Vintages

The first one. The one you don't really know how to do yet.

It started with Ranch Zinfandel and the reasonable assumption that making wine couldn't be that different from anything else we'd figured out by doing it. We were wrong about that, in the productive way.

The 2021 taught us more about what we didn't know than any subsequent vintage. pH, timing, temperature management — each one was a lesson delivered after the fact. The wine was good. Better than it had any right to be, honestly. That's what kept us going.

Named for the address. Named for the North Star above the vineyard at night. Both felt right.

We got ambitious. We hosted a harvest party. We learned what "uneven fruit" means.

More hands in 2022. More opinions. A harvest party with a sorting table in the driveway, which was louder and stickier than expected, and considerably more enjoyable than I would have guessed.

The fruit that year was uneven. The fermentation was opinionated. The press — a red pneumatic model that became the workhorse — ran in the garage and produced wine that had real structure, despite a process that was anything but predictable.

We pressed more Zinfandel. We started to understand that the vintage shapes you as much as you shape it.

The year we added sparkling to the rotation. A decision that sounds simple in retrospect.

Traditional method sparkling wine is, by most reasonable measures, a difficult thing to attempt at home. Riddling. Disgorgement. Dosage. Each step is a new surface area for error. We did it anyway.

The carboys multiplied. The cellar started to feel like an actual cellar — which is a compliment that also means: there's wine everywhere, labeled in a system that only one person fully understands.

The 2023 Sparkling Rosé disgorged cleanly. The Zinfandel was more restrained than the previous two years, which we consider a sign of progress.

Sauvignon Blanc. Hopkins Vineyard. Russian River Valley. Gold.

The 2024 was the first time we made a still white. Hopkins Vineyard in the Russian River Valley — fruit we trusted, picked at the right moment, processed cold. The result was a wine that tasted like it knew what it was doing, which is more than we can say for every vintage.

We entered it in the Sonoma County Harvest Fair. It came back Gold. That's a competition with a long history and a short tolerance for marketing — the wine either holds up in the glass or it doesn't.

It held up.

The work continues.

Whatever is in the carboys right now is still deciding what it wants to be. That's the part of this we've learned not to rush.

Check back.