Harvest 2026: A Worthy Gamble

With the last of the grapes coming off the vines just yesterday, Harvest 2026 is officially in the books, but Vintage 2026 is just beginning. The fruit is picked and now we move into the cellar to care for it: pressing and pumping, tasting and planning, punching down and racking, and cleaning – mostly cleaning. So how was harvest ‘26? It was a gamble, but we think it’s paid off…

This harvest was tricky. It was a relatively cloudy and cool ripening season, and while it thankfully stayed quite dry, we didn’t have many of those hot and sunny fall days to push the fruit over the finish line. So we had to be patient. We had to give the vines time to care for their fruit. We carefully made picking plans, and then, when the forecast changed slightly, we carefully made new picking plans. We did that a lot.

We had to be defiant. Most of the growing season, we’re at Mother Nature’s mercy, responding frantically to her whims. Come harvest time we get gutsy, standing our ground, betting on our vines and their ability to handle whatever she throws at them, risking our fruit through rain or cold for the hope of just one more good day of ripening on the other side.

Contending with imperfect weather is one of the exciting challenges of making wine in a climate like ours. At this point in the season, we think often of a little piece of wisdom we learned from our favorite winemaker while working in New Zealand: “If you pick before a rain when the fruit isn’t ripe, you’re guaranteed to make a mediocre wine. But if you hang it, there’s still a possibility of making something great.” This year, more than any other since we’ve been at Lincoln Peak, we put this philosophy to the test.

So, in search of extra ripening days and with a healthy dose of courage, we decided to hang about 50% of the vineyard into the second week of October when most everyone else in the state had finished picking. The risk, we believe, has paid off. This year’s fruit is intensely flavorful, complex, vivid, and full of energy.

We chose what to pick and what to let hang on a vine-by-vine basis, doing multiple passes through each vineyard block at specific times. It’s labor intensive and time consuming, but carefully evaluating the condition of each vine is truly the greatest tool a winegrower has for ensuring ripeness. This multi-pass strategy is something often seen in cooler wine-growing areas known for white wine, like Austria and Germany, and we already have really high hopes for the 2026 wines.

Now comes the fun part: making the wine! You’ll find us in the cellar keeping track of more than 30 different fermentations, each one unique and demanding. Fermentation is dynamic, so we taste the rapidly changing wines every day, watching carefully to see how flavors evolve, discussing maceration and temperature, and making sure nothing goes wrong. There is no formula or standard recipe. Rather than make a wine that tastes identical year after year, our focus is on finding the best expression of each individual vintage. That is, to us, the beauty of wine driven by its terroir.

Stay tuned for more from us as the 2026 wines settle in for the winter. In the meantime, read on for a bunch of exciting events to come, and we hope to see you in the tasting room soon!  

Musings from the Great Lull

The arrival of early and eager Adalmiina means harvest is officially underway at Lincoln Peak, yet we still have a week or two before our next pick. We’re in the Great Lull, the stretchy interlude between the activities of summer and fall. We worked tirelessly with our wonderful team all year to tend the vines, laying canes and wrapping shoots, clipping and combing and thinning, walking the long rows again and again, all with one goal in mind: to raise resilient vines able to ripen fruit that bears the unforgeable signature of place.

Our job is, momentarily, done. Now we get to sit back and watch the vines work, converting the last photons of summer to sugar and flavor. We are waiting for the Goldilocks moment when the vine has reached its reproductive acme. Achieving fruit ripeness is a vine’s sole evolutionary task; it lives to pass on its DNA, guarded in the seed of its fruit, but its roots keep it firmly in place. So the vine produces colorful and delicious berries to attract seed dispersers like birds and deer, who will eat the fruit and drop the seeds elsewhere. When the grapes are ready to be nature’s dessert, they are ready to make wine.

