Early each year, we sit down at Mom and Dad’s dining room table overlooking the vineyard for our annual vertical tastings. Held over a couple of days, these tastings give us an opportunity to compare vintages, to evaluate how the wines are developing, to notice trends and assess the continuity of our winemaking style. We all have our bias: which vintage is our favorite, which is our least. And it is in these tastings when those biases can change.
Bottling is a critical stage of winemaking – wines that are ready to bottle are very fragile and can be easily ruined by microbial contamination or high oxygen pickup (making them age prematurely.) We bottled the 2014 Rosé recently and I wore a GoPro to share with you what 90 seconds of bottling is like.
I am the lucky one during harvest – 
I spend my mornings sampling, measuring, tasting, evaluating each lot of Chardonnay to ensure that the fermentations are progressing well. Just after the grapes arrive at the winery, I check their sugar content with a refractometer by putting a few drops of juice onto this hand-held instrument. Within it, there is a scale that reads the sugar level by refracting light through the juice. I taste the juice and record the grape aromas, the sugar content and the details of the fruit – which vineyard block and clone the grapes came from, the tonnage and the quality of the fruit. A day or two later, the juice is inoculated with yeast and I begin measuring the fermentation rates with a hydrometer. This tool is a glass tube that is weighed on one end and measures the density of the sugar and the temperature of the liquid by floating in the fermenting juice.
