He Had a Gun

He had a gun. The neighborhood was like a war zone. He handed me a brown paper bag with twenty grand in $20 bills. Outside there where dozens of street people huddled in the nooks of the building, most of them savoring pints of MD 20/20. Leaving that run down building with a bag of money was more than a little intimidating in a neighborhood where they would probably kill you for five bucks.

I made to to my car and hightailed it out of there. I had made my first big score. The twenty thousand dollars in the brown paper bag was my first payoff. I had just collected on a big gamble. This was my first payment for the 1982 Bordeaux futures. There would be more than a few of the brown paper bags of money from the man with the gun over the next few months.

This is a true story and what selling wine was like in the Chicago of the early 1980s. Such were the logistics of the red-hot 1982 Bordeaux futures campaign. I had finally made it in the fine wine business. However, the gun and the brown paper bags full of cash were not exactly what I had envisioned as I poured over Edmund Penning-Rowsell’s The Wines of Bordeaux and dreamed of the glories of the Premier Grand Crus.

Now I'm in the Napa Valley three decades later. While the neighborhood has changed I'm still scratching for bags of money and wouldn't mind a few right now. The economics of winemaking in the Napa Valley requires the biggest bags of money. Oddly enough, those bags of cash given me by the man with the gun seem somehow cleaner than the cash bags required to play in the Napa Valley these days. The buyers that filled those cash bags in 1983 actually got their moneys worth, either in great wine or in huge returns on cases sold on today’s auction market. Dollars invested in the Napa Valley today are highly unlikely to repay such an investment in either financial or spiritual terms.

In 1983, the man had the gun to protect himself from the criminals outside. These days its getting harder to see who has to be protected from who. The wine industry seems at a cross road, with big money wineries on one side and consumers on the other. But there is a world of wine where consumers and winemakers are on the same side.

The "natural" wine movement may be controversial and not all the wines may live up to the hype, but you can't deny you feel more soul in these wines than in the high end cult wines of the world.

I'll take the music of Aretha Franklin over Celine Dion anyday. It's just got more soul. I feel the same way about wine.

Swearing Like an Italian

I'm a unabashed fan of Luca Currado and his wines at Vietti. I had the pleasure of spending hours tasting through his cellar with him when I lived in Italy. He is a thoughtful and talented winemaker making extraordinary wines. Do not miss the current interview with Luca on I'll Drink to That with Levy Dalton, the consistantly excellent wine podcast. You can find it here.

In Italy, swearing is an artform as compared to English, where it is usually simply vulgar. In Italian swearing decorates the language adding life, spice and personality. In this interview, Luca leads us on a educational tour of this Italian artform. It's a delight!

The Vietti family story is very compelling and this interview touches on the entire modern history of winemaking in Piemonte, beautifully told by the colorful and delightful Luca Currado.

Drink and Yelp

She was nasty; complaining and putting us down. No matter, it's only your life's work; better get a thicker skin. But then I thought better of it, when someone's full of it you should stand up for yourself.

Of course I'm talking about a Yelp review. I can't really complain as, after over 122 reviews, Cornerstone Cellars has a four and half star rating. Honestly you can't do any better than that. Indeed it's an accomplishment of which I am extremely proud.

At a winery tasting room, odds are pretty good that that outlier one star review was by someone who had too much to drink and was refused anything more to drink. Nothing pisses off a drunk more than cutting them off.

So I have decided to stick up for myself and, contrary to Yelp's recommendation, take on the that rare dissatisfied customer. Now, obviously if you're getting bad review after bad review you'd better do some soul searching, but in our case nothing could be further from reality.

For Cornerstone Cellars, out of the last twenty-five Yelp reviews eighteen have five stars and four have four stars or better. Take a look here and be sure to read the one star review. Perhaps they were not feeling so great when they woke up the next day and wrote them.