The vines will tell us when we have reached this moment. Monitoring concentrations of sugar and acid is helpful, but the real tell comes from our intuition, and from lots and lots of tasting. We walk the vines, plucking berries from all sides of the cluster, in all parts of the canopy. We taste from the morning side, then the evening side, then the morning side again. We think about the flavor, the complexity, the balance, the richness. We chew on skins and crunch through seeds, noticing textures on our tongues, evaluating bitterness and astringency. We feel how the seeds separate from the pulp, whether they slide away with ease, ready for dispersal, or stay trapped inside, protected and continuing to ripen. We spit out the seeds to check for lignification, pressing a fingernail through to see whether any green remains, or if it’s ripe, brown and impenetrable. Berry analytics serve as a gut check, a little nudge in the right direction. But the most revealing indicators are the ones you can’t measure. After all, making wine, just like drinking it, is more about feeling than anything else.

More than any other moment during the year, the ripening period after veraison is the greatest informant for our winemaking decisions in the cellar. It will indicate how much time we let the juice soak with the skins, how gently we press our whites, whether to include stems or whole clusters in our ferments. This is the human side of vintage variation, entirely predicated on what we taste off the vine. Over time spent in our vineyards, we learn to read our fruit like sheet music, letting it reveal to us the unique sound and color of the season, the melody and the harmony, the dynamics and the timbre. It is humbling, this admission, knowing it is not really up to us to decide. We are merely the musicians playing nature’s score.

With very little left to do in the vines, the ripening period is a time of mixed emotions for us. We diligently scrub the winery, preparing tanks for fresh juice. We feel pride and joy, satisfaction and relief for all that we accomplished during the season, but our minds fall prey to the anxious anticipation of the upcoming rush. After months of proverbial sprinting, we come to a screeching halt, and it takes some time before our cortisol drops, before we can take some deep breaths and prepare ourselves for the marathon of harvest.

For now, as always, the power lies with Mother Nature. In the words of the late Wendell Berry, our early September pursuit is only to “come into the peace of wild things.” There will be more work very soon, when the secrets of the season are revealed as we steadily unload small yellow picking bins onto the crush pad.

In the meantime, we hope to see you in the tasting room! Fall’s beautiful display of color is just around the corner, and we couldn’t imagine a more perfect time to enjoy a glass of wine on the porch.

New Release - Starlight & Frontenac Noir 2025

Get ready to taste the latest releases from the 2025 vintage! These wines have become favorites in the tasting room, and we’re very excited to share the new vintage with you all.

2025 Starlight

wild raspberry. grenadine. white tea.

One vineyard block, one harvest day, one fermenter.

Starlight is a dry rosé made entirely from Marquette. The Lower Vineyard provides the fruit for this wine, which we like to harvest a bit earlier in the season to showcase the variety’s bright, fresh, and fruity side. A lighter Marquette crop in 2025 meant that the entire lower block went into Starlight. Every drop came from those vines, and their fruit went no where else.

We harvested on the morning of September 12th alongside enthusiastic and generous volunteers from our community. After picking, the juice was immediately pressed from the berries and transferred to a single stainless steel tank, where it remained until we bottled it last month, just as the eight month (!) spontaneous fermentation finally came to an end.

Like many of the wines we’ve released from this vintage, the 2025 Starlight feels more delicate and restrained than its 2024 counterpart. We think this is the vineyard’s expression of a larger than normal diurnal shift in August and September, which slowed ripening and helped retain acidity and fruit character. And golly, there’s a lot of fruit — raspberry, cranberry, elderberry, and just about any other berry you can think of. Wait till you taste it.

Starlight is a snapshot of a single vineyard at a single moment in time. It’s one of the most transparent and expressive wines we make.

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2025 Frontenac Noir

macerated cherries. blackberry jam. palo santo.
Adaptability, age, and time.

While Starlight was one of our first picks in 2025, Frontenac Noir was our very last. We harvested the fruit for this wine on October 10th with ice crystals of the season’s first frost crunching underfoot. We started early and were finished by noon, by which time the leaves had fallen from the vines, bittersweet closure on another stunning growing season.

If there is one variety in the vineyard that we’ve learned the most from it might be Frontenac Noir. We went into the 2024 harvest thinking we’d make a light-bodied, fruity, chillable expression of Frontenac Noir, but the wine turned out to be so much more. We were blown away by its richness, complexity, and depth, and inspired by who the wine wanted to be. Smitten, we leaned further into that style in 2025. We love letting the vines take the lead, reacting to the season and adapting our practices in the cellar to best represent them.

