La Honda Winery Blog

2009 Almost done…

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 18:36:19 +0000

With 29 vineyards to manage and harvest, it is a fun and challenging matrix to manage the harvests and the arrival of fruit at the winery. As of today, we’ve completed the harvest on 24 vineyards. In every single cuvee’, the fruit is de-stemmed and then slowly and carefully hand-sorted berry by berry on our custom Italian Mori shaker table. Where other wineries go from crusher right into tank, we remove every single raisin, green berry, leafy material leaving on perfect pristine berries headed into the tnak. The result is nothing but pure pristine fruit going into every fermentation. With fast chilling and heat, we’re able to dial our preferred fermentation kinetics quite precisely. These early steps in the winemaking process protects delicate flavors, softens tannins, and assures beautiful elegant mouth-feel and aromas in the bottle years from now.

Goodbye 2008, Hello 2009

admin — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:54:18 +0000

2008 in the wine business, like many industries, ended with a quiet whimper. When you are as small as La Honda Winery, you thank the fermentation gods for your dedicated clientele and your hard working and loyal restaurantors and local retailers. Prices are being pushed down and only those with deep pockets and luxury of product will survive. In our little corner of the world, we plan to continue doing exactly what we’ve always done - produce small quantities of delicious local wine at a reasonable price.

Our newest releases just came through several professional blind taste tests with flying colors, and so we enter 2009 with high expectations that our wines will continue to be appreciated despite tough times ahead.

Before the crush, a moment for fun

admin — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 19:08:44 +0000

The wine crush is coming, and when it does we’ll be busy 24/7; in the vineyards harvesting fruit, and in the winery running lab tests, and punching down and pumping over every 4 - 6 hours. It’ll be November before we get some sleep. But right now in the vineyards, verasion is over, and so the perfect moment to take a break and smell the roses before all hell breaks loose.

Up before dawn, Steve Maller, friend and noted professional photographer (www.stevemaller.com), and I headed out to capture images of our winery’s best local vineyards - to Saratoga, Los Altos Hills, Woodside, and La Honda we went looking for that perfect shot of Lonehawk, Marrone, Quartermoon, Silent Hills, Winding Way, and our La Honda estate vineyards.

By mid-afternoon, we were down off of the mountains and looking for food. We ducked into The Village Pub in Woodside (www.thevillagepub.net) , and asked for and received clearance to take a table even though we were dusty in our shorts and t-shirts. We had in mind a quick snack. Steve immediately began downloading the vineyard images onto his laptop, and before we new it a small crowd of Village Pub staff had gathered.

Out of that fray stepped noted sommelier K. Maxwell Klassen (max@thevillagepub.net) who jumped into action and lead us through some very choice menu items and some amazing wine pairings. Without exchanging a word, Steve and I knew we had fallen into the hands of a food and wine genius, and we silently put ourselves in Max’s hands. Over the course of the next two hours a barrel select Riesling from the Mosel was macthed perfectly with a charcuterie plate, a sensational Pinot Noir was matched with the perfect Halibut, and then the coup de grace - a sweet yellow peach topped with chilled shaved fois gras and matched expertly with a sumptious Sauterne.

For a local winemaker, I could not have asked for better way to set the stage for the upcoming crush. Thank you photographer Steve Maller, and thank you genius sommelier Max Klassen!

Native yeasts - what’s the deal here?

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:33:03 +0000

Knowledgable guests at the winery often ask me if we use ‘native yeasts.’ Whether we allow the naturally occuring yeast on the grape skins to be in charge, or do we ‘innoculate’ with ‘factory yeasts.’ The issue for me is mostly about a proper balance between modern science and old-school winemaking. We know that prior to Louis Pasteur, the great winemakers of old did not know what exactly made grapes ferment; they had no microscope and little concept of microbes. With few scientific tools, they had to rely on their wits and generations of experience built on trial and error to make delicious wine. But modern science has isolated those very same grape yeasts, identified the charactertisitcs of each, propogated them, and put them in the hands of winemakers. So a decision must be made. Roll the dice with native yeasts, or employ modern tools? There is a time for respecting the old ways and a place for modern science. Nothing replaces the winemakers constant and vigilant attention during fermentation. Great care is required in the handling of fruit - from picking to destemming to fermentation. It would be a grave mistake to turn that hands-on process over to automation. But winemakers who extol the virtues of naturals yeasts are rolling the dice on the wine taste profile. Nobody, including me wants anything foreign in their wine. But in the end, the decision to employ ‘naturally occuring’ yeasts may be more about marketing - “we use only natural blah blah blah.” Applying the best that modern science has to offer as a tool to better winemaking - and this includes selecting the perfect natural yeasts from reliable modern sources is a smart move.

Verasion is here, relax, a little

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 03:33:44 +0000

With the gradual arrival of verasion, we’re finally relaxing a little. The threat of our major crop fungus in the Santa Cruz Mountains, mildew, is about over. Verasion is when the fruit starts to turn from green to red in late summer. Why the color changes is for another blog post. Suffice it to say that mildew is no longer a threat once verasion is underway. The best way to treat mildew is to prevent it in the first place. With the exception of a few tons of fruit from friends in Napa or Chalone, all of the fruit going to La Honda Winery is grown by us, our vineyard subsidiary Post & Trellis Vineyards. And Post & Trellis Vineyards employs sustainable farming practices. So we purposely limit ourselves to organic and sustainable vineyard sprays - sulfur dust (a pure organic mineral right off of the periodic table of elements), Sodium Bicarbonate (otherwise know as kitchen baking soda), and organic horticultural oils. The upside of using these ’soft’ materials (and not petrochemicals, which do in fact have a good and useful place in the case of a real farming emergency) is that our vineyard soils are healthy and happy and alive. The flip side is that these materials are not quite as strong and therefore the timing and frequency of applications becomes critical. So we montor the presence of fungus very carefully - until verasion starts - so now we can cross that risk off of the list and continue our focus on getting the fruit to perfect ripeness in the last few weeks of the season.