Fire Update

Dear Friends –

We are safe.  We evacuated to San Francisco on Saturday with ample time to load our cars with anything of real personal value.  Last night, the fire burned down Chalk Hill Road and through our neighborhood.  As of now, it appears that our home and the Torrey Hill Vineyard were spared from catastrophic damage.  The fire appears to have passed behind our property on its march south.  We are still under evacuation orders and likely will not be able to return home for a few more days.  Only then can we assess the damage for ourselves.  Unfortunately, another wind event is predicted for Tues/Wed so we are STILL not out of the woods.

We are grateful for the tireless, determined, sweaty and physical work of CalFire and the striker crews battling to save Sonoma County.  We have read that fire crews hail from NorCal, SoCal, and even out of state.  Local news footage showed fire crews from LA battling spot fires in our neighbors’ yards on Chalk Hill Road and keeping our home safe.  Like you, our information is second hand/third hand, from Twitter, citywide alerts, and TV news coverage.

We want to thank everyone for their kind words of encouragement, thoughtful emails, texts, and personal calls.  Every bit of attention makes us feel embraced (while displaced).

Please know that your wines, the winery, and our vineyards are safe.  Generators are holding your wines at temperature, even in our absence.  The 2019 fire will not affect harvest 2020.  (Recall that we prune in February; vines grow fresh shoots/canes).  And luckily, pinot noir is an early ripening variety.  I finished picking October 3.  The entire 2019 vintage is dry and safe in barrel.  In fact, the majority of Sonoma County was picked before the Kincade fire erupted.

That said, the winery infrastructure of Sonoma County is discombobulated - slowed to a halt with mandatory evacuations.  From our amazing harvest interns to my forklift buddies at the warehouse to the gals who help me pack cases, everyone has been evacuated from the area.  We hope that soon-ish, folks can return home, and the machinery of wine country will slowly repower to capacity.

As we notified you during the Fall Release, we planned to ship release wines during the first week of November.  As of now, we cannot promise that wines ship out as intended.  We think it’s reasonable to assume that it will take at least an additional week for the distribution apparatus to ramp back up – and that’s without any additional, significant damage in our area.

We do promise to alert you when your wine ships and apologize that we cannot respond to every inquiry immediately during this time.

Thank you for your kind words and well wishes.  If you’d like to help, please consider supporting Sonoma County.  Please drink our wines and indulge in our locally produced cheeses and relish anything made in our beautiful Sonoma County.

Cheers as we raise our glass to table fellowship. 

Thank you for being our people.

-Kerith