Blog

The alarm never wakes us on mornings that we are scheduled to pick Pinot Noir. Brain’s just seems to know the alarm will soon start chirping. It’s just after 5:00 am. Showers would be ludicrous on a day like this, so we slip into some “clean” picking clothes and are riding a picking bin pulled behind a tractor within a half-hour of rising, having hastily gulped large amounts of strong coffee and grabbed something from the...

The wine business doesn’t believe in weekends or regular vacations. Much like being a waiter or a chef, it seems that wine is made and sold during time periods usually designated for leisure. During the summer we are hard at work, while families are on their way to beach barbecues. When the weather gets hot at the end of the summer the last thing winemakers think about is heading to some mountain lake for a refreshing dip or some...

The whole vineyard shows a golden cast as September heralds the beginning of harvest. Winemakers don’t return calls; people who work at wineries have fallen off the edge of the earth. Harvest has begun in California in earnest, and many grape varieties are being picked simultaneously. The warm spring and hot summer mean that the wineries are going to be slammed for the next month—Sauvignon Blanc is arriving on the same trucks as Pinot...

As harvest approaches (way too quickly), we thought it might be interesting to describe the process in a manner that might require you to know some basic vineyard and winemaking terminology. So here are some things that you might hear a vineyard manager say around harvest, followed by a layman’s definition. Brix Brix (pronounced like “bricks” here in America) is a measurement that is roughly equal to the percent of sugar within...

A walk through vineyards in August reveals such a sense of neatness. Vineyard floors are cleared to allow the movement of air – a way to control the temperature of the vineyards. The vines are hedged and “leafed” and secured to trellis systems. We continue hand management of the vines’ development, finding the right balance between greenery and fruit. Our grape crop has matured at a steady pace. In fact, the...

Our winemaker, Mike Sumner, has the kind of opportunity that winemakers dream about: he’s been starting vineyards and a winery from the ground up, and the 2014 harvest will produce the first Sumner Vineyards wines widely available. The land that we have been developing is in Trinity County, in Northern California, and the closest town is named Hayfork (if that doesn’t say “agriculture”, we don’t know what...