Blog

I took Friday off. Actually, I took the entire weekend off now that I think about it. And it felt gooood.

Friends of friends were visiting from Virginia so we piled into two cars and drove over to the coast. After goofing off trying to fly a kite at Gazos Creek beach access, we drove up to Pescadero and had lunch at Duartes. Best crab sandwich in over 20 years. Just sayin’.

Visited the Harley Goat Farm and treated myself to some homemade soaps, 4 different cheeses, brown eggs, and wildflower honey. I didn’t think that anything could top the crab sandwich, but this was by far the highlight of of the weekend. I’m a Capricorn, and love goats…go figure.

On Saturday, we confirmed our participation at the Las Vegas Rock N Roll wine event for September. I’ll have more info. on that soon. If you’re interested, it’s Saturday the 25th at Mandalay Bay. Rock On!

Sunday we got stuck in traffic on our way to Moss Landing for the Antique Show…it was on the list of things I’d like to do, but after staying out late Friday AND Saturday night (oooh), I was in no mood to wake up early just to look at old stuff. It wasn’t too cold, damp, or foggy but it was cold, damp and foggy. Found some small Bauer pieces I almost bought, but nothing that stood out that I just had to have. Maybe next time.

I’m stupefied that July is wrapping up already…is summer ever going to get here? I know the folks back east are sweltering, but someone needs to turn off the a/c out here already.

More poppies keep popping up! This is Paul’s favorite flower, so when I see them coming up I make sure to point them out to him. It’s the simple things in life, yes? Keeps him from ranting too much…

Also in the vineyard, veraison! I need to look back through the vineyard notebooks to be sure, but I think we’re about two weeks behind “normal” for our estate vineyard here in San Jose.

I asked Stefania that via email at lunch today. She said just “as long as you alternate the rants and don’t bash the industry too much”.

I had this posting in mind:

http://stefaniawine.blogspot.com/2010/04/public-events.html

It explained why we won’t do public tasting events any more. Since that posting we’ve been invited to about a dozen public events. I think it’s time to modify our policy some. We will only do public events that do not charge the winery to attend. Of course that’s like saying we’ll only give away free wine to people named Salma Hayek who stop by our house. We’re pretty sure Selma is not dieing to stop by, and a public wine event that doesn’t charge the wineries is about as rare as having a Hollywood starlet come by for a visit.

I was thinking about that reading the Rolling Stone last night. Which by the way the Rolling Stone has the very best political and foreign affairs writing in the country today. Even if you don’t like the political views, no other publication comes close to the depth and impact of the reporting going on at the Stone. Anyway, back to the main rant, there was a column on all the summer rock festivals.

It got me thinking. Do they charge the rock bands to play at those events? Do the promoters tell the bands: “We’ve got a huge audience of your target market lined up to come, just give us $10000 and we’ll charge them $50 each and let you play for them”?

The wine is the attraction at a wine tasting isn’t it? If you had a wine tasting with no wine, would anyone attend? It just seems we’ve been doing it backwards in the wine industry for a long time.

A couple of years ago Stefania and I were shopping early one Saturday morning at our local market. They had a special on pork butt. I think it was 99 cents a pound.

I stood in the market for a long time wondering what to do. This same market will have prime rib on sale from time to time at $7-$8 a pound. Once they even hit $5 a pound. That’s an easy buy. A prime rib I can cut up. I can make steaks or I can cut it into smaller roasts and freeze it for later. Pork butt though really should not be cut up. It’s best cooked long, slow and whole. Our freezer is small, and mostly used for cocktail equipment, so freezing a pork butt isn’t really a good idea.

What to do, I wondered? “Pork Emergency, Pork Emergency”!! That’s what we did. We bought it and sent out a message to a few friends – “Pork emergency, come help us eat this thing.”

Well it happened again on Saturday. The market had good looking butts and St Louis Style ribs at 2 for 1. It was time for a Pork Emergency.

Sunday morning Stefania and I broke up an old barrel to use for smoke and we put the pork on about 9AM. This was at about 1PM when I took the ribs off the smoke.

I like to let ribs stay on the smoker for about 4 hours, then remove them and finish them on the grill. I find the fat does not render down to my liking on the smoker alone. I do the same with pork butt, but don’t feel like I’ve got in down 100% yet. I did 6 hours on the smoker, then three in the oven at higher temperature. I would have liked to get the fat rendered down a bit more. Maybe next time I’ll do it Carnitas style and return the meat to the oven at 450 degrees for 20 minutes after chopping it up to get it slightly crispy.

