What the 2017 Vintage Means to Us

The debut of a new vintage of Silver Oak is always a sentimental, coming-of-age moment for a winemaker. Wines that began as a delicate grape flower more than four years ago are now ready to go into the world and write their own Bottle Stories.

A look back at the story of the 2017 Alexander Valley vintage is all about our new Sonoma County winery, where improvements in farming methods and new technologies allowed us to achieve the wine quality for which Silver Oak is known around the world.

Fermentation tank inside the production area of the Living Building-certified winery.

While winemaking is a 7,000-year-old craft, we are living in one of the most exciting chapters in history of the wine industry with explosive innovation and widespread improvement in global quality. Many of these technologies arrived just in time for the 2017 vintage, including mechanical harvesting first pioneered in Champagne and new tanks built locally in Sonoma County that allow for smaller individual fermentations. We were also able to start performing automatic pumpovers and to configure settings like tank temperature remotely.

The vintage was bracketed on both ends by dramatic scenes. Epic winter rains and flooding finally brought an end to an enduring five-year drought and awakening Mother Nature with a jolt. The growing season concluded with a heat wave that compressed our window for picking fruit. The speed and perfection of a mechanical harvester gave our vineyard team a big assist, allowing all fruit to be picked at optimal ripeness over a brief four-week period.

Hot weather kick-started harvest on September 4, but our irrigation management, milder temperatures and foggy mornings allowed the vines to recover and resume their trajectory towards full aromatic and physiological ripeness. We were pleased to see sugars and acids clocking in at normal levels.

Although 2017 certainly presented its share of challenges, it also represents the beginning of a new era at Silver Oak, where new technologies and methods shine through in the wine with a lighter footprint on the planet.

We’ll toast to that!