Author: Paul

“Is this crap any good?”

Wine writer David Tong always says that’s his favorite wine quote of all time. I don’t remember on what visit, or for what wine it was that Stefania asked him that, but I do remember her saying it.

We really didn’t know what to think of those two barrels. We liked them, they seemed good, and we did start to share sample with people to get their opinions. Everyone was in agreement; “This crap isn’t bad.”

It suddenly occurred to us that we were not going to have to throw it out and that meant we had to figure out what to do with it. If we were going to bottle it, we’d have to come up with a name and some labels. It also meant we’d be sinking some money into the wine. We’d need to buy bottles, corks, labels and pay for the bottling. That meant we should probably think about selling it which means coming up with a price and marketing plan.

We knew if we were going to market the wine ‘crap’ was probably not a good name. One night we called a business meeting. That means Stefania and I got in the hot tub and that we were drinking cocktails. We kicked around about 5-10 different ideas, then I don’t remember who, it was probably Stef though she has all the great ideas, said: “Let’s call it Hot Tub”. There was more smarting off about pretension and foofoo in the wine world and I remember thinking we should give it a name that sounds French as a way of making fun of that foofoo.

Two of Stefania’s very favorite wines are Haut Brion and La Mission Haut Brion. Haut mean ‘above’ in French and does sound a little like hot. I was on to something. The vines in the back yard are ‘above’ our hot tub so it kind of fit. Haut Tub, that was the first beta name. I thought for a minute though on how to play with the Tub word. Tub in French it turns out is Tub, I didn’t know that then, but came up with what I thought was a funny play on Tub: Tubee.

That was it. We decided. Haut Tubee it was. We’d make the label as fun and unpretentious as we could. The romance on the back would let people know it was named after our hot tub and we’d just put ‘California’ on the label as the AVA, even though we could have put Santa Clara Valley, or San Francisco Bay on the label. We really wanted to make it fun.

We decided that we’d price it as low as possible to fit in with that fun image. Since the production costs and grape costs had already been factored in on other wines the only costs directly tied to the wine were barrels and bottling. We though $20 was a good number and went with that.

In the Spring of 2008 we released the wine. In keeping with the theme, I really downplayed it in the release letter. I almost made it sound like leftovers. I really wanted to go 180 degrees from the fluffy letters and prose that announced so many new wines being released. I remember that the recommendation was to: “Drink it this summer with pizza in your hot tub.”

We had just 37 cases of that 2006. We sold about 25 of them from the release letter. Soon my email started to fill up with requests and comments: “Do you have more?”, “Can I get a case?”, “Wow, this is really good!” The other 12 cases were gone in about a month, word was starting to get out.

Mostly people were very surprised. We had made it sound like the wine was no big deal and at $20 people were not expecting a lot. Then they started to open them and found a rich, flavorful, deep wine with lots of complex flavors going on. That 2006 really had a great taste of a southern Rhone red. We knew it was a good wine, and that at $20 it was a great price.

Now it seemed like we were stuck with this happy accident. Demand and praise was so high, we had to plan on a 2007 version.

Cleaning up after a pick of the Haut Tubee Vineyard

Next Up – The Haut Tubee Gets All Serious and Stuff (part 4)

Just two months after throwing out the 2005 Haut Tubee (It still didn’t have a name, that came later) I spent a long day working the Chardonnay harvest at Chaine d’Or. At the end of the day I sat with Jerry Anderson on the stone wall at Chaine d’Or and chatted about our 2006 winemaking plans.

We had moved out of the facility we used in 2005 and were on to a new place in 2006. It was closer for us and we’d be one of only four wineries using the equipment. Jerry knew the winemaker and operation there and offered some advice on how to deal with the quirks we’d find over time. I told him we were excited though and planned on making three wines and crushing about six tons total.

I told him our only disappointment was that this place also had a one ton minimum and we would not be able to process the grapes from our small vineyards. He asked about the small vineyards, and how much wine it was. I told him we were expecting to make a single barrel, maybe up to a barrel and a half.

He said; “Why don’t you make it here. I have an old half barrel you can try to bring back to life and there’s some space in the corner.”

