Madroña Vineyards Blog

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...

Over the last year or so, I'd say that the number one conversation I would have with people in the tasting area of our winery had to do with the state of the wine industry. There had been so much coverage of the "younger generation" not drinking or people cutting back on alcohol consumption for this reason or that.

To be honest, anyone can find some amount of data to support their supposition. But there is more and more information coming out that is starting to explain some of the feelings people have been having. Even over a year ago when Maggie and I attended the WiVi Show in Paso Robles...

Now that we've got your attention, no, Madroña didn't score 100 points in some influential magazine or on Tic Tok. (Although in our in-house tasting, I habitually give our wines a score of 107 points!) Instead, how about a round about discussion of what wine is really meant for in life. It's not an existential question or even a health question (although maybe 400 years ago it was safer to drink wine than the water), but it's more a question of where wine fits into life.

As you all know, we at Madroña love to travel. In fact we're meeting up with our Madroña group in Paris (that's France...

Firstly, I do understand that I work in a creative industry (the wine industry) making expressions of art or happiness or terroir or business, depending on who you are. But there are times when the overall responsibilities of the wines, vineyards and business line up with pressures in other parts of the world (that we can't control). Sometimes, honestly, this feeling of overbearing burdens can be extremely hard to shake.

Understanding that just retreating to drinking copious amounts of our own product may not be the healthiest solution, I instead search out examples of how humans are truly...