From December until March each year, our veteran vineyard crew tackles the tedious and time consuming job of pruning our 80,000 vines. While the vines are dormant, the crew removes most of last year’s growth selecting which buds will be saved to grow this year. Every cut answers many questions: Is the vine in balance? How strong is the vine? Is this spur in a good position for the harvester? How did this vine fair last year? With 96 acres, these decisions must be made quickly. Martín Aleman has been with Hafner Vineyard for over two decades. Here he wears a GoPro showing us what it is like to prune just one vine. With eight men in the vineyard, each prunes roughly 10,000 vines. A daunting task but one with great reward. 

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Looking out over the vineyard from our home, I see Winter asserting its cooling authority and I remember the warm magic of Spring and Summer.  How excited all of us were in March and April to see the first green leaves on our winter-darkened vines. It will be here shortly.

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When it comes to picking grapes, harvesting by machine is the best way in my book. It is incredibly efficient because the grapes go from being on the vine to crushed and into a chilled tank within the span of a half an hour. When grapes are picked by hand, that process takes a minimum of four hours.

If you visit Wine Country during Harvest and happen to take a drive in the middle of the night, you would almost certainly come across a machine harvester at work. Many people wonder why we harvest at night. It’s simple...

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There are two days of the year that I look forward
to the most in the vineyard…the first day of Harvest and the last.

This year the first day arrived earlier than normal, and that is just fine by me! The vineyard crew eagerly awaits this day all season. Our hard work has produced another bountiful crop, and there’s much excitement as we prepare to bring it in.

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Once Autumn arrives, Mother Nature dictates our schedules in the cellar and vineyard. At the beginning of August this year, we anticipated our earliest Harvest yet because the growing season started early. Temperatures were warmer and the conditions drier than in previous years. This led us to believe that Harvest would start about two weeks ahead of normal.

Or so we thought. Mother Nature always keeps us on our toes.

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