Montemaggiore

At Montemaggiore, where our vineyards surround the family home, we have a vested interest in being good stewards of the land. We grow our grapes according to organic and biodynamic principles—with no chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides—which lead to healthy vines with intense, richly-flavored grapes.

Leverage Nature

The key to healthy vines is healthy soils and good predators, which we achieve by leveraging nature itself. Through the use of cover crops and compost, we enrich the organic matter in the soils naturally. Leaving riparian corridors and woodlands intact, we leverage our diverse habitat by encouraging owls and raptors to control the rodent populations. Avoiding chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, we maintain a vital, regenerating ecosystem both beneath our soils and above ground in the flora and fauna populations. Utilizing biodynamic farming practices, we harness and balance the earth's downward forces, feeding the soil and plant vigor, and the sky's upward forces, aiding flowering, fruiting and ripening. Thus we leverage nature itself to bring better balance, improved texture, deeper flavor, and more intensity to our grapes and wines.

Reduce and Reuse Water

Water is gold in California and we treat it that way. We utilize drip irrigation instead of overhead sprinklers, thus targeting the water right where it is needed, at the roots of the individual vines. We also practice "deficit irrigation"—by reducing the amount of water we use, we moderately stress the vines slightly in order to produce the smallest, most intensely flavored grapes. The water that we do use for irrigation consists of both winery wastewater (naturally-filtered through our constructed wetland) and rainwater captured in vernal ponds.