Summary: Grgich Hills Estate opened its 2026 harvest on Aug. 27 with the 50th Blessing of the Grapes, drawing employees, longtime members and first-time visitors to the winery’s crush pad in Rutherford. A Carmelite priest blessed the first sauvignon blanc of the vintage, the crews who picked it and the families of those attending. The fruit came in early and small but with unusually high acidity, the profile of a low-volume, high-quality year. Winery leaders said they are hiring and building new markets at a moment when much of the industry is contracting.
“So many times winemakers are glorified and field workers are forgotten.” — Ivo Jeramaz, winemaker and vice president of vineyards and production
RUTHERFORD, Calif. — Before the first sauvignon blanc of the 2026 vintage moved into the winery at Grgich Hills Estate, a Carmelite priest blessed the fruit, the crews who picked it and the families of everyone standing in the yard.
The winery has held a blessing at the start of every harvest since its first crush in 1977, which makes Thursday’s the 50th, even though the winery itself turns 50 next year. It arrived a week earlier than last year’s ceremony, a marker of a season running ahead of schedule across the valley.
“People have celebrated harvest for thousands of years, and that’s what they’re doing today at Grgich Hills Estate, thanking God for the harvest and praying now for the economy,” said the Rev. Donald Kinney, a priest at the Carmelite House of Prayer in Oakville. “The economy is challenging now.”
A Ritual With a Widening List of Prayers
It was Kinney’s first time to lead the Grgich Hills blessing, though priests from the monastery have conducted the ceremony for many years. The Carmelites have been in the Napa Valley since 1955, he said, and their monastery sits a few miles south of the winery off the Oakville Grade.
The content of the blessing has shifted over the years they have done this work, he said. What began as a prayer for a good crop and good wine expanded after winery workers began approaching him with requests.
“Father, pray for a safe harvest, that our workers will be safe,” Kinney said, recounting what he has been told. “And then I’ve gotten to know families, and they’ve been telling me now, ‘Father, you should pray for our families.’”
He told the crowd the fruit was not the point.
“You are more important than the grapes, and the grapes are to bring joy to your heart and to mine,” he said.
Kinney closed with lines from Psalm 90, then sprinkled holy water over the grapes and the gathering. He said afterward that he prefers to use his hand rather than the olive branches set out for the purpose.
A Small Crop With Big Numbers
Ivo Jeramaz, winemaker and vice president of vineyards and production, told the crowd this is his 41st harvest and one of the more unusual seasons he has worked. A hot March melted the Sierra snowpack early and pushed bud break ahead of schedule, and the stretch from bud break to bloom ran about four weeks — unusually short.
“That’s why this year’s harvest is early,” Jeramaz said.
Statewide tonnage is down, which Jeramaz framed as workable given the wine inventory the industry is already carrying. Quality is another matter. The sauvignon blanc coming in Thursday carried more than 9 grams of acidity at 23 Brix, a combination he called magnificent — ripe fruit that held its acid, the shape of a light year that makes very good wine.
The pick underway was the start of the winery’s harvest, not the end of it. Most producers have finished their sauvignon blanc and chardonnay, Jeramaz said, but the estate’s soils stay covered year-round, which keeps them cooler and slows the fruit.
He said the estate’s regenerative and organic program costs about a third less to run than conventional farming, and he credited the crew rather than the absence of chemical purchases.
"Why are they efficient? Because they love working for us," Jeramaz said of the roughly 40 vineyard workers, led by vineyard manager Oscar Chavez of Colinas Farming Co. — the same company that has farmed the winery's vineyards since the 1980s.
“So many times winemakers are glorified and field workers are forgotten,” Jeramaz said. “It’s not my brilliancy or Violet or Austin Hills. They grew these grapes wonderfully.”
Hiring While Others Cut
Violet Grgich, president and CEO, addressed the downturn directly.
“We are doing better than most, and we are actually hiring, whereas everyone else is either selling or laying people off because we really believe in people,” she said.
In an interview, she said the winery has hired five people recently — replacements rather than new positions — and is adding to its sales team in California and beyond. Some searches took a year and a half to two years. Out-of-state sales in one region are up 42% over the prior year, she said.
“If you make wine and you sell wine, if you don’t sell wine, you don’t get any revenue,” she said. “So if you’re cutting your employees who sell wine … We need people to go out and make friends and sell wine and build those relationships.”
The downturn has also made experienced people available.
“It’s a great time to find people because everyone else is laying people off,” she said.
The winery has contracted in places. Some positions vacated in recent years have not been refilled, production is down from a peak of about 95,000 cases and a replanting program will put insectary rows between vine rows, trimming yield further. Grgich said that suits current conditions.
Asked what she sees other producers getting wrong, she pointed to pricing.
“High prices, overpricing themselves, going beyond the reach,” she said of the Napa Valley market.
She said hotel rates that climbed during the coronavirus period never came back down and that lodging packages requiring guests to spend a set amount on dining leave visitors with less to spend on wine.
