Clos Pepe

Vintage in Photos

Budbreak, March.

4" Shoot Growth, April. Sprays Begin.

Frost Damage, April.

6" Shoot Growth. Canopy Develops. May.

Spraying in April on a calm morning.

Canopy developed, June/July.

Canopy after leafing with clusters exposed. July.

The first blush of veraison/fruit softening. August.

90% veraison, almost there! Late August.

Ripe, lustrous Pinot Noir clusters. September.

Bin of picked, ripe fruit ready to make wine. September/October.

Fermented Pinot Noir being pressed to barrel. October.

Clos Pepe Vineyards Virtual Vineyard Tour

There are no secrets at Clos Pepe. We don't hide our cultural practices or keep yields, harvest chemistry or our methods hushed up. We believe that the combination of climate, people and dirt combine to make a quality of fruit and wine that is perfectly unique and impossible to reproduce.

Great wine is about place, but without the hard work and planning of our crew and staff, Clos Pepe would be a hillside covered with weeds, grasses and a few flowers. So there is some 'magic' to the way we farm, but it is more like taking the tarnish off of a silver chalice than building the chalice itself. The key is to enable this piece of land to express itself naturally through the wines we grow--to let the specialness of this land shine through the wines.

In the most basic sense, these are our goals:

To prune the vines to produce a balanced crop, and to give each emerging shoot space in the canopy to absorb light, spread its crop into open niche spaces, and to avoid crowding of shoots or clusters.
Encourage a healthy, diverse vineyard environment by using sheep, chickens, owl boxes, raptor perches, and policies that guarantee a healthy farm. As long as there is a highly diverse population of animals here at Clos Pepe, the critters are constantly chasing and esting each other, giving the vines enough dispensation that they can produce their crop without the fear of pest infestations that would occur in a monocultural agriculture environment.
Promote soil health by composting and organic fertilization, but only enough to make the vines able to support a small crop. We are not driven to promote overly vigorous vines. The Santa Rita Hills has incredibly well-drained soils, poor soil fertility, and limits vine growth significantly. To impact these natural factors with attempts to make the soil vigorous and the vines too green and healthy would be an attempt to change the basic physiology of vines in the Santa Rita Hills. Our vines struggle a bit, especially at the end of the season, and produce very limited amounts of fruit. A 'good year' would see around 2 tons per acre in pinot noir and three tons an acre in chardonnay. Some sections struggle a bit more than others.
Keep the young clusters from being burned and destroyed by frost. March until June is the frost season, and we lose a lot of sleep watching thermometers drop, turning on sprinklers and fans.
Keep mildew and botrytis from destryong the crop. The Santa Rita Hills has some of the strongest mildew pressure anywhere where pinot noir is grown. Mildew loves warm, moist climates. Morning fog and moderate summer temperatures are a perfect combination for mildew sporulation, so we must be extremely vigilant in our spray programs and in our canopy management and leaf pulling. Most of our sprays are organic, but we do use some low-impact non-organic sprays for their cutting-edge efficacy and the incredible amount of diesel fuel we can save being burned by using them. We believe that organic practices that help improve our wine are worth implementing, but we do not believe in organic for organic sake, nor do we practice biodynamics, which we consider (mostly) voodoo fluff/marketing fodder.
Farm each of our clients' fruit to their specifications and harvest chemistry. Some of our producers prefer less or more leaf pulling, more or less irrigation, higher or lower Brix at harvest. We like to be a small and nimble business, able to give our winemaking clients exactly the quality and chemistry they seek in pinot noir and chardonnay.
Farm like winemakers. Some grape farmers don't drink wine. We do. Lots of it. From all over the world. We are wine geeks first, and the focus of our business is not profitability or bluster. We farm the way we do to produce some of the finest pinot noir wine and chardonnay wine in the world. This is our goal. This is our passion and our reason for living.
Take care of the people that take care of our vines. We are committed to offering our full-time field workers medical, dental and vision benefits for them and their whole families. While this is exceptionally rare in agriculture, we believe that having a committed, professional and permanent crew is the best guarantee that the work in the field will be done with amazing skill and consistency. Instead of training a new crew each year, we are fine tuning our practices every year for higher quality and an increasing sense of place.