Immaculate weather and a total lack of rainfall at the end of the season allowed us to push the ripeness and get the most out of the vines. We picked more than a week later than in 2024 and the fruit was beautifully ripe, dimpled and delicious. In the cellar, we included 30% whole clusters in the fermentation, stems and all, contributing texture and spice. We fermented a bit cooler, extracting slowly and carefully, and pressing earlier than our other reds.

This wine changes profoundly with age, both in the winery and in bottle. In its youth, we find incredible aromatic intensity centered on a dense and complex core of fruit. With time, the fruit will soften, turning jammier and plummier, and the wine’s earthiness, smoke, and spice will shine through.

Frontenac Noir is a testament to Vermont’s ability to produce truly profound, age-worthy wines. Buy a few bottles and open them periodically to watch the wine change.

A Look Back on Two Years at Lincoln Peak

Our story in real time

Suddenly, we blinked, and it’s been over two years that we’ve been back in Vermont, raising our girls and building our dream at Lincoln Peak. Our individual connections to farming started long before we met; Nichole was raised on a peach orchard in California’s Central Valley, and Kevin grew up here in Vermont’s Champlain Valley. We both got bit by the wine bug back in 2013 and after a decade traveling around and making wine with some of the best in the world, we finally found ourselves where we always wanted to be. We took over Lincoln Peak in April of 2024, and we pruned the vineyard, reopened the tasting room, and welcomed our second daughter before June. Talk about a whirlwind…

Fast forward two years and our baby is a toddler, our love for making wine in Vermont grows stronger every day, and our vision for the future of Lincoln Peak has never been more clear.

This is our story, in media res. An update in real time.

Here’s what stands out for each of us:

Nichole

As a native Californian, I am somewhat ashamed to admit that my first impression of Vermont was, “That’s a wine region!?” Thankfully, after our first harvest, I was convinced; now, I can’t imagine living or working anywhere else. I am so proud to be a part of Vermont’s nascent winemaking story. Cold climate-appropriate hybrids are no longer just a footnote in the winemaking world; they are becoming a large part of the conversation around sustainability and resilience in the face of climate change. Growing hybrids is not easy from a marketing perspective — the market still wants Pinot Noir and Cab and Sauvignon Blanc — but it allows us to make wines that are far more sustainable, and that story is one I can tell with integrity. Hybrids are the future, and to think that we’re among the trailblazers of this Brave Little State is something I’m immensely proud of.

While moving to Vermont has infused my career as a winemaker with new excitement and motivation, the most unexpected abundance has come in the form of community. In California, the industry is simply too big and developed for the closeness that we have found here in Vermont. From the small business collabs to the open sharing of advice among winemakers to you, our biggest fans — I am deeply grateful for the community we are building. My cup is already overflowing and we’re just getting started.

As we look to the future, we have one simple goal: make serious, world-class wine that doesn’t take itself too seriously. To do that, we’re going to continue focusing on two things that really matter: the land and the community. Our what and our why.

Kevin

I’ll admit that moving back to Vermont was a selfish decision. Making great wine here always felt like a pipe dream, and a secondary goal to just living here. When you’re raised in Vermont, its soul becomes an indelible part of your own; living and working in different parts of the world was formative and foundational, but the call of Vermont was never silenced. It was time to head home and, thankfully, Nichole was on board.

When I look back at our first two years at Lincoln Peak, I’m overjoyed. We’re making wines that I’m super proud of and we haven’t had to sacrifice quality to farm the way we want - with a focus on sustainability, ecology, and soil health. That’s a choice you have to make in a lot of places, but when you work with varieties suited to your climate, it’s a no brainer. Farming this way makes you an intimate part of the ecosystem. The land becomes your colleague: a living, breathing entity that has a personality and preferences and idiosyncrasies just like we do. I love to imagine how time spreads out in front of me, allowing me to deepen my relationship with this place and these plants.

Sharing the vineyard with our community has been everything. We wouldn’t have been able to entertain the idea of this dream without the help of our village: parents, siblings, grandparents, friends, the community coming out to harvest, our regulars at Friday Night music… it’s overwhelming to think about how much support we have. Thank you to every single person who has been a part of our story.

Here’s to many more!