In the mean time, watch your emails and texts for the next Pork Emergency!

Seems like we drank more wine than that…or we’re starting to slow down a bit. 🙂

All I know about cooking with fresh okra is that it can be weird and there are techniques used to avoid it getting gummy.

I didn’t bother to research it further and followed my instinct last night. Maybe it was the gin martini talking (Hendricks with a slice of cucumber)

In a hot skillet I browned chicken pieces, added garlic, onion, fennel, and red bell peppers.
When it got too hot and sizzly, I poured a little white wine into the pan and gave it a toss.
Added sliced shiitake mushrooms and sliced okra then poured a lemongrass/soy mixture over everything and covered it. Walked away for 30 minutes while it burbled on medium low heat.

Shared the last half of a bottle of sake with Paul…(previously opened)

Added fresh snow peas and raw bok choy, covered and let steam/burble another 15 minutes.

When the snow peas and bok choy got added, Paul started a pot of asian noodles.

I don’t know if it was because the okra was super fresh or because I sliced it lengthwise and let it mostly steam, but it was perfect.

We shared this feast in front of the t.v. while watching a past episode of Anthony Bourdain shooting guns in Texas with Ted Nugent. A classic episode and one I like to quote often.

Last night Stefania and I were back in Morgan Hill for a dinner meeting at a local pub down there. As we parked Stefania spotted these growing on the fence that divides the property lines. Unlike the bright healthy plants from our bike ride, these were withered and browning from powdery mildew.

This is an advanced stage of the disease. The white powder of the early stages has turned brown and dirty. The leafs have started to curl and die. Growth is stunting the plant and the mildew has spread to the grapes.

The berries are underdeveloped and will not get ripe. You can see the leafs starting to curl here, the first step in their death. The plant will survive through next year and onwards after that, but it will not produce any ripe fruit. The berries you see here will turn brown in a few months and fall off.

We had started the evening though with a more hopeful sight. We visited the Sesson vineyard in Coyote Valley. Jerry had spent the day tieing down new cordons and we were checking on his progress. The vineyard needs another mowing, but it seems to be fully recovered from the training mishap of last year and should produce some fruit next year.

I know most wineries, and almost all small businesses start off without a written business plan. Truth is our initial plan consisted of a lot of excel spreadsheets, a business plan template with my hand written modifications scribbled in and my memory. I had it all pulled together in a small blue binder. To anyone but me and Stefania it probably looked like a scrapbook.

We knew enough though to break the plan out into phases. This would let us focus on smaller goals while still keeping the longer ones in focus. It would also guide us on choices we made, acting as a road map to make sure things we were doing matched our short term goals and supported our longer term ones.

Here’s what our original phases, time lines and goals looked like:

Phase I – Original Projection 2005-2012

In Phase I of our business plan our key success criteria were: Establish a brand, grow our mail order customer list to 500 names, secure long term vineyard sources, make high quality wine, achieve high customer loyalty and satisfaction, start distribution sales and reach a cash flow positive state at a production level of 600-800 cases per year.

Phase II – Original Projection 2012-2019

In Phase II of our business plan our key objectives are: Move into a dedicated urban facility, handle 100% of our own production, grow our mailing list to 1500 names, establish a wine club and grow it to 200+ names, expand our restaurant and retail presence to 100+ locations and maintain a cash flow positive state and profitability at a production level of 1200-2000 cases per year.

Phase III – Original Projection 2015-

In Phase III of our business plan our key objectives are: Purchase and plant an Estate Vineyard in the Uvas Valley/Uvas Canyon area of the Santa Cruz Mountains with a total property size of not less than 30 acres and a vineyard size of 8-12 acres. Bring that vineyard to bearing by 2019 and build an Estate Winery with a tasting room and event hosting facilities by 2019. Maintain profitability at a production level of 3000-5000 cases.

I’m busy working on a revision now because we feel that we’ll met all the goals we laid out for Phase I in 2010. We’re laying out the ground work and plan for Phase II and seeing if it is possible to move the time line up by a year. The small blue binder has been scrapped for a 50+ page document complete with financial forecasts, budget projects, marketing plans and 100’s of other details.

