Photos: Teela Ridgeway
If you like to line dry your freshly laundered sheets in the great outdoors, as I do, you'll have a steady supply of clothes pins to anchor your linens against the infamous Petaluma Gap winds.
Should you have found yourself in the market for replacement supplies of clothes pins this past month, you might have been out of luck. For West Petaluma Pinot farmer, Michael Ridgeway spent an entire Sunday afternoon this late summer scouring every single clothes pin in Petaluma stores.
"Our damage from birds and yellow jackets was minimal this year, as Mike took extra care in netting a little earlier than usual and placing yellow jacket traps all throughout the vineyard," said Teela Ridgeway, in the midst of yesterday's abundant harvest at the Ridgeway's D Street extension estate.
"One challenge we always face is the wild birds that die after becoming tangled in the nets, so this year we made sure the nets were properly closed at the bottoms so that the birds couldn't get in. I think Mike purchased EVERY clothes pin in the county! We have thousands of them! It was all so clean and tidy out there that bird loss was minimal this year. We have also provided more wild bird seed on the property so that the birds were not so tempted by the grapes."
As stewards of the land and nature's visitors, the Ridgeways farm a total of about 10 acres of premium cool climate Pinot Noir. Yesterday's harvest, on the last day of summer, yielded around 14 tons of fruit. The majority of this year's fruit trucked directly to Rhys Vineyards in Los Gatos. "We also sell to a few local Garagesites as well as a customer in Vancouver and one flies in from Wyoming to crush with his son in Napa," said Teela. "It looks like we have more crop this year than last, but one never knows until the last of the grapes are weighed in."
The Ridgeways, like most all cool climate Pinot Noir farmers within the Petaluma Gap microregion of the Sonoma Coast Appellation, reveled in this past week's heat spike that brought the sugars up on crops for an optimal pick. Three quarters of the Ridgeway's vineyard was harvested yesterday, with the remainder scheduled to be harvested later this week.
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