On the Scene
Sitting here in the vines brings it all to life. Take me through harvesting.
Everything here is hand harvested. Obviously with the slopes, it has to be hand harvested. Zinfandel’s a perfect example. On a cluster you'll have raisins, perfectly ripe berries, and then you also have under-ripe berries. That's just the nature of Zinfandel. When you go through the optical sorter which has these magic eyes, you can actually set the tone and say, ‘I want a certain percentage of those raisins, I want a certain percentage of those underripe berries and then I want all the perfect berries.’ What that does is [it] adds to that complexity of the wine.
You'll notice that we're looking at little clusters that soon will bloom. We look at the balance of the vine, making sure that we're not adding too many clusters; that there isn’t too much energy going into every cluster, but really focusing and isolating on specific [ones]. If it looks heavy, [we] will go through and take off some of those clusters to really isolate and have that concentration. … and then this is the outcome.
In the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, fires are an inevitable piece of the landscape, unfortunately. How are you preparing for this?
I think one of the main things is creating and building a defensible space around your property line; making sure that all the cover crop is basically killed down, so it doesn't have any fuel for the fires to spread. [And] focusing on making sure that you have the water sources or fire hydrants nearby. What's really unique about both Napa and Sonoma is the camaraderie and how everyone bands together after a crisis like that, to help each other through the entire process.