For years, we enjoyed having the mustard as a spring cover crop, but we never harvested it. This year we harvested it, got the seeds and started using them in our cooking
. All led by Claudia, the queen of "use what ya got", "grow stuff" and "let's try this..."...
The winter is behind us and the vines got enough rain this year to get them through the growing season. We pruned as the rains ended and now the shoots are growing and the clusters have formed. Now's the time to go in and show some love. The vines grow about 3x mor...
Watch out gophers! The first of our owl boxes is now in place. Barn owl mating season is about to begin and we wanted to make sure we rolled out the carpet for at least one prospective owl family down in the new Cabernet block where the gophers have destroyed about 5...
After a mailing to virtually everyone in my address book, we gathered up a core group of friends that want to be the "founders" of the Griffin Hill Wine Club. This group, which will get extra-special pricing for life, will meet at the winery for our first event on Nov...
power shutdown included Griffin Hill. Yes, it did and yes there were some pretty high winds up here, so the way I see it, it's all good. In fact, it came at a pretty okay time, with our coolers already shut down following...
After waiting the standard three years for our new Cabernet Sauvignon vines in our newly redone lower section, we netted the vines to save the grapes from the predators and held a harvest with friends and family last weekend. The fruit was in great shape and many vine...
Come see us this weekend, 5/18-19 at the Rotary's 44th annual Fine Art in the Park event in Los Altos' Lincoln Park. Rain or shine. We'll be pouring all or our wines: 2016 Estate Chardonnay, 2016 Estate Pinot Noir, 2016 Cabernet and 2016 Santa Cruz Mountains Zinfande...
Among the activities taking place in the winery this time of year is racking. There many reasons to rack. The most common reasons are: natural clarification of the wine, getting the wine off the lees and gently getting more oxygen into the wine. The first racking fo...
Work in the vineyard at Griffin Hill starts earlier than you might expect. The rains (and a rare snow - see photo) keep equipment out of the vineyard due to safety concerns, plus the need to protect the soil from getting churned up and compacted. The work this time o...
We sell out of Pinot Noir each year, which is a good thing from the perspective that we can be sure at least some folks approve of what we're doing. On the other hand, we would rather have enough wine to fill all the orders and we would like to have enough inventory t...
