Bee Cool

As befitting a farm started by two city slickers, we’ve got another possible town/country rivalry set to start. This one is about bees. Remember back in late March I told you Hector Alvarez of Hector’s Bees had decided our lavender fields were a good place to place some of his hives. One book on Sonoma calls Hector "a gentle man who smells of honey." That's...

A Modest Proposal for Jeff Bridges

I’m not jumping on the bandwagon here just because he recently won a long-overdue Best Actor Oscar. I’ve long proclaimed to all who would listen (and few would) that Jeff Bridges is one of the most underrated great actors in the last thirty years. Don’t trust me? I’ll let the inestimable Roger Ebert say it for me. This is from his review of Crazy Heart, the...

Days of Wine and Rosé

It’s about time for another winemaking post. After all that was the raison d’être of my blog. I know it seems I get sidetracked, what with writing about worms, Johnny Cash and guns, but that doesn’t mean winemaking has stopped here at Two Terrier Vineyards. Even though we got everything in oak barrels months ago and the vines are just starting to emerge from winter...

The Return of Cousin John’s Yeasts

Cousin John, as you’ll remember from this post, is a purist. He makes wine, but spurning our carefully crafted and specially raised UC Davis yeasts, Cousin John uses whatever is floating in the air. In fact, Cousin John only uses au natural techniques and ingredients to make wine. He’s been known to wander the byways of Sonoma picking wild fruit for fermentation....

The Last of the Wine

Harvest and primary fermentation seem to get longer every year. I’ve been wine babysitting in Sonoma since early September with hardly a break. That means living out in the wilds with two terriers, a bobcat, a newly resident coyote and a whole lot of fermenting wine. But today, we got the last of our Cabernet grapes out of primary fermentation vats (where they needed three times...

A Tale of Two Presses

Today we tackled the Cabernet press and again, we were lucky enough to have Cousin John to help us. But that also meant two different presses as we are still in the throes of an interesting experiment. Andy and I are processing our Cab with UC Davis yeasts and modern methods. Cousin John, who we “paid” in grapes for his help with the crush, is defiantly Old Skool:...