My winemaking career began in the year 2000 after my wife Elisheva and I decided to purchase 209 acres of raw land in the Shenandoah Valley AVA in El Dorado County. Within a couple of years, we built a winery and planted 20 acres of vineyards, which were expanded to...
If you have been to any of my “Tasting with the Winemaker” sessions in our tasting room, chances are you heard me saying, “A wine has a sense of place.” What this really means is that a wine acquires some unique characteristics from the geographical place that the...
Cork has been the traditional closure for wine bottles. While cloth, leather and clay closures preceded cork, it became the closure of choice in the 1700 after glass blowers were able to manufacture wine bottles of uniform size, shape and design. Some winemakers and...
I am into my 18th year of winemaking. I went through 17 harvests and made about 200 different wines. Since I had been a wine collector for many years before I became a winemaker, it was very normal for me to want to set aside every year a few cases of the wine from my...
With the release of a wine that I named SandFire Red we are celebrating the third anniversary of the Sand fire, which came very close to devastating our winery and our home in 2014. On July 25, 2017, a day before my birthday, the pungent smell of smoke woke me up at...
People have been asking me how this year’s wet weather will affect the quality of the 2017 vintage wine. We must have had at least 70 in. of rain, more than double the average yearly rainfall. The rains kept coming down all the way into the month of June. ...
In 1998, before Elisheva and I even dreamt about having a winery, we sold our flavor company that we founded 20 years before to a French company from the South of France. After the acquisition I continued working for them for an additional three years. ...
If you read wine magazines, wine columns in your daily paper or visit wine blogs, does it ever happen that you come across a statement that does not sound quite right to you. It happens to me all the time. I find some of these statements to be “myths”,...
I have been compiling a list of questions that people ask me about wine in general and my farming and winemaking techniques and philosophies. In this winemaker’s corner I will discuss a few of the topics that interest many of our customers. To water or not to...
Our original customer base which consisted of predominantly baby-boomers and Gen-X is aging and getting replaced by younger consumers. In order for us to continue our presence in the wine market it behooves us to understand the character, habits and life style...
