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Karissa Kruze and Steve Dutton
This is a sample podcast episode of Off the Vine (piggybacking on California Wine Country) to give you an idea of what an OTV podcast could look like and to see some of the available systems and tools. For another example, check out this OTV episode with Erik Miller of Kokomo Wines. Here, I ran a current OTV show in a CWC slot during the Drive’s recent summer break.
Off the Vine is back on the air today, as a segment The Drive with Steve Jaxon is also back on the air, weekdays from 3:00 to 6:00 PM on its new station, Wine Country Radio 95.5 FM. The Drive is also streaming at TheDrive955.com.
Off the Vine is sponsored by Sonoma County Winegrowers and has been on the air for 10 years. Today, Steve Jaxon welcomes Karissa Kruze and Steve Dutton to the studio. Karissa Kruze is President of Sonoma County Winegrowers and her husband Steve Dutton grows grapes in Sonoma County and makes wine under the Dutton-Goldfield label. His family bought a ranch in Graton in 1964 and today they have 1200 acres of certified sustainable wine grapes and 280 acres of certified organic apples. They also just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Dutton-Goldfield label.
As they taste the 2020 Dutton-Goldfield Chardonnay, Steve Dutton tells about their production starting with 700 cases 25 years ago, to today when they make up to 15,000 cases per year. His partner Dan Goldfield is the winemaker. He was a winemaker at La Crema when it was a small brand. Steve and Dan met when Dan would buy grapes from Dutton Ranch for La Crema.
The Sonoma County Winegrowers have been working on a partnership with the San Francisco Giants, from Friday August 25 to September 13. They are beginning a 12-home-game presence in one of the VIP suites with several Sonoma County wineries. They are also producing a new video series with Evan and local artist Amy G, who is based in Petaluma.
About “Vamanos” on Karissa’s T-shirt
Karissa’s shirt reads “Vamanos” on the front (Spanish for Let’s Go). In July, they took 31 people from their vineyard employees leadership academy to Washington DC. Tonight there is a reunion of the travel group.
At Dutton Ranch they have harvested 1000 tons of apples so far this year. They just had the Gravenstein Apple Fair in Sebastopol. The grapes are ripening and they may begin harvesting the week of September 4th. Last year on this date they were in full harvest mode. This is a later ripening year which is promising. They got 60 inches of rain by April so all of the ponds and the underground water table are full.
Dutton Ranch sells grapes to 80 wineries. The winemakers are on the scene tasting grapes, measuring sugar and deciding when to harvest. It is scheduled out 10 days in advance.
Karissa describes the just-concluded global launch of the Ford F-150 electric truck. The Ford Pro partnership was a big collaboration with Sonoma County Winegrowers. They are still using the trucks and studying the savings and benefits. She also talks about their Farm of the Future summit last July. They invited companies to share new technologies that help farmers realize their sustainability goals, to become more climate resilient and control labor costs.