This year was the El Niño effect. We fought the weather and dropped, literally, tons of fruit until harvest so the grapes would ripen. The upside is that we hired our first full-time helper - Vidal. What a luxury to have an extra pair of hands out in the vineyard! Our...
The 1994 Paloma Merlot, our first wine, was released – all 575 cases of it. The wine is a blend of 88% percent estate grown Merlot and 12% estate grown Cabernet Sauvignon. It was a hit with the wine critics and, more importantly, with the public. After three years of...
In March, we moved into our home and acquired a new friend, Aussie, the vineyard dog. She is an Australian Terrier who loves to hunt; this trait will put her on a collision course with our local rattlesnake population. The Prides released their 1991 Merlot, which was...
In May, we finally started building a house at the vineyard. Jim closed his office in Midland, Texas and moved to California full-time. Andy Isdahl, a skilled builder and our close friend, built the house with the help of his assistants – us, and our son Sheldon...
Last year we cleared some fir trees that were shading an area of the Merlot; we decided to plant a small block of Syrah on the cleared area as an experiment. Carolyn and Jim Pride, with their wine maker Bob Foley, bought some bulk Merlot wine made from our grapes that...
Before this year, we had a contract with our friends across the road, the Schweigers, who would send their foreman and crawler over to do work around the vineyard. We would have to stop traffic and lay heavy boards across the road so he could drive from their vineyard...
We planted the last five acres of our vineyard with 2,300 more Merlot vines on 110-R root stock for a total of 15 planted acres. We used a mix of Clone 3 and Clone.
We had been coming to St. Helena from Midland, Texas (our home at the time) since 1983, staying and working on the property from a few days to a few weeks at a time. This year we decided that the vineyard needed full-time supervision, so we rented an apartment in St....
In the spring, we planted 3,555 Merlot vines that were one-year old bench grafts. At the same time, we planted 945 Cabernet Sauvignon vines. The Cabernet was a clone from Germany that was planted in the original vineyard at Inglenook. Both were planted on AXR-1...
17 acres of rugged, untamed mountain-top land was purchased. Ten acres of the property were cleared and the steeper areas were terraced. We put in two ten-thousand gallon cement water tanks at the top of the vineyard to hold water for future irrigation and a six-foot...