So, spring Passport Weekend for our wonderful, visitor attracting wineries is a comin’ fast on March 23 and 24 and a spat has broken out. Hopefully, Sycamore Creek will change direction and participate in the weekend and, hopefully, the winery owners will get together to seek solutions to the challenges of parking and rowdy wine drinkers who overindulge. Toward that end, perhaps the winery owners could consider hiring shuttle buses – a few for the Gilroy area and a few, likewise, for Morgan Hil. The buses could ferry passengers on a loop route between wineries during the weekend. A main parking lot would have to be identified and promoted – Dhruv Khanna’s paved soccer field parking lot at Kirigin Cellars could work, for example – and that could minimize some of the challenges. If the winery owners are smart, they’ll do what they can to solve the problems themselves and collectively keep intact the momentum of Passport Weekend and the growing reputation for fun events, good wine and hospitable staffs that the area wineries have built.
Nestled in the heart of historic Uvas Valley in Morgan Hill, Sycamore Creek is a small family-owned winery that produces limited amounts of award-winning, hand-crafted wines. The estate vineyard consists of head cane old vine plantings, as well as more modern plantings which utilize state of the art trellising and canopy management techniques. Their winemaking focuses on capturing the expression of the Uvas Valley and creating wines with great depth and finesse. When crafting each wine, they handle the fruit gently and process as little as possible, utilizing both traditional and modern fermentation and cellaring techniques to preserve the distinctiveness of Sycamore Creek Vineyards.