Social Media Part II

I promised a follow up blog from the other day about the following quote from an article I read in Sunday’s paper.

Quote #3:

If I hear one more story about, ‘We use the best grapes and best fields …’ Tell me something new. Because that’s what everyone else is telling me.”

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120711/BUSINESS/120719915/1350?p=2&tc=pg

Paul and I have a story that is the exact opposite of “the best grapes and best fields”.

It was the same year we planted the first vines around the property of our suburban home.  We had 25 grenache and 25 syrah vines but no grapes yet to practice winemaking with.  Paul was eager to try his hand at making wine but didn’t want to invest a lot of money going through the motions on a test run.

We lined up a rental crusher de-stemmer (later referred to as the crusher-pulverizer) and invested in a small basket press that we still use for the smaller lots that go into the Haut Tubee blend.  We still didn’t have a fruit source and we didn’t have a bottling plan, per se.

Someone clued us in to a possible fruit source so we did a scouting mission and checked it out.  We’re pretty sure the grapes are petit sirah and they weren’t for sale…so we absconded with a “few” pounds.

The gross part of the story is really the grapes. They are growing along two major streets as landscaping for a commercial property.  When we crushed them, the juice was a dirty brown and there was plenty of other debris floating along the top of the vessel.  Really gross stuff.

Our hands got filthy from handling the clusters and the fermented juice smelled like soy sauce.  Nasty stuff.  But Paul persevered and ran the grapes through the entire process…right up until I declared the odor too much to be contained in the house and it was dispatched down the drain.

But he did it.  Harvest, Crush, Fermentation, Press, done.

Best grapes? no way…

Actually, the grapes were exactly perfect for another project, we used them one year for the grape stomp party…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cheers!

Social Media

Maybe I just woke up crusty today, but an article in today’s paper got under my skin.  (Link to the article at the bottom if you want to read it in its entirety)

Quote #1:

Companies should be blogging, tweeting, posting videos and sending emails at a rate that some in the audience found surprisingly high. At a minimum, companies should tweet 100 times per month, Moffitt said. A good goal is for a company to tweet 200 times per month, and a great goal is 400 times per month. Blogs should be updated five times per month at a minimum, but a good goal is to do 12 blog postings per month, and a great blogger posts 30 times per month.

Quote #2:

“I believe that if you have a chief executive that says, ‘I have a guy that does that for me,’ the next thing that guy will be doing is running the company.”

Quote #3:

If I hear one more story about, ‘We use the best grapes and best fields …’ Tell me something new. Because that’s what everyone else is telling me.”

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120711/BUSINESS/120719915/1350?p=2&tc=pg

Where do I begin?

I know, the tweeting and blogging.  How am I supposed to be the CFO, CEO, Winemaker, Packaging Engineer, Vineyard Manager, Tasting Room Coordinator, Office Manager, Tank Washer, HR, and Gopher Baiting Monitor if I’m whiling away the hours writing 30 blogs and 400 tweets?  Are you Effing Kidding me? Who makes this crap up?

A winery we are personal friends with, belong to the wine club of, and purchase fruit from, had me fill out a survey about their online practices. I was blunt, I said they are sending out too many emails “check our blog, check our facebook account, follow up on twitter… bla bla bla”.  I understand the power of the delete button and believe me, I use it more often than not.  However, having to use it that frequently was turning their marketing into a nuisance and making me “hate” them.  At some point, in social media venues, you reach a saturation point with your audience and you piss them off.  Or I’m crusty.

Next blog up, a story that is the total and complete opposite of “we use the best grapes and best fields….”  Oh, you’ll be shocked for sure.  Spoiler Alert: we didn’t bottle the wine.

–just read this aloud to Paul and he acknowledges I woke up crusty today…think I’ll go have brunch with an Old Pal–

Website Updated

I’ve just updated the website with the new wines we will be releasing in the fall. Check the ‘Wines’ page for details. We will have three new releases. The last of our 2009 wines, the 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon Chaine d’Or Vineyard will be released.

We’ll also have the first of our 2010 wines; the 2010 Haut Tubee and a new wine for us the 2010 Nueva Casa de los Padres. Details on the three wines and tasting notes are up. The Library Release will be the 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains.

So far reception for the three new wines has been great and we’re very excited by this release. We’re planning on sending out letter in September.

