separate picks over three weeks, all because they saw that different rows were maturing at different rates. Sure, they could have just split the difference and picked the whole block at once to make life easier, but where’s the fun in that?
“It’s a matter of doing right by the vineyard, and it gives us all of these cool micro-lots to fiddle around with different yeasts and techniques,” Skye says. “It’s extra work, but it ultimately helps us build the best wines.”
The Verdict
The results are (almost) in!
“I would definitely say that the fruit this year is really powerful,” Skye says. “We’re seeing beautiful flavors and fully formed tannins. You’ve got some big, delicious wines coming your way.”
