Another beautiful Napa Valley harvest season has arrived, and as usual the mood around the winery is upbeat, focused, and exhilarated. As many of you know from your visits, there is nothing like the pure natural energy of the harvest. It is go time! But behind the scenes and before the harvest begins, there is a full season of preparation that happens to make the harvest work successfully. The controlled chaos and constant motion of the “crush” is in many ways the culmination of hours and hours of preparation and planning done by our winemaking team. Here are some of the highlights of what happened before the first picks made their way to the crush pad…

Blending wines from the previous harvest: We spent days working through the previous wines, finalizing blends and bottling wines from the 2022 harvest (and some white wines from 2023), and getting a first look at how the 2023 wines are developing in the barrel.

Barrel review: Tasting barrel samples from the recent harvest blind, we reevaluate all of the various coopers that we work with. The continued insights that we gain from these tastings help us to determine and finalize our barrel orders for this vintage. All of those barrels are ordered months ahead of harvest and then shipped from France.

Vineyard review: At the beginning of the year, we sit down to review our vineyards. B Cellars harvests from nearly 40 separate vineyard properties (and well over 50 separate vineyard blocks within these). We take time to discuss each one, noting what we like about the fruit and what we would like to hone in a bit. This allows us to talk to each grower about the viticultural plan – watering, pruning, yield management – to ensure that we achieve the optimal ripeness from each individual block.

As you can see, a huge number of critical planning decisions are made long before the pick date, and at B Cellars, we have a well-seasoned team heading this up. This will be our 21st harvest under the professional, watchful eyes of Master Winemaker Kirk Venge, and our 14th harvest with Director of Winemaking Derek Taylor in charge of the production operations in our winery. Their passion, experience, and instinct shine through in the consistently high quality of our wine offerings.