The Fund for Vineyard and Farm Workers

Johnine and I established The Fund for Vineyard and Farm Workers in 2004 for a couple of reasons. First, our friend Archie McLaren of the Central Coast Wine Classic (at the time, one of the largest charity wine auctions in the United States) had developed a program of philanthropy to support various local charities in San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara Counties. I thought it would be a good idea to start directing some of that money to farm workers because they are the people who make the wine industry, and indeed all of agriculture in our region possible. As we looked into it, we learned that there was no charity that focused on our local farm worker community. 

Second, with a strong interest in philanthropy and community service, Johnine was serving on the Board of Directors for the Community Foundation of San Luis Obispo County. We agreed that this would be a way to merge our interests in philanthropy and in supporting the farm worker community. As we considered the issues and challenges of establishing a non-profit, we agreed that it would be easier and better for us to do this under the Community Foundation umbrella. Our goal when we started was to create an endowment with a balance of $1 million that would exist in perpetuity.

The Fund for Vineyard and Farm Workers now has a balance of more than $1.2 million and is held by the Community Foundation San Luis Obispo County.  While our main focus has been to provide grants to 501(c)3 non-profit organizations that support the farm worker community, we’ve recently added a scholarship for the children of farm workers. Scholars have attended Cuesta College, Cal Poly and UC Berkeley.  Past grant recipients have included the Noor Clinic, Clinica de Tolosa, Raising a Reader, the Children’s Health Initiative, the South County Boys and Girls Club, and the San Luis Obispo County Literacy Council.  By the end of the year, total grants will exceed $300,000.

Johnine and I are proud of the impact that the Fund for Vineyard and Farm workers has had in our community and appreciate the broad based support we’ve enjoyed since we began this initiative back in 2004.

– Brian Talley

Highlighting the Rincon Vineyard

Bud break occurred 3 weeks ago, in early March.  I love to see the very uniform shoot growth, a harbinger of excellent quality for the coming harvest.  We’ve made a pass through the vineyard with the flail mower to mow the grass and chop the canes left after pruning, as well as the weed knife to control weeds in the vine row. The next step will be shoot thinning, when our ladies crew will remove suckers and weak shoots to promote vine growth to support the 2025 crop, which will mark 41 years since these vines were planted.  

After the historically small 2024 crop, my expectation is that our crop this year will be a bit more generous, and my ambition, just like every year, is to produce the best wine we’ve ever made from these vines.

– Brian Talley

This April, we’re celebrating the story and significance of the Rincon Vineyard—with a special focus in our tasting room. Our Rincon Collection | Legacy Tasting offers guests a rare chance to experience the full range of wines sourced exclusively from this legendary site, including our newest releases of Rosé, Rincon Chardonnay, Rincon Pinot Noir, Grenache, Syrah, and Don’s Blend.

It’s a lineup that speaks to the depth and diversity of this vineyard—and a glimpse into what makes it truly Grand Cru–worthy.

This limited-time flight is available through the end of April and leads up to the Rincon Vineyard Lunch on May 3, where we’ll celebrate the land, the season, and the wines that began right here. Join us at the table among the vines and experience Rincon where it all began.

Talley Vineyards: Generations in the Making

The story of Talley Vineyards began when my grandfather, Oliver Talley, began growing specialty vegetables in the Arroyo Grande Valley in 1948. In 1982, his son and my father, Don Talley, planted wine grapes on a rolling hillside parcel unsuitable for vegetable farming. Four years later, in 1986, he and my mother Rosemary founded Talley Vineyards.

Talley Vineyards is located in the San Luis Obispo Coast American Viticultural Area (AVA) which is recognized as the coolest AVA in the state of California due to its direct proximity to the cold Pacific Ocean.  Within the San Luis Obispo Coast, there are two smaller AVAs, the Arroyo Grande Valley and the Edna Valley, and our family owns vineyards and farms in both valleys.  The cool climate of the area, coupled with calcareous clay and shaly loam soils, makes it ideally suited to grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, Talley Vineyards’ specialties.