Yelp is powerful and for us, for the most part, a great thing. The only real issue I have with Yelp is that they don't take into account that usually the people that write bad reviews for winery tasting rooms are the ones that have indulged in a bit too much fruit of the vine. They need to find away to take that into account and banish such wine induced rants.

In Sideways Miles drank and dialed, the equivalent of drinking and Yelping. We do not recommend either.

Formatted Wine

Wine can indeed be a study in contrasts as emphasized by an article read and a podcast listened to on the same day this week.

The first, an article in the Napa Valley Register, contained these quotes about a wine in the Premier Napa Valley Auction, “Through the study of phenols, the wine is broken down into its key chemical components to determine the optimal levels of extraction while the grape skins are in contact with the freshly pressed grape juice. The science of phenols is used as a predictor of wine quality… (this wine) represented the highest recorded phenolic reading to date at 4,600 iron-reactive phenolics in parts per million. This high reading translates to a more complex wine featuring higher quality attributes, including taste, mouthfeel and body.”

Just a few hours later I was listening to the I’ll Drink to That! with Levi Dalton podcast interview with Jacques Lardière, formerly winemaker of Maison Louis Jadot in Burgundy and who is now making wine in Oregon at Jadot’s Résonance Oregon winery. First of all, if you are serious about wine, listening to Dalton’s interviews are a must. Secondly, if you’ve never listened to the podcast before, do not start with the Lardière interview as, as Dalton notes in his introduction, this interview needs to be listened to a few times before it sinks in. I assure you a few listens are well worth the effort.

The contrast between the article and the podcast could not have been more obvious. Lardière spoke of “vibrations” and wine as a spiritual component of the earth itself. The Napa wine was in a contest to achieve the highest rate ever of iron-reactive phenolics. If it’s hard to believe they’re making the same product it’s because they aren’t.

In his interview, Lardière refers to, “formatted wines.” Formatting is a technical term that makes me think of technology, not nature and wine. Formatting is important for your hard drive on your computer. But, personally, I’d prefer to think of the vibrations the wine and I exchange rather than the emotions I had last time I reformatted my hard drive.

Back To The Garden

"And we've got to get ourselves back to the garden," wrote Joni Mitchell, but I always hear the urgency of Crosby, Stills and Nash when I think of these words.

Today I arrived back in Oregon for the Oregon Wine Symposium right on the heels of finishing Premiere Napa Valley. It's most decidedly the yin and yang of wine experiences.

Behind me is a week of massive parties, dinners and nude dancing girls painted in gold followed by an auction that raised $5 million all dedicated to promoting the Napa Valley as the greatest wine region in the world. It is an amazing event and a major accomplishment. The Napa Valley wine community deserves great respect for a stunning marketing success. However, I never feel at home there even after seven years. It just does not mirror my values and what I want to achieve with my wines. The Napa Valley is a bigger is better, in all things, environment slowly squeezing out all but the ultra-wealthy and corporations.

Arriving in Portland today brought me a lightness of spirit and, best of all, a feeling of reconnecting to what I love most about wine. A connection to nature and slowing life down.

So for a few days I will slow things down and think about terroir, indigenous yeasts, biodynamics and what winemaking in Oregon means compared to the Napa Valley. I think my blood pressure dropped ten points as soon as I stepped off the plane at PDX.

It seems I've "got myself back to the garden."

Winemaking On The Fly

Recently I’ve been tasting some of the upcoming pinot noir releases from Oregon’s 2013 vintage. As you might suspect from the vintage reports, the quality can vary a bit due to the significant rain storm that hit towards the end of harvest. Fortunately both the winemaking and vineyard skills in the Willamette Valley have advanced dramatically and most of the wines are very good and many are excellent.

