cinco niños

Craig and I were not looking to buy a vineyard. In fact, I had been researching agave production in California with the thought that with global warming and drought, and our love of tequila, that agave was the future in California and in making “Mescalifornia” , I could continue my love of gardening and nurturing plants, with having a small farm. However, fate had a different plan. When our good friends, Sonny and Bruce Hanson, announced they were moving, my emotion right after dismay with losing them was interest in buying their beautiful home. Having 6 kids living with us during covid (the Cinco Nińos and Hannah, Cole’s girlfriend) we felt we could use a little more space, so in buying the Hanson’s house we also inherited their vineyard and chickens. 

Sonny and Bruce had planted around 220 Syrah and Grenache vines back in 2004 and had several vintages of Sleepy Hollow Reserve made and bottled up in Napa. They left us with a few bottles of their 2013 and an in person tutorial on how to prune the vines, where we had the whole family out in force in March of 2021. There are a few photos of this in the gallery. 2021 was a blur between moving in, selling homes, and trying to plan our wedding at our new home. The vineyard was given very little attention and it showed. While we thought it was kind of cute that we found a bird nest among the vines, we didn’t realize exactly how destructive the critters would be, with even the wasps desperate for any semblance of water. By the time that we got married, Kim took a trip to Greece with her boys, and we all had a moment to breathe and think about the harvest, the BRIX had reached 24, it was time to GO and there were very few grapes left – I have a photo from 9/11/2021 with beautiful bunches of grapes – but they were not netted and when we harvested on 9/24 we only had 22 lbs of grapes where normally there could be up to 1000. We found two lovely winemaker tutors – Katie Garcia and Mari Johnson, who led us through the harvest, destemming, fermenting, pressing process – all with our tiny harvest. It was actually liberating to go through the process without having a the fate of a whole barrel of wine in your hands. Unfortunately, we stalled out at the malolactic fermentation stage as I could not get the wine to complete this stage. Also, we had some technical issues with the argon gas – and trying to top off the air to keep the wine from oxygenating. At this time we weren’t as familiar with the “top it off with wine” strategy. So, long story short, our bird nest vintage is sitting in jugs in the pantry and has not been bottled. We have friends who have said they’d help us with this hurdle – we have the bottles, just I guess we need the siphon and a kick in the pants? And a way to keep the lees that have settled out as well. But we may just end up decanting from the jugs and giving it a taste this winter. 2021 was a learning lesson, so with a little more time, money and energy put into the vineyard 2022, we hope to have a real harvest.