Sustainability

We farm our vineyards with a 100 year mindset. Our children and our dogs have the run of the vineyard and we farm so they can play hide and seek in the vines.

We planted all the grapes on our estate in 2001 and 2002 and have made sustainable farming practices and balanced vineyards our priority. We believe healthy vines produce a wine that is truly representative of our extraordinary site. Because of our elevation and aspect we do not use any frost protection in our vineyard. This means less water use during the critical winter salmon runs.

Since we planted our vines we have never tilled the soil. We use year round cover crops of native grasses to reduce erosion to a minimum. Our tanks are only cleaned with water and we reuse that water to irrigate the 450 olive trees we have planted. We also use all the grape must to mulch around the olive trees. Like many of our neighbors, we use owl and hawk boxes to keep down gophers so we don’t need poison or traps.

Being an Estate Winery is a big part of minimizing our impact. We grow our red grapes on our property, make the wine in our winery, age the wine in barrel in our caves, bottle in our building, and keep the bottled wines aging in our caves. We keep everything on our property until the wine is released to the market place. When we purchased Chardonnay fruit we bought from close neighbors. All of this minimizes traffic and truck trips. We also believe it is much better for our wines.

We keep our caves cool by utilizing a night air cooling system. This system uses the natural diurnal temperature fluctuations to cool the caves. At night when the outside air drops below the cave temperature the vents open and the system draws in cool night air. In the morning, as the outside temperature rises, the vents shut and the natural insulation provided by the caves keeps them cool all day. We are currently exploring solar solutions for our site that will allow us to generate 100% of the electricity we use from solar power.