Summer 2017 - State of the Winery

We’re bottling our wines from the 2016 vintage in a couple weeks, so it’s really a pretty intense time for us; there a ton of logistical details that all have to come perfectly together, not to mention the fine finishing details of all the wines themselves. It’s akin sending the children off into the world, and you can do nothing further for them- it’s frankly emotional on a lot of levels. We fret over small details, and the actual bottling days can range from a grueling ordeal to getting a real beat-down! But that’s part of the price nature demands if you want to make Pinot, and when it’s over, we look at each other and laugh as we know we managed to [somehow!] do it again.

Over the past few months we’ve made our blending and barrel selection decisions, and we are extremely happy with them. It looks like we’ll bottle eleven Pinots from 2016. This includes a new Pinot blended from two vineyards on Sonoma Mountain, one at the top along the sandy eastern slope, and one near the base of the west slope that seems planted in shale. Sonoma Mountain is a special place, and dramatically different from other places we get Pinot, and the wine is dramatically different. We’re also bottling a small Pinot blend that celebrates some of our higher elevation vineyards along the coast. These two new wines represent geographic bookends for our vineyard sources- ranging from Sonoma Mountain to the mountain sites in the True Sonoma Coast.

- John Holdredge