We’ve started to meet with bankers and sought out advise on attracting investors to help fund the next round of expansion. We think we have a solid plan and a good story to tell. It reminds me though of two quotes from two different CEO’s I’ve worked for. Quote #1; “Now it’s about executing flawlessly”. Quote #2; “The most important quarter of your life is this one”. I think both sum up exactly where we are at.

Stefania has been busy working on the books for Q2. A few months ago I shared our Q1 results in this blog.

We are still looking at the numbers as preliminary but they should be 99% accurate at this point. Our sales were up 8% from Q2 of last year, and that makes it a record Q2. Wholesale sales were actually up more than direct sales at 8.5% compared to Q2/09 and up over 50% from Q1 of this year. We’ve already passed total wholesale sales from 2009.

We are just half way though the year but it looks like we’re on track for a record breaking 2010 across all our sales channels. Being conservative in projections at this point it looks like we will be up at least 40% and that wholesale sales will be up over 100%.

Our success thus far in 2010 has put me to work updating our business plan. No small task, our revised plan will top out over 60 pages! I’ll have some details tomorrow.

Sunday Stefania and I slept in late. We had no plans for the 4th of July and by 11:45 we were wondering what to do. The temps had reached the low 90’s so a few hours out in the sun doing hard exercise seemed like a good plan!

We hooked up the bike rack, packed a picnic lunch, loaded on the bikes and headed to Coyote Creek Trail for a 21 mile bike ride. Yep, more than a little nuts and Stef got over hot on the last 5 miles. We stopped for lunch half way though and had a nice picnic by the river.

On our way back down the trail my shoe lace got tangled in my sprocket and I had to stop along side the trail. Stefania spotted this growing along the river right where we stopped.

They are grapes growing wild along the river bank. I looked around to see if there was any sign of a past vineyard and there really wasn’t. Most likely some time, perhaps as long as 40-50 years ago, some grapes washed down the creek from a vineyard up the valley and took root here. It’s also possible that birds ‘deposited’ seeds along the banks.

In the wild, and left to their own, grapes take a long time to get established. All kinds of critters feed on the leafs, and in a dense riverside canopy they have to struggle for sunlight. It takes four years to get a plant established in a vineyard, it can easily take 20 in the wild. Eventually though the plant will do what it has evolved to do and climb up a tree for sunlight. This one had finally climbed to the top of a young sycamore.

Once the vine gets its leafs up in the sun, it will finally set fruit. In the wild the fruit set will usually be poor and spotty like you see below. But then the plant only needs to get a little fruit out there to reproduce. Once it’s firmly established it will set more fruit.

Our final picture is a stop we took along the trail. You can see the picnic loaded up on Stef’s bike. I was trying to take a picture of a very curious young buck across the trail, not 15 feet away, but as I pulled out my camera, another bike came along and scared him off.

I’m sure we will be back on the trail again this summer, maybe just not on so hot a day.

I couldn’t come up with a good title for this collection of pictures, and I know we’ve used ‘Random Pictures’ as a title before.

When people come and visit the winery I often explain how the fog hangs during the summer on the peaks just about a mile from the winery. This keeps the vineyard cool, even on sunny days and preserves good acidity in the grapes.

I took this picture about a mile from the winery on HWY 35 (on one of those peeks) on a day we were moving barrels from Big Basin. You can see the heavy fog. The temperature was about 58 degrees

I meant to take another picture at the winery, but of course I got busy moving wine and checking on the vineyard and didn’t remember until we were back on the road. Luck would have it though that just about a 1/2 mile down the road from the winery a Cal Trans crew had set up traffic control to manage some road repairs. I took this picture as we waited.

You can see bright blue sky and the crewman is in short sleeves. It was about 78 degrees at this location, 20 degrees warmer than just a mile and a half away. This is one of the key things that makes Chaine d’Or such a great spot for grapes.

The next couple of pictures came from a hike at Calero. This little guy is a California Alligator lizard. It was late on the trail, about 8 PM so he was moving slow.

Stef couldn’t resist picking him up. It was a busy critter day on the trails, we saw deer, wild turkey, dozens of moles, hawks and turkey vultures.

And the last random picture from Amber’s birthday party. I think my favorite wine was the 2005 Karl Lawrence to Kalon Cabernet Sauvignon. The Latour was from 1995 and was also really great. No sucky wines in the group!