Grape harvest at Dos Cabezas Wineworks | Drone Zone

Harvest time in southern Arizona and Dos Cabezas, their wine works, they are right in the middle of it. The grapes are coming off the vine. Yeah, and we're taking you above it to see what the harvest looks like. Drone pilot Levi Pettigrew takes us over Arizona wine country in the drone zone. I'm Todd Bostock, a wine worker at Dos Cabezas Wine Works in Snoyda, and this is harvest 2026. So today we're doing both whites and reds. We're processing claret blanche, which is the latest of the white grapes we grow to ripen, and we do that whole cluster press. So that means we just take the fruit straight from the vineyard, pull out anything we don't like the looks of, and then we load it directly into the press. There's a Kevlar membrane that inflates and squeezes the juice out, and then we'll put it in the tank, get it real chilly, let it settle overnight, and then tomorrow we'll put it in barrels to kick off fermentation. And then after that, we've got three tons of more Vedra, which is one of the later reds that we grow, and we're going to go through and pop all the berries off the stems, put them into a bin, and get them ready to start fermenting. 2026 has got to be the earliest season we've ever seen. I don't think we've ever really started picking this early, and we'll finish in August, which has never happened before. You know, it was a mild winter, so the growing season started earlier than usual, and everything progressed and carried through. You know, overall, the fruit quality is high, the wines taste great. We're happy with what we got. You know, monsoons were a little challenging this year, but we're happy for the water. It should be a vintage with a lot of character and a lot of high points. There's two vineyards we farm here in Arizona, the Cimarron Vineyard, about an hour and a half east of where we are in Wilcox, and the Pronghorn Vineyard, just 15 minutes down the road in Sonoita, Elgin. So today, all the fruit's coming from the Cimarron Vineyard. It's about 37 acres planted. It's at the base of the Chiricahuas. There's these two peaks you'll see. They call the Dos Cabezas. That gives the vineyard its name. They look like, you know, two little heads up there. Wilcox is a closed basin, so it's surrounded by mountains, and the soil's very sandy. It's, you know, a rural ag community, so there's a lot of farms. The goal's really to figure out as fast as possible what works best here and what's great about our climate and how unique it is. So we're just looking for that constellation of varieties that can work well together and work in this extreme climate to produce something, you know, consistently delicious. We grow just over 30 varieties. Roussan, Riesling, Vionier, Pequot Blanc, Albarino, Muscat, Malvasia, Grenache Blanc, Claret Blanche, Pequot Blanc, if I didn't say that already, Arinto this year for the first time. They're like Baskin-Robbins. We've got like 31 flavors. Our winery is not at our vineyards in bustling downtown Sonoita. It is the operational winery. In the front, we have a tasting room, so you can come to the actual winery. You can order pizza. You can try all the wines. You can buy wines to take home. You know, you can catch a glimpse of us running around in the back, sweating, hustling, moving grapes around. So the whole point of wine is pleasure. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to be a good time. And so that's what we want people, you know, to experience. You know, there's nobody else in the world that cares as much about what the poor folks in Arizona need to drink in the summertime when it's 110 degrees out and they're having like tacos al pastor. And we think about that all the time. And so we try to make sure we've got stuff for you to drink that is as good as anything from anywhere but fits what's happening here. To watch more Drone Zone stories and to check out the behind the scenes adventures, you can download the Fox Local app. Scan the QR code, though, on your screen to tell us about a spot that we should feature on the Drone Zone.