From Harvest to Bottle

Have you ever wondered what actually happens between a grape hanging on the vine and that glass in your hand?

Turns out… a LOT! Let’s dive right in:

Picking

It starts with a decision, not a date. We're not watching a calendar, we're watching the fruit. Three numbers drive that decision: Brix, which measures sugar and predicts the wine's eventual alcohol level, pH, which affects both stability and how the wine will taste, and total acidity, or TA, which keeps a wine from tasting flat once it's fermented. We track all three as harvest approaches, but we also taste the fruit itself, checking the color of the seeds and the flavor of the skin, because the numbers only tell part of the story. On Red Mountain, that window can move fast. The heat during the day and the cool nights push ripening hard, so timing the pick right is one of the most important calls we make all year.

Crush and Fermentation

Once the fruit comes in, it's sorted, crushed, and moved into fermentation. This is where grape juice actually becomes wine, as yeast converts sugar into alcohol over one to three weeks depending on the variety. Choosing the yeast strain is part of that decision. Different strains ferment at different speeds, tolerate different alcohol levels, and bring out different aromatic qualities in the finished wine, so the strain we pick depends on the grape and the style we're going for. For our reds, this stage also pulls color, tannin, and flavor from the grape skins, which is why reds ferment with the skins on and whites usually don't.

Pressing and Barrel Aging

After fermentation, the wine is pressed off the skins and moved into barrels. This is where things slow down. Oak barrels let a small amount of oxygen interact with the wine over time, softening it and adding structure. Depending on the wine, that might mean twelve months in barrel, or closer to two years for something like a reserve. New oak brings more spice and structure, older oak brings less, and we use both depending on what a particular wine needs.

Blending

Most of our wines aren't single varietals. A wine like Traveler or Crosswind is built from several barrels of different grapes, and blending day is where we taste through everything and decide what goes into the final wine, and in what percentage. A few points of Cabernet can change a wine's entire personality. This is also where the Super Tuscan influence really shows up, since it's a style built on blending Sangiovese with grapes like Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, and Merlot, applied here to Red Mountain fruit instead of Tuscan fruit.

Bottling and Rest

Once a blend is finalized, the wine is bottled and given time to settle before release. Some wines are ready to drink right away. Others benefit from a little more time in the bottle before they're at their best.

Then… it's Yours!

From pick to pour, a single bottle can represent well over a year of decisions, most of them made by taste rather than by formula. That's part of why no two vintages taste exactly the same, even from the same vineyard.