Fall has finally arrived in the Napa Valley after an unusually warm September. The beginning of harvest happened right on time, with our first pick, Sauvignon Blanc, coming in on August 23rd, with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay for sparkling coming in quick on its heels. The 2024 harvest was steady, with picks coming in consistently throughout September; a heat wave at the beginning of October brought a frenetic finish to the end of harvest, with our last pick occurring on October 16th. Beautiful, full-flavored berries, very juicy, with thick, intensely flavored, and tannic skins. The fruit’s chemistry was uncannily “textbook,” leading to efficient and clean fermentations. We have many reasons to be happy about this vintage and to look forward to truly excellent wines!

Now, our attention turns from the vineyard to the tank.

On The Crushpad

While we are finished with harvesting and all of our grapes for the vintage are in, we are hardly finished with what we call the “harvest season” or “crush.” Managing fermentations, pressing wines, cleaning tanks, and barreling down…our team will be on the job for the next couple of months to see everything through. If you would still like to see crush in action, the next few weeks present a perfect window of opportunity, and there is still a lot to see, taste, and smell around the winery.

The pace of this later part of crush feels more like a good band in the middle of a jam than the controlled chaos of the first part of the harvest. The team is in perfect sync and knows each other well. There is an easy rhythm to the pump-overs and punch-downs, the set-up, and the clean-up. Now is the steady build-up to the final barrel down and all the wine making it into the cave to rest.

In The Winery

With most of our fruit fermenting, the smell of yeast permeates the winery and the caves. Our output of thousands of bottles is the work of billions and billions of these little creatures. In fact, next to the grapes, yeast is the single most important ingredient in making wine. Yeast choices affect the flavor, aroma, texture, and body of the wine. During fermentation, we coddle them by cooling or warming tanks to match their preferred temperature, and winemakers constantly experiment with new and different strains while also relying heavily on their old favorites to get the job done.

Eventually, a yeast colony’s success becomes its own demise. Yeast are intolerant of high heat and elevated alcohol solutions, yet they produce both through their fermenting abilities. Once the wine goes dry and there are no sugars left, the yeast loses its primary food source, causing it to die off and produce what we call the lees.

In the Cave

For most of our wines, after completing fermentation, the next step is to transfer them to the cave for aging in barrels. First, we drain the fermentation tanks and transfer all of that “free run” wine into barrels.  We use French cooperage, meaning barrels that were made in France from oak trees grown in France.  Each lot is divided into barrels from multiple coopers, including new and used (neutral) barrels.  This adds complexity and subtle layers of flavors to the wines as they age.  Next, the solids (skins, pulp, seeds — called the “must”) are shoveled out of the tank and put into the wine press.  This sopping wet pile of “must” is full of good wine that we do not want to waste.  We press this wine out and move it to separate barrels to age as a “press lot.”  These “press wines” are eventually blended back into other wines, where they will add tannic structure and depth.  Once the nested stacks of barrels are filled with this year’s new wines, we will leave them alone to age.  This process takes anywhere from about 6 months to almost 3 years, depending on the wine.

The Harvest Team

A huge thank you to our incredible harvest team, who have worked long days to ensure a successful crush.