Katarina's Blog

What about all this rain the past months and your vines? That is a question I have been getting a lot lately. Since October we have had 68 inches of rain, which is over 50% more than our normal rainfall. As a matter of fact northern California is now officially drought free. But there are also consequences such as erosion and damaged vines.

As time works its magic on the wine in barrel and in bottle you will get incredibly rewarding flavor experiences. This is not for the impatient wine lover! Wine needs time to develop more flavors than what you get from the grape and from fermentation.  Aging wine in oak barrels will add and enhance additional flavor in wine such as butter, cedar, spice, nuts, raisin, and vanilla. We will explore how this happens in todays blog post.

One of the more fun wine tastings to do is a vertical tasting. It means that you use the same wine, i.e. the same varietal from the same vineyard from a number of different years. Invite a group of friends who like wine, they do not have to be experts, neither do you. You are actually about to learn a lot from tasting the same wine from different years and you can do it just for fun and notice the differences and enjoy the wines, or you can go about it more seriously and take notes, discuss and compare.

Excitement is in the air, as well as the smell of harvest. We kicked off our harvest early Friday morning with a crew of 10 people picking. The very first grapes we pick are Chardonnay for our sparkling Blanc de Blancs. And to illustrate how everything has come full circle, we just brought in grapes to start the sparkling process again.

A big treat for me, any time of the year, is to walk through our vineyards and the surrounding landscape of forests and fields. Right now the small embryos of grape clusters have been through bloom but are still hard and green. This time of the year the bees are busy and patches of flowers have come alive, each with a humming chorus. Especially the lavender turns the bees just crazy and they seem drunk as they plunge in. Gnarly vines, wild turkeys, a fox, grape trucks and fermenting fruit are some of the things I encounter depending on the season.