How today’s Pinot Noir winemakers can protect quality, improve flexibility, and adapt to a changing wine market. Pinot Noir has never been an easy wine to make at scale. Now, the market is also changing. Wine demand has softened. Buyers are more selective. Younger consumers are drinking differently, want value, sustainability, distinctive flavor. That puts more pressure on every cellar decision. This thin-skinned, delicate variety demands careful control over extraction, oxygen exposure, maturation, oak influence, temperature, movement, and sanitation. Small cellar decisions can change aroma, texture, color, freshness, and balance. The challenge is clear: protect the elegance and character of Pinot Noir while improving cellar flexibility, production efficiency, and margin. More control in the cellar helps winemakers do both. These four practices help winemakers make better Pinot Noir with more control and less waste: 1. Build More Precision into Extraction Pinot Noir rewards restra

If you've followed any recent news about the wine industry, you know it's going through a rough stretch. Wineries are closing, vineyards are coming out, and visitor traffic is down. On top of that, the weather keeps getting harder to predict. The wine industry will come out the other side of this period, but it will look different. The wineries that make it through will be the ones that built resiliency into their business. Resiliency isn't something that just happens. It's a set of strategic decisions about how you plant, how you sell, how you staff, and how you pay for what you need. That choice is strategic, and it comes with a cost: thought, planning, and often working a different way. When the market slows, these are the decisions that  allow resilient wineries to thrive. The Two Stages to Build Resiliency Resiliency gets built in two stages. The planning stage. This is where you can make every decision with minimal additional cost. That covers everything from where you'll so

Two Paso Districts. Multiple Rhône Possibilities. There are still substantial Rhône grape opportunities on the table for the 2026 vintage. This WIN Marketplace listing brings together premium fruit from two Paso Robles vineyard sites, with: Paso Robles Willow Creek District Grenache + Syrah Templeton Gap Syrah + Grenache + Grenache Blanc The seller is offering anywhere from 1 to 200 tons, with pricing ranging from $1,500 to $4,500 per ton depending on the variety, vineyard, and volume. The listing also notes that fruit from these sites has previously been selected for wines from JUSTIN, DAOU, and Hope Family Wines. That range is what makes this particularly interesting right now. A winery could be looking to fill a relatively small gap, secure meaningful volume for an established Rhône program, or explore several varieties from the same broader Paso Robles sourcing opportunity. By late August, the window is getting tighter, but it isn’t necessarily closed. View Listing Not every sourc

A Different Side of the Wine World Most of the opportunities we feature revolve around familiar California varieties, vineyard sourcing, bulk wine, equipment, and winery services. This one takes us considerably farther afield. RHESUS MAVRUD 2022 comes from Bulgaria’s Thracian Valley and is made from 100% Mavrud, an indigenous Bulgarian red grape with deep roots in the country’s wine culture. For many U.S. wine professionals, Mavrud may not be a variety they encounter every day. That’s exactly what makes the listing interesting. It offers a glimpse into a wine region, grape variety, and winemaking tradition that sits well outside the usual Cabernet-Pinot-Chardonnay conversation. And that’s part of what makes an industry marketplace useful. Sometimes you go looking for something specific. Other times, you discover something you didn’t know was out there. View Listing The wine industry is a much bigger world than the varieties, regions, and products we encounter every day. That’s part of

A little bit of Italy in Dry Creek Valley Not every vineyard opportunity needs to be measured in dozens of tons. This new WIN Marketplace listing offers just 2–3 tons of 2026 Sangiovese from a one-acre Dry Creek Valley vineyard in Healdsburg. The vines were planted in 2008 and have been organically managed for nine years, with an unusual vineyard detail: they're interplanted with olive trees in a traditional Italian-inspired approach designed to encourage biodiversity. The block features FPS01 Sangiovese on 101-R rootstock, planted in clay, loam, and gravelly soils. The seller describes fruit showing bright cherry, plum, and raspberry character, crisp acidity, and moderate tannins. The asking price is $2,800 per ton. At this stage of August, a smaller lot can be particularly interesting for a winery looking to add something distinctive without building an entire program around a large vineyard commitment. View Listing Harvest doesn't always leave room for a complete change of plans. S

One crucial step in winemaking is the process of selecting an appropriate glass bottle. Why? Because a wine’s identity is greatly influenced by its glass bottle. Often, the content of the bottle takes center stage in conversations and articles rather than the bottle itself. However, our attention today will be on elevating your wine packaging, specifically how wine bottles are packaged for distribution. In the last few years, wine packaging has experienced a radical shift. The invention of cans, tetra packs, and other packaging materials and innovations have changed the way producers think about wine packaging. However, glass bottles remain the traditional and preferred method for wine packaging. A typical wine bottle is made of glass and is available in a variety of sizes and forms. However, most wines are commonly packaged in 750 mL glass bottles. Glass bottles have been used for hundreds of years for wine packaging and have proven to be quite beneficial. However, this has not alway

This week, growers from all over the world are descending on the San Joaquin Valley for the annual table grape field days. Here are some pics from the Grapa Global field days showing some of their popular varieties. It’s always great to catch up with our grower partners and see what the future of table grapes holds!

Join us in November for two days of practical vineyard education, research-backed solutions, and conversations with the growers and experts shaping the future of winegrowing. View the full program >>> https://www.sustainableagexpo.org/conference/program/ This year's program features 30+ researchers and industry leaders tackling the topics growers are asking about most, including: Headliner Session Dr. Michelle M. Moyer (Washington State University) explores how modern grape varieties are reshaping disease management and sustainable farming, followed by a grower panel discussing what these innovations mean in the vineyard. Sponsor: Beckstoffer Vineyards + Additional sessions include: - Biological pest management with Dr. Pam Marrone - Precision sprayer technologies with Dr. Brent Warneke - Soil health insights from Dr. Charlotte Decock - The future of sustainable disease management with Dr. Akif Eskalen - Grower panel on holistic management of vine mealybug & leafroll

Ulrich Willmes The Press as a “Quality Gate” Ten Practical Rules for Preserving the Grapes’ Potential in the Must The press is the critical juncture between vineyard and cellar. It is where it becomes clear how much of the grapes’ quality potential actually reaches the must. Anyone seeking to work in the premium segment with as few corrective interventions and additives as possible—and anyone aiming to produce wine as cost-effectively as possible—must plan precisely before the first pressure stage. Pressing Does Not Begin in the Press House Pressing is not an isolated machine operation. The condition of the grapes, harvest timing, outdoor temperature, weather, transport containers, waiting time, and route to the press collectively determine the quality that can ultimately be extracted. Even a good press cannot turn damaged, overheated, or microbiologically compromised grapes back into intact fruit. The most important practical consequence is this: The vineyard, harvest logis

There is, for good reason, a lot of reporting right now on climate change and how it's affecting the grape harvest. Everywhere you look, wine regions are experiencing harsher-than-normal conditions. It would be easy to write a post about how hot it is and stop there. But, I want to pick out something else: this is a story of climate volatility, not just heat. A Cold Night in Bigfork, Montana This hit home for me in 2022, when I was asked to evaluate a future winery, and existing vineyard in the Bigfork area of Montana. Two years earlier, in 2020, the growing season had been warm, and the owners felt good about what climate change might mean for grape growing that far north. But, climate change isn't just hotter weather. It's climate volatility. In that same warm year, Montana got a sudden, early, catastrophic cold event. The weather through September and into early October 2020 stayed mild, highs in the mid-50s, with only two nights that dipped to freezing. Because of that, most of the