Category: Blog

The Farmer & The Fox  Restaurant  opened very quietly to the public for dinner on Thursday June 5th and is now open nightly from 5pm to 10pm. I have officially dined there more than a handful of times since opening night and sometimes find myself dreaming of the smoked duck wings, freshly baked popovers, game…

One of the most common questions that people in the wine industry hear is “what food will go well with this wine?”  The answer to this topic has been thrown back and forth between sensory analysts for years, but now most can agree with at least a few basic guidelines to food and wine pairing.…

A 2013 Christmas Poem ‘Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the cellar, the barrels o’ Chard need not stirring, and the barrel racks no welder. The hoses were hung upside down by the staircase with care, in hopes that St. Trifon The Pruner soon would be there. The red wines in barrels were…

So far, this harvest has been a bit of a roller coaster: it was hot, it was cold, it was rainy and then those weather patterns started all over again. It seems like thing are leveling out and, here at the winery we are getting a little break before a lot more fruit starts rolling…

When to harvest you ask? That is a great question and one which we ask ourselves many many times each and every day…. Harvest is arguably the most beautiful time of the year in Napa Valley (it is difficult to discount mustard season of course). Now the leaves of the trees turn majestic auburn colors…

Move over bottling.. that was so last week! Cairdean Vineyards kicked off harvest this year (just yesterday September the 3rd) with a pre-dawn pick of Riesling grapes from the Suisun Valley for our sweetheart of a wine Leannan. Leannan is Gaelic for sweetheart and is an apt name for this wine as it is fermented…

In efforts to rid your cellars (and ours) of cork-tainted wine, the Cairdean winemaking team decided to sniff (or have personally sniffed) 15,600 corks for our upcoming bottling of our 2012 Sauvignon Blanc and Rosé Wine. We tend to write and talk a lot, in general, about how we toil in the vineyards to grow…

Veraison! It’s the most wonderful time of the year! Well, maybe not as wonderful as Christmas, but for winemakers, it’s a close second. For anyone who does not know, here is the fun stuff that Wikipedia has to say about it.  “Véraison is a viticulture (grape-growing) term meaning “the onset of ripening”. It is originally…

Cairdean Vineyards was recently awarded 11 medals and 2 Best of Class Awards at the Annual California State Fair Wine Competition! In honor of the event, we announce the new release of our just medaled 2010 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. We are very excited to announce that our 2010 Napa Valley Merlot was awarded a…