The 2008 harvest season was quite an interesting one here in the Russian River Valley appellation of California. The beginning of the season was marked by several frosts just after bud break. This is normally a very dangerous situation, as the frosts can destroy the young tendrils and buds, but due to the nature and geography of our vineyard blocks, there was virtually no damage to the vineyard, to say the least... a great relief.

The rest of the growing season was fairly even with cool mornings and sunny afternoons, which Pinot Noir thrives on. Despite this, many of the Estate vineyard blocks did not ripen at the same time. As a result, we had to harvest the various blocks at three different times. Probably the most expensive way to going about harvesting, but the result was well worth it.

The Estate vineyard is broken up into many blocks of clonal types (Pommard-4, 828, 777, 667 and 115). Our job in the vineyard is to present a wonderful matrix of flavor profiles resulting from the various clonal types to our winemaker, where he then has the greatest latitude of blending elements to give us our finished wine, emblematic of our vineyards personality and nature, which will deliver these wonderful flavor profiles like a genie in a bottle to you.