On Top of the World & Humble, too
September 6th, 2008 by Annette
OK, OK:Â I’m Not Superwoman
Let me begin by flatly stating that I’m not invincible. There you have it. I am after all 37 (no longer 27…), have a child and husband, run a winery, and on top of that, thought I could keep up a blog, too. I’ve learned some lessons lately, and with running a small winery I will be the first to tell you, one runs into infinite opportunities to embarrass oneself or at the very least humble oneself on a daily basis….but the most important lesson I’ve learned is that I can’t do it all. Nope. Making wine is the easy part, all the other stuff takes a tremendous amount of energy, creativity, fortitude and patience, and as a result I suffered a time of “blogger’s block”. Well, I’m back and inspired so watch out. As I mentioned in a previous post, my blog will concentrate on harvest, with racking and bottling thrown in, but not much else for the foreseeable future, for better or for worse. So, let me introduce the 2008 harvest:
Coast View Vineyard
I’m a California girl born and raised and I know lots of folks who move out here from back east don’t like the dry landscape this time of year, but to me they are just as beautiful as any time. I was seemingly on top of the world today at Coast View vineyard and much of the views were golden, rolling hills as far as my little eye could spy. I found Coast View through my fellow local winemaker David Coventry of De Tierra and I’m thankful to him. This place is gorgeous — one of the most rugged, beautiful, challenging, remote vineyards I’ve visited (almost to the degree of the Sonoma Coast vineyards). John Allen is the owner, and Tony manages it. Tony told me today that he has been there 12 years and put in most of the fences, trenched, excavated, planted, etc. much of what is up there. As you can see it is a “hilltop” vineyard that involves some terracing and encompasses hillsides — ie, difficult terrain to farm. If that’s not enough, the road that leads up to the vineyard is little more than a path cut into — and sometimes hanging onto — the hillside, so all the vineyard equipment, stakes, wire, plants, had to be painstakingly brought up in small truckloads. Needless to say, John and Tony have put in a lot of work, learned a lot about the vineyard over the last decade, and their dedication shows in both their intimate knowledge of what every vinerow has to offer and in their enthusiasm for the place.
Coast View Chardonnay at Cima CollinaÂ
So, we are processing our first load of Chardonnay — 3.5 tons. It’s Dijon clone 95 and it’s pretty damn beautiful. We’ll get the second and last load of 3.5 tons on Monday. For this load, I will probably rack it to barrel tomorrow
- Posted in Uncategorized
- Comments Off
Comments are closed.