each other. We had done it. We had introduced our winery to the world—or at least the world in Napa.

# CHAPTER 8

# It's All About that Grape

From the start we knew that you need fabulous grapes to make fabulous wine. So after a few years of making wine, we decided that we wanted to upgrade the quality of the fruit from the Sacrashe vineyards.

From working her family's vineyard all those years, Kathryn knew that the flavors and quality of a grape depend on a multitude of factors. Viticulture basics range from sun exposure to water and everything in between. You need to plant so that the sun hits—and ripens—the grapes evenly. Otherwise, at harvest you wind up with ready-to-pick grapes on one side of the vine while thein terms of flavors and tannins. So we knew we wanted to produce low yields of small, concentrated fruit. Harvesting less than four to five pounds of grapes off of a vine rather than eight obviously raises the cost of the grapes, but those four to five pounds of grapes are going to be loaded with deep flavor.

Since tighter spacing forces the vines to battle each other for the nutrients in the soil, that's going to correlate to a higher quality berry, just as it does when vines fight for water and nutrients on a rocky hillside. Could we improve _our_ grapes if we used the more modern, closer, denser spacing of vines? It was a risk, but we needed to find out. So we ripped out perfectly