Beyond the Tasting Bar: 5 Ways to Celebrate Harvest in Temecula Valley
September is California Wine Month, and Temecula Valley has been picking since midsummer. Here are five ways to spend a weekend — or better yet, a Tuesday — in the middle of it.
Temecula picks early. Grapes for whites and sparkling wines come off in high summer, reds follow through August and September, and the practical result is that California Wine Month lands here in the middle of harvest rather than at the front of it. By Labor Day, the crush pads have been running for weeks. Tanks are full, the floors are sticky, and if you walk into the right building at the right hour the whole place smells like fermenting must. It’s heady and it’s electric.
Temecula is also a valley of small family wineries, which means the person who made the wine is usually somewhere on the property, and during harvest they’re on the property a lot. Fruit doesn’t wait for the weekend. That access is the thing most visitors don’t know to take advantage of, so we’ll start there.
1. Come midweek and ask questions.
When you schedule your visit to Temecula on a weekday, the region becomes a different place. Tasting rooms are quiet, staff has time to talk, and owners and winemakers are far more likely to be around and willing to stop for a few minutes.
Ask what came in that morning. Ask what’s fermenting. Ask whether you can see it. Plenty of the time the answer is yes, and you’ll find yourself out on the crush pad or in front of a tank, tasting juice that’s still fermenting, which is not an experience anyone sells tickets to. It isn’t a package you book. It’s just how the valley runs, and it only happens if you’re not afraid to speak up. Chances are, the team will reward your curiosity one way or another. Be sure to grab a SIP Passport for discounted tastings and other perks before you go.
2. Taste a vertical, then get your hands dirty.
Harvest is the front end of a wine’s life. A vertical tasting shows you the other end: the same wine from the same site at five or six different ages, poured side by side so you can taste what a decade does to it.
Baily Vineyard & Winery has built an experience around this. The estate tasting walks you through a vertical of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, or Meritage, and the family holds back cases of each vintage specifically so the tasting can keep running. Three generations of Bailys make the wine now — Phil, son Patrick, grandson Alex — and one of them is usually the one pouring. Reservations are required, and it’s worth planning the day around.
If tasting backward makes you want to try it forward, become winemaker for a day at a blending session, where you build a wine from component lots, bottle it, and take it home. BOTTAIA offers this experience by appointment. Sip the fruits of your labor over a charcuterie board as you take in gorgeous vineyard views and contemplate a potential second career in the cellar.
3. Stomp grapes, then stay for dinner
Climbing into a barrel of grapes is undignified and completely worth it, and thankfully Temecula Valley is full of grape stomp events throughout the harvest season. Callaway, Ponte, Wilson Creek, Bella Vista, South Coast, Wiens, Europa Village, and Somerset all run them through September. Bring a towel and a sense of humor, and wear something you don’t care about.
Then stay for dinner. September is when the valley’s kitchens do their best work: harvest dinners in barrel rooms, winemaker’s dinners where the winemaker is at the table, and larger food-focused evenings across the valley. Dates move around, so check www.temeculawines.org before you commit to anything.
4. Get out into the vineyards
You can’t learn much about the growing season from a patio, and September is the month the vineyards are worth looking at closely — fruit on the vine one week, bare canopy the next. Thankfully there are plenty of options for getting out there and seeing it all from a different perspective, not just from the bottom of your glass.
Doffo invites you to hop aboard a Kawasaki NAV through the estate vineyard — wine in hand — and then into the production facility for a look at harvest and aging up close, with a barrel tasting and a walk through their MotoDoffo motorcycle collection.
Wilson Creek’s Regenerative Agriculture Tractor Tour lets you ride through the regenerative blocks while learning about composting, cover cropping, and what they’re doing to the soil, with five tastings poured out in the vineyard.
Danza del Sol’s Grapes & Gears takes small groups out through the estate on six-seater UTVs for a wine-filled 90-minute experience covering the De Portola side of the valley.
Sidecar Tours run tandem motorcycle sidecars out of Akash Winery on roughly two-and-a-half-hour routes that hit two wineries, letting you know that the back roads and vineyards look different from three feet off the ground.
Several outfitters also run guided horseback rides through the vines, and there’s sunrise balloon flights with El Cielo. Seeing wine country from the sky is particularly special in September since grape-picking usually happens near dawn, so you can catch a birds-eye glimpse of vineyard crews doing what they do best.
5. Order the Mediterranean varieties
The most interesting wines in Temecula are often not the ones most visitors order.
The valley sits at elevation with a marine corridor that pulls cool ocean air in through the Rainbow Gap most afternoons, and the grapes that respond to that are Mediterranean: Vermentino, Falanghina, Grenache Blanc, Fiano, Mourvèdre, Sangiovese, Tempranillo, Cabernet Franc, Syrah, Montepulciano. Growers didn’t plant them on a hunch about trends. They planted them because they shine here.
Let California Wine Month be your moment to get outside your comfort zone and ask for the wines you’re struggling to pronounce. Tasting room staff will always be happy to help and you may just end up with a new favorite.
Don’t forget to post it.
Harvest is one of the best-looking months of the year in Temecula and it’s full of pure wine country action, so if you’re out in the valley this month, share it! Be sure to tag the winery and the person who poured for you. Use #TemeculaWines and #CaliforniaWineMonth, and tag @temeculawines and @visittemecula. We love to repost.
Full September lineup: temeculawines.org | visittemeculavalley.com/wine-month