The question is then, why are the ones that are excellent significantly better than other wines grown in the same vintage conditions? For me the answer is clear. It is the ability of the winemaker to think and work on the fly. Such skills are earned over years of work, not at enology school. The intuition of when to pull the trigger on a pick at the last possible second and the skills to look at the condition of the fruit as it comes in and know just what to do are talents learned on the battlefield, not the classroom. Some winemakers have the ability to adjust to conditions and to make great wines in vintages of widely differing conditions, while most others struggle if taken out of their comfort zone.

In my over thirty years in the wine business one of the very best winemakers I have had the pleasure to work with is Tony Rynders. Vintage after vintage he seems to ignore the whims of Mother Nature and make outstanding wines no matter what she throws at him. There is a lot of justifiable buzz in the wine press about the 2012, 2014 and 2015 Oregon vintages, but I often find the somewhat less heralded years (read less extracted) more to my taste.

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In 2013 the best of both worlds came together when the skills of a winemaker like Tony Rynders took what nature gave in 2013 and made some of the most elegant, balanced pinot noir wines that you could want. The 2013 vintage of Rynders’ Tendril Wine Cellars wines are soon to be released and I urge you to get in line and on the mailing list for these ultra-limited production wines. Many of the wines are produced in quantities of fifty cases or less so they will not be around very long.

Wineries like Tendril Wine Cellars are making Oregon’s Willamette Valley one of the most exciting wine growing regions in the world.

The Tendril Wine Cellars website

Recharging My Batteries

A recent wait staff training at Ruth's Chris in San Francisco gave my batteries a needed recharge. It reminded me who the critics are that I should be concerned about as a winemaker - the people that drink them.

The wait staff loved my wines and they rekindled my love for them too. They tasted alive and fresh and were just what I hoped they would be.

Last weekend brought another recharge as I presented my upcoming 2013 vintage Napa Valley releases to our distributor in southern California. They loved them for their balance and refinement. That’s what I love them for too.

It’s not that wine criticism has no place, the issue is that some critics actually love a style of wines that most normal wine drinkers don’t prefer. Sugary, bloated and alcoholic should describe neither wines or critics.

My continued support and enthusiasm for wine commentary on wine blogs is that it comes from real people drinking real wine the way it is actually consumed in the real world. The average consumer is far more likely to get wines that match words on a wine blog than from a critic tasting hundreds of wines, in a matter of hours, on their own. That's like saying you have a better idea of what a tiger is all about by seeing one in a zoo rather than in the wild. It's odd that an activity that is pointless generates almost all the point ratings given to wines.

Winemakers have to try to remember that wine is about not about critics. It’s about people enjoying food and each other.

Hopefully we are on the edge of a pointless era for wine as it's time that the point of wine is not points. Points are for games.

Singularity

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Purity and delicacy are wine descriptors that do not appear often in reviews of top scoring wines. Terms like powerful, opulent and dense are the genre of pointy wines.

Poor Beaujolais seems destined to miss the mark for ratings defined by such descriptors. Youthful, fresh, lively, fruity, zesty and, the phrase that always damns a wine for the point obsessed, a "food wine", means low 90s at best.

Big points are the black holes of the wine universe. In the heart of the black hole the wines are dense and no light can escape from them, only points seem able to escape. Before all the lightness of wine is sucked away, down into the black hole itself, is the point of singularity where lightness can still exist. That's where wines like Beaujolais become relative.

If young Beaujolais finds relativity a problem, where can old Beaujolais find its place in the universe? It turns out Einstein was wrong when it comes to Beaujolais, Einstein's formula E=MC2 does not compute in this case where less mass creates more energy.

Recently I did a double take when I got a club shipment from Kermit Lynch. Côte de Brouilly? No surprise there. But wait! The vintage was not 2014, but 2006. The 2006 Côte de Brouilly Domaine de la Voûte des Crozes is indeed a singularity. It's a lacy, high strung ballerina of a wine. It was pure pleasure to let her dance through my dinner.

Black holes warp space time just as the 100 point scale warps wine time. Lightness is a concept that suffers in a universe dominated by black holes. They have indeed warped the wine universe.

