Hilliard Bruce Vineyards

Hilliard Bruce Vineyards facility in Santa Rita Hills AVA.

Our location in
Santa Rita Hills AVA

Our vineyard is just North of Highway 246, and West of Kessler Haak / Clos Pepe / Babcock / Melville.

2008 Hilliard Bruce Moon Pinot noir is released

Mailing List is Open

Hilliard Bruce 2008 Moon Pinot noir mailing list is open, so, if you are inclined, let us know of your interest at:

vineyard@impulse.net

Hilliard Bruce Pinot noir in Vertical, sequel to Sideways

2008 Hilliard Bruce Moon Pinot noir has threesome with Miles and Laura.

First Review of Hilliard Bruce Pinot noir 11/2010

First Review from International Wine Cellar November 2010:

2008 Hilliard Bruce Moon Pinot noir: Vivid ruby. A heady, seductively perfumed bouquet displays red and dark berries, potpourri and spicy oak, with notes of minerals and musky herbs adding complexity. Smooth, fleshy raspberry and cherry-cola flavors pick up an exotic Asian spice quality in the mid-palate and are very sharply defined. Fine-grained tannins add grip to the long, sappy, subtly smoky finish. Paul Lato is the consulting winemaker here.

Back vineyards contain Chardonnay and Pinot noir

We planted the back vineyards last, and included 4.5 acres of Calera Pinot noir, and a couple of acres of 828, plus Chardonnay 76 and 96.

Is it wrong to love a compost building?

Blower system injecting air under the compost building.

Compost Building

The new compost building is fundamental to our Certified Sustainable vineyard. Using the manure from 20 Arabian horses who live on the ranch, we create compost in 30 days without turning the pile using an automatic blower system piped under the building.

The entire compost requirements of the vineyard can be provided by the ranch.

New Reservoir Defeats Frost

Reservoir completed in July holds over one million cubic feet of water prevents Jack Frost from defeating our grape efforts. We can spray water over the entire 21 acres of vineyard raising the temperature above freezing for an unlimited amount of time.

New pump building

Pump building competed housing frost protection pump and drip irrigation pumps.

Planning havest

Inside the winery

Hilliard Bruce Pommard Block

The Pommard Block is finely tuned. Look at the shadow cast by the vine rows. Consistency is perfection for viticulture.

Extreme Viticulture

Powdery mildew does not trouble the manicured canopy in Moon Block of Hilliard Bruce Vineyards. 100% estate grown grapes means extreme viticulture. See it to believe it.

Hilliard Bruce Vineyards

Canopy management for wine grape quality begins with shoot thinning and keeping shoots vertical.

2010 Vineyard Consistancy

Vineyard consistency for 2010 is exceptional. Photo taken 5-28-10.

Winemaking

Since the the begining, the 2008 vintage, John and Christine have worked closely with Paul Lato as wine consultant . The first vintage, 2007, was declassified because it did not meet our expectations. Paul is teaching John and Christine a philosophy of wine making encompassing the approach of Henri Jayer. Paul makes his Paul Lato wine with Hilliard Bruce winery equipment in our mutually rented CCWS warehouse space, Santa Maria, California.

Robert Ingersoll Quote on the bottle

Robert Ingersoll wrote: " Happiness is the only good. The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so". Hilliard Bruce dedicates this wine to the life of Robert Ingersol.

Philosophy of Hilliard Bruce Vineyards

Own and farm 21 acres of Santa Rita Hills vineyards. Have only Pinot noir and Chardonnay. Make wine exclusively from these vineyards. Use the highest order viticulture. Make the wine with our equipment.

Focus on each individual task.

Focus on beauty.

Pressing the 2009

New pumps and water filters

Soon an insulated building will protect the equipment, and soften the noise.

Label is awaiting embossing

Next week the final label will be on the bottles.

New vegetable gardens

Vegetables for dinner, and roses for love.

Twilight after touring the vineyard

Roses lining the road to the rear vineyards.

Cold Evening in May

But the frosts should be behind us now.

Reservoir still under construction

Lilly and water grass planting beds in the reservoir will keep the water oxygen rich without pumping.

World renown viticulturalist Tom Prentice visits Hilliard Bruce

Tom Prentice of Crop Care visits Hilliard Bruce Vineyards every two weeks inspecting the 50,000 vines in order to maximize the grape quality.

Our rear vineyards, looking toward Gypsy Canyon. The Hilliard Bruce Vineyards meet or exceed the highest level of viticulture anywhere. The 2010 crop is undergoing shoot tipping.

Bottles of Pinot noir naked no longer

Soon, the Pinot noir bottles will be naked no longer. The labels have been ordered and delivered this month. 178 cases of intensity and magic aromatics held together by the mystery of gravity, for as long as the bills are paid.

Viticulture

We have 2,420 vines per acre at the western border of Santa Rita Hills AVA. The site is cool, with sandy well draining soils. We do cutting edge viticulture equal to the best in the world, overseen by Tom Prentice of Crop Care and Jeff Newton, Ben Merz of Coastal Vineyard Care.

I don't have a label!

The first Pinot noir from our vineyard and winery is now awaiting a label. I forgot about doing it. So the 178 cases have no labels. This is complicated.

Sustainable Farming: We wanted to do it right, we just weren't sure what "right" meant

We all experience it every day. Thirty million of us wonder if we should toss a plastic water bottle in the trash or reuse it for a while and risk bacterial infections. We all want to try to do things right, but what would "right" look like? For several years we farmed our vineyards organically. Organic farming addresses important issues facing farming today, but I wanted to move beyond organic farming by addressing the efficient use of electricity and water, the rights of laborers, and meeting specific sustainability farming criteria. SIP Certification meets a broader, more comprehensive goal of sustainability. SIP™ certification standards have been reviewed by more than 30 state, federal, environmental, social, agricultural and university experts. Outside auditors certify results and assure that program participants are doing exactly what they promise. We were thrilled to hear about the new SIP™ certified sustainable program for vineyards, and we signed up the first year for the pilot program.

Christine and I always wanted climate, thats why our site is in Santa Rita Hills

Climate is everything to quality wine grapes. Surviving frosts, slow ripening, little pest pressure, low humidity, no heat waves to suck the acid out of the grapes, no rain around harvest, these attributes are what make coastal California ideal for grape growing. And add to that a viticulturally educated work force, that makes it possible to do the very best grape growing.

We are trying to do something: the best viticulture we can

Viticulture, the best we can muster, is our goal. From tight 6x3 spacing, variable drip irrigation, shoot thinning, cluster thinning, we are doing everything possible. Reservoir and good roads, canopy management and pest monitoring, it happens here.

So that's why we are building the reservoir.

Santa Rita Hills AVA

Its February 19, and vines are budding out all over the valley, while we wait for bud break at Hilliard Bruce. Cover crops are green, and the second pruning has started. Construction on the new 5.2 acre reservoir is ongoing and will not have water in it for this season's frost control. Will this wet year mean less frost? Santa Rita Hills is gorgeously green.

Hilliard Bruce Vineyards

Our first wine hit the pallets and immediately disappeared into bottle shock. We expect that by spring the wine will return to life. After declassifing the entire 2007 vintage, and a quarter of the 2008 vintage, only the best barrels went into the Feb 2nd bottling consisting of 178 cases including 10 cases of magnums and 18 jerebaums. All grapes were estate grown as Hilliard Bruce wines consist only of grapes owned and maintained by Hilliard Bruce vineyards.