The soft return to light

Spring came to us slowly this year, as if time reluctantly withdrew from the sweetness of winter’s hibernation. The vineyard awoke lazily, which meant we finished pruning with time to spare. The weather oscillated from warm to cold, never quite making up its mind. Consequently (and thankfully), bud break was delayed, sparing us from the devastating spring frosts that just keep happening. Our thoughts are with all of our friends farming fruit in the Northeast, some of whom lost their entire crop in just a couple hours on the morning of April 21st. Here’s a sobering reflection from Tom Croghan at Dodon Vineyards in Maryland.

Though we escaped the worst of it, we did see some damage from a radiation frost on May 21st. With clear skies and no wind, the soil, warmed all day by the spring sun, loses heat quickly to the atmosphere and cold air from above is allowed to settle. On mornings like these, temperatures can be 3-4°F warmer just a couple feet above the ground. On May 21st, our frost line was around 6” so only our renewals were damaged. This is one of the reasons why we train our vines five feet off the ground – to let the fruit grow in the incubator of warm, chest-level air.

The frost was preceded by a brief stretch of mid-80s, which sent shoots into overdrive. On Sunday, May 17, we had half-inch swollen buds; by Tuesday, May 19, the shoots measured six inches. It was cinematic. You could have set up a lawn chair and watched them grow. Mowing and shoot thinning became a priority almost overnight, and so we got to work writing new choreography to Mother Nature’s rhythms. Our vocation demands agility and improvisation, as we learn new steps to a new dance, season after season. 

As any Vermonter knows, spring is a sacred passage from dark to light. After months of cold days and long nights, the return of spring buzzes with limitless light and life. We feel the shift in our bodies, like our cells are responding to a higher frequency, to a more social sun. The yeast feel it, too. Many of our wines, having retreated into dormancy after being tucked away for winter, come alive once again. The textbooks say it’s because the cellar is getting warmer, but we’ve kept it warm all winter. Maybe it has more to do with the light. Maybe it’s the reawakening of the world, the pheromones of plants, the songs of birds and bees, the lingering of light that make the difference. Frontenac Blanc suddenly resumes its fermentation, ending dry as the yeast eat the last grams of sugar. A stubborn and tired barrel of Marquette gets spritzy, then softens and begins to taste whole. It’s hard to see it as pure coincidence.

As we shed the layers of our long wintering, as we celebrate the staying sun, so do all living creatures. We’re reminded every spring of our gratitude to work so closely with the earth and to notice these subtle shifts. We’re sure you’ve noticed them, too. 

In light of the turning of seasons, our tasting room has transitioned to summer hours, and we have plenty of events on the docket! We hope you’ll join us soon for a Friday Night Music concert and a glass of wine, or a relaxing Sunday afternoon on the porch, enjoying the soft return to a little more light.

Spring Wine Release - 2026

Our long-awaited spring release is almost here! We’re thrilled to be popping the corks on the first of the 2025 wines: Limestone, La Crescent, and Black Sparrow. Compared to the rich, powerful wines of the 2024 vintage, 2025 delivered brighter, more delicate wines with lots of complexity and nuance. It was a cooler growing season in ‘25, allowing for slow, even ripening and greater retention of acid. Translation: these are bright, fresh, and fruity wines perfect for the advent of summer.

2025 Limestone

As a blend of every white variety that we grow, Limestone is a great representation of the unique terroir of our vineyard. Louise Swenson is the backbone, its intense minerality and firm acidity laying the foundation on top of which the other varieties shine. La Crescent and Prairie Star bring juiciness and a floral, citrusy lift, while Adalmiina adds a waxy, lanolin-like texture you might find in Chenin Blanc.

Compared to 2024, the 2025 Limestone is delicate and nuanced with intense minerality and more subtle fruit. It was a cooler growing season, which meant that ripening was slower and more even, resulting in a wine with beautiful finesse and plenty of zip. This is a great example of vintage variation - the difference in how a wine tastes from year to year based on the weather’s influence on the grapes during the growing season.

You’ll like Limestone if you like Sauvignon Blanc, Grüner Veltliner, or Txakoli.

