Schramsberg Vineyards
Greetings from Schramsberg! As we trade heat waves (not that this year had many) for sweater weather, we notice that the winery gets a little quieter. Our team shrinks from nearly 20 people to less than 10. The interns slowly peel off to head to the Davies winery in St. Helena to gain experience with the making red wines and we are left with the core team that is here year-round. The sense of urgency that harvest demands eases up and you find yourself walking steadily instead of running upstairs. This is not to say that we find ourselves at loose ends. There is an endless supply of equipment to clean and maintain. Base wines that need analysis and additions and tasting. And our production team is always disgorging and riddling and working in the caves. It is, however, a time that we get to slow down (a little) and appreciate the little things, take time off to spend with family and friends, and maybe enjoy a glass or two of the beautiful wines we’ve produced thus far.
Part of our staying busy has included some outreach to the alma mater of most (but not all) of our winemaking team, UC Davis. At the end of November, I was able to pour at the UC Davis Alumni Association Wine Club’s grand tasting event. It was a nice time to connect with other UCD Alums and friends from the winemaking program that I don’t get to see often enough. I even got to have a mini-reunion with some former marching band alumni who were club members. There were a handful of current and former Schramsberg Wine club members in attendance as well. We also had a class of Viticulture and Enology students visit the winery at the end of November to do a deep dive into sparkling wine production. Because sparkling wine production is such a niche part of the industry, it’s only briefly covered in a classroom setting. You may get a solid theoretical overview of the process but without seeing the process, it’s hard to understand the steps and timing of these activities. With a tour of the winery, caves and our bottling areas, I think we were able to make the process a little bit more real for these future winemakers. And with any luck, one or two may come work with us next vintage.
From our cellar to you, we wish you all a season full of good food, good wines (obviously if you’re drinking Schramsberg or Davies), and a phenomenal new year! Cheers!
Davies Vineyards
The 2025 Vintage is in the rearview mirror and it’s herky-jerky weather patterns will be both memory and mythos for future discussions. Having cut my wine teeth in the PNW, and getting myself grounded in vineyards of Napa Valley, this vintage provided characteristics that I have been used to: cool climate quality of low alcohol some crisp acid.
Along with mother nature, the seasoned full-time staff and this year’s intern crew really made a huge effort in making this a brilliant vintage.
The last month has seen a transformation from a winery filled with a small ocean of fermenting tanks, hoses winding their way back and forth across the deck, and recently filled barrels ushered on forklifts to waiting stacks, into a sparkling clean showroom of sorts, staged and ready for the next VC event.
However, the order, cleanliness and quiet will soon give way in the New Year to a cellar full of 2024 Davies Pinot Noir blends pulled from barrel and blended for a late January bottling. And we will be on to the next new task.
So for the moment, we will take a moment and appreciate our growers and vineyard management teams who took care of the vines all year; to cellar workers and interns who worked tirelessly to gently craft our red wines; to the entire winemaking team who tracked, tasted, sampled and worked together; and the Davies family, who entrusted us to allow the fruit to express itself and “not get in the way” of what nature had provided us.
