Author: Paul

Today was a fun winery day. We got to head up late afternoon to meet and greet customers from Vermont. Newlywed customers in fact, on the first day of their honeymoon!! Paul walked them thru the vineyard and did the entire winery tour and explanation of things in process. They asked a lot of great questions and had nice things to say about the barrel samples we pulled. I broke a glass as I was demonstrating the bruise line across the tops of my thighs this time of year from moving barrels and other equipment about the winery. Oops.

Before they got there, I had one minor repair to take care of before the next harvest. The wheelbarrow tire was flat. We bought a new one late yesterday afternoon and with some adjusting of parts to make it fit, voila, the wheelbarrow is better than new! Well, the tire is new anyway.

Last quick update before heading back to the Monday night game: the 2nd round of mailers were dropped off at the post office on Saturday. Local folks in California should see them today or tomorrow, the rest of them should arrive in your mailboxes by the end of this week.

If I missed any of the finer points from the day I’m sure Paul will fill in the blanks for me.

From our Chardonnay harvest at Chaine d’Or yesterday.

Grapes coming in in the 30 pound picking bins. I prefer to have the crew sort on the vine and in the field rather than handling the grapes again on a sorting table. This crew did a great job as you can see.

There was a tiny bit (2%) of Botrytis, which should give a little peach and pit fruit note to the finished wine.

Grapes enter the press. Once the press is full, we run it on a gentle 2 hour cycle to press all the juice out and transfer it to a chilled tank to settle. This will separate the solids, or ‘lees’.

For a few years at Chaine d’Or I had the job of lifting the bins into the crusher. This year though I ‘drove’. Making sure that the crusher is working right, running the press and watching after the entire process.

The stems are shooting out of the end of the crusher and the juice and berries are dropping into the press.

We had one MOG emergency. That’s ‘Matter Other than Grapes”. Here a water bottle had been left in a picking bin and gone through the crusher. The bottle shot out the end, here I am watching for the label. I found it and got it out of the must.

And at the end of the day? This is another reason why we had training camp this year. 20 oz bone in Rib Eyes on the grill at the end of a long day.

We’ll be back at the winery today. Finishing clean up and getting the wine into the inside tanks to start fermentation. Once it starts going we’ll transfer the juice into oak barrels to finish fermentation. We should use about 8 barrels total this year. Two new Claude Gillet barrels, two new Sequin Moreau barrels and 4 neutral french oak barrels.

This is the lower section of the Chardonnay. Amber is working hard harvesting in the background. We brought in just under tow tons of Chardonnay from just over an acre of vines. That’s a low yield for the site. We expected yield to drop, we pruned more aggressively to reduce yields and dry farmed the site.

When you get a bottle of ‘Stefania’, Stefania actually made it! Here she is in the upper section harvesting grapes.

A vine after being picked.

Millie brings up grapes. We pick into 30 pound buckets here and go right into the crusher.

Kathy waving from the crush pad as we got started.

This was Jerry’s first time as crew chief. He put a fantastic crew together (including his wife, brother and cousin). They picked clean, sorted grapes in the field, and worked very fast.

Weather was perfect for harvesting. Cool, in the 60’s. Overcast and easy to work without heating up the grapes.

Stef’s final lab readings where absolutely amazing. 25.5 BRIX, 3.4 pH and a TA of .72 We should be able to make a rich, powerful wine that will still be crisp and well balanced. I think Chardonnay growers all over the world would be jealous of those ‘perfect’ numbers.

Today I was back at the day job, getting caught up. I really have a great group of managers, they held down the fort just fine while I was off for a few days.

Stef spent the day getting the books in order. We’re pretty excited, it looks like we will be cash flow positive in Q3 and Q4. That’s huge for us. The first time in 4 years since we officially started. We showed a GAAP profit last year, and will show one this year, but most of that was inventory growth in barrel.

I spent 30 minutes talking with Bradley Brown at Big Basin. Just getting our timing squared away now that all my equipment has shown up there. Our relationship has worked out pretty well over the past two years. I’m using his extra space, just when he’s not busy, so in the end his winery stays at full capacity for 10 weeks. That helps a lot if you don’t have down time for employees. Just as his bins are starting to empty out and press off, my Cabernet comes in and he’s able to keep the crew working.

We’ve also gotten to do a lot of comparison lots. We use the same grapes on a number of lots. I make some at Chaine d’Or and he makes some at Big Basin, and we get to compare slightly different methods and conditions.

