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On Saturday March 27th from 11am until 3pm we will have the winery open for our Spring Open House and Pick Up Day. This is one of just 3 times per year we will have the winery open for visitors!

We will be pouring our latest releases and select wines from our older releases. Paul will also host a vineyard tour at Noon and a Cellar Tour at 1:30. Stefania will be cooking snacks (Paul wants hot dogs, Stefania wants dim sum so we will probably have both.) We will also have barrel samples of some of our 2008 and 2009 wines available.

If you placed an order in our Spring Release, your wine will be available for pick up. Directions are at:

http://www.chainedor.com/directions.html

As always there is no charge for visiting and sampling wine. If you would like an email invitation and have not yet received one, please drop us a note.

On Saturday we were back in the winery to finish up on racking two more 2009 red wines. First stop is usually the bathroom after the long drive and I took this picture walking back to the cellar. It was a beautiful day at Chaine d’Or.

We had two wines in tank that needed to go back into barrel. The first racking is critical for the way we make wine. I like to get a decent sulfur amount into the wine so that we don’t have to add more than a little at a time for the rest of the wines stay in barrel. It also gives us a chance to let more of the ‘gunk’ settle out of the wine.

Here is our assistant winemaker getting her gloves on and getting ready to get started.

We had our 2009 Split Rail Vineyard Syrah and our 2009 Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon to get into barrel. As usual we were very busy during the racking process and I didn’t take any pictures. A big part of that is I have to carefully watch the barrels fill up and stop the pump at just the right moment to not over run the barrel.

It’s harder than it seems, especially when you reach the bottom of the tank and air starts to get into the hose. That air then burbles out in the barrel and makes judging the last inch or two very difficult.

The last step is clean up. I clean the pump and we both do the hoses. I also get all the equipment away and everything picked up. My shoulders don’t fit through the tank opening so Stefania gets the job of cleaning the inside of the tank.

The tank has to be rinsed then she scrubs and disinfects the inside. There’s just no way to not get wet so Stef always brings extra shoes.
Then we are done. We leave all the valves and seals open so the tank can’t retain water. That might lead to mold. Next up we’ll do the 2009 Haut Tubee and then start prepping the 2009 Chardonnay for bottling.

This past weekend Stefania and I racked and sulfured four of our 2009 wines. We have to wait until the secondary fermentation is complete before adding sulfur and that usually takes a few months after the wines have gone into barrel.

I think I’m just about to admit defeat when it comes to trying to take pictures on days we rack. I always start off with good intentions, but we end up working non stop and my hands are busy the entire time. I only took only two pictures. This was the first one.

An exciting picture of the top of the tank after I opened it. I was going to take pictures of each step, but we move so fast, and are so busy through everything that it’s just not working to try and take photos. But this is the first step. Open the top of the tank. Otherwise when you start to pump the wine back into barrel you will create a terrible vacuum inside the tank.

Then we we are on to all the tasks. We filled barrels, cleaned barrels, sulfured barrels, moved barrels, emptied tanks, cleaned tanks, filled tanks, added Argon, checked pH’s, added sulfur, cleaned pumps, cleaned hoses, cleaned bins, stirred Chardonnay, topped Chardonnay, cleaned the floor, emptied toppers, cleaned toppers, filled toppers, and tasted samples. Which is picture #2

I pull about a cup of wine out of each lot and Stefania runs acidity tests on them. Those are the instruments in the back. We also pour a bit of that wine into a glass and try them out. The acidity reading helps us figure out how much sulfur we need to add to protect the wine from bacteria. The higher the acid the less sulfur needs to be added.

In between all the cleaning we did get some notes down I’ve combined Stefania’s notes with mine:

2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, Crimson Clover Vineyard, Santa Clara Valley

Alcohol : 14.9, pH 3.67

Dark and saturated with color. Heady nose of flowers, berry, and chocolate. Lush, fat and ripe with black fruit, berries, plum, and mocha. Complex, round and bold. Stefania noted the powerful and ripe tannins. We’ll probably age this one at least 22 months in barrel. Very promising wine, this site is turning out some great wines.

2009 Syrah, Split Rail Vineyard, Santa Cruz Mountains

Alcohol 14.4, pH 3.76

Garnet with purple hues, very bright. Soft nose with black olive, spices, cherry and berry notes. Cherry, Raspberry, wild berry and more olive and some smoke flavors. Great balance with a long finish. More serious than the Eaglepoint Syrah.

2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, Santa Cruz Mountains

Alcohol 13.1, pH 3.89

The first blend is 85% Harvest Moon and 15 % Chaine d’Or. We will likely add more Chaine d’Or to get to a final blend, which should lower the pH and raise the alcohol slightly.

