Wine, a work in progress

"Bottling day is one of those days we don’t talk about much, but everything depends on it.

Last week, we bottled our 2025 white wines and rosé. And once the last bottle was filled, corked, labeled, packed, and stacked, the entire winery collectively exhaled.

Bottling is different from almost every other job in winemaking. In the vineyard, there’s always another pass, another decision, another chance to respond to what the vines are doing. In the cellar, we can taste, adjust, blend, and wait. Bottling day offers none of that. Once the wine goes into bottle, it’s sealed. No tweaking. No correcting. No second chances.

Grape growing and winemaking are about 99 percent fun. It’s real work, but it’s the kind you choose because you love it. That’s what makes bottling day different. It’s one of the few days that truly feels like work because it carries a very particular kind of stress. In more than 20 years at Alta Colina, I’ve always said there’s very little stress here, with one exception: bottling day.

For large wineries, bottling happens on permanent lines that run day in and day out. That’s a different scale entirely. For small producers like us, and for most of Paso Robles, bottling relies on mobile bottling lines that come in for a day or two and then move on. We bottle twice, maybe a third day a year. There’s no in-house crew running a line every day. When bottling day arrives, everything has to be ready, because there’s no easy way to stop, reset, or come back tomorrow.

It’s long. It’s loud. It’s repetitive. There’s a lot of standing in one place, listening to the constant clink of glass for eight, ten, sometimes twelve hours. It’s not glamorous work. The line doesn’t stop. You repeat the same motion again and again. You feel it in your body for days afterward.

But it’s also exciting, because this is the moment the wine becomes itself. This is the moment the wine goes from being ours to being yours."

- Bob & the Alta Colina team, Alta Colina Winery, 1/27/26

"AVV's 2025 harvest officially ended on October 23, 2025, when our final loads of Cabernet Sauvignon arrived at our crushpad.

2025 will not only be memorable as our 50th anniversary at Alexander Valley Vineyards, but it will also be known as another excellent vintage with rather uneventful weather throughout the growing season!

The vintage began with winter rainfall that replenished soils, followed by a mild growing season and a cool July that allowed for slow, steady development in the crop. Winemaker Kevin Hall noted, "The grapes had tremendous flavors at lower brix, and the fruit had concentrated flavors with bright acidity at harvest".

Over the course of the seven-week harvest, 98 different lots of grapes came into our crushpad. While it will be a while before vintage 2025 is in the bottle, it will be worth waiting for!

Now that we are finished with harvest, and no longer have to worry about the daily weather forecast, we can actually enjoy the change in seasons."

- The Alexander Valley Vineyards Team, 10/31/25

"Every year, every vineyard tells a story. This vintage, Alta Colina’s story is one of patience. The 2025 wines are coming out of the slow cooker. Not the broiler.

Most years, Paso Robles’ summer heat has us running to keep up with the fruit. Hot days mean quick ripening and faster decisions. In hot vintages, leisurely mornings to catch up on paperwork are few and far between. Not this year!

While there’s never any thumb-twiddling during harvest, this season isn’t fast and furious. We’ve had surprisingly few triple-digit days and even an early 1.2 inches of fall rain (a mid-harvest curveball that could have caused trouble but didn’t). The fruit avoided rot, flavors keep developing, and the slow ripening continues. That slower pace in the Vineyard also really shows up in the cellar.

In hot, compressed vintages we’re chasing ripeness as big swaths of the vineyard ripen and need to be harvested all at once. In a low-and-slow year like this, we can keep pace with the vines instead of chasing runaway sugars and wobbly acidity.

Vineyard Manager Daniel Martinez and his team have spent fewer consecutive overnights harvesting this season because the season is more measured. Winemaker Dallas, Cellar Master Jesse, Harvest Intern Diego, and the rest of the crew aren’t buried every morning under a deluge of harvest bins full of hand-picked fruit.

There’s time to walk the Vineyard, taste, think, and time each pick because Mother Nature has gone slow-cooker mode instead of broiler mode.

As of today, about 85 percent of the fruit is in, and predictably the last grape hanging is Mourvèdre. It's taking its sweet time!

For now, we’re walking rows, tasting berries, managing active ferments, moving finished lots to barrel, and going with the low-and-slow flow.

Cheers, "

- Maggie T. & The Alta Colina Team, 10/30/25