Winemaking and winegrowing are not solitary pursuits. As a winemaker, I’ve come to appreciate the fundamental need for, and role of, teamwork at every stage of the winemaking process. From countless hours spent nurturing the vines, to long days processing grapes on the crush pad, and onto months of monitoring and blending, teamwork is interwoven into every aspect of winemaking.
Grapes arriving at our cellar door represent a season’s worth of labor by vineyard teams, including the dedicated RBV team of Raul and Jose, as well as our longtime growers. Their work begins immediately after harvest, with seeding cover crops to prepare for the next vintage, fine-tuning not just the vines but land on which they grow, to ensure the highest quality crop at each step. Collaborating with these teams, sharing our vision for the vineyard, and learning from their decades of farming experience are crucial to our success each year.
The handoff to the winery occurs at harvest, when teamwork becomes most critical. Teams of pickers work swiftly, often at night, to bring in grapes at optimal maturity. Our winery team, led by Assistant Winemaker Matt and Cellar Master Miguel, then processes each lot with care, ensuring only the best berries make it to the tank. Daily, or even hourly, tastings follow as each lot ferments with adjustments to punch downs, temperatures, and time in tank made based on how each is developing. Any necessary changes are handled by an agile team in the cellar, ready to pivot in response to shifting priorities. This orchestration of activity continues throughout the roughly 40 days of harvest until everything is in the barn and in barrel.
With barrels quietly stacked in the cellar, the period of élevage may seem uneventful but is filled with activity. Matt, Miguel, and I will taste each lot, frequently barrel by barrel, putting blends together for the vintage as we go. Even the most experienced tasters recognize their limitations and blind spots, so working together helps us notice what any one individual might miss. Through these tastings, we draw conclusions about the vintage and vineyard practices, which inform our strategies for the farming season to come. This is all ongoing while we are also focused on bottling the wines from two vintages ago. With three vintages in progress—the one to come, the one just harvested, and the one to bottle—a solid team is absolutely essential.
These many hours spent caring for and crafting the wines would be for naught without the final piece of the process: the passionate hospitality team here at Biale. They eagerly ask us about the new vintages and are prepared to share the wines with you, conveying the story of the vintage and the heritage of our single vineyard bottlings.
Winemaking is a collective effort. No part of this process could succeed without the steps ahead of and behind it. While winemakers frequently receive the praise, many people share in the accomplishment of creating and sharing beautifully crafted wines with you. This sense of teamwork is what we strive to include in each bottle of our wine, as we craft these vintages that preserve these historic vines.