Winery & Tasting Room
All gone now!
We have one case left of 2009 Split Rail Syrah Santa Cruz Mountains up for grabs. Check the Wines tab for deatils on the wine.
The deal is it is first come fist serve. Email us at [email protected]
Regular price is $35 / bottle $420 per case.
SALE PRICE:
$300 per case Free shipping on the case. If I have two parties willing to split a case I will do that. Add an additional $15 per 6 for shipping. We will bill your CC on file, or you may contact us with a CC number.
Another picture of boxes. These are in our cellar at home so you get a little peak inside our collection. The boxes though won’t be going into our cellar we’ll be having a End Bin sale next week. Figuring out allocations is always hard but we usually do pretty well in selling just about everything with just a little left. It’s a hard thing to figure out but we have a few good brokers who are willing to wait for direct sales to end and then step in and take what ever is left over.
I try to leave just two cases of each wine. One for us that will go into our collection and personal cellar and one that will go into our library to replace any problem bottles that might be reported in the future. On a few occasions I’ve been down to just a few bottles we end up keeping but usually I can get us at least a case for our use.
When ordering season is over and we’re down to just a few cases of something I send a note to our storage facility to send everything they have left of that wine. I always say ‘everything’, because it’s a good way to match up inventory. It also cuts down on phone tag with the warehouse: “You said send 3 but there are only two here, what do we do?”. “Send everything.”
On some items we will have more than two cases left and when that happens I have a blow out sale. I’ll do that next week on a few items. I reduce prices 25-50% and we sell them off by the case, shipping included, first come first serve. We’ll have about 5 cases of Sessen to sell as well as two cases of Harvest Moon Special Reserve and two cases of Split Rail Syrah. Not a ton of stuff but great for bargain hunters. I’ll post the sales here and on Facebook. Usually the people on Facebook get the update faster so if you’re not a friend or fan there, do it now!
We don’t have a store front or a cash register, but we do receive bad checks from time to time.
BAD CHECK LIST:
Jacob Boonsook $167.54
That’s a picture of shipments going to Arizona. They were sitting in our garage this morning waiting to be hauled up to the cellar at Chaine d’Or for storage over the summer. It looks like we are not going to be able to get out Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida and Arizona. The weather just did not cooperate for us this spring.
We had plenty of good cool weather in California but the South warmed up quickly and never cooled for any length of time. I know we’ve had late orders in the past that didn’t make it out, but this is the first time I remember the window closing so early to so many states. It was really the first week of March when we started shipping and in many states it was already too late.
We’ll move all of that wine in package to the dry room cellar at Chaine d’Or where we will store it with the estate library wine for the summer. It will ship in the fall when the window opens back up. The cellar is perfect at 58-60 degrees all summer and we’ll leave everything in shipping boxes so it is ready to go.
I took a few better pictures of the front yard Haut Tubee vineyard to illustrate the comments I made about aesthetics in my update on our Pinot Noir Vineyard. Most of the things we do are simple and you probably would have a hard time noticing the differences. It’s not really an attempt to make it ‘pretty’ as much as one to make it look clean and pleasing.
Below see how the vines don’t have a stake holding up the trunk? Once the vine reaches the cordon wire we remove that stake and let the vine attach to the wire. This removes a lot of metal from the vineyard and lets the plant be seen on its own with no visual distractions.
In this close up you can see there are no ties or clips in the vineyard. There’s nothing to attach the vine to the wire, or the wires to anything else. This vine hasn’t attached on its own so we will use one twisty to tie it off this year. Each vine does have a small vine protector on it to keep it safe from weed whacking. Stef selected guards though that blend in and aren’t too tall. We will use grow tubes, but once the vine is up to the wire we remove it with the stake.
The cover crop between the rows is slow to get started this year, it is a natural mix of crimson clover and California wild flowers. The idea is that the vineyard should look like a natural hillside would and the only thing you should see is the vines and the absolute minimum hardware needed to keep the vines upright.
Another bottling day down! I wish I could say it was drama free, but bottling days never are. Mostly though it went smoothly and a lot of the issues we had were early in the day and I chalked them up to learning a new bottling truck and system. We arrived at the winery at 6am and the truck was there at the gate.
