Vineyard Focus - Thurston Vineyard

We sell out of Pinot Noir each year, which is a good thing from the perspective that we can be sure at least some folks approve of what we're doing. On the other hand, we would rather have enough wine to fill all the orders and we would like to have enough inventory to store it longer and

take advantage of the quality aging provides. For this reason, we began looking for an additional source of good quality Pinot Noir fruit. When we first saw the Thurston Vineyard, we were amazed by how the owners, Dale and Bonnie Thurston, tended the young vineyard entirely by hand, put sustainability first and are taking the vineyard toward dry-farming. Not only were they following the practices we wanted, they were perfectly okay with me making suggestions. We bought most of their harvest from their 1 acre block to make a barrel of wine in 2017. We were so happy with the results that we got them under agreement to get their whole 2018 harvest, which was about 2.5 times the size of the previous year.

Starting with the bottling and release of our 2017 Pinot Noir, we should have enough Pinot Noir to fill all of the orders we receive and we'll do bench trials to see if blending The Thurston Pinot of our estate Pinot enhances it with additional complexity, or if the beauty of terrior shining through each wine dictates two separate wines.