2025 La Crescent

This wine comes from the Lower Vineyard where the silty clays typical of the Champlain Valley provide the vines with plenty of water and nutrients, helping them grow vigorously and creating wines with great fruit intensity.

We pressed the bunches as soon as they were picked and fermented the juice slowly to retain its enchanting aroma. We went a bit drier in 2025, letting the yeast eat more of the sugar before stopping fermentation when we thought the balance was just right.

Just as it did with Limestone, the 2025 vintage gave us La Crescent with a lighter body and more pronounced acidity than in 2024, and punchy aromas of melon and flowers. We love the idea of vintage variation. Wine has the ability to clarify and communicate the character of a growing season in ways that fresh fruit can’t.

You’ll like La Crescent if you like Riesling, Chenin Blanc, or Alsatian whites.

2025 Black Sparrow

Black Sparrow and La Crescent are sisters. The two wines are made from the same vineyard block, but the fruit for Black Sparrow is picked more than a week earlier. On the east side of Lower La Crescent the vines are less vigorous, so the fruit has more sun exposure and tends to ripen a bit earlier than the rest of the block. These are the vines that grow Black Sparrow.

In the cellar, we arrest the fermentation early to leave a small amount of residual sugar and just over 11% abv. Light-bodied, citrusy, and just sweet enough to stand up to spice makes it the perfect wine for sushi or curry.

You’ll like Black Sparrow if you like off-dry Riesling, Vinho Verde, or Pinot Grigio.

Nurturing New Life in the Vines

It’s hard to believe the first quarter of the year has come and gone. We’ve been spending the early days of spring in our favorite way: among the vines, enjoying the rising temperatures and watching the season’s colors give way from white to green. As the snow melts, pruning becomes a softer dance, suckers and ground shoots revealing themselves more freely, renewals becoming easier to identify. Our job becomes twofold: to select strong, healthy canes as the source of this year’s fruit, cutting everything else away, and to identify future trunks, or renewals, now just tender suckers peeking out from the base of the vine. 

Since starting this chapter at Lincoln Peak, our number one focus in the vineyard has been on trunk renewal, drawing up new growth from the roots to replace old, diseased wood. Many of our vines are nearly 25 years old — long-lived by Vermont standards. Historically, the modus operandi was to remove all suckers so that the vines only needed to focus on ripening fruit. But without an eye to the future, we’ll lose many of our vines to cold damage or ubiquitous diseases like crown gall. Trunk renewal, then, is our greatest act of sustainability. To rip out and replant would not only be costly, but would erase a quarter century of root networks, of biological memory, of relationship to the land.

And so, during the winter, we carefully select our renewals, getting on our hands and knees in the snow, searching for the strongest cane able to withstand Vermont’s arctic chill. In the spring, we’ll clear the grass around this renewal, making sure it’s getting sun and air flow, and in the summer, we’ll tie up the new shoot, securing it to the trellis so that it may continue to grow into a healthy trunk. It’s an intimate thing, this act of renewal, tenderly nurturing a new life for this beautiful, wizened plant.

While we’ve been busy selecting our renewals, we’ve also been continuing the oh-so important work of pruning. As winegrowers, there are only so many levers we can pull to impact the trajectory of the vineyard—pruning is without a doubt the most consequential. A single cut that we make this winter will be impactful five, even ten years from now. The question is certainly where to cut, but also when.

We practice delayed pruning, whereby we prune in the opposite order in which the vines wake up. The theory is that pruning the vine just as it’s stirring from hibernation, it becomes distracted, focusing on healing the wound rather than creating new growth. In Vermont, where temperatures are wont to nosedive on a whim and spring frost is a constant fear, delaying budbreak by even a few days can save our vines from bud damage—and save us from losing a season’s crop. Mother Nature is powerful and mercurial; as farmers, we have signed up for a life of appealing to her better angels while preparing for her worst demons. Delayed pruning is like insurance against the latter.

But of course, one can never truly see the future. As our anticipation of the growing season mounts, so too does our anxiety. When snow still blankets the ground, we feel safe knowing the vineyard is asleep. But as the sun starts to linger over the vines a little longer, sap stirring in their phloem, we begin to feel under the gun. Time is ticking until our last two varieties, Marquette and La Crescent, wake from their slumber, pushing fuzzy little buds, within them the secrets of the season to come.