Food Porn

Salami, Mimolette, Truffle triple cream from Cowgirl Creamery and local honey…yumm!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy Hot Eggplant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Broiled Salmon & Eggplant

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spicy Chinese Tofu

Sexy Fishnets – NOT

After this year we will have outgrown the space at Chaine d’Or.  We’ve got a few plans we’ve been kicking around and the one we finally choose will largely depend on how sales go over the next 12 months.  We could go back to doing part of our production at another facility.  There are a few options and a few people we like working with.

We’ve could also open our own facility.  We’ve talked about doing this some where in San Jose in either an urban or suburban facility.  That would make our commute easier and let us lay things out the way we’d like to do them.  That’s expensive though since we’d need a lot of new equipment.  If we do that option we know we’ll need to open a tasting room as part of the facility to drive more local sales and offset some of the costs of running the facility.

We’ve talked about what we want from a tasting room and we’re planning this summer on touring in Napa and Sonoma to get ideas on what to do and not to do.  I’m really leaning towards a modern or post modern look.  Glass and chrome.  I like the idea of doing a walk around facility too rather than a bar.  Something more like the Apple Store, with pouring and information stations that you could approach and linger at.  Maybe one for each vineyard with a slide show of the vineyard you could view.  Instead of the pouring staff standing behind a bar looking at you, they’d move around with people in the facility, letting them go to the station they wanted to explore and answer questions in an informal environment.

I’d also like to tie in a lounge area.  When you’ve had your fill of information and tasting, a place to sit comfortably and review the wines.  Maybe that’s a ‘Wine Club Lounge’ that you could plan a longer visit at with light snacks and music.  I’d like really nice professional photos of the vineyards to decorate the walls.  We’ve talked about what else we might sell in the area and we’re pretty sure we’d limit it to just a few things and have those be very high quality and unique. Something you wouldn’t see in another tasting room.  We also want to have space for visiting artists that we enjoy.

We won’t have $5.99 fake fish netting.  I promise, no matter what.  I actually was offered that in email today.  Something to add to our tasting room.  Fake fish netting?  Does this make the wine better?

Outdoor Living and Working

My day job today was supposed to be bookkeeping and getting caught up in the office.  Instead, I’ve set myself up outdoors on the deck under the canopy and have been working on blogs instead.

I lost about a weeks worth of office time with the poison oak rash that consumed and infected my entire right arm.  Some people complain of having double chins, I had a double elbow from the swelling…good times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I grabbed a quick shot of Paul and Jaye as they headed back down the rows at Chaine d’Or to spray for powdery mildew.  We added some African Bird Pepper into the mix to thwart any more deer should they get back in the vineyard.

Jaye had to leave early for a school event so I took over and joined Paul.  Up and down each row we went, in close proximity to one another, Paul sprayed the right hand side, I sprayed the left.  The only sounds were the intermittent squeaks of the pump handles and the spray hitting the leaves.

There was a certain zen to the rhythm of walking, pumping, spraying.

Some people enjoy an afternoon of golf, walking the course, hitting the balls, drinking beer.  I’m not very good at golf, but I can relate.  I really enjoy spraying the vines, walking the rows, pumping and spraying, and especially drinking the beer.  I figure the backpack sprayer weighs about as much as a bag of clubs, but easier to carry in my opinion.

One of the things I like so much about walking the vineyard and spraying is the pace.  It’s slow enough that I get to see each vine and get a feel for the vineyard.  It’s also fast enough that I don’t stop and linger over tasks I know can wait, like tucking a shoot here, or suckering there, it’s more of a “hi, how are you, gotta run, but I’ll be back soon” kind of tempo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul is offering to buy deer tags for any of our hunting friends.

It’s a karma thing.

Urgent Care

I think I’ll start this post as a rant.  I’ve been to Urgent Care twice now in the past 6-7 years.  Once for stitches to close a puncture wound in my hand – oyster incident.  The other time was last week.  I didn’t go there, my doctor sent me there.  I had made a regular appointment and she did not have enough of the drug in her office I needed to inject me with.  In fact they tried every office in the building and no one had enough, so she sent me to Urgent Care.

