First Weekend in Napa - Harvest

What better way to kick off our first weekend as official Napa residents than harvest? We lucked out with perfect cool, fall weather on Saturday. Usually harvest weekend is blazing hot and so uncomfortable, but not this year!

Grayson ate his body weight in Cab grapes. He loved that they are so sweet and so much smaller than regular table grapes. 

Before we picked, Gramps did the blessing of the grapes blew the conch shell to the North, South, East and West, a thank you for the blessing of a plentiful harvest. Ever seen Walk in the Clouds? 

We like to blast old school Frank Sinatra, and Dean Martin from the Bose speaker while we work in the vineyard and destem the grapes. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie...... :) 

We picked and destemmed {by hand} over 300 pounds of grapes this year. A record harvest by almost 100 pounds! Gramps read off his list from years past, and we couldn't believe that our first harvest in 2010 only yielded 25 pounds of grapes.  This little vineyard has come a long way.

After dinner we soaked our feet in Vodka {to kill the germs, not soak up a buzz} and then started stomping. Grayson thought it was hilarious at first and then started yelling Aw Done! Aw Done!

The next morning we went back to the garden and picked pumpkins from Gram's pumpkin patch and played on the tire swing. After Grayson went down for his nap Nick and I went out to meet our Realtor and started our house hunt! We found a few pretty good ones. Hopefully we are not too far off from completing this crazy transition and will find the perfect new home soon. In the meantime we are counting our blessings that we have such a beautiful family home to live in, and are endlessly grateful to Nick's parents {Grams and Gramps} for sharing their space, their little piece of heaven with us until we find our new house.

Monday morning was Grayson's first day at his new school. We had a really tough time leaving his old school and cried many tears with his teachers the last few days that he was there. We miss all of the awesome staff and all of Gray's sweet little friends, but we know that he will make friends quickly here and eventually he will love them just as much. He cried at drop off the Monday morning and looked at me like I was crazy when I started to walk out the door. He was so happy and having fun when I picked him up and he told us that he had a good day. Until Tuesday... when I pulled in the parking lot and he realized where we were and started shouting NO! NO! NO! NO! before we could even get out of the car.

He's sleeping like complete crap... unless one of us sleeps in his room, which means that all of us are sleeping like complete crap and we're doing everything we can to keep him comfortable and on his regular routine. It's hard knowing that he is having a tough time with the transition and when he asks for his friends at his old school or asks for home it is enough to break my heart. Everyday will get a little bit better, and just as soon as he's used to living here, we will be moving into our new forever home and that is exciting to think about. Even if it means we start all of this over again.

Paper Anniversary



This weekend we celebrated our paper anniversary. It is said that the paper anniversary symbolizes the delicate nature of a young marriage, as well as the modest beginnings of a new couple. I love old traditions and we both stuck with the paper theme for our gifts for each other.

My in-laws loves gifted us the use of their Napa house for the weekend. We are so lucky to have a family home in a place like Napa. Visiting Napa is on so many people's bucket lists, and people spend thousands of dollars to vacation to this place. Our second home. It's important to keep that in mind and not take such a beautiful blessing for granted.

We drove up after work on Friday and found the kitchen decorated with a banner and a bottle of champs in the fridge. God love my sweet in-laws. Seriously. They are so cute.

Nick made a couple pizzas and we spent the night relaxing and reminiscing. I found out Friday night that we would be waking up at 5:00 AM Saturday morning to go on a hot air balloon!

 

We woke up early Saturday to the sound of the pouring rain. A call to the balloon company confirmed that we would not, in fact be able to go that day. We went back to bed and woke up to more rain. We sat by the fire and talked about our wedding morning and what a complete disaster it would have been to have had rain that day. Our entire wedding was outside except for the bar and dance floor. We seriously would have been screwed if it had rained and I couldn't help but think about all of the poor brides that no doubt had weddings happening in the valley that day. We ended up going downtown to get a coffee at Oxbow, which was packed because of the rain. We left pretty quickly and went to a brewery to have a quick lunch and watch the A's game.{by the way... Wooooooooo!!! We won the West!! See you at the playoffs!}

 

Saturday night we went to one of my all time favorite restaurants, Michael Chiarello's, Bottega in Yountville. Dinner was absolutely to die for. We had frozen wedding cake to eat at home so we skipped desert, but loved these cute little peanut butter chocolates our server brought.

 

 

Sunday morning we woke up {at 5 AM} to go get on the balloon. This was an experience that I wish everyone could have at least once in their lives. Watching the sunrise from 3,000 feet above the vineyards was just breath taking. The balloon company that we went with launches the earliest and from the furthest North so we got to see all of the other balloons filling up and launching. At one point there were 16 other balloons in the air. Amazing.

 

We got married right on that golf course! To the left of the pond you can see a section of wedding chairs set up for another wedding.

 

Sunday was our actual anniversary and we flew directly over the golf course where we got married. Having to postpone the ride actually worked out better than we could have planned!

 

By the time we were done it was only 8:30 so we went to breakfast and then back home to watch our wedding video, do our gifts, and definitely take a nap. For my gift I made a shadow box frame with the lyrics from our wedding song. Nick gave me an empty journal with a message in it, promising to fill the journal with love letters and notes to me. I honestly couldn't think of a more perfect gift. This man just melts my heart.

 

 

My heart just feels so full of love after this weekend.



The Crush

Is there anyone in the world that doesn't like fall? The pumpkin spice lattes, the crisp air, the changing colors, the new wardrobe, the football, and most importantly the food. 

For our family, fall is an exceptionally special time of year. Fall means the grape harvest. The crush.
Anytime between the beginning of September and the end of October, the entire family and a few family friends are on call for the harvest. When the sugars in the grapes are perfect, everyone is expected to drop everything and head to my in-law's in Napa to help in the vineyard. Our vineyard is small, we'll just call it 100 vines. Small, but mighty.

The fateful call came mid week last week and early Saturday morning we found ourselves making the short drive up to the valley. {I'm just going to be real here. I'm thanking my lucky stars the call didn't come this week meaning we would be harvesting with a house full of people on my anniversary weekend. As much as I love the harvest, I am not cool with it taking the place of anniversary fun.}

We knew ahead of time that we were going to have a lot of grapes this year. More than we've ever had before so we called in some reinforcements and planned to do a dinner afterwards to thank everyone for helping. By Sunday everyone was exhausted but relieved to have everything done so early in the season. 

I didn't get many pictures of the de-stemming  process but that took us the longest. We dump all of the grapes onto two tables, pour some glasses of wine, and get really dirty. Pulling the grapes apart is a messy job and I didn't want to get my pretty camera all dirty but I did snap an Instagram photo or two.

By far, the best part of the entire process is the crushing of the grapes. Since we don't have thousands of pounds of grapes to deal with, we get to crush them the old fashioned way... with our feet! {Don't worry we bleach ourselves sterile first.}



Saturday night my FIL bottled all of last years wine. It was super tasty and fun to watch. He usually bottles when none of us are around to bug help him.

Happy Harvest!