Since the founding of Talley Vineyards, the goal has always been to produce estate grown wines that capture the unique character of the vineyards we farm.  There are now a total of seven vineyards owned and farmed by my family: West Rincon, East Rincon, Rosemary’s, Monte Sereno and Las Ventanas in the Arroyo Grande Valley as well as Oliver’s and Stone Corral in the Edna Valley. The signature bottlings of Estate Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, which date to the inaugural 1986 vintage, blend these vineyards together to produce wines meant to capture the essence of the larger San Luis Obispo Coast region:  energetic citrus infused Chardonnay and savory, ethereal Pinot Noir.  In addition, single vineyard bottlings are produced from most of our vineyards, and these are meant to reflect the distinctive character of each site.

Optimum quality and long-term sustainability are the two principles that guide our winegrowing decisions.  I work with Eric Johnson, our Director of Viticulture and Winemaking, to continually strive to improve fruit quality while ensuring that vineyard practices work in harmony with the natural conditions of each vineyard site.  Certified sustainable practices are employed in the vineyard: grapes are gently hand harvested at night and no herbicides are used.Classical winemaking techniques are gentle and noninterventionist.  Native yeasts are employed in fermentation, all Chardonnay is barrel fermented and completes malolactic fermentation, while Pinot Noir is fermented in small open top fermenters and punched down by hand.  The wines are gently bottled, generally without fining or filtration.  All Talley Vineyards wines are certified sustainably produced and all are vegan.  

Talley Farms and Talley Vineyards continue to evolve.  There are now four members of the fourth generation of Talleys involved in the family farming and winery operation, which has grown to include more than 30 commodities and 6 wine varieties.  Our fruits, vegetables and wines are shipped all over the United States and exported to more than eight countries.  We are proud to share the bounty of the San Luis Obispo Coast with anyone who appreciates the authenticity and commitment to excellence that is the result of our four-generation family farming legacy in this very special region.

– Brian Talley

Autumn Abundance

Autumn is the season of abundance in our farming operation.  Over the past 76 years, since my grandfather started Talley Farms in 1948, that abundance has expanded immensely in both scale and diversity.  This fall we harvested more than a dozen different kinds of vegetables, six varieties of wine grapes, as well as lemons, avocados and three kinds of berries.  It’s fulfilling for everyone who works here to see all of their hard work pay off.

The 2024 wine grape harvest, our 38th since the founding of Talley Vineyards in 1986, was small, and quality appears to be exceptional.  An ideal growing season was capped with perfect weather during the crucial periods of ripening and harvest.  Pinot Noir production was about 30% below average and Chardonnay was down about 20%. Fermentations have filled the cellar with gorgeous aromas of baked brioche and framboise, and, most importantly, have been clean and uneventful.  I have high hopes for the 2024 vintage.  Most of the other crops that we grow have been both high in quality and production, which puts a smile on all of our faces.

Over the next few weeks, we will turn our attention to bottling the majority of wines that we produced in 2023, and I look forward to sharing these charming wines with you in early 2025.

– Brian Talley

Brian’s 2024 Harvest Update

September 30, 2024

The 2024 harvest at Talley Vineyards began on September 3 with a small pick from West Rincon Block 5, one of the best sections of that vineyard.  This was 2 weeks earlier than our start in 2023 and one day later than we picked the same section in 2022.  On September 4, we picked Rosemary’s Block 7, the original planting of Pinot Noir in Rosemary’s Vineyard, which my father planted in 1987.  We made the strategic decision to harvest this block just before a heat wave which started the next day and persisted through September 11, when things cooled dramatically.  So far, yields are running at between about ½ and 2/3 of normal and quality looks great.  In many respects, it reminds me of the very successful 2022 vintage, which also saw low yields.