No issues getting it into place (the last truck we used could take up to 5 hours to get through the gates and down the hill). The truck was ready to go by 8:15 am. This is early in the set up process with the forklift in the foreground. The equipment needs to get set up, hooked inot the tanks in the winery and cleaned before we start.
This was just as we got started. Millie, Kaleb from the bottling company and Stefania in the truck. This seemed to be a really good fit for the speed we like to go and care we like to put in. We had some early drama figuring out the right screen to put in line with the bottle filler. The first one we used jammed up after 5-6 cases. We finally went with a wide ‘bug catcher’ screen that lets everything through but big chunks.
Once we got over that problem we ran out of Nitrogen. The Nitrogen is used to sparge the glass and clean in before filling. Millie is doing that step below. I had a back up tank but it was also almost empty. I must have left it open at some point it as it should have been new. So we sent Millie down into Redwood City to get another tank. They would only let her load one at a time into the car so she had to make two trips.
Once past that we were back on our way. You can see Kaleb, Stefania and Ingrid’s back in the picture below. Somehow I missed getting Jaye in any pictures but she was there also working on the line.
My job was to tape up the filled cases, put on tags and load them on to pallets. It’s a good job for me because I can lift the cases and they come off slow enough that if I need to be gone for 5 minutes I can and only a few cases will back up. That time lets me use the forklift to move pallets around or run into the winery to make adjustments inside.
We wrapped up bottling about 1:30 and clean up by 3:00. A pretty good day in all and we were really happy with the new truck. Our 2010, Haut Tubee and a new blend are safely in storage now!
When we got home we had one last bit of drama. A bee swarm trying to move into our house. I called Art the Bee Guy and he arrived after 9:00 pm and safetly got the queen and her hive off to a new home.
Bottling is always one of the hardest most stressful things we do. There are over a dozen different vendors to coordinate with and everything has to be timed just right. It’s also hard because we do it just twice per year so getting experience for us and the crew has been a process that takes years.
This time we’ve also been fighting the weather and have had to reschedule twice around rain. We just don’t have enough room inside to stage everything indoors and that means rain is a deal breaker.
Stefania and I came up yesterday to prep the wine and get it ready. We’re doing a small lot of two wines. Our 2010 Haut Tubee and a new wine we will release this fall. There was a small amount of blending to do and Stefania had to check final SO2 on the wines so I could make the right additions. Other than the drain backing up on us it went smoothly.
The forklift showed up at 8:30 and I got that positioned and ready. The truck showed up at 12:30 with the empty glass and this is when I knew we’re finally at the point of being veteran bottlers. The driver had forgotten to load a pallet jack and had no idea how to get the 1000 pounds of glass from the front of the truck to the back where the forklift could pick it up.
“No problem”, I said. “I’ve had this happen before, I’ll show you what to do.” So I went in the winery and pulled out my strongest rope that we keep for just this emergancy. I showed him how to tie up a pallet and pull it out of a truck with the forklift.
Everything was wrapped up by 2:30 and we were able to get a late lunch and some hot tub time in last night. This morning came really early:
53 degrees and 5:30 am when we hit the road. We’re waiting now in the winery for the bottling truck to finish setting up. If all goes well we will start about 8:30. We’re using a small crew today. Stefania, Millie, Ingrid, Jaye and I. Another veteran thing we’ve learned. It’s actually better to have a small experienced crew than a large one that needs lots of hand holding.
I’ll be busy most of the day so probably won’t have too many pictures, but I’ll try and get some as we bottle and get them up before Friday.
Tuesday we drove up to the Los Altos Hills after work to drop off some grow tubes and check on our Pinot Noir Vineyard. This small vineyard has just about 800 plants and should produce about a ton of fruit from us once at full production. This was our first vineyard to have bud break this year and the plants were pretty far along in growth.
Stefania, Millie and I did all the pruning this year. There were some spacing issues I wanted corrected and I though many of the plants needed new cordons as they’d been pushed too far too fast before we took over the site last year. We went through each vine very carefully to get it pruned with the focus on strong plant this year. So far the growth looks really good.
The vines need some suckering and thinning. Stef and I will do that ourselves also so that we know the plants are trained exactly how we want them. We both felt there was too much green growth and too many shoots left last year so thinning will be a key. The vineyard layout is good but it is ‘busy’ compared to what we normally do. Stef likes a clean simple aesthetic in the vineyard and this one had a lot of extra clips, stakes, holders and tape. We try and avoid using those items.