Deep ruby red. Wild berry, mint and spice on the nose. Stefania said “Heritage Berries, you know berries before they started breeding them for size.” Super ripe tannins make the wine very soft and smooth with plum, and ripe berry fruit. No sharp edges on this wine. Not picking up a lot of wood notes yet, it’s in 70% new oak.

2009 Cabernet Sauvignon, Chaine d’Or Vineyard, Santa Cruz Mountains

Alcohol 14.2, pH 3.67

Dark with purple hue, very deep color. Open fruity nose, with currants, berry and plum. Ripe round tannins. Getting the tannins ripe on the estate is a challenge, but we did it in 2009! Berry fruit with chocolate notes. Heady notes of spring blossoms, bright fruit and spicy wood notes. Great lift and finish, very fruity.

This is really the vineyard starting to reach it’s maximum. Ours hopes for this wine are very high, best of the 09’s at this point. Aging now in 75% new oak.

We’re pretty hopeful on the 2009’s. The pH’s had us a bit worried, they seemed high, but the wines all show good balance and lift. The noses are very expressive. This will probably be a vintage I tell people to buy and drink while they age their 2008’s. I little like 2007 or maybe 2005 with more concentration in the wines.

Last week a friend asked on the Wine Spectator forum if we were happy with how our older wines were turning out. It was a really hard question to answer and it took me a couple days to post a reply.

Most of what we drink ends up being the most current release. We’re opening bottles at the winery or at events and pouring for people. We usually have a little taste, but it’s rarely a good time to take notes, or even gather thoughts. Usually I’m answering a whole lot of questions about the wine. I also like to let people reach their own flavor conclusions so I’m not talking about the wines flavors, just about how it’s made.

Even when those bottles make it home, or we open it at home, we rarely get to sit and savor a bottle. Usually we have people over and we’re busy cooking or entertaining. I might get a glass and have just enough time to go; ‘humm, not bad’.

Over the past week though we made an effort to pull out some older bottles and actually sit down to dinner with them and spend a little time enjoying them.

2006 Haut Tubee – Just Stefania and I over dinner last week. The wine is darker than I remember with a very Rhone like nose. This wine is more than 50% Cabernet Sauvignon, but the Rhone grapes still come through. It’s also denser than I remember with ripe fruit and a spicy quality from the stems. Lots of fruit and very fresh finish.

We didn’t plan on making this as a commercial wine in 2006, it was a bit of an after thought and even a month before bottling we were not 100% certain we’d put a label on it. I’m glad we did, it’s turned out very well, and even at 4 years old passed my expectations.

2005 Syrah Eaglepoint Ranch. – Stef and I again over dinner. Wild wine, with a nose of ripe black fruit, bacon, smoke and spice. This is a ‘fool your friends’ wine. Throw it in a blind tasting, I bet no one can figure out where it’s from. It’s got a lot of ripe fruit but also a really wild spicy edge. Reminded me a lot of a Hermitage. In fact the next night we opened a 2001 Yann Chave Crozes Hermitage to compare the nose. I think people would say; ‘well it’s got the fruit of a California wine, but the nose is very Northern Rhone.’ I’m sticking with my recommendation to pair this with lamb.

2007 Pinot Noir Santa Cruz Mountains. It’s a fruit slut now. Tons of red fruit really explodes out of the glass. Strawberry, raspberry and bing cherry. There’s also forest notes. ‘Wet leafs on earth’, Stef calls it. The nose is powerful and surprising given the wine is not that dark. We had this over dinner with a small group of friends who cooked for us. I think this wine will be really great with ham this spring.

Maybe I’ve heard of this before and already forgotten about it. Friends of ours came by the winery on Saturday to pick up used barrels to make into planters and one of them asked, “So, what wine are you opening tonight for That Bottle Night? “.

I scratched my head and said, I don’t know, what do you mean, “that” bottle. You know, that one special bottle you keep saving for just the “right” moment. A birthday, anniversary, new job, new baby, etc. Huh. Still scratching my head. So I turned to Paul and asked if we had such a bottle in the house that we were saving. He shrugged.

We worked through the rest of the afternoon racking the 2009’s and kept pondering “that” bottle to have. Still nothing. I went through a mental checklist of what’s on my side and pretty much all I’m stashing are the gift wines (from Paul to me) that we’ll open for a future Christmas dinner. So far, I’ve got nothing.

The reason for that is we celebrate just about anything anytime. Special bottles aren’t for saving in my house, neither is champagne. At least once per month we open a bottle of bubbly “just because”. When we go out to dinner and order a bottle of sparkles the waitstaff always asks, “oh, is it a special occassion tonight?”, and they leave our table perplexed by our reply, “No, we simply enjoy it”.