I prefer to experience wines at the point of singularity.

This Wine Makes Me Mad

This wine makes me mad. It really ticks me off. It's balanced, elegant, complex, interesting and outrageously good to drink. What really gets me is that it's from a warm climate, downright Mediterranean, with hot sunny days - just like the the Napa Valley. This leads to the question, what the hell is wrong with the Napa Valley and why can't we make wines like this?

Yes there are those few that do, but they are lone voices. We all know Corison, Dunn, Stony Hill and a few other regal producers who get nods from the more enlightened media. Yet when it come to points it's excess that still wins the day.

The wine that angered me so much? The 2009 Mas de Daumas Gassac a stunning wine from a place famous for its sunshine.

What's your excuse Napa Valley? Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Last Leaves Napa Valley

Cabernet Sauvignon Yountville Napa Valley

Cabernet Sauvignon on Thanksgiving

Cabernet Sauvignon leaf on Thanksgiving Day in Yountville Napa Valley

Fall Napa Valley

Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard just before Thanksgiving Yountville AVA

Ram Horn Vineyard Syrah Harvest, Mendocino

A true family endevour, the Poor Ranch in Mendocino is home to some wondeful old vines. The third generation is now working on the land and a fourth is one the way. The vineyard has always been farmed organically, in fact, this was the way vineyards used to be farmed and they just kept doing the way they had always farmed the land. They kind of laugh when people talk about the "new California" style of agriculture. True natural winegrowing by people that know no other way

Fall Napa Valley

It finally feels like fall in the Napa Valley. Some actual rainstorms and cool dew on the leaves in the morning. All the grapevines changing colors are beautiful with each variety having its own distinct hue.

Let's Play Two

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The Dodgers and the Mets were in game five of the division championships and it occurred to me that the winner would be facing the Cubs in the NLCS. As a long time White Sox fan I'd spent the better part of the last three decades hating the Cubs. Normally I'd just assume I'd be pulling for whoever they ended up playing.

However, now I've been on the west coast for so long I've truly become a San Francisco Giants fan. To be a Giants fan means having a deep contempt for the Dodgers. So the idea of a potential Cubs and Dodgers NLCS made me face my true baseball fan soul.

What I discovered is that Tony Bennett has won out over Frank Sinatra and my roots are now truly more on the west coast than the midwest, where I grew up. The true measure of this was revealed to me when I realized in a showdown between the Dodgers and the Cubs I'd have to pull for the Cubs. Mind you I might not have been pulling very hard for them, but anything is better than the Dodgers getting to the World Series.

I guess we’re defined equally by not only the team we root for, but by the team we decide to see as evil incarnate.

There are several things that have made the Giants number one in my heart over the White Sox. Without a doubt winning three World Series in six years didn't hurt, but the fact that the White Sox, as they play in the American League, have a DH and the Giants don't has really changed the way I like to watch baseball played. The game is just better without the DH.

The Cubs, Dodgers and Yankees are rich teams in big markets. The (L.A.) Dodgers and Yankees have thrown their money at the game always feeling that anything less than a World Series Championship is failure. The Cubs, on the other hand, have been satisfied to just take the money from their fans and delivered mediocrity knowing they would still pack their quaint ballpark just by coming close to the playoffs every few years. Success at Wrigley Field has been measured by accountants not championships. It’s hard to like a team that has treated its long suffering fans so callously. Just think if they win the World Series this year they can ride that gravy train for another century. If is often joked about the Cubs that any team can have a bad century. But in fact the Cubs have had a tremendous century, they just haven’t won any championships. The lovable losers have been taking it to the bank for a long time now.

It was this attitude that eventually drove my loyalties from Wrigley Field to Comiskey Park and there they’ll stay in Chicago. I was drawn to the White Sox as, like me, they had to win to succeed. I felt closer to a team that had to produce results than one who was living on a type of inheritance and was milking it for all it was worth. It took a lot to drive me away from the team of my youth and the first place I ever saw a major league baseball game, but the Cubs did it.

