We recently bottled the 2010 Hocus Pocus Syrah at the winery in Lompoc. The wine tastes very good, sadly there are only about 485 cases of it. It is always a great relief to get wine into the bottle. The winemaking part of my job is over, though the selling part now begins. We have ...{read more}

The last grapes of the season for Black Sheep Finds have been picked and processed. On November 3rd we brought in our last bit of Syrah, from the White Hawk vineyard near Los Alamos. It’s a good thing we did: it rained later that night, the vines had little left to give and in three ...{read more}

At times it seems like growing grapes and making wine in California is the complete opposite experience as it is in most of Europe. Here have a long and relatively cool growing season (night-time temps in the 50’s all summer), while in Europe they have a short and compact warm growing summer. season We try ...{read more}

Having just recently returned from 10 days in France visiting wine producers in Burgundy and the Rhone Valley, I have the somewhat unfortunate opportunity of being awake at 4AM due to the 9-hour time change I am now re-adjusting to. 10 days is just enough time to allow your body to be fully adjusted to ...{read more}

Yesterday we bottled the first white wine ever on the Holus Bolus label, our 2010 Holus Bolus Blanc. It is 100% Roussanne from grapes grown at the McGinley Vineyard (formerly Westerly). The finished wine really turned out lovely, especially considering how difficult the growing season was. Roussanne is always a late ripening grape variety, but ...{read more}

Whenever I am walking through the vineyards (particularly in the Spring, when there is far less to fret about than in the Summer and Fall) I realize how fortunate I am to being doing something that I love. In fact, I don’t have the work ethic to do something that I don’t enjoy (like that ...{read more}

I am very pleased to announce that the 2008 Holus Bolus Syrah was chosen as the Wine of the Week by the LA Times! We had no idea that the wine was going to be selected (or even tasted for that matter) until our friend Jeff Zimiti (of Rosso Wine Shop in Glendale, CA) emailed ...{read more}