Blog

2023 Harvest Recap

This year’s harvest was absolutely amazing! We celebrated five years of making wine in our own facility, doubled production, and brought in the most beautiful fruit to date. Picking season was delayed by about two and a half weeks, and then it WAS ON! Fruit was ripening so fast I ran out of bins. I had friends call me to take fruit because they were full and I was running all over southern Arizona picking and hauling grapes. Then it was back to the winery to stomp and press. And then it was over, as quickly as it started!

Each season truly is so different, which is why vintage variation is very real. While we didn’t have a great Monsoon for Arizona, it was certainly nice on the vineyards. Our fruit had zero rot and it was a bumper crop year, where the vines pushed additional clusters. I also got to work with three new vineyards, along with the three we normally get fruit off of!  The new vineyards were in Willcox, El Frida, and also Los Milic’s vineyard in Sonoita. I am so excited about experimenting with new grapes from different terriors/soils/microclimates. It allows me to make more complex and interesting wines.

In addition to pulling in new fruit, I also experimented with an orange style Picpoul, a dessert Malvasia, a rosé dessert wine, a few Pet-Nat style sparkling wines, along with the normal reds and orange style wines I tend to make. Harvest was intense, fun and full of excitement! Now I need a month-long nap!

I wanted to take a minute and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support.  Wishing you and your family all the joy and peace this holiday season.

Nov 15, 2023 at 6:55 PM Permalink

Harvest 2021 Recap

This year’s harvest brought a whole new list of challenges.  Our number one fruit source the Caretto Vineyard was sold in May to a lovely family that is from Tucson.  To Cameron and Ericka’s credit they jumped in enthusiastically.  The growing season was wrought with a super intense monsoon season. One that saw us get north of 30 inches of rain in 30 days coupled with 2 mini hail events.  The previous year’s hail events and early 2020 fall frost manifested in the vineyard by a loss of buds and specifically fruiting buds.  The vines looked sickly and the fruit looked like shit.  Thank god again for Willcox fruit sources.  We got Malvasia, Grenache and Tannat again from the good folks at Rhumbline and Dos Cabezas sold us some super pretty Mourvedre and Sangiovese.  I would say over all, I had 1/3 the fruit I was slated to get, but I was a little ok with that as the anxiety of selling the wine still needed to be figured out.  The rain yielded vineyards with gnarly over growth on the vineyard floor.  The grasses were feet high and our farmers were mowing and spraying regularly.  It is especially important to keep the vineyard floor manicured as they can quickly become habitats for disease carrying insects.  The humidity pressure was significant and rot on the fruit was present.  We dropped a lot of fruit so I didn’t have problems with ferments in the cellar, but there were still some issues with ferments finishing.  The hail that did hit was heavy enough to pierce the skins of the fruit, but didn’t shred the canopy like the year prior.  The juice to skin ratio was low again as the berries dehydrated a bit as they ripened.  The cabernet struggled to ripen again and stopped altogether at roughly 18 Brix, which was perfect for making a barrel fermented rose.  This was not my plan initially, but I have struggled to get that block to ripen for 3 years now, and I think moving forward I will just dedicate that block to barrel fermented rose!  I made an orange wine out of the Malvisia and am looking forward to adding a white and to the line up!  Overall, 2021’s harvest was underwhelming in fruit volume and the weather, once again was something I had never seen before down in Southern Arizona!   

Nov 30, 2021 at 5:09 PM Permalink

Shingles Made Me Do It

Let me paint the two people who will read this blog post with a picture. The year is 2014.  I have a 2 year old, 3 year old, 10 year old and 14 year old. I am a VP of Marketing at a mobile payment processing company that also has a couponing app.  I have been working in technology since 2005 as a New Media Director for a renewable energy company, in marketing for an Digital Ad Agency, I was a Marketing Director at an internet radio company etc...you get the jist.  Prior to that I was an volleyball player at Saint Mary's College of California (Go Gaels!) where my degree was in Maritime Archaeology (yes that is a real thing) where I spent my summers diving on ship wrecks in the Caribbean and Bermuda.  I thought I would get my masters in Archaeology and live the life of academia, but I had the opportunity to continue playing volleyball and moved to Spain to pursue that dream. 

Once my body had had enough, chronic stress fractures and hernias being the culprits, I came home and just really needed to work.  Ape and Greg (my parents) said "Um no, we aren't going to pay for graduate school.  Get a job." So I settled down and started working.  Marketing & technology is where I fell.  At first, I was all about being a working professional, but life at a computer is just simply not for me.  All this back story is to show, I don't sit well, especially for hours and hours a day.  It's not in my genetic makeup.  I move. 

So fast forward to 2014.  I'm working 60 hours a week, I have nannies raising my kids (who were/are wonderful and I love so much) and I hated my life.  One Sunday afternoon, my 2 year old was on my lap and reared up and popped me in the eye with the back of her head.  I knew it was going to be bad...it was really GNARLY pretty quickly.  I thought I broke my ocular bone.  It hurt and it hurt and kept on hurting, for days.  It just didn't seem like it was getting better.  So I went to Urgent Care and the NP took one look at me and the odd rash that was forming on my head, cheek and neck and said I had shingles.  Son of a b*%$#!  I couldn't lay on that side of my head or brush my hair for MONTHS.  That's what broke me.  I quit my job.  Told my husband I wanted to do something totally different. 

We have a painting of a vineyard on our wall in our bedroom I look at every night and morning.  It's a farmhouse on a hill with the beautiful rows of vines in the foreground.  I looks like it's in Italy or Croatia, somewhere around the Adriatic.  I brings me peace to stare at it.  Plus we had always wanted to buy some acreage and live on a farm.  Maybe I could take some classes on viticulture and we would move to Oregon or Washington and have a little vineyard and farm.  So I started researching programs and learned we grow wine in Arizona!  I took some classes online with UC Davis, but it wasn't hands-on enough for me, but the Arizona specific program was a 2 hour drive north in Clarkdale, AZ.  After looking at the program I realized I could do all my classes on one day of the week along with my practicum hours.  So that's what I did.  Packed all my classes into one day/night and volunteered in vineyards & wineries around the Verde Valley in my off hours.  It took me 3 years to graduate a 2 year program, but I graduated Magna Cum Laude.  My mom said I needed to study wine in order to get grades like that.  Ha!  So when I think about where I am today, I blame shingles.  Shingles broke me, made me reevaluate who I am, what I like to do, and forced me to make a hard left turn, when I could have stayed on a more "normal" road.

Feb 9, 2021 at 1:42 PM Permalink Comments (336)