We’d found a home for the Haut Tubee! The 1/2 barrel was old, it had 1992 written on the bands. With lots of hot water though it swelled back up and was sound enough to work. We had another old barrel we’d lined up and looked ready to go. We processed all the grapes as we had done the year before. Each lot was fermented on its own and pressed with the little wooden basket press. Then the juice was blended together with the other lots in the stainless steel tanks.

We had an extra addition in 2006. We pulled aside about 300 pounds of Cabernet Sauvignon from the Uvas Creek Vineyard for our annual grape stomp and harvest party. On a cool Saturday night our friends stomped the grapes into must. The next Sunday morning a few friends came over and we picked out all the stems, then ran a bucket brigade from the bin we had used for the stomp into a fermentation bin. The ‘Stomp Wine’ would be added to the final blend.

In what would become the standard for the Haut Tubee, as soon as the stainless steel tank reached capacity, we transferred the wine to barrel. In the end we had one full barrel and one half barrel of wine. We tucked it into a little corner in the cellar at Chaine d’ Or and learned to use the equipment there for racking and sulfuring the wine. There it would stay cool through the summer of 2007.

In August of 2007 we would take over operations at Chaine d’Or and move the other 14 barrels we had made in 2006 from the facility we were in to the cellar at Chaine d’Or. We now had all our wine together. We kept tasting the Haut Tubee, and we didn’t know what to think. Our expectation were pretty low but the wine tasted really good. I think we kept waiting for it to suck, but month after month it held its own against the other wines we had in barrel.

Through the busy harvest of 2007 we didn’t give those two barrels much thought. We kept them topped up and safe and worried about all the other things we had to get done. It wouldn’t be until the Spring of 2008 that we’d start thinking about those barrels again.

Early Haut Tubee experiments in our home kitchen:

-Next up , Part 3, “Is This Crap any Good?”

Of all the wines we make the Haut Tubee generates the most email, most retail orders, most re-orders and most information requests of any wine by at least 3 to 1. I think it would be fair to call it our most popular wine. Most people I talk with are surprised that it’s so good. We down play it in our release letters and the price ($20) is so low that most people have lowered expectations.

I thought it might be a good idea to run through how we came about making the Haut Tubee. To go through the process we use now to make it, how the final blend comes together and why we price it so low.

When we first planted vines around our house, we didn’t have a name for the vineyard. It was our yard after all so mostly we called it; “the vineyard at home”. We knew though that that was misleading if we didn’t qualify it. Our home is small and the yard even smaller, we always had to add; “it’s just 50 plants.”

The first few years as the vineyard matured we had a small quantity of grapes, not really enough to make any real wine with. We played around with the grapes, but the results always ended up being dumped out. By 2005 we knew that would change. We had added a couple of other small vineyards by that time and combined with our home vineyard we knew we’d have a large enough quantity to properly store and age the juice.

Our problem was that the facility we were making wine in had a one ton minimum to process grapes. We thought we might be close to a ton, but we also knew that all the grapes would not be ready at the same time.

That year we decided we’d just make the wine at home again. We bought some improved equipment that year to help out. We purchased two 200 liter stainless steal tanks for aging, a 35 gallon wine press and a couple of 60 gallon fermentation tubs. All classic top end home winemaker equipment. Since we were making the wine at home, our plan was we’d just bottle it for ourselves. It couldn’t be something we sold because it was not made in a bonded facility.

The grapes all came from small vineyards that we took great care of so everything was really high quality. I rented a crusher de-stemmer and we processed each lot individually just like we were doing for the commercial wine, only on a smaller scale. That year I kept the small lots separate as we fermented and then after pressing the finished juice I added them together into a stainless steal tank.

I bought Argon to help protect the wine and the tank we used had an adjustable top so the wine was protected as it would be in a commercial winery. That first year, 2005 the wine turned out really good. Through the Spring of 2006 Stefania and I both actually thought it was excellent.

Then Summer came. We had a heat spell that got the garage up over 100 degrees for almost two weeks in a row. We had no way to cool the tanks and no additional insulation in the garage. The wine was cooked. We ended up dumping it all out after the heat wave. It was a great disappointment because it had been doing so well.

