As you may imagine, there are many tasks to be completed so that we finish with a quality wine in the end. There is something to be done during every part of the year, and many hours are spent ensuring no detail gets overlooked. A fine wine can only be achieved by using quality grapes and sound winemaking processes (yes, this includes speaking to the wine softly while it is in the barrel). For this reason, we feel it is essential to personally grow and hand-tend our own grapes, keeping quality in check. This cannot be said for many wineries.
Winter Vine Pruning - Each winter while the vines are dormant, we must carefully prune the 1st year growth back, both to minimize unnecessary growth in the spring, and to ensure the vines are productive for many years to come. Considering we have over 5600 vines, this means almost a quarter of a million precise cuts must be made at our vineyard during the cold winter months. I hope you've been exercising your hand grip for those pruning shears!
Spring Vine, Cluster, and Leaf Pruning - Although much of each vine is cut back in the winter, there is still a large amount of pruning and thinning to be done in the spring when the vines transform themselves from lifeless dead looking branches into a field of green. If you thought wine grapevines naturally grow into nicely-trained vines, you can think again! Laziness in your vine-pruning efforts will get you nothing but a field full of fruitless "bushes." Multiple passes of shoot pruning are performed over a 4-8 week period. Later in the spring and summer, additional thinning of grape clusters and leaves is necessary.
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Fall Harvest - For any vineyard, this is the most critical and busy time of the year. We typically harvest our grapes beginning in mid-September through mid-October, depending on the season's past weather and desired plant grape yield. Generally, less grapes per plant result in better fruit and earlier harvest, one of the reasons we grow many more vines than we need; to bring you a quality wine. All the grapes are picked by hand when they are ripe, and then must be crushed immediately. There is no time to delay during this part of the process.
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Grape Processing - After picking the grapes, we immediately begin processing them by destemming and crushing them. Our white grapes go directly from the destemmer into our modest-sized grape bladder press to extract the sweet juice, which then gets pumped into large stainless steel fermenting tanks. Our red grapes are destemmed and pumped directly into the fermenting tanks without being crushed in the press. Once primary fermentation is complete, some of our wines will make their way into oak barrels for the final aging. Depending on the winemakers preferences, many variables can be altered throughout the winemaking process to achieve a well balanced wine.
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Wine Festivals! - Part of the fun of operating a winery is getting out on the weekends to interact with our fellow wine drinkers! Wine festivals can be easily found almost every weekend from spring through fall. A majority of our wine sales are made at weekend festivals. Check our event schedule to see when we may be at a festival near you.
Staff & Volunteers! - Owner/Operators: David & Marie Gibbs
Like many of the other small wineries, we rely heavily on the help from many generous volunteers throughout the year.
If you'd like to offer your time and energy during any time of the year, or for festivals and events, please contact us by email or give us a call.