SAMsARA Harvest Blog

8/29/2020

Hi Samsara family! It’s Lily coming to you from our winery here in Goleta, CA. Harvest is nearly upon us and it’s the most exciting time of the year! In our tireless endeavor to keep our indispensable cellar crew healthy, we aren’t able to give our fun, interactive cellar tours in-person this year, but we wanted to find a way to keep everyone in the loop of what’s going on in our winemaking world. So here it is, the birth of our Samsara Harvest Blog! I hope everyone enjoys it and please shoot me your questions or comments if there’s anything that’s unclear or you’d like to know more about. The calm before the storm is about to end and I will do my best to keep you up-to-date and immersed in the action of Harvest 2020. Let’s hope it’s the best and brightest part of this year (this should be easy after the previous 6 months of mayhem!). Stay tuned and stay tipsy my friends! Cheers!

9/5/2020

Harvest is in full swing here at Samsara, thanks to some rogue heat waves that have rolled through Santa Barbara County over the past few weeks. “Dumpster Fire 2020” as we affectionately call it had the silver lining of shaping up to be a pretty textbook year in the Sta. Rita Hills, with great weather at budbreak and flowering, and a cooler-than-average trend in the early summer months. But here we are, at Labor Day Weekend with extreme heat warnings in effect all over Southern California. We’ve lost a bit of sleep doing large scale grape sampling to get an idea of the perfect moment to get our fruit off the vine before this Sunday’s high of 110 in Buellton. This doesn’t mean that hope is lost, only that the time to pick is now, and that means fruit pouring into the winery at alarming speeds. The fruit we are receiving this week made it through the first heat spike in mid-August beautifully, and we are impressed by the quality seen in our vineyards. Our vineyard managers are the real heroes here, out among the grapes tirelessly thinning compromised fruit, adjusting the canopy to prevent sunburn, getting crews organized in the middle of the night so our grapes can come in cold and ready to be sorted.

Hey guys: We love you!

Zotovich and Bentrock Chardonnay, Rancho La Vina and John Sebastiano Pinot noir all look and taste incredible and our cellar crew members are pulling 14 hour shifts to process up to 10 tons of fruit per day. As of today, we are over one third done bringing in fruit, all of which has come in on just four massive days at the winery. Our spirits are high, though, and we love the excitement of this time of year. The stress and the sticky messes, the early mornings and the earwigs that crawl down your neck at the dinner table (or while you’re scarfing a burrito over a trash can) are all part of the process and make us feel like we are really in it. All in all, so far so good for Samsara Harvest 2020, and stay tuned for more updates and anecdotes from this crazy year, we promise to tell you all the secrets!