As I write this, I have just begun to emerge from another harvest. Normally, there is a slight lull in the action where I can collect my thoughts and begin this newsletter. 2010 would not hear of it! What looked like a repeat of our first vintage – 1991 – was decisively swept away by two blistering heat spells which robbed us of the majority of our Zinfandel crop and pretty much caused all the earlier season grapes to be ready within a few days of each other. Through monumental efforts by my family in the vineyard and painstaking cluster-by cluster surgery by us in the winery, we were able to make a tiny amount of some really wonderful Zinfandel. Fortunately, the other varieties were not ravaged as much by the unrelenting sun, so there are some absolutely stellar wines in normal quantities from the other varieties. But the lack of ANY time to write this has resulted in this newsletter being even later than normal. I hope you will find it worth the wait.
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