Background: The Tenbrink family farms 52 acres of walnuts, fruit orchards, tomatoes and 50 of vineyards in the paradise of Suisun Valley. Suisun is just on the other side of the mountains east of Napa, just west of the Sacramento and San Joaquin delta wetlands. it is an old farming land with mixed agriculture, dominated still, as it was three generations ago, by small family farms raising several crops. The Tenbrinks have been raising fruit for more than 25 years; their lives are rooted in their fields and ordered by the daily cycle of the sun and the yearly cycle of the growing seasons. The Tenbrinks do not just farm, they feed. their home is always open, their table full of guests, the local youth in the driveway seeing what Linda has cooking or out on the counter. Beer in the cooler, wine on the table. From 2006 on, some of the wine on the table has been theirs.
In 2002 they sold grapes to Luna Vineyards in Napa for the first time; in 2003 Luna made a single-vineyard wine from their Petite Sirah. In gratitude for making the connection to Luna, the Tenbrinks gave a ton of their Petite Sirah to Abe Schoener, then the winemaker at Luna. He gratefully accepted the grapes for his own little business, the Scholium Project. From them, he made a crazy, dark red wine, so wild and so intense that he felt obliged to give it a name that made clear how far it was from the civilized wines of Napa. he called it Babylon. with that gift was born a great partnership. the Tenbrink's babylon vineyard is now the anchor of the scholium project's red wine making, and abe is now the Tenbrink's winemaker for their own wines. in 2007, they manifested the courage and imagination to build their own facility. Abe gets to run it, and it is the home for his wines, Maldonado Family vineyards, and the projects of two friends: Jason Berthold's Courier wines, and Grayson Hartley's yet unnamed project. The new Tenbrink winery is a simple, wonderful, happy home for all of this wine. it is has a past rooted in family's fruit and vegetable farming and a future that looks unbounded. It is pretty clear that he Abe's role in the wine making is somewhere between teacher and custodian: within a year or two, Steve Tenbrink will be all the winemaker the family needs.
Viticultural Plan:
Vineyard Favorites:
Our old vine Cabernet is planted on a South facing hillside and the rows are oriented to East and West. We leaf-pull on the North side only, for additional indirect light. These vines have very low vigor because ofthe heavy clay soil and hillside location. Vines are spur-pruned with two canes per spur and we allow some extra canes to grow off of the cordon arm if it is naturally spaced properly. The fruit set is generally only one bunch per cane, therefore the yields are very low with a 3 ton average per acre. The climate of this area is very similar to Rutherford and Calistoga, with very warm days and cool nights with a 40 to 50 degree change from the daytime highs to nighttime lows. The Southern exposure allows the sun on the vines all day to give this Cabernet the long growing season it needs to achieve maturity. The vines are drip irrigated and are allowed only enough water to maintain sufficient growth to ripen the crop. At verasion, any bunches that are way behind in maturity will be removed so that all the bunches on the vine are uniform in ripeness. Any bunches prior to harvest that don't have good color will be dropped also. The crop will be hand picked by the same men that have been working for our family for over 20 years.
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