Too much of a good thing can be wonderful. —Mae West Every hour toiled and dollar spent is suddenly worth it With the commercial wine competition and awards season just getting underway I’m thrilled to announce—while being more than a little dumbstruck!—how well the first professional vintage of Tiny Vineyard Wine Company is doing. We’ve only received results from two competitions so far, and already we’ve won some bling! The most exciting is a Gold Medal and 93-point designation for our Daniel’s Pride Chardonnay in the North Coast Wine Competition. This is a very respected, industry-driven wi ..read more

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it. – Henry Ford I just bottled them yesterday. First peek at the 2022s! I’ll talk about them more below, but I wanted you to see them before anything else. And to know that all three of these amazing—and somewhat improbable—red wines are for sale, right now, just to you dear reader with SPECIAL ADVANCE RELEASE PRICING and FREE SHIPPING on orders over $150, at tinyvineyards.com. Do you remember that harvest of 2022? Well, I certainly do. For seven straight days in September afterno ..read more

Marketing is like a first date. If you only talk about yourself, there won’t be a second one. –David Beebe The first time I heard that old winemaking platitude—How do you make a million dollars in the wine industry? Answer: Start with two million!—I was deeply offended. I couldn’t imagine a more soul-depleting point of view, especially as I was just starting off on my own winemaking journey. But even now, over six years later, I would guess that at least half of the people I meet in wine country tell me that “joke” when they hear that I’m a winemaker. I’m not kidding. And they do so with such ..read more

There is simply the Rosé; it is perfect every moment of its existence. – Ralph Waldo Emerson Mea Culpa My apologies if you already read a similar post on Sunday but as you know first-hand, or read in the news, we got hammered this past weekend by a Level 4 storm and an atmospheric river that lived up to its name. We had buckets of rain and several power outages where I live in Sonoma, and the Internet was down for hours. So, it’s quite possible many of you never got this post. At least that’s what our Internet metrics are showing. Therefore, please humor me and put up with this condensed resen ..read more

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted. - Henri Matisse What’s a bottle of Rosé between friends. Empty. - Anonymous Not every wine takes years to make If you recall in my post of December 17th, I ended with a bit about Making Rosé 6,000 miles away. It described my efforts to direct a September harvest of old-vine Zinfandel and the subsequent production of almost a ton of those grapes into Rosé—all remotely from Italy, where I was succumbing to a serious over-indul ..read more

It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear. —Donald Trump The straw that broke the camel’s back… and then some Wednesday, September 13 - Last we left off, we were hopping aboard our train from Florence to Rome—our final destination in Italy—and I was sending off emails to everyone involved in harvesting and processing a ton of Zinfandel grapes into Rosé from ancient vines that were about to be torn out of an old, storied Sonoma vineyard. As you’ll recall from my last post, the grapes all got picked and processed successfully, even with me micro-managing from afar ..read more

The trouble with eating Italian food is that five or six days later you're hungry again. — George Miller Florence Okay, so where were we? Oh yeah… returning from the fifth and southernmost village of Cinque Terre, Riomaggiore, via ferry ride back north to the first, Monterosso, after a long day of hiking and eating in between. Hard to believe, but we actually passed up dinner that night, surrendering instead to the physical and food fatigue of the day. Saturday, September 9 - Another fantastic Euro breakfast spread at the Souvenir hotel—we seemed to have gotten our appetites back!— and then it ..read more

Traveling is the ruin of all happiness! There’s no looking at a building after seeing Italy. — Fanny Burney Nel vino cè la verità [In wine there is truth] — Old Italian proverb But I digress Before I continue our harvest tale with the first part of our trip to Italy, I must beg your forgiveness for the recent irregular scheduling of this newsletter. One of the hazards of writing about winemaking, particularly around harvest season, is the danger of tumbling down every rabbit hole encountered in the telling of your story. There’s simply too much going on and it’s too easy to want to explain it ..read more

Come quickly! I am tasting stars! — Dom Perignon Let’s begin at the end Sorry to all that I haven’t written in this newsletter for 77 days, but there’s a good reason for that. In fact, there are several good reasons, beginning with the sheer breadth and quality of this remarkable harvest season and the mental and physical energy it took to navigate such an unexpected enological time warp. But to tell this tale I’ll have to break it into parts; so much transpired. And I’d like to begin on the last day, which was just one before yesterday. On that evening we held our annual end of the season har ..read more

Good things come to those who wait. - English proverb But don’t wait too long. Our advance wine sale ends Thursday! On September 1—five days from now—the prices on our 2021 Inaugural Vintage wines are going up. So is the shipping. If you haven’t yet placed your advance order, especially for our celebratory Eclipse Malbec (remember, the Great American Eclipse is April 8th!) please do so before Friday. As a loyal reader you’ve earned the discounted pricing and free shipping but as we prepare for our official release date, we need to get our pricing in line with the true value of the wine. We wil ..read more