2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020
The 2024 McHenry Vineyard Harvest was fantastic. The fruit came in between 23 and 24.5 Brix, with 3.3-3.4 pH. Yield was bountiful. Again we are making our wine at Beauregard Vineyards down the road. We appreciated the hard work from Gerardo's vineyard crew, and Ryan's crew at the winery. We poured our wine at the Bonny Doon Art and Wine Festival in the fall, which is a fun local event benefiting Bonny Doon school.
We continue to work with our designer on a new pre-Clearance application, and hope to be cleared by the end of 2024, or early 2025. Next steps will be to do soil testing for foundation and septic and do a drainage and excavation plan with a Civil Engineer. Following that we can do a final Septic system design. In the meantime we'll continue to work on floorplans, and plan the water system (10k gallons, hydrants etc). We hope to begin construction in 2025. We are still awaiting resolution of our Business Income Loss and Extra Expense claim, as well as the resolution of some disupted ares of the Winery Insurance policy. For the Caboose insurance plan, this battle will linger as we incur rebuilding costs over time, once we begin construction.
We are also resuming some work in the pool area of "Grandma's House". We are re-landscaping the area uphill from the pool, and plan a lawn terrace, with planter beds around the fence line. We also installed electrical for lights, and sprinkler timer system. We hope to lay the sod soon.
The summer has been beautiful, and we are busy with the regular work of managing the vineyard and caring for the property. Early Summer is highly focused on wildfire risk management. There's a tremendous amount of mowing and weed-whacking to be done to keep good barriers around the vineyard, structures and other infrastructure. We are starting to see some potential production of the vines that were replanted between 2020-2022. But it will be another year or two before they are all producing any measurable amount. We continue to enjoy and be grateful for the surviving house ("Grandma's House"). The boys love the swimming pool and we've been able to host friends a number of times.
After some extended effort we did receive all of our Code/Ordinance coverage money for both the Caboose and Winery insurance policies. We have hired a Designer, who will begin work later in the summer. We will produce an updated Site Plan that shows the rock fall mitigation and septic systems more accurately, Brandon submitted our Business Income Loss and Extra Expenses Claim and is working with the insurance company to resolve.
The 2023 winter has been focused on getting the main surviving house up and running for use by the family. Adding furniture, TVs, bedding etc. It is a joy to be able to comfortably stay on the property and be able to host friends and family. In the Fall of 2023 we hosted the first McHenry family Thanksgiving in many years (with extended family), and hope to do so again in 2024. The vineyard continues to be quite healthy. However, the 2023 yield from our Estate vineyard was quite small. Maybe the smallest on record. As such, we decided to buy more Pommard fruit from Beauregard Ranch (right across the street), and some additional Pinot noir from Coast Grade (Ryan's Pinot noir vineyard in Bonny Doon). This will be a one of a kind wine. We've been jokingly calling it the "Tres Ranchos" wine. But, it will be a showcase of the Ben Lomond Mountain AVA. This Spring found us out participating in the Santa Cruz Mountains Grand Tasting event at Mountain Winery. It's nice to have enough inventory to participate in these types of events and get back out there.
In the winter months of 2024 we bottled our 2022 vintages. They are both quite lovely, and will age beautifully. Our wine was bottled along with a bunch of other Beauregard wine, and Brandon got to work the line for a day to help out. It was a rainy cold day, but was fun to see how the bottling trucks work. We had a nice late bud break in the vineyard, which bodes well for the vintage and health of the vines. There's lots of work to be done to continue burning excess wood from the fire around the property (lots of burn piles)! Some trees continue to fall, including three redwoods up by the Caboose that we hoped would survive. One fell right on where the Caboose will be rebuilt. Luckily we hadn't started building yet. There are more trees around the Caboose that will need to be felled before construction.
In terms of the rebuild, we are still working with our Septic Consultant and others to secure our Insurance coverages related to Code/Ordinance requirements. It is clear our cost will exceed our coverage by quite a lot. We are going through the hoops to get that documented and secure the money. We are now trying to hire a designer to redo our pre-Clearance application Site Plan now that we have plans and know what needs to be done to mitigate the rock fall hazards and rebuild our septic systems. Brandon is working on our Business Income Loss and Extra Expense claim component as well. It is a tedious process having to show many years of financial information. This is the last major component of the Winery (business specific) claim, minus a few areas of disagreement about coverage with our insurance provider. Hope to have this claim wrapped in 2024. The Caboose home insurance claim will take longer.
