2023 Matthiasson Napa Valley Chardonnay

A few days ago, we had our friends Mary and Barry over for dinner. Mary is a Chardonnay aficionado, but very particular in her style of Chardonnay. For dinner, we prepared a Greek meal with spanakopita (spinach pie) as the appetizer. We paired this 2023 Matthiasson Napa Valley Linda Vista Chardonnay with the spanakopita. It was a beautiful pairing and all of us enjoyed the Matthiasson Chardonnay.
We have been watching many episodes of Steve Matthiasson and his wife, Jill, on SOMM TV. My husband has been especially interested in Steve Matthiasson because his philosophy of winemaking is like ours. In fact, when we went to Napa in February, we tried to visit them, but Steve was unavailable. On their website, they describe the Linda Vista vineyard:
"The Linda Vista Vineyard is just across the creek behind our house. The West Oak Knoll area where we live is one of the classic Chardonnay spots in Napa—Chardonnay from just behind us won the famous Paris tasting in 1976. The cool winds off the San Pablo Bay bring acidity and freshness, while the Napa sun gives flesh and ripeness. The 25-year old vines were originally planted by Beringer, and we’re proud to take our turn caring for them as the vineyard develops maturity. Certified Organic."
We loved the Matthiasson Chardonnay so much that my husband is thinking of purchasing more!

Passionfruit Estate: The Genesis of Our Label

My husband and I had many iterations of label designs before we finally agreed on one that we both liked. It was a Google Earth view that showed our vineyard at the head of the Mystic River. My husband took that view and stylized it and that has become our label.
The Google Earth view shown below on the left hand side has our vineyard circled in red. It also shows the Mystic Seaport and Mystic Aquarium landmarks as references. The right hand side shows what my husband did with the view. It's more of a tilted view which not only shows Mason's Island, but Fisher's Island as well as Long Island and the Connecticut coastline in our area.

Through time we have had Michelle in California and Kimberly here in Stonington help us refine the label with the appropriate font styles and sizes to achieve the right balance. Sometimes we forget to tell the people who come to purchase our wines what the label is about. We hope they can figure out that it is a view from our vineyard.

Vintage 2025: June Update

It's already four days into June! The rain has made our spring pruning duties very difficult. In fact, the last cuttings from pruning the vineyard was removed yesterday with the help of our friends Mary and Barry.

Yes, full disclosure. We were working until Monday to prune our vineyard. You can see that the cuttings in the sled have green growth on them. Everything looked so promising at the end of March, but April and May were two months full of rain. We don't prune on days that rain so when we could we were pruning. Pruning and laying down the canes became, pruning, laying down the canes and disbudding! We had to be very careful when doing those activities so as not to knock off a bud or later, a young shoot. But now we are finally done! Thank you Mary, Barry and Rich for helping us with the cutting removal.
While Mary and Barry and my husband were busy with cutting removal, I worked on shoot tucking the Barbera. I call the Barbera our wild child because the developing shoots are not stiff like other varieties and have a tendency to lean any which way that they want to.
Here is what the Barbera looks like now:

They have reached the second catch wire. Looking at the buds, the growth seems a little slower than normal. From here on out, it is a race to ensure that the shoots are thinned!

2015 Passionfruit Estate Chenin Blanc

A few days ago, my husband looked into our stash of wine and found this bottle of 2015 Chenin Blanc, the first wine that we made. The wine is now 10 years old!
The color indicated that it was still in good condition! The flavors were of lemon and pineapple with an acidic finish. It went well with the Asian food we were eating that evening, teriyaki mariated pork sandwiches with Hawaiian style macaroni salad.
In 2015, we might had about 150 Chenin Blanc vines that survived the disasterous polar vortex of the winter of 2014 and these vines gave us 360 clusters of grapes. Our friends who helped us harvest the grapes came to our home to foot stomp the grapes in an Igloo cooler! The nice thing about the cooler was that it had a spigot where the juice could be drained into a 5 gallon jug.
Prior to the foot stomping, my husband converted our old refrigerator into a temperature controlled environment with which to conduct a slow and low temperature fermentation.
From that initial fermentation we learned to be patient and let the yeast do it's thing. We also learned that the flavor of newly fermented Chenin Blanc can be searingly acidic! My husband refers to this flavor as "jet fuel". Now we know if we taste "jet fuel" our Chenin Blanc is on the right trajectory on it's journey to being the Chenin Blanc that our terroir produces.
Since we only use 100% grapes grown on our vineyard, yeast to ferment the juice and less than 50 parts per million (ppm) sulfites to preserve the wine, we like to say that our wine is the pure expression of the grape varietal.