A stylish new Woodhawk golf cap being worn by a stylish friend
By Michael Busselen - November 1, 2026
We are delighted to announce the Woodhawk Vineyards brand new website. As we prepare to release our first wine shortly, we have a little “amuse-bouche” for you: our first logoed merchandise, featuring limited editions of Woodhawk Vineyards logo wear: hats, shirts, vests, corkscrews and sweatshirts.*
We’re proud of the new website, which we’ve been working on for the past year with our website designer Percy Chow and our Chief Technology Officer Greg Osborn (turns out, like everything else in our winery journey, it’s a lot more work building a great website with an online store than we imagined!). We think it does a wonderful job of telling the story of Woodhawk, giving people a sense of the place before they visit. Plus, it features the true star of the show: our dog Rosie!
What about the wine?
We plan to release the 2023 Cabernet Sauvignon in a couple of months. If you sign up for our interest list (or order any merch), you’ll be the first to know our official release date! And as a reminder, we are only releasing 100 cases.
Tasting Room Update
We continue to make good progress on our tasting room, which will open in late 2027. We have been hard at work behind the scenes meeting with our architect, general contractor, interior designer, geotechnical engineer, civil engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer and structural engineer (among others) to move as fast as we can to get it built. It is going to be gorgeous, and we have been fine-tuning our tasting experience. We can’t wait for the blog where we tell you we are open for tastings!
Architect’s rendering of our new tasting room coming late 2027
Harvest 2026 Recap
Our winemaker Rob Davis likes to talk about how harvest is his favorite of the year. The smell of the ripe grapes, the excitement as we pick and begin to make wine, the first taste of juice – all the wonderful sensory experiences arriving in quick succession. Then in the next breath he will tell us how much he likes spring in wine country. And bud break. And veraison. I think we can all agree: every season in wine country is beautiful in its own way.
But harvest is the moment we spend the whole year anticipating. And because, based on the weather, the grapes ripen at a slightly different time each year, it is an event that cannot be scheduled in advance. When it is time to pick – well, we drop everything and harvest our grapes.
It was an cool, overcast morning when we picked on August 24
This year we picked our Woodhawk Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon grapes on August 24. Everyone was up before sunrise and the day started a little on the chilly side. Four hours later, all the grapes were in the bins and on the trucks, and we began making our 2026 wine.
Our yummy grapes ready to get processed
If you haven’t heard, 2026 was a different growing year. It started with a couple unusually hot days in the early spring, which tricked the vines into starting early. We then had some rain events and cooler weather, which had the unfortunate effect of knocking a lot of the flowers–the would-be grapes– off the vines, leading to a smaller than normal harvest. After that rocky start, we settled into a more normal growing season in May and saw our usual mix of hot days and cool evenings, allowing a nice long growing season. And then, as always, it got hot at the end, leaving us once again harvesting some of the very first Cabernet Sauvignon in Sonoma County.
The silver lining in this challenging growing year is that the grapes we did get are of extremely high quality and flavor. Across the valley, growers and winemakers alike agree that the 2026 vintage will be one of the greats. There will just be less of it!
*Note that shipping rates for small businesses like us are much higher than for the big companies you typically order from. If you order more than one item of our merch, the cost per unit for shipping comes way down.
