We have lived in San Diego for about 10 years now, and I can’t believe I didn’t know about Bernardo Winery until now. It is the oldest winery in San Diego (actually in southern California), and is truly a unique venue. The winery tasting room is located on the original winery property, and is now [...]
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My in-laws are visiting from Germany, and that seemed like a good reason to check the progress of all of the vintage 2009 wines in the shower. I pulled 100 mL samples from various carboys for a taste. We started with the Fallbrook syrah. This wine already has great aromas with big fruit and good [...]
Just got an update from Live Oak Vineyard on the syrah progress, it’s up to 22 brix already. Harvest should be in about a week, which is actually the same time as last year. So, even though the weather this year has been very strange and is definitely affecting harvest around California, looks like we’re [...]
This “summer” has been unusually cold. Record-setting coolest high temperatures cold. Temperatures were below 70 degrees F on the coast, and mid-70′s inland throughout July. This weird weather is delaying ripening of the grapes, so harvest will be a little later this year, barring another heat wave like last year. Mike Hoffman just sent me [...]
I got an email today from Mike Hoffman that the syrah started veraison and harvest should be around the first week of September. Hopefully there won’t be a last-minute heat wave like last year, which raisined a lot of the grapes before we could pick them for wine. I’ll need to start thinking about what [...]
We are planning to bottle the syrah soon, and I will also probably bottle the primitivo as well. The merlot and petite sirah in the barrels have not picked up enough oak for our tastes, so we’re going to leave them for another year. I realized I haven’t cleaned out the airlocks on my carboys [...]
John and Paula York hosted the annual Ramona Valley Vineyard Association summer social at Hellanback Ranch. It was HOT, even in the shade, but such a beautiful location. Everyone brought wine and a side dish, and John grilled up home grown and raised beef burgers — they were SO good. We got to taste a [...]
We visited Fallbrook Winery yesterday with some of our friends. It has been unusually cold and dreary around San Diego, but the sun eventually came out later in our tour. We were greeted by Vernon Kindred, one of the winemakers at Fallbrook. He walked us through some of the vineyards while describing the growing season [...]
I entered two wines into the San Diego County Fair Homemade wine competition: ‘Bahia Belle’ Bordeaux Blend, a 50/50 blend of cabernet sauvignon and merlot made from fresh grapes, and ‘Sail Bay Sundown’ RJ Spagnols Argentinian Trio Limited Release white blend. One of my fellow winemakers also entered the same cabernet sauvignon and merlot as [...]
I popped by to check on the merlot and petite sirah in barrels at my friends’ office. While I was there I took some samples to test for free SO2. Last time I tasted these wines there was no detectable oak, which was not expected from barrels that have only been used once so far. [...]