Facebook Redo

Well I wasn’t able to make Facebook go away. Stef still insists it’s ‘Lamebook’, and I still would rather have friends over for wine and dinner to know what they’ve been up to, but I have been keeping up on it now.

At least every few days with a status, and eventually getting around to friend requests and figuring out what pokes and wall writings are. If I don’t respond right away, don’t worry, I will eventually.

We finished racking today. Stef tried out our new sulfur tester and we did some work on the 2008’s. I’ll have a couple pictures tomorrow and a bigger update. For now I’m climbing into bed with some hot tea to see if I can get a cold out of my head before the New Year.

Racking Day

We didn’t start too early today, I was still up before 7am, but Stef and I enjoyed some coffee, fresh orange juice and the newspaper in bed until about 8:30. Our Orange tree is finally ripe and we’re harvesting a few each morning.

Jerry arrived at 9am and he and I headed up to Chaine d’Or for the days tasks. Stef stayed behind to bake some cookies, do a delivery and get caught up on some billings.

It’s been cold in California. 36 degrees when we headed out at 9:05


Jerry and I prepped all the hoses and tanks to get wine. We had broken everything down and cleaned it all after our last pressing. We racked our 2007 Santa Cruz Mountains Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2007 Chaine d’Or Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. Both are turning out fantastic. The fruit in 2007 is very intense and deep and these wine will have wonderful noses.


We also got the lab report back on our 2008 Chardonnay and it’s finished Malolactic fermentation. Great to have that done before Christmas. That meant it was time to add sulfur to the Chardonnay. I prepped individual amounts to go into each barrel, just about 21 grams, or 50 parts per million. I’m doing a little higher now at the first sulfuring than in the past.

This seems to be a growing trend from many winemakers I admire. The ideas is to get a good amount in the wine early and kill anything before it can get started.


We worked just about 4 hours before heading home. Emory and Tracy came by to help and learn a little about the racking process, which went smoothly except for one loose hose that dumped about 1/2 gallon on Emory. He now has an official pair of winery pants.

Fun with the TTB

United States Department of the Treasury, Alcohol and Tobacco, Tax and Trade Bureau. They go by TTB. That’s the agency in charge of all federal laws around wine and collecting taxes on wine. They also approval all labels.

The approval process can be very mystifying, and approval can depend as much on the person reviewing your application as anything. It really can be very random, but that’s not the point of this little rant.

The TTB has an entire set of rules on what you can say about where a wine was produced. These laws were mostly drawn up in the 1970’s. The top ‘ranking’ is Estate. That’s the most strict labeling in theory. To call something Estate, it must be grown, produced, cellared and bottled on property owned by the winery. The thought in the 70’s was this would be a way for consumers to identify the very best wines.

It never worked that way of course. Gallo can claim a bottle of jug wine is Estate. Even if it came from 1000’s of tons grown on 1000’s of acres in Monterey and then trucked to their giant tank facility in the Central valley. They own all that property so that, according to the rules, is Estate wine. The term Estate never really caught on as a quality indicator, and with the rise of winemakers like Brian Loring, Adam Lee and Wells Guthrie, who owned no vineyards it became even less a quality indicator. Still the rules remain as well as rules for all kinds of other things you can put on the label. Produced By, Produced and Bottled By, Cellared By, Bottled By, all have their own set of rules. In theory these rules are to help the consumer. In practice they are in fact worse than meaningless, they are misleading.

Our Haut Tubee is a perfect example. We grow that wine on our Estate. Well it’s our yard, no one but the TTB would mistake it for an Estate, it’s a track home in a suburb, but it still counts as an Estate. The wine is then made by us at Chaine ‘d Or. We produce it and cellar it there. According to all the rules we can call that Estate Wine since we manage Chaine ‘d Or and the grapes are grown in a vineyard we own.

We’re not bottling it at Chaine d’Or. Bottling equipment is expensive and prone to failure, so most small wineries use a third party bottling company to do bottling. It’s called the bottling truck and the truck uses your bond to bottle, in effect you rent the truck and crew and provide extra labor. The TTB doesn’t care about this, it can still be called Estate.

But now things get silly. For logistical reasons we’re going to have the bottling truck go to Big Basin Vineyards for our next bottling. 9 of the 12 barrels we want to bottle are at Big Basin, so we are going to move the other three there to bottle. This is called a bond to bond transfer. We transfer the wine to Big Basin. I then write Big Basin a power of attorney letter and allow them to do business as Stefania Wine for two days. They then file a statement in Santa Cruz County that they will be Stefania Wine for two days. All these hoops are to keep things legal and make sure we’re not trying to hide wine, and thus excise tax from the TTB (The tax on three barrels is about $50, it costs about $300 to do all these paperwork steps, as per Alex Spiro).

So we are good to go. But guess what, we can’t call the wine Estate anymore. In fact we can’t even call it Produced and Bottled by. The only thing we can legally claim is “Bottled by Stefania Wine.” Which of course is the one and only thing that is not true. The wine was grown, produced, aged, and cellared by us on our estate, but bottled by Big Basin Vineyards.

So when you see these phrases on the back of bottles, ignore them, they are totally and completely meaningless.

We’re Still Here!

We just took a break from blogging while we recovered from harvest and got a few other pressing tasks done.

The front yard at home has been torn down, and a new trellis system put in. Stef promises pictures soon. We’ve also been going round and round with labels approvals from the ttb, I’ll post more on that later.

We wrapped up the Winter Futures Program and that went very well, and we’re preparing for bottling in January of our Pinot Noir and Haut Tubee. It’s been busy, just more office work than winery or vineyard work, so it doesn’t seem very exciting to write about.

