Barreca Vineyards

Barreca Vineyards

From Vine to Wine since 1986

Archive for 2018

All the leaves are brown

All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray… (California Dreamin, the Mamas and the Papas) Four days after Halloween daylight savings time ends. It gets dark around 4 PM. On the bright side there is daylight at 7 AM. What really closes in is the realization that although winter might not be officially… (read more)

Kinda Yellow

Look out your window That grass ain’t green It’s kinda yellow See what I mean? Bob Dylan, Traveling Wilburys – Inside Out So October was “kinda yellow” from the get go. It involved a lot of chilling out from 62 degrees in the evenings at the beginning of the month to 41 degrees and some… (read more)

Fall 2018

As you could expect, this is a very busy time of year at the vineyard.  So to shorten the blog to a minimum I will just put a link here for an article I wrote in the North Columbia Monthly for October – and have recreated here on this website.  It is called Dirt First and gives the basics of Regenerative Agriculture.  Then I will put in some pictures with captions.

Dried Fruit for the winter

Tomatoes coming on

Filberts from out trees

Hot Lips are still in bloom

Paste Tomatoes

Crab Apples

The Red Oak picture by Cheryl

Marechal Foch Grapes

The Rav4 broke a timing belt on the way to the Farmers Market

Siegerrebe Grapes in the crusher

Cheryl sold her 4 wheel drive Toyota to my daughter April. Maybe James will be able to drive it in 2030.

Lucie Kuhlmann primary fermentation

Friends picking a future French Rocks Red wine

Big Cat Face spider 

Siegerrebe Grapes at Downriver Orchard

Our VW Vanagon cracked ahead – out for the season

Kit and Sharon Shultz crushing grapes with Tom Distler

Amber and Tom helping out

A big Black Lab Cheryl rescued from the highway and found the owners for

Himrod Grapes

3 cords of wood delivered

Silent Fall

When a pendulum swings it pauses at either end and quickly passes through the middle. August is the middle. Things are changing quickly. We have gone from some of the hottest summer days on record to days of giant swings between the high and low temperatures. That part of our weather is actually good for… (read more)

The To-Do List

Usually I review diary entries from the last month to write this blog. I did that for June and it looked pretty boring. I also usually have a theme and had been thinking about “recycling” as the theme. That sounded like it could easily end up as another pedantic rant on sustainability from an old… (read more)

Special Wines

One of the advantages of growing a winery out of a backyard vineyard is that you tend to have a variety of plants and wines. The disadvantage of course is that you may not have a tremendous amount of any one wine. These past few years neighbors have stepped in to add to both the… (read more)

Morel Season

It’s that time of year again, Morel season. Even though there is a long list of things to do around the house, garden and vineyard, the call of the wild mushrooms lures us away to the sites of last year’s fires for a “Taste of the Wild”. This year we have been picking in the… (read more)