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Last Saturday we held our Spring Open House. Usually we send out an announcement to everyone on our mailing list within the Bay Area. This year though we had rain the entire week before the open house and one day in particular that Jerry said was the most rain he’d ever seen in a 24 hour period.

The net result was that the little field we usually use for parking was too wet to mow and too soft to park in. We decided rather than trying to do traffic control on the street, or worse have to tow cars out of the mud, we’d cut back on the email invites and just send them to people who had checked off ‘hold for pick up’ on their order forms.

This gave us a small group of visitors and a much more low key event. The first picture I took was for some people on the Wine Spectator forum. There was a question about ‘gunk’ in wine and I thought I’d take a picture of some Syrah we have in a carboy. This is the net result of letting 5 gallons of gross lees settle for a few months. The lees are on the bottom and the wine is on the top.

Now a better picture of our hostess with a bottle of wine in the cellar getting ready for visitors.

Here is our little low key tasting table. I actually forget sometimes I’m supposed to do the pouring and tend to think people will just help themselves. Not your normal tasting room experience I’m sure. I was feeling like celebrating the opening of a new Chavez Supermarket near our home so the treat were chips, red salsa, nopales salsa and queso fresco.

I opened 5 wines in total the three from the current release: 2009 Chardonnay Chaine d’Or Vineyard, 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Crimson Clover Vineyard and 2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains. The other two wines where a 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Uvas Creek Vineyard and 2007 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains.

The Uvas Creek was best after being open about an hour. I think that means it’s almost out of the odd stage that this bottling has always gone through from age 3 to 4. If you want to open one over the next few months I’d decant it for about an hour to let the cherry fruit open up. Right out of the bottle the fruit is a little muted but with air it comes back around. I saw this in the 05 and 06 also at about the same age so I think it’s something with the aging profile of this particular vineyard.

We’re almost ready to start shipping for our Spring Release. Stefania has cleared out the garage and tabulated the orders so far. She placed an order for boxes and those will arrive next week. As soon as the boxes arrive she’ll start having the wine picked up from CWT. I’ll probably do this in the FJ Cruiser after work as CWT is on my way home. We can only handle about 40 cases of wine at a time in the garage with all the shipping material so we’ll have to do a few runs.

She’ll pull the wine and pack boxes and we’ll send them to UPS in groups of 10-15. More than that and it overwhelms the UPS Store. Shipping will be on Mondays and Tuesdays to avoid having the wine sit in any warehouses over two weekends. That means the entire UPS portion of the process will likely spread out over three weeks.

California, Arizona and Nevada Orders will go out via GSO. We have more options with those as it’s overnight (CA) or two day (NV, AZ). That means we can ship out Monday through Thursday. The GSO driver also is able to handle more cases at a time, so it’s possible all the CA, NV and AZ orders will be done in a week and a half or so.

We still do have wine left from the Spring Release. We’re very low on Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon, but have good number of Chardonnay and Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon left. It’s not too late to get an order in and we usually get a little grouping of orders right after Tax Day on April 15th.

There are just about 40 plants in this vineyard just outside of downtown Los Gatos. The address is Monte Sereno, but it’s just 2 blocks from the main drag in Los Gatos.

The plants are Merlot from our best guess and are about 15 years old. There’s a mix though of cordons from very mature to brand new which makes me think the vineyard was probably not taken care of at some point in the past, then restored.

Stefania and I went out and did all the pruning a few weeks ago. It took both of us about 35 minutes to finish and carry out the cuttings. We’ll have more pictures from this vineyard as we go through the year.

This was from the storm that came through February 25th – the one that got everyone excited that it might snow on the valley floor. No such luck down below, but the foothills got a nice coat of the white stuff.

Everyone asks if the snow is bad for the vines and the standard answer in California is “not really”. Frost on the other hand can zap an entire crop if the tender buds and shoots get burned.

I threw a couple of snowballs for the dogs to chase but after the second one they were on to me and then went back inside the winery to see what Paul was up to. We spent just a few hours in the morning racking the ’09s and catching up on paperwork, a really light day which was nice.

We hit the Chavez market by our house and grabbed lunch at the taqueria before heading home to the kitties.

Meet the new kids:

This is Rupert aka Fat Cat.
She’s enjoying her new couch and in/out privileges. Most afternoons I
can find her sitting among the roses just keeping an eye on things.

