In a lot of ways, August was a rerun of July. The sky is gray with smoke, the sun sets and rises as a bright red ball. We check every day for new fires and what is going on with the old ones. We are about to break a 1917 record for days over 90… (read more)

It started out like a normal April. I was doing a lot of grape pruning and planting cuttings as I went. We had just had our first artichoke dinner the night before and temperatures were starting to stay above freezing. To verify the temperature I started comparing our analog (alcohol-filled) thermometers with our digital one…. (read more)

Okay, when most of you saw the title, “Condensation”, you figured I had definitely been out in the rain too long. There was a lot of rain in October and November. It will soon turn to snow. But the condensed theme stems more from my major activity this month, condensing raw apple cider into a… (read more)

October was wet, really really wet. It rained on more days than were dry. You would think that any sane person would be doing a lot of writing and computer stuff inside. That didn’t happen much. It was still all wine, wine, wine. It was picking grapes on dry days and crushing, cleaning, bottling and… (read more)