Dysfunctional Family Winery Launches Online
The launch of Dysfunctional Family Winery: Exclusively for our blog post readers, in time for the winter holidays, Dysfunctional Family Winery announces the launch of our online presence - providing our blog subscribers with the first opportunity to purchase our...
Sonoma 2020 grape harvest finally winds down as red flag weather warnings continue…
Another grape harvest in the books. 22 vintages for me. And what a vintage 2020 has been. The winery established a 'no visitor' employees-only policy, so no client visits this season. We've all been functioning as a tight pod. And hanging over the entire harvest were...
The smoky grape harvest of Sonoma 2020
A smoky harvest like no other... Pandemic, wildfires, smoke, and riots. And who can forget the electromagnetic solar pulse that destroyed the electrical grid! While all this mayhem has been going on, the Sonoma wine industry has been grappling with a grape harvest...
Wine label press check, Dysfunctional Family chickens, egg frittata, fresh tacos and recipes, sourdough, art, NorCal fires, and walnut slabs…
A good photo essay of a wine label press check.
Iconic Sebastiani vineyards returning to glory…
Hydeout Sonoma was selected by one of the arms of the historic Sebastiani wine family to return two iconic vineyards to their former glory. But it almost takes a secret Sonoma decoder ring to explain the vaunted family history, players, vineyards, and wines.
Dysfunctional Family Winery: Shelter in Place Delivery
What can a winemaker do to ease the shelter in place burden? Hand deliver wine, of course. Members of our growing 'Dysfunctional Family' wine community receive their bottles of wine, sometimes in a direct handoff, sometimes over the fence. This was in early April 2020...
Sonoma Farm Life (in the time of Corona Virus)
Farm life in Sonoma
Organic vs. Conventional Farming
Organic grape and wine farming: Thanks to the support from all of our Hydeout Sonoma vineyard clients, we are a 100% organic farming operation. As this debate continues, I invite you to take an in-depth look at the differences between conventional and organic. Let's...
Dysfunctional Family Chickens
Here at the Hydeout, we have many projects going on around the property.The latest addition being a chicken coop! Many friends in Sonoma have backyard chicken coops and we thought it would be great to join in on the fun. Raising chickens on property is part of a...
Wine Country in the Fall: Grape Harvest & Olive Oil
The last ton of grapes is safely in the winery, and in celebration of the end of the 2019 harvest Hydeout Sonoma hosted a BBQ lunch for the whole hard-working winery team. The joke is that 'it takes a lot of beer to make good wine', and in this case, yes, guilty as...
Hydeout Sonoma and Dysfunctional Family Winery grape harvest 2019 wraps up…
Update: This is a video from the Hydeout Sonoma ranch cam at 4 AM Sunday night, October 27th, just before the power went out. This blog post below was intended to be a celebration of this year‘s harvest, but with the epic wind/fire/power outages and the suffering...
Sonoma Barn Owls and social tidbits…
Sonoma Barn Owls and social tidbits...we've lost many grapevines, three years in a row, to damaging gophers. The gopher population is out of whack. Hard to say why? Maybe not enough snakes? We don't want to use poison or traps, so what's the better option? Owls! (not...
Announcing two new Sonoma cinematic events with music, food, and wine…
Two terrific Sonoma movie events for your calendar: On Sept 20th at 6:30pm at the Hydeout Sonoma ranch, benefiting the Sonoma Int'l Film Festival, enjoy an outdoor under-the-stars showing of Jonathan Demme's "Stop Making Sense". Bring lawn chairs and blankets. Carpool...
Before harvest, let’s bottle some wine…
As the clock clicks down to another harvest, it's time to make some room in the winery. Here are a series of short videos and time lapses of our most recent bottling of Dysfunctional Family 2017 "Red Blend". Starting with some barrels full of the wine: Seven short...
You’re interrupting my Sonoma summer…for this?
I will soon be sharing images of the re-construction of an iconic Cabernet vineyard in the next blog post. But while we wait for the newly planted vines to grow, please enjoy this short sampling... This is the project we've been working on all summer, with old vine...
Ganau…it’s Italian for cork!
For over 20 vintages, I have been a loyal customer of Ganau America, a cork company based in Italy, with natural cork sourced from Sardinia and Portugal. Join me on a pictorial journey through their impressive Sonoma processing facility... The cork arrives in bundles...
2019 wine grape season is (almost) a nightmare so far…
Update - May 29th, 2019 - Republishing this blog post with more current information - the rain is over, the sun has arrived, and the vineyards have dried out enough to rush labor and tractors into the vineyards. As of today, it looks like we avoided most of the...
Hydeout Sonoma in documentary at Sonoma International Film Festival
Very excited to make this 'world premier' announcement...for almost a year, famed documentary filmmaker Joe Daniel followed over a dozen Sonoma hobby grape growers and home winemakers through the 2018 season. The resulting film "Tiny Vineyards" is premiering at the...