And this is Buster aka Little Bubba.
When he’s not getting into mischief he’s a social little lover with
plenty of purrs. For awhile I was calling him my my little alarm
clock. He gets up very early and likes to talk.

Rupie in the garden….

Little Bubba on the couch…

It’s been just over four weeks and so far everyone is getting along. There have been minor adjustments to our normal routine but nothing dramatic. They’re a lot of fun and great company to have around. I’m learning that computer work in the afternoon is impossible until Mr Loverboy gets his 15 minutes of purring and attention out of the way before he settles in for another nap. Fat Cat is happy being solitary and would prefer I not pester her all day long with constant pets, attempts at mouse play and general house noise. She’s very interested in food and treats though.

One of the new vineyards I didn’t get a picture taken of last week was this small 250 plant vineyard in Morgan Hill. Coming up with a nickname for a vineyard can be a little tough sometimes. It’s also hard to describe them to Jerry so he knows where I’m sending him. So we might call something a fanciful name like’ ‘Vista Vineyard’, but Jerry will know it as, “The Vineyard with the Crazy Lady’.

This new site though was pretty easy to come up with a nickname for and the nickname will be an easy way for Jerry to remember it too. A muster, and they are called musters if it’s mixed males and females, of peafowls have made this backyard their home.

Here’s a closer view of the lead Peacock. Peacocks are completely unafraid of humans when they are feral in California like this group. I don’t know how they behave in India but here they largely ignore human’s, cats, cars, and any other distractions.

Stefania and I were out at 8:00 AM Sunday morning (It was 32 degrees when we arrived) to show the owners how to prune. They had a vineyard management company who put it in and was taking care of the vineyard for them but this year they wanted to do most of the work themselves.

That’s something we’re happy to help out with. We’ll answer emails and phone calls when they have questions and go out and show them how to do key things in the vineyard like pruning. Sunday we spent about an hour showing them how to prune these three year old vines.

The site is actually similar to our home vineyard. It’s on the eastern side of the Santa Teresa hills in deep rich black clay. The vines will have a lot of vigor and yield well with little watering. The owners aren’t actually sure if it was Zinfandel or Cab Franc that was installed. Their paperwork says Cab Franc, but the lead installer told them it was Zinfandel. Right now it’s hard to tell the difference. It looks like Cab Franc to me. As soon as the plants get leaves I’ll be able to tell the difference very quickly.

We’re hoping the yield will be high enough to process the grapes on their own. Right now it’s likely going into the Haut Tubee blend. In the future though with other vineyards we have coming on line it might be part of a Santa Clara Valley Cabernet blend.

I did pretty good on Saturday, I actually took a few pictures in 2 of the 4 vineyards I visited. The 5th appointment was canceled as it was raining all day and the owner thought the vineyard was too muddy. I think the mud and rain worked to my advantage all day. Usually it’s hard to stay on schedule with these types of visits as the property owners have dozens of questions.

With the rain Saturday though no one really wanted to stay outside and chat, which worked just fine for me. The first stop was a 3 acre vineyard near the Uvas Creek vineyard site. It’s in the same small valley between the Santa Theresa hills and Santa Cruz Mountains that we like so much. This vineyard though was in foreclosure and has not been taken care of for two years.

The vines are black from mildew and we’ve nicknamed it the ‘Black Hole Vineyard’. The new owners are trying to get it cleaned up and repaired. I was visiting on site to show their vineyard helper how to try and prune the vines in an attempt to recover them.

This is a closer look at just how ugly it is right now. None of the fruit was harvested last year. I doubt it could have been used with the amount of mildew on the vines. You can see there is a serious gopher problem and the trellis system is in need of a major overhaul and upgrade.

On my next two stops I didn’t take pictures. The first was just about 1/2 a mile from the ‘Black Hole Vineyard’. It was 250 Cab Franc plants. The vineyard was in excellent shape and the owners are just looking for someone to train them how to take care of the vines so that they can do it themselves. I’ll have pictures from that one this Saturday when we go out to show them how to prune.

After that I was in Los Gatos talking with another homeowner who had just purchased a house with 40 Merlot vines in the backyard. That went fast and I had time to stop at Cooper Garrod for a visit on my way to my last appointment of the day. This is the tasting room there.

My last stop was at a 2 1/2 acre vineyard in the Mount Eden area of the Santa Cruz Mountains. This vineyard is at 900 feet and is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. It would be a good addition to our Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet, so we’re trying to work out a deal for the fruit this year.

Part II