My mother loves the Cubs and so if they do win I will be very happy for her and the other Cub fans so desperately praying for their beloved Cubbies to finally break the fabled curse. The same goes for the players who will be the real champions if they can pull it off. However, the ownership of this fabled franchise should not be let off the hook. They could have pulled this off much sooner with the resources at their command. The reason the Cubs have not won the World Series since 1908 is not due to the players or fans, but due to the callous economic interests of the various owners over the years.

I was lucky to visit Cooperstown and the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer. It was an amazing experience for someone who loves baseball and nothing moved me more than the plaque honoring Ernie Banks. Behind me in my office sits a framed scorecard my dad kept when he took me to a game in Wrigley Field on August 24th, 1962, the day after my ninth birthday. Warren Spahn pitched for the Milwaukee Braves and Hank Aaron hit a home run. A young player named Lou Brock was playing center field for the Cubs. Billy Williams was in right and Santo was on third. The Cubs lost. On the front of that scorecard are the autographs of Don Landrum, Ken Hubbs and the incomparable Ernie Banks all scored for me by my dad.

So for my mom, dad, Ernie and that beautiful game in 1962 I will root for the Cubs to make it this time in spite of the suits who have run the franchise so cynically for the last century. Terrible owners have given Chicago the Black Sox and a hundred years of frustration for generations of faithful Cub fans. It’s time to think about the game, not them.

“Let’s play two,” said Ernie, the most beautiful quote in baseball. For the next two weeks, I’ll be a Cubs fan.

The Wine Dance

You hear software and hardware developers often use the phrase, “eating your own dog food.” It simply means if you make something that others use you better damn well be using it yourself. It’s the only way you can truly understand what you make.

As I review the Cornerstone Cellars portfolio now I can see I’ve been following this same dictum.

What American wines do I like to drink? When looking for value and direct pleasure I seem to find Rhône-style wines on my table. What wines do I think go best with my own personal daily style of cooking, which has become increasing lighter with decidedly less red meat? These meals are perfectly matched by Oregon pinot noir and chardonnay. When a special occasion presents itself often a grand aged cabernet sauvignon is retrieved from my cellar.

These preferences clearly come from the entire history of my wine drinking experience. When I seriously begin to immerse myself in wine in the late 1970s the wine world was French and that was the style of wine I learned to love and still do. Balance, elegance, freshness are still the characteristics I value most in wine. Being on a limited wine budget I delved with delight into the wines of the Côtes du Rhône and with great pleasure sought to understand the nuances of Sablet, Rasteau, Lirac and other village wines. Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Hermitage and Côte Rôtie were still inexpensive in those days and I enjoyed them when I could find them. Then there was Bordeaux, which seemed the pinnacle of refinement and breed. You could gather a few wine lovers together and buy and taste all the First Growths from a vintage just chipping in fifty dollars or so each. Tasting the majesty of wines like Lafite, Latour and Mouton forever gave cabernet sauvignon a special place in my heart. The buttons these wines pushed when I was in my twenties they still push today.

Then there was my total immersion in Burgundy that started in the early eighties when I began importing the wines of Rebecca Wasserman. My time with Becky, both on her visits here and visiting her in Burgundy, built such a deep respect for the growers and terroir of Burgundy that these are among the most emotional of wines for me. Profound pinot noir touches both your soul and your intellect at the same time. It is irresistible.

The one gap here is the great love I have for the wines of Italy, which are as likely to be in my glass as any of the wines mentioned above. However, while I find great examples of wines from Rhône varieties, pinot noir, chardonnay and the classic Bordeaux varieties in the New World, with a few rare exceptions I find the noble varieties of Italy have not produced wines outside of Italy that I find personally compelling. When my palate craves nebbiolo, sangiovese, barbera, dolcetto and the many other Italian varieties I adore, I always reach for a wine from Italy. Obviously, no Cornerstone Cellars Cal-Ital wines are on the horizon.

