Well, you’d think that since most of us are retired, we’d have more time to update this website!

In September of 2025, we bottled only the 2023 Zin. The Cab had a bit of a bite and so we thought we’d let it go another year in barrel to, hopefully, smooth out. Then in August ’26 we bottled. As it turns out, the ’23 Cab did smooth out some but still had a little bite. My opinion is that it was the pH (which was on the acidic side).

Ok, 2025 harvest also different for us. After some discussion we realized that most of us are accumulating wine faster than we can — shall we say — utilize it. As you’ve heard, while getting older has its perks, you do tend to lose some too. Three of the five of us are finding we are not consuming wine as fast as we used to. Some of our wives don’t drink at all now or don’t drink as much. Note that the text is now bigger on this page than in prior years! Alas, time has a way of forcing changes on us.

So, we made the decision to drop back from 2 varietals to just one. Given our history, we felt that our Zin and Syrah wines were generally the best. Unfortunately, we can’t get Syrah anymore, so we chose to go with Zin that year. Although it can be tricky, incredibly, we have had really good results with Zin. The trouble with Zin is that the grape bunches are typically very inconsistent. The bunches are very large, but the maturity of each grape varies greatly. In a single bunch, you can have everything from a green and immature grape through to raisins. The high-end wineries hand pick the grapes to ensure only the truly ripe grapes are processed. We’ve never had the capacity to do that since Martin Ranch de-stems the grapes directly into our T-bin for us.

And no one has ever accused us of being high-end. Although we do have our fans. We have many friends who genuinely look forward to drinking our wines. It’s quite common for one of us to get a text from someone we gave wine to saying they opened the bottle and were impressed with it. That’s what we have hoped we could achieve — a wine we could be proud of giving away.

As mentioned before, we bottled in August of ’26 — 3 barrels worth!!! Amazingly, we had less help than most times and yet, and in less than 7 hours, we bottled 3 varietals: ’23 and ’24 Cab plus ’24 Zin; a total of more than 82 cases!! In fact, we ran out of bottles.

We should mention the label fiasco. Each year, Bill orders labels for when we bottle. The labels have the varietal and the harvest year so we can’t re-use labels from past year. This year, he clicked the box for matte finish, not knowing that this would impact the way colors look on the label. By the time we realized the labels were a different color, it was too late to get new ones. In fact, Bill assumed the vendor screwed up. Only after a week or more of back and forth did he find out that it was due to the paper finish.

Initially, several of us were alarmed at the look of the new labels. Furthermore, the backing paper wasn’t scored properly so you couldn’t just bend them to get the back off. We ended up just putting the labels in the box and each of us would add the labels on our own later.

Weeks later, some of us decided that the new labels were nicer looking than the old ones!

For harvest this year, we had arranged to go with Zin again but due to early rains and late hot spells, the Zin was ruined. You see, Zin bunches have another problem. They are tight due to the grapes mostly being large. That doesn’t allow air to dry them off and so they are very susceptible to bunch rot. We got word in early October that the Zin crop from the local grower was ruined. We discussed getting juice from somewhere else but, in the end, we decided to skip this year. Having just bottled 85 cases had something to do with our reluctance to spend a ton of time finding a good alternative.