Winemakers of Schramsberg and Davies Vineyards
Winemakers of Schramsberg and Davies Vineyards

Winemaker’s Corner, Feb. 2025

Davies Vineyards

Angel, our Davies Cellar Lead, and his wife Jesse joyfully welcomed their daughter, Gianna Guzman Gonzales, into the world on December 5th. Gianna measured 22.5” and weighed 9 lbs 11 oz—safe to say she takes after her father!

Meanwhile, just before the presses were put to rest, the final 24 harvest team members and the Red Wine team completed the finishing touches on the 2022 Jamie and the 2023 Pinot Noir blends. These wines are now poised for their final racking and assembly before bottling in the last weeks of January.

The Davies team has also been hard at work pulling barrel samples for a special Premier Napa Valley lot—a collective blend crafted by six winemakers from the Diamond Mountain AVA. This exclusive wine will be showcased at the February Premier Napa Valley auction.

Schramsberg Vineyards

Greetings from Schramsberg!  I hope that the first part of 2025 finds you all healthy and happy.  We’ve had a bit of quiet here at the winery, though that never lasts for very long.  There is always something to do in preparation for the next big project, in this case, tirage bottling of the 2024 vintage wines.

Sean, Katelyn, and I have been busy putting together blends for the J. Schram blends (Blancs, Noirs, and Rose) as well as selecting the sites that had an exceptionally good showing for the vineyard designate series.  Over the next few months we’ll be able to assemble these blends and all of the others in the cellar and send them to the caves to age.  It’s a period of organized chaos, similar in many ways to that of harvest, though a LOT colder here in the cellar.

There is ice forming on the outside of the tanks indicating that we’re “going through cold stability” or the process of chilling the wines down to freezing, simulating what would happen in your freezer at home should you need to chill a bottle down quickly.  Should you forget that said bottle is in the freezer (which I’m sure would never happen) then the wine would be likely have tartrate crystals out of solution.  Those crystals form at these low temperatures and stay out of solution once the wine has warmed up again.  Often mistaken for shards of glass, we try to alleviate everyone’s minds and undergo that process here at the winery.  This often means it’s colder inside the winery than out most days, so if you see a group of people who look like they’re more prepared for ski season than spring, that’s probably our cellar team members.  Please send them warm thoughts as they work in the winter-like cellar.

 

Stainless steel tanks at the Schramsberg winery that are covered with ice.

Winemaker's Signatures