The Turning SeasonAugust fields, ripening fruit, and wines from seasons past.
T H E T U R N I N G
S E A S O N
Hello August. Your light has begun to shift.
Summer is still very much with us—the vineyards are green and full, the gardens have gone almost wild, goldenrod is beginning to rise along the roadsides and field edges, beneath the vines. The days are warm and long. Rain is forecasted then evaporates. And yet something has changed. The colors have changed.
The fruit speaks first. In the vineyards, berries are beginning to soften and deepen or transform in color. Pears hang heavily from the trees. Seed heads are appearing among the flowers: lilies, poppies, rosehips. The light angles across the fields differently now, as it reaches toward evening. There is a sense of ripening everywhere, and with it, that first suggestion of autumn where green leans towards gold, the cicadas and crickets sing long hymns to summer.
This is one of our favorite moments of the year at La Garagista. The work of the growing season is still unfolding around us, but harvest has begun to appear on the horizon. We find ourselves moving between the vineyards and cellar, the gardens and wine shop, taking stock of what has grown and what is nearly ready to be gathered.
There is a flash, too, of looking backward and forward all at once. The wines we are drinking and sharing now carry earlier seasons inside them, while just outside the door another vintage is taking shape.
Over the next few weeks, before harvest takes us completely into its orbit, there are a few things we want to share with you: wines we have been waiting to release, some last opportunities to visit us here in Vermont, and glimpses of the places and ideas that have been occupying us this summer.
For now, though, we wanted simply to begin here—in the turning season.
IN THE VINEYARD
Veraison has begun.
Across the vineyards, berries are changing color and accumulating the sugars, flavors and textures that will carry them toward harvest. We walk the rows now looking less at growth and more at fruit—tasting berries, watching the weather, waiting.
Elsewhere on the farm, another kind of ripening is underway. Meadows are high, flowers are going to seed, fruit is appearing in the old gardens, and the landscape is beginning its slow turn toward autumn.
WINES FOR THE TURNING SEASON
The wines we find ourselves reaching for begin to shift too.
The bright wines of early summer make room for bottles with a little more depth: wines for the last dinners outside, for cooler evenings, for tomatoes and corn and the first mushrooms, and for bottles carried to the table as the light begins to disappear earlier.
Over the coming weeks, we'll be sharing some of the wines we've been saving for this moment: bottles like the new vintage of Loup d'Or and Ci Confonde Rosé, a reserve of Of Mint and Lightning from 2023. These three wines will be part of our Summer into Autumn Wine CSA selection, gathering earlier seasons into the one now unfolding around us.
AT THE TABLE
We understand the year through the plates and bowls, the dishes at the table.
Right now that means tomatoes still warm from the garden, corn, herbs, late beans, fruit, bread—and bottles that seem to belong to that hushed golden hour when afternoon becomes evening.
Soon enough there will be harvest meals eaten between time in the vineyard and cellar, those simple breaks during days full of rhythm and bounty.
FROM THE ATLAS
Alongside the work in the vineyards and cellar, another landscape takes shape on paper: drawings, field notes, plants and animals: the traces of things collected from the places we farm. A kind of atlas of the world of Domaine La Garagista—part observed, part remembered, part imagined. As the growing season begins to turn toward harvest, we’ve been gathering some of these fragments together, too.
For now, we are watching the fruit, clearing space in the cellar, gathering what the garden gives us, and enjoying these last weeks when summer still feels almost endless.