I’m roasting a chicken right now, and sipping a little 2004 Copain Syrah Broken Leg Vineyard. This will probably be the last real down time for 4-5 days.

We left this morning at 8am to head to Chaine d’Or. Our goal for the day was to prep the crush pad and vineyard for tomorrows harvest. The first step was for Jerry and I to give everything another good cleaning and scrub down, then sterilize with citric acid.

This is Jerry inside the large tank.

Next up was the press. This is a fussy piece of equipment and hard to clean. Both Jerry and I have band-aids on now. It’s Italian, and is as fussy as an Italian sports car. Hard to clean, prone to failures, and just generally high maintenance. It doesn’t really help that all the buttons are in Italian. We did get it running and checked out though

White wine is a more complex process than red. Here you can see everything ready for hook up. The grapes will drop into the press and the juice will be pumped into the waiting tank. The tank is chilled to 50 degrees so the gross lees will fall out of the juice.

This is as hard and dangerous as it looks. This is one reason we don’t like to use volunteers with the Chardonnay harvest. We have to use the forklift to get the crusher in the back of a pick up. It weighs about 900 pounds. Then we have to drive the truck to right over the press and balance everything there. My first job at Chaine d’Or was to be the ‘truck and pump’ guy. I stood in the bed of the truck dumping the grapes in the crusher, then when it would fill up, I’d pump the juice into the tank.

This is the view from the bottom. The tarp is to keep the stems out of the vat. It gets messy and is noisy. I’ll keep everyone away from this area tomorrow.

While Jerry and I fussed with all the equipment, our lab mistress was hard at work getting readings from the Woodruff Family, Arastradero an Cabernet portion of Chaine d’Or vineyards.

Jerry is out now removing netting. I’ll join him shortly. The sales rep from Sequin Moreau is dropping off the Chardonnay barrels in about 30 minutes. We’ll take a short break for lunch, then finish the day removing secondary clusters from all the Chardonnay before the crew arrives tomorrow.

Last night at the gym was a little hard. After working hard for 4 of the last 5 days, we still shuttled off at 7PM to hit the gym. We hadn’t been since Thursday, but had been getting plenty of work done in the winery.

I rode the bike hard for 30 minutes and my legs felt tired. The weight room was where the last few days activity really showed. My body was pretty warn out. Instead of our usual 90-120 minutes, we were in and out in 75 minutes.

I think It’s time to officially declare training camp over after 4 weeks. The regular season has started. We’ll still be hitting the gym on days we don’t work at the winery, but I’ll need to change the routine. Less time on hard rides on the bike and strength training with weights. More time on endurance on the treadmill and bike, with light weights to keep muscles in shape.

We also need to change up the diet a little starting tonight. The bumps, scraps and bruises start to get bad now. Stefania is prone to getting bruises, so we’ll be eating more spinach, chard, broccoli and bison. Those are all high iron foods that should help with healing.

It’s probably a surprise to most people how much effort we’re putting into being physically ready for all this. It is necessary though. It’s hard work, long days, lots of lifting, and demands you stay sharp. I think we’re pretty well prepared.

The first stop this morning was at Chaine d’ Or to pick up barrel racks. Jerry and I set off at 7:30. I checked in on the Haut Tubee, and it’s started fermenting. The juice looks extra dark, and the cap needed to be punched down.

Next we were off up Highway 84, to Highway 35, then Highway 9 finally getting to Highway 236. These are all very twisty mountain roads, and it’s about 45 minutes from Chaine d’Or to Big Basin Vineyards. We make about half of our wine at Big Basin. Today we started bringing over the barrels and racks we’ll need there from Chaine d’Or. Big Basin had already started making some wine and the crew there was cleaning up when we arrived.

We stacked our racks right outside the winery entrance. Bradley Brown is the owner/winemaker and he built the winery out of redwood trees grown and harvested on the property. Upstairs is a yoga studio where his wife teaches. Bradley learned to make wine with John Alban, one of the original Syrah pioneers in California.

We then headed back into San Jose for an appointment with our CPA, a brief lunch, and then back up to the winery to sort out which barrels are going tomorrow to Big Basin. In all a typical harvest day in many ways, about 4 hours in the truck, 1 hour in a meeting, 3 hours moving heavy things and 5 minutes making wine.

The last picture is left over from Saturday. Our lab mistress, Stefania, working TA and pH tests in the little lab at Chaine d’ Or.