Overall, this has been an excellent growing season with cool weather persisting throughout the summer, until our September heatwave.  We were generally unaffected by the major heatwaves that impacted most of the United States in July and August.  We received just about 23 inches of rain this season, which is just above our annual average of 20 inches per year.  This was the second year in a row of above average rainfall, and it really benefited the vines. 

People often ask what explains yields that are above or below average.  I attribute our low yields this year to a couple of factors.  First, we had historically high yields in 2023, and in my experience, grapevines are somewhat alternate bearing, meaning that a high yield year is often followed by a lower yielding vintage.  In addition, much of the potential crop for the year is dictated by the weather conditions during the spring and early summer of the previous year when a process called bud differentiation occurs.  If you recall, 2023 was a historically wet year with about 50 inches of rain (more than double our average rainfall in the Arroyo Grande Valley) and we experienced consistently cloudy conditions during the spring and early summer.

A challenge this year has been intermittent power outages (almost daily from mid August through mid September) due to a combination of PG&E’s extremely sensitive equipment settings to mitigate wildfire risk and some aging and damaged wires in a very remote area to our east.  PG&E appears to have resolved the issue and we’ve experienced less frequent outages since mid September.

The unseasonably cool weather we’ve experienced through most of September has resulted in intermittent harvest as we wait for sugars to increase and flavors to develop.   This is a common occurrence and one of the reasons that the San Luis Obispo Coast experiences one of the longest harvest seasons of any winegrowing region in the world.  Hot weather is predicted starting tomorrow (October 1) and I anticipate that this will dramatically increase the pace of harvest.  As with most years, the vast majority of Chardonnay will be harvested in the month of October.

Join Our Crush Crew!

For the first time, we’re excited to share a little harvest tradition with you. For over 30 years, we’ve been creating custom crush crew t-shirts for our team. Each year, the theme naturally comes to us — from “Be Happy, Drink Chardonnay” and “Make Wine, Not War” to “2020 – Wines to Remember from a Year to Forget” and “The Year of the Wasp,” finally arriving at the year of “Banger Clusters.”

This year, we’ve been embracing the perfect pairing of wine and music. We sang “Lavender Haze” at the Secret Spot Dinner at the Lavender Farm, danced to the Molly Ringwald Project in our vintage band tees at Homecoming 1984, and enjoyed picnics with live music for the Adobe Encores. So, it only made sense for our t-shirt this year to be a Talley Vineyards Crush Crew Band Tee!

Shop Limited Release Band Tee

The Marianne Talley Foundation:  celebrating Marianne’s life with community collaboration.

The Marianne Talley Foundation was established after my sister, Marianne, died suddenly of a heart arrythmia on May 18, 1993.  Marianne was an avid athlete who won several league titles in swimming, was a member of the USC swim team and completed the famed Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii the year before she passed away.  As my family considered the best way to honor her legacy, we made the decision to establish the non-profit Marianne Talley Foundation for the purpose of funding scholarships for female student athletes at Arroyo Grande High School. 

The first scholarship of $4000 ($1000 per year for 4 years) was granted to Amber Dodson in June 1994.  After the death of my grandfather in 1999, we decided to add the Oliver Talley Scholarship, this time for a male student athlete.  Around that time, The Marianne Talley and Oliver Talley Scholarships were increased to $6,000.  Finally, after my dad passed away in 2006, we added the Don Talley Leadership Scholarship, $10,000, to celebrate my father’s legacy of leadership.  Our annual giving for these scholarships totals $22,000 and we have granted a total of $358,500 to 64 worthy students since the inception of the foundation.

The initial seed money (more than $100,000) for the Marianne Talley Foundation came from the tremendous outpouring of our local community at the time of Marianne’s death.  Over the next few months, we were approached by two people who wanted to help support the Foundation as well as honor my sister’s memory.  Coach Roger Warnes of the SLO Roadrunners came to me with the idea of hosting a fun run at the winery and through the surrounding Rincon Vineyard.  I had long been an avid runner, so I welcomed this idea. The first ever Marianne Talley Memorial Fun Run occurred in 1994, with the special twist that anyone who “Beat the Vintner” (me) got a special commemorative t-shirt.  Over the years, we raised lots of money and I gave away lots of t-shirts.  In 2018, after the 25^th Anniversary of the event, and the retirement of Race Director Marian Fiorentino, we made the difficult decision to discontinue the Marianne Talley Memorial Fun Run.

