Author: Paul

We will have the first set of offer letters out next week, maybe as soon as Monday. In the newsletter I said there would be two waves, but there are likely to be as many as four different mailings going out.

The first set will go to the 1000 pointer’s. Those customers with more than 1000 points. There are about 70 of those people. They signed up early, and have bought a lot of wine! They will get an offer of two six packs of 2006 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah at $200 a six pack, and one three pack of Haut Tubee at $60. Yeah $60, $20 a bottle 🙂 Since this group usually buys a lot of wine I’m going to judge how to get the next set of letters out.

I’ve broken the remainder of people on the list into three groups:

700-999 points will be offered one six pack of Syrah and one three pack of Haut Tubee
400-699 points will be offered one six pack of Syrah
100-399 points will be offered one three pack of Syrah at $105

Right now there are about 60 people with under 100 points who have signed up in the last couple of months. If I have wine left after the first few waves of mailings, I’ll get a three pack offer out to them, but I suspect I’ll just be able to offer them an apology that we’re out of wine and hope they hold out until the Fall release.

Our list has grown about 250% since the release last Spring. This release will be a big clue about what the future looks like for us. For the next few years we really won’t have much more wine to sell than 125-150 cases of each wine. I have to judge how ordering goes this time to figure out future allocations pretty closely. I don’t want to get into a situation where it takes people years on a waiting list, but I’m afraid for people signing up in the near future, it might be a long wait to get wine.

A good article I found from the LA Times:

http://www.latimes.com/features/food/la-fo-youngwine12mar12,0,5536281.story

We’ve seen this on our mailing list. Lots of young people, under 30 who buy our wine for special event drinking. The one piece I thought was missing was any mention of the much higher than traditional percentage of women buying and drinking wine under 30.

One of the classes I attended at UC Davis in 2002 noted that the percentage of wine over $25 bought by women was under 10%. Women made up the majority of wine purchases, they just bought daily drinking wine at the supermarket, not higher end wines. This mirrored what was traditional in Europe, where women had bought the daily drinking wine, and men bought special occasion wine.

I think for the new generation on wine drinkers, you can through that out the door. Women are buying the wine across all price points. If one has any doubts about the shift in the market place, I’d suggest looking at the ad campaigns of Budweiser. They clearly feel pressure on their core market of 21-30 year olds and are trying to counter wines growing popularity.

I’ve updated the blog with a few links of friends who’ve written about our wines and have good blogs with food and wine info.

I just sent off the new label and font for Stefania to have added to the website. I suspect it will take a week or two to get done, and then the entire site will get a content refresh.

As soon as the label work is complete I’ll have updates on the 2006 and 2007 wines as well as plans for 2008. There will also be an update on our new vineyards. Look for the schedule to be updated as well. We have a number of events coming up in March, April and May.

I may also start adding the newsletter to the site as well. We’re just a few weeks away from sending out offer letters for our 2006 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah, and I’d like to have the site updated by then. Originally we had planned to have on line ordering set up for 2008, but that was postponed for another year. With the new vineyards we’ve taken on that money had to go to vineyard maintenance costs this year.

Paul and the crew worked Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Woodruff Vineyard in Corralitos this past weekend. I was able to help on Saturday and we rounded up a few more volunteers to whom we are greatly appreciative.

Huge Thanks to Kathy, Wes, and Dave!

The rest of the crew, Daniel, Jerry, and Millie kicked some serious butt over the weekend and are almost done – just a few more rows this week and we can cross that off the list as “Done”.

I took some time out Saturday to capture the site and the crew working – the photos are uploaded here: http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/316611

The next round of blogs and updates will probably include the bottling schedule (early March for the Syrah and Haut Tubee) and whatever random musings cross our minds.

Again, a huge round of applause and kudos to our volunteer pruners, you guys are awesome!!!!
(and we secretly wonder if you’ll be back…)

S&P

http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/312203

I captured the vineyard before we pruned, and took a bunch of pictures yesterday with it all done and cleaned up. I even got Sophie to sit still for me long enough for a photo. Inside the winery Paul and I racked almost all of the barrels. He trained me on using the equipment and had me working alongside him both days.

Though I meant to take photos of another vineyard we were contracted to prune, it was raining way too hard and I was soaking wet from a quick survey of the site. The wind chill was brutal as the actual temperature outside was somewhere around 46 degrees. Bone chilling and wet.

For certain I enjoyed the challenges and technical aspects of the winery tasks from the weekend and it’s always a great day at work when there is a sample of wine to taste and talk about.

We barrel tasted everything and there were some amazing highlights that I’ll let Paul blog about further. One barrel had this heady aroma of cinnamon and spice, another had the most beautiful aroma of flowers; purple and white flowers. When we took samples and tasted them, they were both full bodied and fulfilling even though the nose was sexy and wispy on the flowery one. (I left varietal and vineyard specifics off on purpose).

