Frogs Leap Winery
Near St. Helena and Rutherford in the Napa Valley is Frog’s Leap Winery. When they gave us directions to get there, they gave us a series of twists and turns and twists and turns that ended with, “Look for the red barn with the weather vane with the frog on top”. As we twisted and turned through the mustard flowers that were woven through the great vineyards, we saw the red barn and sure enough up on top was the frog weather vane. When we walked inside we expected to see a cat sitting on a chair and sure enough, “Where was the cat?” “There was the cat”. The cat had wandered onto the property 13 years previously. The wine tour was free and was absolutely fantastic.
We didn’t learn a whole lot about making wine, but we did learn an awful lot about Frog’s Leap Winery. Some of the greatest things about the tour are that there was absolutely not even the slightest (???) to buy any wine(???). At the end of the tour, they let you try to shoot a basket in the old red barn. If you make the basket, you get a free bottle of wine. Sure enough, out of the 10 people who were on the tour with me, none of us were able to make the basket, although many of us were able to hit the rim. I think part of the trick of it was there was this overhang on the roof and if you try to do a really high shot, you may very well hit the roof instead of making the basket. It is totally a makeable shot though, and I’ll only need to go back and practice more.
On the tour, they told us about the farming methods, which was the part I was most interested and excited about. One thing is that for six months out of the year, there’s no rain where they are and that’s right in the deepest growing season of the grapes. In order to handle this, the vines have had to grow their big stems 15 ft into the soil where there’s a constant supply of water. They’re also very careful that in the spring time they lay down a layer of compost to cover the soil and keep it moist, and then they cut down the mustard flowers to create a pad over the compost. They don’t put any pesticides or herbicides on any of their plants. They’re very careful to do things to attract the right kind of insects and they make the vines as strong as possible so that the pests and diseases don’t attack them. I took a good long walk to the vineyards by myself when I was done and sure enough all the vines are incredibly thick and strong and healthy as if they could survive years of drought.
The entire facility runs almost entirely on solar electricity. They have approximately a thousand solar panels out back that they use to convert the sun’s energy into electricity. During their busiest part of the year, they take about 5% of their electricity from the normal electricity sources and the rest of the time of the year, they’re able to run almost entirely on the solar panels and in fact, sometimes even put extra electricity back into the regular system from their solar panels.
The people there were very, very nice and one of the things I enjoyed the most because I’m not a big drinker is that they had an organic vegetable garden and organic fruit trees, and they don’t mind if you pluck a carrot or a piece of broccoli or tangerine as you walk through the property. One we would’ve expect in today’s world for tour like that would cost a lot of money or at least with a heavy sales pitch at the end to try to get you to buy wine, but there was nothing of the sort and it was an incredibly a leisurely beautiful experience. The tour took about an hour and they took us into my favorite room which is the room where they stored all the oak barrels and we got some great photos with hundreds of oak barrels in the background.