Croatian Roots
Miljenko “Mike” Grgich and Austin Hills founded the winery in 1977, breaking ground on July 4 and finishing in time for that fall’s crush. The timing was not incidental. Grgich had made the 1973 Chateau Montelena chardonnay that placed first among the whites at the 1976 Paris tasting, whose 50th anniversary falls this year, and he and Hills bought land and started building the following spring.
Hills said he had been growing grapes since 1971 and making wine since 1975 when he went looking for a partner.
“I wanted a partner who had more experience than I had, and Mike seemed like the perfect partner, and everything worked out very well,” Hills said.
Mike Grgich died Dec. 13, 2023, at his Calistoga home at age 100. His daughter said he left communist Yugoslavia for the Napa Valley because he had heard it was paradise, and that he counted employing nearly 50 people as the most important thing he had done.
“His last real question about the winery the night before he died was, ‘Is somebody doing payroll?’” she said. “’I want to make sure that everybody gets paid.’”
Jeramaz, Mike Grgich’s great-nephew, came from Croatia to join him at the winery in 1986. He said his uncle never retired and was still selling wine three days before he died.
Music closed the ceremony, as it has for decades. Violet Grgich played accordion alongside her husband, Colin Shipman, on upright bass, moving among English, Croatian and Mexican songs. The two met in music school and have played together since 1997.
“Music is part of the social glue that makes everybody human,” Shipman said.
The People Who Showed Up
The crowd arrived from several directions.
Chris Pedemonte spent his career with Colinas Farming Co., the company that still farms the winery's vineyards, and first worked at Grgich Hills around 1986, on the bottling line alongside Violet. He comes back every year now as a retiree. He said Colinas means hills, a nod to the Austin Hills Vineyard Management Co.
Pedemonte said the farming challenge has inverted over four decades.
“When I first started, frost was a big, big issue, and we would run frost protection sprinklers in the spring,” he said. “And now we rarely run frost, and we run the sprinklers, if you have them, in the fall for heat protection.”
Jesse Jensen, a Petaluma wine-club member of about five years, said the winery’s reputation brought him in and the informality kept him coming back.
“It’s just like a family picnic, and they pour wine, and they’re very kind,” Jensen said.
His sister, Jennesis De Rosales, came from San Rafael on a few hours’ notice, days after flying home from Paris.
“I’m ready to see if Grgich can knock their socks off again,” she said.
Carmen Cardona and her husband, Jim Gilroy, walked in without knowing the ceremony was happening. Cardona first visited alone in 2010, bought a wineglass and has carried it through every move since. She met Gilroy the following year and had been meaning to bring him ever since.
“Fifteen years later, here we are, finally,” said Cardona, who is from Puerto Rico.
They were invited to stay and joined the membership that day.
“We were greeted in such a special way and invited to come to this event,” she said. “We were shocked because nowadays it’s kind of a different thing when you go to wineries.”
A Second Blessing
Donna Puizina-Alvers and her husband, Paul Alvers, have been members for more than 25 years but had never come to the blessing. She is Croatian American, from Daly City, and she said the family’s roots are why Grgich Hills is the only winery the couple visits.
She came with something else in mind. Her husband’s wedding ring broke years ago, and the replacement they bought had never been blessed — a loose end she had never managed to tie off. She had never met Kinney before Thursday, but she asked anyway.
He stepped away from the crowd and did it.
“It was very emotional,” Puizina-Alvers said. “We had such a good 5 minutes, really a spiritual moment on the day that they’re blessing the harvest.”
She said it had been on her list of things she worried about, and that she had not expected to cross it off standing in a vineyard.
“That was a moment that was meant to be,” she said.
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Tim Carl is a Napa Valley-based photojournalist.
Harvest Update — Napa Valley
Aug. 27 — The 2026 crop is light across Napa County. Growers in Chiles Valley and on Atlas Peak have reported yields as much as half of normal, and Stu Smith of Smith-Madrone described significant shatter — when a vine’s flowers fail to mature into fruit — in the first Napa Valley Vintners harvest report of the year, published in the St. Helena Star.
The season is early almost everywhere. Marla Carroll of Antinori picked chardonnay on Atlas Peak on July 31, the earliest in that property’s history, and finished Aug. 20. Christopher Hyde said harvest at Hyde Vineyards in Carneros began the same day, the earliest on record there.
Caleb Mosley, executive director of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers, attributed the pace to two things: vineyards pruned early that had green tissue exposed during the March and April heat and lighter crop loads, which put less demand on the vine and speed sugar accumulation.
Calistoga is the exception. Nearly three weeks into harvest at Chateau Montelena, winemaker Matt Crafton said the appellation had yet to begin in earnest — a few scattered picks of white grapes, some non-irrigated and hillside blocks, little else. Sugar is running ahead of flavor in everything he has tasted, which he put down to the light crop.
“Nature seems to have done the thinning for us this year,” Crafton said.
One thing has turned. Crafton said growers who spent the season waiting for buyers are now seeing them appear.
Cabernet is still ahead. In Stags Leap, Pine Ridge winemaker Josh Widaman expected to be picking in earnest the week of Aug. 31.
Napa Valley Vintners posts harvest updates at harvestnapa.com. The Napa Valley Grapegrowers’ Growing Conditions Report is at napagrowers.org.
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