About the same time as Roger and I were organizing that first fun run, my father was approached by a longtime family friend, Tim Sugishita, about holding a cioppino dinner as a fundraiser.   This was the outgrowth of a casual cioppino dinner for a group of friends in Tim’s backyard that had occurred for several years.  The inaugural Pinot/Cioppino Dinner was held at Talley Vineyards sometime around 1994.  It now occurs annually on the third Saturday of February during the height of Dungeness Crab Season and is prepared entirely by a local crew of volunteers, who are longtime family friends and supporters of Arroyo Grande High School.  This has become a signature annual event at Talley Vineyards and features a vast array of large format and library selections of Pinot Noir, the perfect wine to pair with the complex, spicy flavors of cioppino.  The dinner is also the key fundraising event for the Marianne Talley Foundation.

The Marianne Talley Foundation is a registered 501(c)3 non profit organization and all donations are tax deductible.  If you’d like to make a donation or learn more, please contact my mother, Rosemary rtalley@talleyfarms.com or me, btalley@talleyvineyards.com.

“The Rincon Adobe is truly the symbol of Talley Vineyards: It’s been pictured on every bottle of Talley Vineyards wine we’ve ever produced. It’s the first thing visitors see when they arrive, and it’s made of the earth of this place. It preceded us here and will endure long after we’re gone.”  Brian Talley

The first thing visitors see when they arrive at Talley Vineyards is the historic El Rincón Adobe built in the early 1860’s by Ramon Branch, son of Francis Ziba Branch, holder of the Rancho Santa Manuela Land Grant and one of the original settlers of the Arroyo Grande Valley.  The house is constructed of sun dried mud bricks crafted onsite from soil collected from the area. 

The Branch family spoke of the ranch surrounding the adobe house as “El Rincón,” which means “the corner” in Spanish, likely referring to the corner of the 16,955-acre Rancho Santa Manuela.  The Rincón Adobe was the smaller of the two adobe houses constructed by the Branch family.  The larger Casa Santa Manuela, built by Francis Ziba Branch about two miles west, on land owned by the Ikeda family, no longer stands.

During the years that the Branch family lived in the adobe, the driveway leading to the property was lined by olive trees as it is today.  The house itself was surrounded by fruit trees and geranium hedges.  The deep window sills are a distinctive feature of the house, reflecting the adobe walls that are more than 24 inches thick.  Each morning, according to family lore, the Branch children stood in the sills waiting for their mother to dress them.

Ramon began to establish El Rincón immediately after he and his wife Isabela moved into the adobe, working the surrounding flat land along with his older sons and hired help.  Here he raised wheat, barley, corn, and beans, maintained livestock and operated a dairy.  The Branch family continued to live off the land surrounding the adobe until they moved in 1892.  To this day, this is some of the most productive agricultural land in the Arroyo Grande Valley.

El Rincón changed hands twice before the Talley family purchased the property in 1974 for its prime vegetable land.  Don Talley began planting wine grapes in the Rincon Vineyard in 1982, and since Talley Vineyards’ first vintage in 1986, the adobe has been pictured on the winery’s labels.  In 1988 the building-the oldest continuously inhabited residence in San Luis Obispo County until that time-was restored to serve as the Talley Vineyards Tasting Room.

Though no longer the main Talley Vineyards tasting room, the Rincón Adobe remains the symbol of Talley Vineyards and the Talley family’s enduring commitment to the soil and history of the Arroyo Grande Valley.  The Adobe is open in the summers for live music and can be booked for larger groups.