It might be hard to spot below but if you look closely you’ll see lots of green tie tape on the plants. Each plant is also staked and tied down to the stake. I put up a picture of our front yard vineyard as a comparison. Notice that there is no tie anywhere and no extra metal or plastic in sight. It’s something small and subtle but it gives the vineyard more of a natural feeling versus looking like a ‘metal and wire garden’ as Stef calls them.
I was able to take a little time off from the day job last week. We were also caught up in the vineyards and winery so had a few free days. We gave Jaye a few days off and she was able to go visit family in southern California. Millie stayed close to home but we also gave her a few days off as well.
Stefania and I headed down to Monterey for the Easter weekend. It’s been a favorite getaway for us over the years. We were lucky in having clear beautiful days. It was chilly with highs just in the 50’s but the sun was out the entire time. We brought down our bikes to get around in. What a great idea. I’ve been going to Monterey for 25 years and never brought bikes before. Friday we rode them from downtown to the gates of 17 mile drive.
We stopped for lunch at the Cannery Row Brewing Company, which has become a favorite spot of mine. There’s a little hidden out door sitting area with fire pits that we love. One of the great things we about having the bikes is that it’s about a 25 minute walk from the Cannery/Aquarium area to the Downtown/Wharf area. On bikes it’s 5 minutes and a bike trail connects the two.
Friday night we went back for dinner, beer, bourbon and cigars. Most of the weekend revolved around beer, bourbon and cigars. We were joined at the fire pit by two Marine Corp Captains and an army Captain who were studying at the Naval Post Graduate school. We had a great night exchanging vineyard and winery stories for stories of goats wearing sweaters (Pakistan) and Nissans up on bamboo polls (Liberia).
I only took one picture all weekend. Here’s the bike on the balcony of our room at the Marriot. That’s going to be my one piece of advice for anyone visiting Monterey. Bring your bikes.
Saturday was a cold and rainy day. We headed up to the winery for a long day of work inside so at least we’d be mostly dry. We still had 15 barrels to get through the first racking and sulfuring of the year. Malolactic fermentation has been slow this year and 5 different lots were just finishing up.
We can’t add sulfur to the wines before Malo has completed or the sulfur will kill the Malo bacteria along with the bad bacteria. The longer we go though the greater the risk of those bad bacteria showing up so it’s been a tense few months.
Stefania started by setting up her lab and I got the pump, tanks and barrel cleaner ready. We had lab results back from the lab we have to do our government testing with so we didn’t need to do much in the way of actual measurements, but we would have to prepare SO2 for every wine and Tartaric Acid for a few.
One routine we always have is that a second person must verify that the pump is hooked up right and all the seals on the tanks are closed. This helps prevent oversight and shooting wine all over the place.
We had five different lots to work with; Crimson Clover Cab ,Harvest Moon Cab, Coastview Syrah, Mourvedre and Haut Tubee. Everything would get an SO2 treatment of 40-50 ppm depending on the pH of the wine. The Mourvedre, Harvest Moon and Haut Tubee would also have Tartaric added to lower pH.
We combined some of the Crimson Clover Cabernet, with some Peacock Cab Franc and a little Harvest Moon Cab to start a Santa Clara Valley Cabernet blend. The rest of the Harvest Moon and the Haut t was kept on its own for now. We finished up the day about 5PM by filing the tanks with Coastview Syrah in tank #1 and Mourvedre in tank #2 and left them to settle for the night.
We returned the next day to get those wines back in barrel and spent just 3 hours compared to the 8 the day before. We started our GSM blend by putting some of the Syrah in with some of the Mourvedre, but kept two barrels of each on their own. In the end we had 14 barrels and topping wine.
Each barrel is rinsed and cleaned as part of the process on the barrel holder below. The holder allows the barrel to spin and Stefania usually does this job.
I was really happy with the Mourvedre. Our original plan was to blend all of it into the GSM blend or the Haut Tubee, but we may keep some on its own. The other wines were all good as well, and I’m excited about the final wines. After a rough weather year last year it looks like we still ended up with good wine.