Harvest Photography in Dry Creek Valley

I love Dry Creek Valley... It is a beautiful little slice of the world located in Sonoma County. It offers a simple, rural lifestyle where you can drive along narrow winding roads passing vineyards and farmhouses where you may see fencepost signs selling natural eggs or heirloom tomatoes, olives and fresh breads... many sold on "honor system" tables by the roadside. Dry Creek Valley is also filled with some of the best Zinfandel vineyards in the world. You also find Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Syrah, Cabernet Franc and a little Chardonnay, among others. Two of my favorite wineries in this small idyllic valley are Michel-Schlumberger and Bella.

Jacques Schlumberger along with winemaker Michael Brunson have built Michel-Schlumberger into a beautiful example of a sustainably farmed benchland winery. An exhibit multimedia clip will feature the winery for it's impressive practices and trendsetting in the area of organic & sustainable farming in the vineyard.

A relative newcomer in Dry Creek, Bella Winery has seduced me with it's comfortable, non-pretentious atmosphere. It's almost new age and traditional at the same time. The wines are big and rich...tasting that "Lily Hill" Zin in the wineries hillside cave makes me one happy camper!
Bella is a small winery making handcrafted wines. The grapes are pressed in a medium size hydraulic basket press. These little gems employ old world pressing technique & design in shiny modern stainless steel versions with computer monitored accuracy.

A Week of Photography

The morning fog in the vineyards was beautiful this week. Most of the grapes have completed veraison and the vines seem to be entering a more mature stage showing nice fruit and taking on character. The photograph above was taken in Alexander Valley in Sonoma County. Shortly after the photo was taken, the cool fog burned off, and the elements that formed to create a magical morning scene quickly yielded way to a warm sunny day. I shot four or five hundred photos earlier this week for the multimedia applications that will be part of the wine exhibit. Most of the photos were detail shots in the vineyard but I also did some cellar photography in Napa.


Working in a vineyard at sunrise is very special. You can see so much life there, but not just of the human form... I routinely see jackrabbits, foxes, deer, wild hogs, hawks, quail and waterfowl. For me, this melding of the flora and fauna in the vineyard is just one aspect of diversity and balance in winemaking and in life. In another month the pickers will be out in the vineyards at dawn...working as man has for centuries harvesting the fruit of the vine.