Month: July 2010

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.