This is the view from our porch in the AirBnB we rented in a little town called Leynes outside of Macon, France. Make sure to turn up the volume to hear the evening song of birds and insects.

Both Beth and I love wines from the Gamay grape and thought a couple of days living in and exploring Beaujolais in advance of our club member river cruise would set us mentally straight. This night-time magic is slowly seeping in.

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Steven and Beth talk about the craziness of putting together large (relatively) blends of Cab Franc. Sara Mirassou adds her own twist on things. Great night!

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A soliloquy about the turning of a tide, a vision of the future; making great wine and championing Cab Franc.

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Give a listen to me and Beth talking about the past week’s craziness, Livermore Valley’s celebration of TASTE! and how Cab Franc is the future.

It has been a crazy week! We thought we had all of our fruit in on one day, but then added 20% more of the total harvest with 10 tons of Cabernet Franc from a new vineyard in the Valley a day later.

As the video above notes, we are close to being dry on our newest Cabernet Franc Blanc just as we are presenting the few cases we squirreled away from last year for a series of TASTE! events that we stupidly committed to way before harvest began. you know it’s non-winemakers who are the ones who schedule events smack dab in the middle of the busiest time of our year!

So, morning, noon, and night punchdowns everyday, inoculating new 15 fermenters over the last three days, and pressing off Cab Franc and Merlot; and four pouringevents/seminars over the last four days makes for a dull boy.

*The headline above was written to test various hypotheses about how to garner attention from the substack world. While this video does not explicitly address the headline, it does describe our focused commitment to a single grape and reaffirm our desire - as a 7th generation family wine brand - to be circumscribed by the magnificence of Cabernet Franc and to move forward in the wine world with one guiding star, come what may.

If there is a lifecycle to wine (and there is!), today was that most auspicious of meetings.

Sperm meet Egg. Yeast meet Must.

An early morning stroll through fog-shrouded vineyards grabbing a sample of grapes to set a baseline for maturation, led to a later-morning moment of creation.

I take you through the process of preparing a specific yeast strain and the pitching of that yeast into a fermenter in order to start (in a “controlled” chaos sort of way) the life of a wine.

That moment is an absolute turn-on, by the way.

In which a crushing fuck-up gets un-fucked, and we walk through one of our favorite vineyards to begin an apotheosis of Merlot and Cabernet Franc. Oh, and we talk about selling wine too.

Beth and I shared a glass of Champagne at the top of Sachau Vineyard (one of our favorite places) overlooking the Livermore Valley, celebrating crystal-clear skies and the wonderfully inevitable advent of another harvest.

It was a great morning.