Rancho Azul y Oro ~ Surviving the Dream

Before we receive a barrage of emails, no, this is not our vineyard.  We cannot even get all the lights to work on our Christmas tree yearly.  One cannot even imagine how much bad language might occur attempting to light up an entire vineyard or the size of the tangled ball of lights. Amidst all the excitement in preparing for Thanksgiving, Hanukah, and Christmas, we are taking a moment to say a big Thank You to everyone who has helped us out at the rancho this year, from neighbors and neighboring vineyards, to Custom Vineyard for their very professional crews who harvested our lavender and our olives; I would also like to thank all my friends who journeyed out for Girls' Trip 2013, only to find out they were really going to be picking figs, debudding lavender, picking table grapes, and destemming and crushing thousands of grapes and learning to make jams and jellies.  Not only did it get the job done quickly, perhaps it passed down some preserving skills to the Next ...

2013 Olives So here we are, two nights before olive harvest, wondering if we will sleep for the next two nights, until we know if we have the minimum weight of olives to be able to go to the mill.  That is the first major hurdle.  Once we know that, we will know how much of our next year will fall into place.   Without going to the mill, there is no chance for EVOO certification, no chance for competitions, no chance to go forward with marketing, because we won't have anything to sell.  Everything hinges on how many olives are on those trees.   In the next few years, there will be a time that this will not be a worry we have.  There are 120 new olive trees being planted next spring, so then, there will be new challenges, but until that happens, and until Friday night, we will be experiencing the angst all small farmers experience, worrying about cold temperatures on their crops, worrying about yield, working hard to sanitize hundreds of bottles in a...

2013 Petite Sirah being racked into stainless steel tank   The 2013 harvest is winding down.  The Cab and Petite Sirah are sitting on the gross lees for a bit, and then we're going to rack them into their barrels and begin MLF. We're now in the midst of our assessment of what we could have done better.  Truly, we could not have asked for a better growing season.  The Growing Division of the Rancho knocked it out of the park with the grapes that were presented to the Wine Making Division.  Okay, okay, they weren't presented, they were picked -- by us -- an astounding one ton of grapes, in mind-numbing heat of over 100 degrees.  In a word, the grapes were amazing.  Yes, we would have preferred the deer not eat 15 of our Petite Sirah vines, thus compromising them enough that the grapes got sunburned; yes, we would have preferred it to be 72 on the days we picked; yes, we wish we were still 25, but we all know the saying,...

Heritage Zin - 2.5 lb. cluster    Heritage Zin       The 2013 Cabernet    

Ready to hit the vineyard at 5:07 a.m. -- wait, it's still dark. The 2013 AyO Dusi Zinfandel The 2013 AyO Dusi Zinfandel The 2013 AyO Dusi Zinfandel The stems, which will go back into the vineyard The must, safely tucked under dry ice and plastic The future site of the AyO olive grove

The rancho wine grapes look the best they have ever looked and the chemical tests bear that out.  Additionally, they taste the way they should and the seeds are brown and crunchy, so are the stems.   What are you waiting for, one might ask?   Ducks are being placed in their rows -- and you know how well ducks work in rows.  We believe our yields will be exceptional this year and therefore need additional bins, and will drive north to pick those up on Tuesday.  In the meantime, the vintner/chemist (and we use those terms very loosely), will run one last set of numbers to see how the harvest will be scheduled.  The balance of Tuesday will be spent cleaning and sanitizing the barrel room floors, the crusher-destemmer, the bins, all of our buckets, all of our picking tools, so we're ready to go at sunrise on Wednesday, September 4th.   We don't know our sequence yet or if it will be concurrent or consecutive for the t...