Winemaking

With only five vineyards and just over 115 acres to farm, Archery Summit takes a personal, hands-on approach that one might even call intimate because we know our vines so well. Every crew is dedicated to a single vineyard, and many of us have been here for more than a decade. For instance, Moises Sotelo, a foreman who planted Archery Summit Estate in 1994, still attends to those vines. We also use hands-on cultivation and natural pest-control, going so far as to find beneficial insects on leaves in caneberry fields and bring them back to our vineyards. With many of our vines planted in narrow rows on steep slopes, we also hand mow. This personal style continues in the winery.

Just hours after our grape clusters reaches optimal ripeness, we hand harvest and deliver them to our 100 percent gravity-flow winery where the clusters are then hand sorted. Following fermentation, the wines flow from the tank to our barrel caves, where they age for as long as 18 months. We use only French oak barrels, often experimenting with small batches to find the optimal toast or barrel style for a particular estate wine. Only gravity moves the wines from blending to bottling; we never use pumps, so the individual character of each estate’s wine is never diminished. The outstanding Pinot Noir that begins in the vineyard fulfills its destiny in the bottle.