We talked a lot about what we could do different in 2006. After kicking it around for awhile we decided that the answer was nothing. We didn’t really want to invest the money in insulating the garage. That was money better spent on the commercial wine. Everything else we had purchased to make the small lot we could use in the future on our commercial wine, but redoing the garage, we could not reuse or justify.

We planned on making it again in 2006, we just knew that it would probably be ruined again the next Summer. Still we though it was worthwhile to try. It gave us good experience in making wine, and we were after all the experience we could get. We just didn’t want to throw more money at it. That’s a big part of where our low expectations on the wine came from. The first year we planned on making it we planned on keeping it for ourselves. The second year we planned on throwing it out. It was never something we thought would be a big thing for us.

Next up- The 2006 finds a home.

I never have any fun trying to figure out what amount of wine to offer people. It’s a hard process and I always wish I had more wine to offer. I start the process by sorting everyone on the mailing list by points, highest to lowest. The higher the points, the higher the allocation.

Next I make breaks into groups based on how many people fall into a group. Then I assign an allocation amount to each group. It’s pretty straight forward but the amounts are always a bit of a guess.

I’m pretty sure this time we will sell out of everything pretty quickly and the only wine available to some people will be to reorder some of the 2007’s we still have available. The really hard part is I don’t want to have anyone who ordered wine last time, to not get it this time.

Stefania and I will have to work something out so the order form is not to confusing and maybe get creative with some sampler packs. I’m sure we’ll also want to have some way for people to request more wine than they have been allocated so that on the chance we have some left we can get that to people who want it.

We’ve started to get some email about the timing of our next release. We’ve picked a date and it will be September 15th. Shipping will start in November.

I listed the new wines we will have available back in June

We will also have a few 2007 wines that we will be re-offering. We are going to have to go back to doing letters in waves like we did in the past. We will probably do three waves, starting on the 15th, then the 22nd and finally the 6th of October. The first wave will go to people with more than 1000 points. The next wave will go to people with less than 1000 points and new people who have signed up since the last release. The last wave will go to people who have signed up in the past but have not made a purchase.

It seems very likely that we will sell out of Syrah and Haut Tubee in the first or second wave of letters. I’d bet in fact the Haut Tubee is gone in the first round, with an 80% chance the Syrah will go as well before second wave letters go out. I think the Pinot Noir will last a little longer because it’s more expensive, but I’m betting there’s a 50% chance it too is gone after second wave letters.

I guess that means we’re back to having a waiting list at least for some wines.

Thanks to Todd D. from California. He finally inspired us to jump through all the hoops we needed to jump through to add American Express to the list of credit cards we can take.

Some how in the transaction we also can now take Discover cards as well. I’m not sure yet if our mobile application will work with American Express, but for all other orders we are finally able to also accept American Express!

Back in January I wrote a detailed blog about pruning the vines in the backyard:

Pruning the Haut Tubee

I’ve been meaning to get an update together to show the results of the pruning and supply the ‘why’ to what we did.

This is the before on one of the vines that I described as a part three year old part four year old vine.

This is the same vine today with fruit hanging in what is called the fruit zone and the shoots going up into the trellis system.

This us the entire vine and some charcoal for the smoker in front of the hot tub. The green growth has created a curtain of leafs with the fruit hanging below.

This was a head trained vine that we were trying to retrain into a Cordon and Spur VSP trained vine.

This is the same vine with new cordons established. There’s a little less fruit on this vine at this stage. Next year with the retraining complete, it will look like the vine above.

Changing the training on a vine is tricky and requires a lot of experience and understanding of how a vine grows. If you have that though the results can be great.

The world has strange karma.

It wasn’t more than 24 hours after I published this rant about public wine events and compared them to rock concerts that Colleen from Rock and Roll Wine invited us to their big event of the year – Wine Amplified.