What does this mean at Cornerstone Cellars? It means we are expanding our “Wine Dance” Rhone Ranger series of wines beyond our Corallina Syrah Rosé to include a whole range of Rhône varieties. It means we have just completed our eighth vintage at Cornerstone Oregon making pinot noir and chardonnay. It means that our Cornerstone Cellars Napa Valley White Label wines have evolved into an elite group of single vineyard wines including the greatest of the Bordeaux varieties - cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and merlot.

If you are going to eat your own dog food, you better make some damn good dog food. That’s my goal at Cornerstone Cellars. I simply want to make wines that I love. If I love them I know I can find others that will love them too.

The next step in this voyage will be the introduction of our new “Wine Dance” Rhone Rangers series wines in 2016. Now in the cellar happily completing their fermentations are viognier, marsanne, rousanne, mourvèdre and grenache from El Dorado and syrah from Mendocino. Our new “Wine Dance” whites will be released this spring along with Corallina Syrah Rosé and the first reds will arrive this fall. Along with the single variety wines there will be a red Rhône blend - remember I do love Côtes du Rhône. As with all of the Cornerstone Cellars wines these are limited production, single vineyard wines with only a few hundred cases of each produced.

I’ve always felt a wine is defined at the table. In this case I guess the wines of Cornerstone Cellars are defined by my experiences with wines at my table over three decades. That is the true “Wine Dance” the magical interplay of wine and food.

It is wonderful to be able to share those experiences with you.

Harvest Fun

It always happens. I tell someone we're harvesting or I have a pick in the morning and they say, "have fun!"

Harvest is many things: inspiring, rewarding, fulfilling, exciting, meaningful, exhausting, but it one thing it isn't is fun. At least not if it’s your life and your living. It may be fun to work a harvest or chip in for a few days, but if you have to take that fruit, make wine, bottle it and sell it fun is not part of the equation. Harvest is the worst thing and the best thing that happens to you every year if you want to make wine that means something. Making great wine is not fun, it's an obsession. Most of all it is intensely rewarding, not financially, but somehow, spiritually.

The mental and physical exhaustion that is harvest is what wells up inside of you when someone asks you about how many points your wine received from some critic, but then you remind yourself it's a lot easier to make opinions than it is to make wine.

It's hard to describe the intensity that we focus on our wines. The hours and hours of walking the vineyards and agonizing over every little choice that is made in the sometimes years long path a wine takes from the flowering in spring until it has the Cornerstone Cellars label applied to its bottle.

The experience of each harvest may not be fun, but the memory of it most certainly is as each moment comes back to life with every cork you pull of that vintage for years to come.

Worth it? You bet.

Harvest Napa Valley - Half-Empty or Half-Full? 9/17/15

I couldn’t believe my eyes as the last bin was lifted off the scale and they handed me the weight tag. I blinked in disbelief as I read 2.25 tons. That was less than half of what we picked from this vineyard last year.

Making things even more painful was that this was not just any vineyard, it was our Oakville Station Cabernet Franc block. We just had just bottled the 2013 Cornerstone Cellars Oakville Cabernet Franc, Oakville Station Vineyard and there were only 101 cases from that banner vintage. A small amount of this exceptional cabernet franc is used in the blends for Michael’s Cuvée and The Cornerstone, but we save enough to bottle as a single vineyard as this is one of the most distinctive cabernet vineyards in the world and to not let it sing its own song would be a sin. The 2015 Cornerstone Cellars Oakville Cabernet Franc, Oakville Station Vineyard could end up being less than fifty cases.

This one of those situations when you find out if you are a optimist or pessimist - a half-empty or half-full glass sort of person. The half-empty of this situation is the small amount of fruit harvested, the half-full is what little we got is of exceptional quality. We’ll take the half-full side of this situation as quality is always more important (and more delicious) than quantity.