By the time we got home, we were both pretty tired, but Paul headed to the market and picked up a chuck steak that I ground up for burgers. While I ground the beef, he prepped the baked potatoes and an artichoke, and then headed off into the cellar.

He came back out with a 2000 Domaine Tempier Bandol.

My notes are really flat and basic; I liked it. I couldn’t tell you anything more beyond that, it was a great quaffing wine with goat cheddar cheese burgers and baked potatoes.

I don’t see this “event” catching on at my house, but if you’re interested for next year I found this link:

http://www.openthatbottlenight.com

I’ve used that term a few times. It’s not 19th century furniture. It’s a special gizmo that shakes the grapes after they have done through a destemmer. The shaking takes place over a grate and the result is that the whole berries pass through to the fermentation tanks and any other ‘gunk’ that was too small to pick out in sorting falls through.

I found a picture here:

The option I’m after is not this solid table, but rather one with the grate feature. This would allow us to get even cleaner fermentation bins than we have now and it’s similar to a system we’ve used at Big Basin Vineyards on some of our wines.

In order for the table to work we would also need to upgrade our crusher destemmer to something like this:

This unit has an option to just de-stem the grapes without crushing them, which is what we would need to do for the table to be effective.

The table runs about $12,000 and the destemmer, for the small size we need is about $18,000. We would also need about $4000 in other equipment to mount the entire thing correctly into our space. In addition to the cleaner bins this would also mean we would not have to do the truck balancing destemmer routine at Chardonnay harvest. (See my blog picture). This set up would just roll right over the press.

So $34,000 is a ton of money for our little operation. That’s why we’ve put so many other things on hold. We don’t ‘need’ this, what we have now works very well, but this would allow us to squeeze a little more quality out of each wine.

If you don’t see us in your town this year, remember theses pictures and you’ll know why.

I few people have asked what shows we will be doing this year and what our travel schedule looks like.

The simple answer is; “not many, or much”.

We really need a website upgrade and I want to get a shaker table for the crusher destemmer. That means I’ve cut the travel and marketing budget back to almost nothing. We won’t be doing the Family Winemakers shows or the Chronicle show at Fort Mason. Those three alone add up to about $3000 in expenses so that puts us at least part way there to the website work.

We get invited to pour at dozens of events each year and usually would only do a few. This year so far the only things we have scheduled are private events and fundraisers. As those come up we’ll let people know about them.

The travel budget is also being sidelined for the shaker table (total cost about $28,000, so we will need to save for awhile for that one). If the Spring release goes well I might add some money back in to the travel budget, but we’ll have to see how sales go.

We would like to do an east coast swing and hit DC, Philly, NY and Boston. We’ve had so many requests to come visit that we really would like to get that done. We’d also like to get to Florida, and back to Chicago and Nashville.

We do know that we’ll have visitors coming by the winery more this year than last, and we will be open at least three times this year. When those events come up we’ll let people know as well.

Stefania took this picture this morning of our Gold Medal from the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. I didn’t notice until posting this, but it’s actually taken in front of our hot tub.

We also got the Spring Release letters into the mail this morning. They should start to arrive later this week.

We have a busy week ahead. We’ll be getting out about 20 pending shipments starting Thursday and new orders should start to arrive Friday and Saturday. There’s also some work to do in the winery this weekend and if the weather stays ok, more work in the vineyard.

I’ll have a few more blogs up this week about our travel schedule and plans for this year.

It’s great to have so much rain, but I’m officially ready for blue sky and sunshine. The vineyards are muddy and mucky and there is still plenty of work to be done in them.

There are broken posts to replace and wire repair still to do. I don’t mind the office work that goes along with owning a small business, but I really want to get back outside and work. We’ve been hitting the gym fairly often to make up for the lack of outdoor labor we’re usually doing this time of year.

The cold winter days are usually my favorite for hiking the local hills. I’m prone to overheating so I like to take advantage of the crisp air. The cloudy skies though make it too cold and everything is so soggy that it’s no fun.

Speaking of hiking – we are postponing the Grand Canyon trip. We had thought we would go this April but we missed the deadline to sign up for overnight and some other things came up that we needed to work around. It’s still on the list of things to-do one day.

And, I saw the shoe repair guy to see about making my hiking boots fit better. They are a great shoe, but they are too tight on my heel. For $10 I picked up some leather stretching goo that I need to apply next time I put them on. We’ll see how that goes. I’ll need them one last time this year when we go out and prune Arastradero.