In the early 1980s a friend and I began to make beer and winemaking soon followed. We sourced our grapes from a store called Wine and the People in Berkeley – it was very funky but lots of fun. In 1980 Christie and I had bought our home on Carr Dr and much of its big back yard was undeveloped and needed some landscaping. As I had begun to take some winemaking classes at UC Davis, I decided to take one on small vineyard development and management. The young couple teaching the class helped me plan a vineyard and I enlisted the help of our extended family to do the work.
I chose to plant Chard, Merlot and Cab initially based on climate data I obtained from EBMUD – Lamorinda has roughly 2450 degree days during the growing season and that mimics the town of Napa, so why not Chard and Bordeaux varietals? The vineyard was planted in 1987 but we lost more than 50% of the vines the first year due to a supplier problem and had to replant in 1988. I tried hard to make an acceptable Chard but never felt it was very good, so in 2000 we cut down the Chard and plant Cab and Cab Franc. We currently have a mix of 80/10/10 Cab, Cab Franc and Merlot, some 15 yrs old and some 27 yrs old.
The 2014 harvest was our biggest to date with 1900 lbs but this latest harvest provided just 450. We continue to purchase fruit from time to time and we make all our wine on site using pretty basic equipment and 30 gallon French and Hungarian oak. Lately we’ve begun naming our wines after our 5 grand daughters.