The winery weekend started on Friday. We spent the entire day cleaning. Everything. Top to bottom, every nook and cranny. Wiped, washed, disinfected, scrubbed, and cleaned. It was a long day, but worth every minute of elbow grease – the winery sparkled when we left.

Saturday started an hour earlier. At 7:30 Gerardo (Jerry) showed up and got started taking nets off the vines out front. Paul joined him while I printed new labels for the net bags. While they were harvesting and taking care of their work, I was in the winery office emptying out my desk in anticipation of the delivery of the new work station.

The new work station arrived, it was assembled, and off we went to the Ottigurr Vineyard to harvest. By 10a.m. we were loaded up and mobile to the winery with the first batch of grapes.

In years past this first lot would be crushed by foot, but Paul wanted to run everything thru the equipment and make sure we were set for the bigger lots that are due in soon. The clean up took longer than the actual processing time, but it’s still good practice.

We sent Kathy and Millie back down the hill to Home Depot for two storage cabinets for the Dry Room and sandwiches. While they were gone, Paul and Jerry started racking the 07’s and I did the lab work. I calculated pH and TA numbers for the estate chardonnay and mixed the sulfur solutions needed for racking.

I don’t prefer working with sulfur, the fine powder gets in my hair, on my clothes and up my nose. Most annoying of all is the effect it has on my palate for the next day or so. Drinking wine is worthless after a day in the lab – everything tastes like “bottle shock” to me. For anyone that suffers from allergens or similar work dust, I recommend using a neti pot.

Around 1 the sandwiches showed up – and the five of us ate in mini shifts, half of a sandwich at a time while the wine was either on its way in to the tank or back into the barrel. All told I think we sat down for maybe 30 minutes the whole day. Three of us worked the entire day in the Wet Room, two of us spent the day in the Dry Room.

I was completely exhausted by the time we finished putting away the last clean bucket, moved into the new cabinets, and turned off the lights at 4:30.

Normally we’ll play with Sophie or Jesse (the vineyard dogs) for a few minutes at a time, or take a break to water the garden (dying tomatoes, sad corn), or even just to rest and get some water in us and catch our breath. Not on Saturday. If we had stopped at all and interrupted the momentum of the tasks at hand the day would have lingered well past 11 hours, and when you’re working with heavy equipment, fatigue is almost as dangerous as being drunk.

Thank goodness for football season. We worked all day long again on Sunday, but sitting at a desk printing, signing, folding, and stuffing envelopes isn’t exactly strenuous work and can be done perched in front of the tv.

And those are my thoughts on the first weekend of harvest. Cheers.

Sunday morning we got out and visited a couple vineyards that are getting close to harvest. I only took pictures at one though. After visiting the vineyards, we think both are still 10-14 days away from picking. The weather forecast calls for sunny moderate weather for the next few weeks so we’re in no hurry now. In some ways it’s reminding me of 2005. That year we had a wild ride through the spring and summer, then in mid September, we just went into a holding pattern of sunny, mild weather for weeks.

The challenge with 2005 though was fighting dilute grapes from all the spring rain and summer green growth. This year I think it will be controlling the tannins and intensity from the small concentrated crop. So the pattern is similar, but the grapes are very different.

This photo is of the Crimson Clover vineyard. You get a good sense of the hills that surround this vineyard site

The plants are 4 years old now, and we’re expecting about 2 tons from this 1 1/8 acre site.

It takes a lot of work during the year to end up with plants that look this perfect.

The sugars are almost ready in these grapes, but the tannin and flavors are not just ripe yet, it will be a couple more weeks.

Here you can see the grapes we dropped earlier on the ground, returning their nutrients to the soil.

Stefania has been busy all afternoon in the home office, printing and preparing the fall offer letter. Her and I have signed all 400+ copies and the last step will be to stuff envelopes.

We’re sending the letters out again in waves. The first group of ‘1000+ pointers’ will go out tomorrow. I think there are 79 of those in total. The other 350 or so letters will go out next week, and the week after in two waves.

We’ll be releasing our 2006 Uvas Creek Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. This was a very popular wine last year and we sold out very quickly. This time around we have a total of 121 cases. We’ll also be letting people order 3 packs of our 2006 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah. We had some cases left after we decided not to do a few events this summer and they will be available on a first come, first serve basis.

Look for your letter to arrive in the next few weeks