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.
From December until March each year, our veteran vineyard crew tackles the tedious and time consuming job of pruning our 80,000 vines. While the vines are dormant, the crew removes most of last year’s growth selecting which buds will be saved to grow this year. Every cut answers many questions: Is the vine in balance? How strong is the vine? Is this spur in a good position for the harvester? How did this vine fair last year? With 96 acres, these decisions must be made quickly. Martín Aleman has been with Hafner Vineyard for over two decades. Here he wears a GoPro showing us what it is like to prune just one vine. With eight men in the vineyard, each prunes roughly 10,000 vines. A daunting task but one with great reward.
Looking out over the vineyard from our home, I see Winter asserting its cooling authority and I remember the warm magic of Spring and Summer. How excited all of us were in March and April to see the first green leaves on our winter-darkened vines. It will be here shortly.
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.
During Spring and Summer, friends often visit and ask about our favorite day trips in Sonoma County. There are many to choose from! Sonoma County is incredibly diverse, reaching from the Mayacamas Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. I frequently suggest an excursion to the coast because it is one of our favorites.