For now, we’ll be in the vines, making our last pruning cuts, waiting in anticipation for the gifts of another vintage.

Pruning Season!

As the sun strengthens and the days grow longer, we jump boots first into our favorite vineyard task of the year: pruning. Pruning is like pressing a vine’s reset button, shedding the wood that laboriously produced last year’s harvest and making room for new growth. We may remove up to 90% of the vine’s wood every year, each cut strategically placed to maximize the plant’s potential and longevity. Nothing we do in the vineyard has a bigger, more lasting impact on the vine’s ability to fully and sustainably ripen fruit than pruning.

To better understand how and why we prune, let’s start by looking at the cycle of growth that the vines go through every year.

After we harvest the fruit in October, the vine sheds its leaves and enters dormancy in the same way that many other plants do. The once tender, green shoots harden and lignify into woody canes and the vine is left looking much like a tree in winter (1). Once fully dormant, we prune the vine, removing most of the previous season’s growth, shaping the vine along the fruiting wire, and selecting the buds from which next year’s shoots will grow (2). In spring the vine awakens, growing new shoots from the exact buds that we intended (hopefully) and quickly adding leaves and grape clusters (3). The fruit ripens, we pick it and make wine, and the vine prepares for its winter rest, starting the cycle anew (4).

It’s important to understand that these vines are not particularly interested in growing delicious grapes and making great wine. Left to their own devices, they prefer to grow mostly from their tips, spreading wildly as vines do. Spaced evenly along each of the canes depicted above are dozens of buds from which new growth originates in the spring. If left unpruned, all of these buds would push, growing hundreds of new shoots stunted by a fierce competition for resources and supporting tiny clusters of grapes that would struggle to ripen in the crowded, humid, shady canopy. Yuck.

So we prune, strategically selecting just the right number of buds for the vine to focus on to keep it balanced and organized. There are a few different pruning systems but we mostly use a technique called cane pruning, whereby we pick two strong, healthy canes, trim them to the correct length, and cut everything else away. In order to keep the vine compact and remove as much old wood as possible, we look for canes that are growing close to the trunk. Upstream of these we leave two renewal spurs - canes cut back to a little stump with a single bud that we hope will generate the perfect cane for next pruning season.

We then gently maneuver our precious fruiting canes to the supporting trellis wire and tie them up. The buds on these canes - now referred to as cordons - are the source of all of the next season’s growth. The new shoots will grow in one direction, evenly spaced, each supporting a couple clusters of grapes neatly organized into what is called the fruit zone. We can now easily manage the vines throughout the season, maximizing sunlight and airflow, and focusing energy on ripening the very best fruit we can. After all, great wine starts in the vineyard.

We're back at it for 2026

After a lovely little January break and lots of quality time with the fam, we are back at the vineyard. The vines are deep in sleep under a light blanket of snow while the wines are abuzz in the cellar. Most of the 2025 wines have finished primary fermentation with just a couple stragglers working through the last grams of sugar at their own pace. It’s remarkable how much the young wines change this time of year as they slowly shed the veil of fermentation and begin to reveal the character of the vintage. Two weeks without tasting them feels like an eternity.

Some of the wines - the early whites made from fruit harvested in September and fermented in stainless steel - are really starting to sing. Blending season begins. Louise Swenson, Prairie Star, Adalmiina, and La Crescent, picked, fermented, and aged separately, will make up a few of our favorite wines - Limestone, Black Sparrow, and La Crescent. We’ll taste each component and carefully blend them to craft these wines. Teasing out flavors, popping aromatics, and building textures. Seeking complexity, intensity, balance, and beauty. Taste, discuss, conceptualize, blend, taste, discuss. Repeat. And enjoy, of course.

We’ll bottle these early whites in March, but first: BUBBLES. In just a couple weeks the new Piquettes, more Sparkling Marquette, and a teeny bit of Brut Rosé will go under crown cap and get tucked away on their sides in a dark corner of the cellar. There they will slowly ferment again, filling the wine with pillowy bubbles. We hope to be drinking Piquette again as soon as the weather warms, but we’ll have to wait till 2028 to pop the Brut Rosé. There will be lots to celebrate.