We did end our set up with our shipper though. We were having a lot of trouble with orders, inventory and compliance with them and just decided to take the entire shipping thing in house now. It was a painful process, but we picked up our last wine inventory from them on Friday.

The good news from the entire thing is we have 6 cases of 2006 Haut Tubee that we didn’t know about. We had thought we were totally out. If anyone is interested please email me. It will be first come-first serve at $240 a case, no charge for shipping.

Pick Up Day / Open House

This Saturday will be pick up day at the winery. We’ll have our 2006 Uvas Creek Cabernet available for pick up from our Fall release. If you placed an order, your wine will be available.

We will also be pouring tastes of our other releases this year, the 2006 Haut Tubee and 2006 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah. We will also be pouring the 2006 Chaine d’Or Chardonnay and 2005 Chaine d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon.

The winery will be open from 11 am until 3 pm. If I have the room, I’ll pull down a barrel for barrel samples as well. We will have snacks for everyone as well. If you’d like to bring a picnic up, the crush area is now clear and the little hill by the pad is open. Bring a blanket. Hopefully the weather will stay nice.

Shipping Update

Well we did pretty good through harvest on getting updates in, and we are definitely in recovery mode now and the posts have slowed down. We’ve still been busy, but now we’re trying to catch up on office work, shipping, and still doing punch downs on the last of the Cabernets.

We did get just about the last of the 2006 Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon orders this week. There are 3 orders we still need to ship, two will go Friday and one is on hold until the 23rd. Pick up day is the 22nd at the winery, but I’ve already made a few local deliveries.

Saturday is our F.O.W. event, and we set aside 10 cases of wine for that event. There are 43 people who bought tickets, but I still don’t think we’ll go through 10 complete cases, so we may have a little wine left on Monday. Right now we’re trying to manage the difficulties of just having one car. Tomorrow I need to be at the day job, Stef needs to be at the winery and some how we need to get to the UPS store and then get me up to the winery after work. More logistics 🙂

Firsts

The first rains of the season came last week, and along with them, the first cold temperatures.

Our first Volunteer Appreciation Dinner was last weekend. Anyone that donned vineyard gear and braved the elements was awarded, those that made it through bottling with us (some of them twice!), were awarded, and those that were instrumental in our successful harvests were awarded. I totally forgot to thank Amber for her work on the website and getting updates posted for us, and we only briefly mentioned Kathy for her appearances at marketing events.

Publicly I thank you all for your spirit, your willingness to be subjected to the rigors of grape farming, and for supporting us as we grow our business.

Other firsts in the past five days:

First fire in the fireplace.

First time cooking squid ink noodles.

First frost on the rooftops of my neighborhood.

The first black president.

The Last Few Days

Well we must be getting close to the finish, because we’re writing less and less.

Thursday Stef and Jerry spent the day shuttling bins to Martin Ranch. We’ll pick Tuesday there, and it looks like we’ll just get a couple tons instead of the six we wanted.

Friday we were back in the winery (pictures coming soon) racking wine into barrels. The Pinot Noir went into one new and one used barrel with about 30 gallons left in kegs right now. We’ll likely transfer that 30 gallons to a half barrel when we’re all done. We tried to revive an old (1992) half barrel but it was just not going to seal back up. We want to wait on the half barrel usage until the very end. We only have 3 of them, so need to use then as little as possible.

We also put the Haut Tubee and Elandrich into barrel. Both went into new oak, a first for the Haut Tubee. The Elandrich will eventually go into a Santa Cruz Mountains blend, the Haut Tubee will be bottled on it’s own, but we’ll only have 25 cases for 2008.

We also stirred the lees on our Chardonnay and topped up all the 2007’s.

Saturday we brought in the Cabernet at Chaine d’Or. A very small amount, just under one ton total. Last year there was 3+ tons. We didn’t take any pictures of the day, but Wes posted a bunch at:

http://good-times.webshots.com/photo/2386957800102270864roupyx

Today we’ll visit Bonny Doon to see if there are any grapes left in the Llama vineyard. The owner did not want to net the vineyard, so we’re expecting that birds have taken most of the crop in the last few weeks.

We’ll also be boxing up orders. The weather finally looks cool enough here in San Jose to start shipping the Fall Release. The first batch will go out this week, with more going next week. We still have a little 2006 Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon left, so if you’ve been holding on to an order form get it in soon. We did not sent allocations to the last 30-40 people on the mailing list this time, so it looks like we’re at the point that it will take a couple releases after you sign up to work into an allocation.

Back From Our Short Break

We spent Thursday to Monday on our annual trip to New Orleans for our Anniversary (17th), and my birthday (19th). Tuesday we were back at work pressing off the Pinot Noir and Elandrich Vineyard Merlot. It was a full day Tuesday with both wines now settling in tanks. I like to let the wines ‘rest’ for 48 hours after going to press. This lets all the gross lees settle to the bottom of the tank, and we rack only clean wine into barrel. We’ll finish up that process tomorrow.

In the mean time a few pictures from our trip:

Stef and Ozzy at ‘Coops Place’ on Decatur in the lower French Quarter.


Me and Natalie Boos at her gallery on Royal Street. Natalie started as a street artist selling her work in Jackson Square. She opened her gallery the week we visited in 2006. I got the painting in the upper right, Stef got the one on the lower left.


Our menu at Bayona on our Anniversary night. The chef signed it for us and came out to visit. We had a really nice bottle of Roumier 2005 Chambolle Musigny with dinner.


Stef getting ready for a night out. We stayed in a little apartment between Decatur and Royal about a block from Jackson Square. Rhonda and Walt from the Louisiana Loom Works were our hosts. Rhonda did the rug for our dinning room this past year.


It was a great trip. Good to see old friends and make some new ones. A really good break in the middle of harvest for us every year.