Madroña Vineyards Blog

So, I may have already mentioned that the harvest for sparkling wines in Santa Barbara started this year on June 30th. That's the earliest they have ever seen it. Similarly, harvest for sparkling wines on the north coast has already started as well.

Now, segue with me here. On Tuesday, I found myself in Windsor, just north of Santat Rosa. (With the cost of shipping constantly going up due to diesel pricing, it made more sense for me to drive down to pick up barrels and corks in Sonoma. (Crazy, but that's business!)) In traveling through Napa, I of course look at the vines as I'm driving by. I...

Let's, for a second, not say that this is shameless marketing, but is instead a bit of history as we prepare our country's 250th Anniversary on July 4th! For many, you may believe that Madroña Vineyards existed when our country started in 1776. True, our estate vineyards are older and registered with the Historic Vineyard Society (warning--shameless marketing), but our winery is not quite as old as our nation.

But what we really wanted to talk about was which wines you should be choosing to enjoy at our country's celebration. As a nation, we are lucky to have had several enophiles (those...

OK, so full disclosure, we don’t have an “Employee of the Month” program at Madroña. That’s mostly due to the fact that we have such a great staff (and everyone would be “Employee of the Month” each month). But then again, nepotism runs strong in the wine industry, and we felt we did need to highlight someone truly special from our crew. So our “Employee of the Month” is (drumroll please!)…Tessa Bush!

A little backstory here. Tessa graduated from WSU (Go Cougs!) last summer with a business degree in Hospitality and a minor in Wine and Beverage Business Management. Right...

How many times have we traveled into California through the Agricultural Inspection and wondered if these efforts really matter? With the abundance and importance of farming in our state (for ourselves and our country), keeping invasive pests from ruining our plants, trees and vines helps all of us.

So when we learned earlier this week about Glass-winged Sharpshooters having been found on uninspected grapevines at a Costco in Sonoma, this quickly became a huge issue to educate people. It's amazing how many people buy plants (not just grapevines for your backyard) from Costco. (And credit to...

So, full disclosure, one of our reasons for extending our travels in Europe to almost 7 weeks was, wait for it, education. It always amazes us as to what we know (and more importantly, what we don't know!) when we get out of our own winery. That isn't to say that we don't love our own wines, but it's interesting to see how others approach growing grapes and making wines (especially when their region maybe has 1000 years of experience).

From the inception of the idea for this fact-finding trip, Maggie always had the idea to learn more about Alvarinho and a lower-alcohol expression made up in...