We attended one RnR Wine event before and really had a great time. They’ve invited us back a few other times but we just could not fit it in our schedule. With harvest looking like it’s running late this year though, the last weekend in September opened up for us. Part of why I really like this event is that Chris Hammond, the promoter, does treat the wineries like we’re an attraction. He only asks that we bring enough wine to be able to pour through the event, no fees. He puts together great shows, great venues and does an awesome job.

The wine industry is struggling so hard to figure out how to market to people under 35. People in the industry ask me a lot on my ideas and how we’ve been successful at it and my answer is always the same: “You should talk to Chris Hammond, he’s the freaking genius of wine marketing to people under 35.”

I also really enjoy working with Colleen La Prade. She handles all the winery coordination and is about 50 times more organzied and professional than any other organizer we’ve ever worked with. “Colleen I need someone to ship too, Colleen can I get help pouring, Colleen we need a room?” – The answer is always either, “No problem I’ve already got that set up , or give me 24 hours and I’ll get that set up”.

The headline act this year is Third Eye Blind and the concert will be on the beach at Mandalay Bay. We will be in the main beach area pouring, and Colleen has set up some help for us so we can visit more with people at the table. There are special room rates at Mandalay Bay and the Luxor.

Please let us know if you’re coming! It will be a great party!

Paul has been bantering online about the value of using the term Meritage on a label. He came up with Monkey Butt Cuvee as an alternative and we had a few good laughs over it.

At least Monkey Butt can be pronounced and there is no wondering what it means. It’s not a great example, but what does Meritage mean?

Nevermind what it means, if you don’t know, it’s not a big deal and you are not alone. I don’t like it for one reason and one reason only, it alienates a good portion of the wine-buying population and makes wine that much scarier to the uninitiated.

Wine is a beautiful accompaniment to food, on it’s own, for every day consumption, or for special occasions. You can make it a big deal or it can be casual. You can buy all the accessories, the fancy stemware, sexy openers, and blown glass decanters, or you can unscrew the top of your favorite bottle and pour it into just about any vessel to imbibe.

Whatever you choose, the one thing that wine should not do is confound, confuse, or intimidate you. It is my opinion that the word Meritage does those things.

The most valuable lesson I learned in a public speaking course was “know your audience” and so I’m not going to overly criticize those wineries that use Meritage on their labels, because they are speaking to their audience.

At Stefania Wine, we will not label any of our red blends as Meritage, but do watch for a version of Haut Tubee Monkey Butt Cuvee, or maybe MBC since I bet TTB has a field day with “Butt” on the label…

I love that song. Every road trip we ever takes starts out with me humming it.

We’re just about eight weeks away from harvest starting for us. It’s time to open training camp. That’s how I’m going to think of it anyway. I actually wrote a blog about 49ers training camps when I was growing up. The 49ers start training camp next week so it seems like a good parallel for Harvest Training Camp.

We had done pretty good through the spring and early summer with staying up on the gym. July we took a lazy break of about three weeks. I’m not sure how lazy it actually was, we had vineyard work and winery work during that time, but we hadn’t visited the gym in 3 weeks.

Starting this past Monday though I was back on the exercise bike. My plan is to ride it every day until September 8th. Just taking off Sunday each week. Not long rides, just 30 -60 minutes each day. We’ve started up the hike schedule as well and are trying to get in 2-3 a week.

The goal is to build up the endurance we’ll need for harvest. I’ve been focusing on heart rate while I’m on the bike and trying to keep it at 120-125. Leg strength and stamina is really what gets you through harvest so the bike and hiking are perfect.

Usually its not a good idea to exercise every day. The body really does better with some days off to recover, but I think this training camp approach. like the NFL uses, should work well. We start traveling on September 8th, about the same time NFL teams will get out of their training routine and into regular season routines. We will do the same. We’ll cut back on gyms and hikes then and use our energy for harvest days. The rest will be in between those busy days and we’ll only hike or gym when we see stretches longer than 3-4 days between the busy harvest days.

My hope is that I personally come out a little less tired in November than I did last year. We made it through the harvest great, and I never felt worn out, but by late November we were worn down. I hope this approach, planning on building continual endurance, then planning on rest periods during harvest, will mean less fatigue at the very end.