We got home in time to catch the 2nd half of the SuperBowl though mostly I think it was on for noise in the background while we sat still and tried not to think about our sore muscles. I’ll be glad when winemaking is full time on-site and not something we cram into every weekend minute we have available – it’s a lifestyle change for the better, but a smoother transition from sitting on my posterior during the week to full days on my feet would be nice.

Oh yes, snow! Have I taken any photos yet? No, but I’ve been waiting for the clouds to lift high enough to get a good shot. It’s just about the same as the photo on our main page of the website, so you get the idea.

Anyway, we were up at Chaine d’Or last Saturday and Sunday pruning. I’m still passionate about this part of grapegrowing and call tell you for certain that pruning these old boys was much different than young vines. (I’ll leave out the part about wearing a wrist brace all week and the blisters — shhh, you’re ruining the romance).

It was interesting to go through each plant, see where it was doing very well and where it needed to be retrained or cut so as to inspire new growth. Overall I would say we did great in the ten hours that we put in.

On Saturday we had morning fog which was nice because it can get very hot when you’re out there with full exposure and little shade. The sun peeked out around 11:30, then by noon I was cursing it for being so hot and then glad toward the end of the afternoon when we made the lower section and got some shade.

Sunday morning, when we got up, I begged the weather gods for lingering fog so that we weren’t working in the heat of the day again at noon with the sun on us. I even dressed in fewer layers anticipating another warm day (no thanks to yahoo or the newspaper on the weather forecast by the way). We got up there and it was foggy alright, but it was also misting, and cold, and a biting wind that kept whipping up the rows.

The sun peeked out for a scant total of about ten minutes over the course of the five hour day, barely enough to warm the surface layer of my thin fleece pullover. It must have been right around 3:15 when I finally yelled at the boss and said we have to stop, it’s just too cold to be out here any longer. The wind was whipping up even harder and it was sprinkling on us off and on.

I kept saying it felt and smelled like snow. Like when you’re on the lift at the ski resort and the next storm is about to hit, you can smell it. The air has that crisp edge to it. I felt it, in my bones.

On Monday we headed “over the hill” to Boulder Creek and got bits of hail and heavy downpours of rain. By the time we got to Highway 9 it was a full snow storm at the summit. I knew it!

We got home, Paul got a roaring toasty fire going for us and we spent some time chatting about the next round of vines to prune. I’ll be sure to dress more appropriately and keep my mouth shut since I’m certain now the weather gods were listening.

-SR

My favorite job in the vineyard happens but once per year – pruning. And let me tell you what, with the new vineyards we’ve agreed to manage this year, I’m up to my eyeballs in pruning. I may have to reassess how I really feel about pruning after this January.

This kind of ties in to the initial romance of being winemakers and grapegrowers. Picture if you will a quiet tranquil morning, walking row after row of vines across from the love of your life, chattering all along the way, discussing each plant and how to shape it for optimal fruiting, all at a leisurely pace. Then you stop for lunch, a picnic in the vineyard, with nothing but the birds chirping and a light breeze rustling the tree branches overhead. That was Year One.

Fast forward to last weekend: Crazy madness, six of us this time, no leisurely walks through the rows, no chatter or banter or lingering over the plants. It’s quick faced paced decision making because this is just one acre and there are 13 more to go, all before the end of the month. Oh yeah, and that picnic, a thing of the past, it was more like burgers and fries horked down well past lunchtime because we were so hungry!

Regardless of the pace and the fact that I no longer get to greet each plant anymore, I’m still very much enamored with this part of being a grapegrower.

I’m taking the camera with us this weekend and will get some photos posted up shortly.

Vineyards that we’ve already pruned:
Crimson Clover (cabernet in Morgan Hill)
Harrison (syrah Los Altos)
Elandrich (various, Portola Valley)

Upcoming vineyards:
Chaine d’Or (chardonnay and cabernet, Woodside)
Woodruff (chardonnay and pinot noir, Corralitos)
Llama Vnyd (merlot, Bonny Doon)
Ottigurr (various, Santa Clara County)

I read an interesting little quote in Rolling Stone. A scientist was asked the question: “How many hours do you work?” His answer: “All of them”.

I’ve stolen that quote and I’m using it now when people ask how we get everything done we need to get done. Even working ‘all of them’ I get behind in things I need to do. Documents that need to get written, updates to our website, and writing blogs.

I was really encouraged though this past weekend in getting caught up a bit more. Daniel and Jerry who have proven so helpful in the vineyards and winery, got their first exposure to pruning this past weekend. They did an amazing job, and we’re now a week ahead of schedule. I feel like I’ve got a top flight crew now, and their growing experience in the vineyards should make it easier to shift some of those work hours to other work tasks.

Not that Stefania and I didn’t spend many hours pruning vines this weekend, we did. And I replaced broken trellis and made repairs, but we don’t have to spend all the working time doing that. There should be more time for other tasks now.