Welcome to the seasonal newsletter from your friends at Last Ditch, your convivial grape and wine growing collective based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We’re excited you’re here.

We’re wrapping up our pruning season with our second and last Grapevine Pruning Workshop + Work Party on Sunday, May 3rd from 9:30am-1:00pm at La Cienega Vineyard, 20 minutes south of Santa Fe.

In this 2.5-hour workshop, you'll learn technical pruning skills and put them to work right away, shaping the 2026 vintage alongside us. Around noon, we’ll gather around a communal table to share wine from the vineyard along with a vegetarian, gluten-free lunch.

See details and register here.

This one's a cross-country tour in miniature: a curated pour of wines from producers dotting the route between Los Angeles and Austin, tracing the landscapes, climates, and grape-growing ambitions of a stretch of the American West that doesn't always make it onto the wine map, but should. Monday, May 11th from 6:00-7:30pm in downtown Santa Fe.

See details and register here.

Last year Tom experimented with splitting his white cuvées: some were fermented with the ambient yeasts present on the grapes, others inoculated with a commercial yeast.

We'll taste through these wines together and explore how yeast and fermentation choices shape a wine. We'll also discuss what drives the decision of what, and when, to bottle. We'll then bottle these wines together. Participants will learn how to sanitize lines and bottles, use gravity to move wine into bottle, and cork bottles for storage.

Around noon, we’ll gather around a communal table to share wine from the vineyard along with a vegetarian, gluten-free lunch.

See details and register here.

​​It's June, y'all. Let's kick off your hot [gal, gay, or they] summer with some cold pink. We'll be exploring some gorgeous North American rosés from our favorite producers that we know were farmed and made with love.

Expect a range of styles, from pale and bone-dry to a little more fruit-forward, all chosen because they're honest wines made by people who care about what they're doing.

See details and register here.

​Early summer brings new gifts from the vineyard: grape leaves for dolmas.

In this workshop, participants will learn the art of dolma-making through three recipes that reflect the cultural foodways of Northern New Mexico. Together we'll make the red chile lamb dolmas Brook and Allison created for the Spring 2026 issue of Edible New Mexico, green chile chicken dolmas, and vegan zucchini and currant dolmas.

​While our dolmas cook, we'll head down into the vineyard to gather grape leaves, learn how to lacto-ferment them, and each pack a jar to take home for future batches. Around noon, we’ll gather around a communal table to enjoy our finished dolmas alongside wine from the vineyard.

See details and register here.

Pruning is like solving a spatial puzzle where you're looking to help an individual grapevine achieve vine balance: a balance between vegetative growth, yield, and quality. There is a science to pruning, and applying these approaches often only makes sense in Vitis sp. monocultures where the vines are all the same variety, age, and size.

Pruning La Cienega vineyard, with ten distinct varieties and vines of varying ages and sizes, requires a little more imagination and intuition. We can use rules of thumb, like making sure each spur has a fist-width of breathing room and aiming for roughly 12-15 spurs with 25–30 buds per vine, more for larger vines, less for smaller ones. And we quickly learn that our best intentions usually require compromise and tradeoffs.

Imagination is especially helpful in pruning as we can visualize where a shoot will grow if left to bear canes and fruit. Often this is where I begin: removing spurs oriented in directions the trellis can't support.

There is something magic that happens when I give my full attention to a grapevine. My nervous system calms, my mind quiets, and my attention becomes attuned to the beautiful puzzle in front of me. Time does that thing where it disappears. And if a friend is nearby, our conversation slows to the pace of our work.

If solving spatial puzzles, working with your hands outdoors, and good conversation sounds like your thing, consider joining us next Sunday, May 3rd in La Cienega Vineyard for our final pruning workshop of the season.

The iNaturalist City Nature Challenge is happening all across the world this weekend and Santa Fe is a participating city. Fire up the iNaturalist app and tag any wild plant, animal, fungi, or slime mold to help researchers know what’s happening right now in your world.

Dang, you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading!

While you’re here, do you know someone who might be interested in learning more about farming grapes and making wine in Northern New Mexico? We’d love for you to forward them this newsletter.

XOXO LAST DITCH