I’m just gonna say if you are in urgent care you should have one of the following on your person – bandage, barf bucket, visible rash, something swollen so much you look like the kid from Mask.  A runny nose or a cough is not Urgent.  I had two of the four by the way.  Otherwise make an appointment for goodness sake.  Don’t make the guy with his eyes swollen shut wait behind you and your runny nose.

So now the back story.  Last Sunday we got an urgent email from Jerry at Chaine d Or.  Deer were in the vineyard and had eaten about 50 plants.  We went up Sunday night to find the problem in the fence.  Jerry had already gotten the parts to repair the fence, but we were coming from the movies and were not really dressed right for fence repair.

The fence was down over about a 30 foot stretch.  A combination of a wood rat den and a down limb had brought it down.  The wood rat was the danger.  They build their dens with poison oak.  I had to cut out a bunch with snipers and a chain saw to make enough room to repair the fence.

It’s an urgent operation.  You have to stop the deer right away or they will come back every night until the vineyard is stripped of leafs.  Stefania got to work putting up dryer sheets around the fence and vineyard.  Deer hate the smell and will avoid the sheets.

I got the area cleared and with help from Millie and Stef got 5 new posts pounded in and 30 feet of new fence up in about 2 hours.

It didn’t set in until Tuesday about noon.  First on my left arm, then most troubling on my neck.  By Thursday morning both arms were covered from elbow to wrist.  I had it on my right leg, waist and back.  It also was in my left ear, forehead, neck and around both eyes.  My right eye was swollen shut.  Stef had it on her right arm, waist and back.  Mine was worse though, probably from the chainsaw throwing poison around.  I had about 5 times more coverage on my body and eyes and ear were the biggest risk.

The doctor put me on a steroid to ease the swelling and that first shot helped right away.  We’re both still red and itchy but recovering.  Hot water helps the most so Stef’s been in the hot tub a fair amount and I shower or wash down every 6 hours or so.  If you wonder why we say we hate deer so much, here’s another reason.  50 lost plants and 3+ weeks of recovery.

New Kindle Book on SCM

One of my favorite books on the Santa Cruz Mountains is ‘Mountain Vines, Mountain Wines. Two years ago the authors contacted us about a planned revision of the book.

The hard copy of that effort should be available later this year. In the mean time they have released a Kindle ready version for touring the area called:

Tour Guide to the Wineries of the Santa Cruz Mountains

The download is $4.99 and available on Amazon. I think I was the second person to buy it. It’s a great resource from what I have read so far.

Magnums and a Bonus.

MONDAY 5/7 update.  All the magnums are sold.  There are 6 bottles of Chaine d’ Or left

I was finally able to get into the cellar for a count on the extra magnums today after returning from working in the Crimson Clover Vineyard.  Here’s what we have:

2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains (Three total)

2008 Cabernet Sauvignon Crimson Clover Vineyard, Santa Clara Valley (Two total)

The deal is it is first come fist serve.  Email us at [email protected]

Regular price was $100 on each

SALE PRICE:

$75 each shipping included.  We will bill your CC on file, or you may contact us with a CC number.

Here’s the bonus.  We also have two cases and 10 bottles of 2007 Chaine d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon available.  This wine has the Chaine d’Or gold label and not the Stefania label but it is the same wine.  This lot was originally sold to a restaurant in Santa Cruz and they had it in their wine locker for some time.  We had trouble getting payment from them and eventually just took the wine back.  We’re not 100% sure on the storage, we’re trusting that the restaurant was honest in saying they had it in a commercial wine locker.  We’ll sell the cases at $180 per case with free shipping and the 10 bottle lot at $150 with free shipping also.

Items #3 and #4 (Sold Out)

All is spoken for this morning.  We’ll have the magnums later today.

We have three cases of 2007 ‘Sessen’ Cabernet Sauvignon Santa Cruz Mountains up for grabs.  This was a second label wine that we released only to wholesale and visitors at the winery.  This wine is available for $180 per case.

The next wine is actually one of those ‘send all’ errors I talked about in the first blog.  We thought we had two cases of 2008 Crimson Clover Cabernet Sauvignon at the warehouse but it turns out there were three cases there.  We will be keeping two, but the third is up for grabs.

The deal is it is first come fist serve.  Email us at [email protected]

Regular price was $40 / bottle $480 per case.

SALE PRICE:

$360 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.

I will have Magnums tomorrow and there is still one case of Split Rail Syrah left.