A little very welcome rain fell on the Napa Valley yesterday hopefully giving the firefighters a little help in their struggle against the Valley Fire. For us that meant no fruit today, but tomorrow we’ll be harvesting Grigsby Syrah in the Yountville AVA.

It will be full speed ahead now until the end of harvest. Yields will obviously continue to be light, but we’ll keep our glass half-full outlook.

Harvest Willamette Valley 2015 This Feels More Like Oregon 9/15/15

Yesterday at daybreak it was cloudy, cool and showers were threatening. Today more of the same. Finally it feels like harvest in Oregon. It was ninety degrees just a couple of days ago and the crew was working in shorts and t-shirts instead of the usual fleece and flannel garb usually associated with Oregon harvests.

The weather we started harvest in was a reflection of the entire growing season in the Willamette Valley. It was hot. The hottest ever. The Oregon wines from this harvest will reflect that, just as they should. After all, isn’t the point of growing pinot is letting the idiosyncrasies of each harvest and vineyard speak for themselves?

What are the results of this warm Oregon vintage? It means that the grapes are being harvested at brix levels that are considered high in Oregon, but low in the Russian River Valley. In other words they will be big pinots by Oregon standards, but not those of California. What I think they will be are rich, charming wines that will be ready to drink, and should be drunk, young. This is the way nature should work with some vintages better for drinking young and others needing time to reveal their true character. Their rich textures and softer acids will mean a lot of wines getting big points from certain critics. Just remember, sometimes the closer the score is to 100 points the more the likelihood that you should drink the wine young.

Yesterday we were very lucky as our fruit, from the Saffron Fields Vineyard in Yamhill Carlton, arrived at the winery early in the morning allowing us to get a quick start on processing fourteen tons of pinot noir. This is really the maximum amount of fruit the team can physically handle. I assure you your arms and legs are tired after hand-sorting that much fruit. Doing it day after day gradually wears you down and getting out of bed in the morning becomes a creaky, sore process. The day finished with a quick tour of the vineyards remaining to be picked to get samples and determine when they’ll be harvested. There will be a break of a few days now as rain comes through the area. The remaining vineyards just need a little more time to fully develop their flavors.

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Winemaker Tony Rynders crushing pinot noir samples to analyze the juice

Today I’m heading back to the Napa Valley as we’re picking Oakville Station Cabernet Franc at the crack of dawn tomorrow. After that harvest we’ll be sampling our cabernet sauvignon vineyards (that’s all that remains in Napa) to set the dates for their picks.

It seems clear at this point that everything will be picked by the end of September. Crazy, simply crazy.

Harvest Willamette Valley 9/13/15

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Our Oregon crew sorting pinot noir

It’s 6:30 in the morning and it’s time pick the grapes. However there is no picking crew waiting except us. This vineyard was going to be harvested by the four of us. This is the Maverick Vineyard, in the Oregon Willamette Valley sub-AVA of Yamhill Carlton. It’s just a baby and an infant like Maverick does not produce enough fruit to interest a crew of pickers paid by the bucket. The fruit needed to be picked so the four of us picked it.

Then to the winery where over the next twelve hours seven of us hand sorted and processed 15 tons of pinot noir, from our other vineyards, which are now happily cold soaking as we finish cleaning up the mess that only handling ton after ton of grapes can make.

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Winemaker Tony Rynders harvesting Maverick Vineyard

An interesting thing happens after you hand sort that much fruit. The tartaric acid crystallizes on your fingernails making them look like they’ve been painted white. I don’t think it’s good look for me.

You’ll excuse me after fifteen hours of hard work for not being more eloquent, but I’ll give you a more detailed look at our Cornerstone Oregon harvest tomorrow. Good night as another fifteen tons will be waiting in the morning.