A Sparkling Harvest Review

Published January 30, 2025

 

 

Happy 2025 to you! As January comes to an end, we hope your new year is off to a great start.

 

Our 2024 harvest was surprisingly drama-free. Weather problems? Nope. Mildew problems? Nope. Tractor problems? Nope. Press problems? Nope. Plus, the 2024 wine in barrel is beautiful. Winemakers across the Willamette Valley are excited about the quality of the 2024 vintage. Nothing to complain about…. except, we did have more grapes than we needed. 

 

Sparkling Wine     

So… we started making sparkling wine! Even though we have no experience making it, that never stops us from launching into some new crazy scheme. But as luck would have it, we connected with a winemaker willing to mentor us. Which is super helpful because we’re making ‘traditional method’ sparkling wine, also called méthode traditionnelle, a multi-year process. Sparkling wine made this way starts off as ‘regular’ wine. Ours is still fermenting in barrel, but once fermentation is complete, we’ll add sugar and more yeast to the wine and bottle it in thick ‘Champaigne’ bottles to restart fermentation in the bottle. This is the step that creates the tiny bubbles. We plan to release our sparkling wine over the course of a few years, and will continue sharing about how we make it.

 

Our very first Pinot Noir juice for sparkling wine, typically picked ‘under-ripe’.
It looked and tasted like lemonade.

 

2024 Harvest

We picked the grapes for Pinot Noir ourselves, as we did in 2023. Our son, Jason, and Joel picked most of the crop, with Jason getting the prize for most tonnage. Our son-in-law, Tyler, picked grapes, too, and often stopped by to collect the grape bins, dump them into the de-stemmer, and clean up the winery. Very welcome help at the end of a long day. 

 

As with harvest, the entire growing season was trouble-free: limited powdery mildew and almost no sunburn. We will continue to improve the high trellis system, but overall we’re pretty happy with it. 

 

Jason and Joel: Who won the Harvest Beard contest? Jason had a great Captain Jack Sparrow vibe.
And our son-in-law, Tyler, the first day of picking.

 

We’ve discovered that we really like harvesting the grapes ourselves. Our high trellis makes picking much easier. But also, we’ve found this slow approach of picking grapes has an added plus: we tend to get longer ‘hang’ times because the harvest is spread over more weeks, and we think this benefits the complexity of the wine. We are able to do this because, during the harvest season, the Willamette Valley usually has mild weather and limited rain. Which is one reason this is such a great place to grow grapes. We may not be able to pick the grapes ourselves forever, and a rainy harvest may not allow it, but for now we’ll do it when we can.

 

Rosé and Group Pick 

With our big crop of Pinot Noir, we made plenty of Rosé which will be available this spring! We also hit a milestone this year: we finally organized a couple of Rosé picking parties. We’ve been wanting to do this for years, and we were happy that a few dozen people came to the vineyard, experienced harvest, and picked three tons of grapes that will be part of our 2024 Rosé! 

 

Rosé picking crews. Pinot Noir juice for Rosé.

 

2024 Vintage

Chardonnay

Joel and Jason picked Chardonnay grapes from Cassin Vineyard, our neighbor. As usual, the fruit was beautiful and had great flavor and acid balance. As we’ve done the past few years, we’re fermenting the Chardonnay in neutral barrels. We will bottle and release it in 2026. We had thought our own Chardonnay vines, planted in 2021, would produce a little this year, but it was not to be. Maybe 2025 will be the debut vintage of the first Kiff Vineyard-grown Chardonnay. 

 

Pinot Noir 

This is an excellent vintage primarily because the quality of the grapes was high, with almost no sunburn nor mildew damage. In addition to that, on average, each individual grape was small, at least in our vineyard. This means a greater skin-to-juice ratio – most of the flavor is in the skin – which creates a more intensely flavored wine. Usually, when grapes are small, the clusters are ‘loose.’ But in an interesting twist, these clusters were large and full of grapes. This definitely makes it easier to fill the buckets. 

 

Small grapes, large clusters & picking only the best.
Pinot Noir grapes waiting to go into the de-stemmer after a day of picking.

 

New Barrels 

Our vineyard is almost 20 years old, and ten years dry-farmed, and with the 2024 vintage looking so great, we thought it deserved something special. We usually buy a new barrel every year or so, but we splurged on four new barrels: a new string of pearls for a debutante just coming into her own power. Over the next year, it will be fun to discover how she looks in them. 

 

Unwrapping the new barrels is a favorite winery job. They arrive heavily packaged for the journey from France. Once freed of shrink-wrap and cardboard, the unblemished, knot-free, light-colored wood is not only beautiful to behold, but it perfumes the winery with a newly toasted oak smell. Then, as new wine flows into the barrel, a caramelized oak perfume wafts out. The fragrance of the new wine and the new barrel starts to intermingle, and hopefully fall in love with each other.

 

We choose the barrels carefully, so that we could compare the effect of different barrel characteristics on the wine: we choose two brands, two ‘toast’ levels, and two different forests. We hear that oak from different forests have different flavors… we look forward to sharing these barrels with you to see what you think of the difference!

 

First drop of wine in, and on, the new barrels & a string of pearls.

 

 

Thank you for reading about our winery!

 

-Joel, Laurie, and Adam

 

 

 

2024 harvest timeline:
Sept 11-18: Pinot Noir for sparkling wine (we picked 7 of 8 days)
Sept 22-30: Pinot Noir for Rosé (we picked 7 of 9 days)
Oct 9-10: Chardonnay (we picked both days)
Oct 1-20: Pinot Noir (we picked 13 of 20 days)
Nov 17: The last of the Pinot Noir put into the four new barrels

 

 

 

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