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Tasting Notes, Nueva Casa de los Padres

In the latest offer letter, Paul quoted me as saying “really good raw chocolate”.

We had been tasting the wines for the current release and I was just saying whatever popped into my head.  What I actually said about the Nueva Casa de los Padres, was that it reminded of artisan chocolate.  And then I retracted the words as quickly as I spoke them.  Why?

Because like a zillion other people (do a google search on “artisan mass produced food”), it occurred to me that the word artisan has been diluted…by Burger King, Pillsbury, Domino’s, etc.  It no longer carries the weight of what it was supposed to mean.

Ok, for you guys on the mailing list and reading the blog, you would get it, you would know what I meant, but then I thought, maybe you would think I was being trite.

I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but on our last trip to Chicago, I spent $98 at Fox & Obel on chocolate.  Yes, chocolate.  Really good, small batch, hand made, artisan, bla bla bla, chocolate.  And it was gooooood.  So good.

When we tasted thru the wines, the Nueva Casa reminded me of a couple of those chocolates, the really raw and natural tasting ones without all the additives and thickeners and junk that “kid chocolate” has.

–side bar on “kid chocolate”–

My very first job out of high school was at The Dime & Dollar in Oakland.  My boss and owner of the store, Hunter McCreary, clued me in to the difference between “the good stuff” and “kid chocolate”.  Because we were a dime store, there was a giant candy section with the usual sweets.  Then, when Valentine’s Day would roll around, he set up a grown up chocolate area on the counter by the register, out of reach of the school kids.  They were pricey chocolates, but bittersweet and oh so good.  I was too young to know it at the time, but he would be a significant personality in my life guiding me toward future foodie geekhood.  He was a great first boss, mentor, and lifelong friend.

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2012 Crimson Clover Vineyard Harvest

El Toro at sunrise on Saturday September 22nd at Crimson Clover Vineyard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul harvesting the first row before the sun reaches the far end of the vineyard, it’s 56 degrees outside.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Paul smiling as he brings in the first of the picking bins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

More grapes coming in!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cows on the hill, oh wait, I’m supposed to be paying attention to the grapes coming in!  The fruit was extra clean this year.  I pulled out one earwig, a handful of white spiders, and not much else.  Dried tendrils were the only ‘debris’ I sorted out of the picking bins.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Three full bins ready for crush!

 

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I Win! Or..something like that

I was feeling pretty smitten with my Silver and Bronze medals for the 2012 International Women’s Wine Competition…right up until I scrolled through the list of all the other winners.

https://www.enofileonline.com/CompAwards.aspx?compID=65

Anyway, I took pictures of the wines from the current release and used the medals from last year as props since I don’t have the 2012 ones yet.

We earned a Silver medal for the 2009 Chaine d’Or Cabernet Sauvignon  & Bronze for the 2010 Haut Tubee, always nice to be recognized, but I don’t take it very seriously at all.

Oh come on, scroll through the link and see for yourselves, Gallo Box Wine took GOLD!   *sigh*

Cheers!

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Fall Release Offer Letters

Last week I was able to print, sign, fold, and stuff the offer letters and get them in the mail…no small task while we ramp up harvest and crush activities.  Paul got home from the day job and I sat him down with a pen to sign letters while I folded and matched up the envelopes to the order forms.

As I was preparing the letters and reading the content, it occurred to me that I have a really hard time keeping up with the winemaking notes.  I’m grateful for Paul’s notes and think I’ll start my own wine journal this harvest.

The thing that I struggle with is that the letters are about wines we harvested two years ago, but only two weeks prior to printing the letters we racked all of the 2011’s, so those notes are fresh in my mind.  Then, just in time to really mess me up, we’re harvesting and bringing in new fruit for 2012 and I’m focused on that.

Without good notes, it’s hard to remember year over year all the details of each wine.   We’re close to or past 30 bottlings now and I’m certain I will refer to this website for the notes, thank you Paul for posting them!

By Friday of this week the letters should have reached your mailbox.  If you are on the mailing list and looking forward to ordering wine this Fall but have not received a letter by this weekend, please send me an e-mail and I’ll take care of it.

Cheers!

[email protected]

Next Up…pics from harvest and crush 2012

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Hiking

We’ve been getting some good hikes in the last few weeks.  It’s great training for harvest, probably the best thing we can do in fact.  Calero County Park has been the destination for most of our hikes.

There are a total of about 40 miles of trails in the park and the connected open space preserve.  Mostly during the wee we’ll do smaller hikes of 3 to 5 miles.  There has been a lot of wildlife we’ve seen on the trail this year.  We’ve seen deer, including a fawn less than a week old, bobcats, turkey, rattlesnakes,wood rats, coyote, rabbits, skunks, skates, and all kinds of lizards and moles.

Birds are a regular site too, with red tail hawks and turkey vultures like the one below the most common.  We’ve seen egrets and lots of different small birds.  No pigs though this year.  We see signs of them but have not seen them live yet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last weekend we did a very long hike. 9.5 miles in just over 4 hours. We went through all parts of the park including a climb to Bald Peak, the highestpoint in the park. We’ll be back a few more times before harvest for sure.

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Crushpad Sold and Broken Up.

Most of you know that our first commercial crush was done at Crushpad in 2005.  What we usually tell people about it is that we were grateful to have a place to make wine.  It was very hard to find anyone south of Napa or north of Paso Robles that would allow a new winery to use their facility.  We also say;  “We learned a lot at Crushpad, mostly that we didn’t want to make wine at Crushpad again.”

We actually started looking for a new facility during that 2005 harvest.  There was nothing I’d say was super wrong or unfixable that year, it was just the second vintage at Crushpad, and there were some kinks for sure.  The main thing was it wasn’t really set up to handle what I’d call serious commercial clients.  It was crowded and chaotic and a few time we had to wait on larger groups to make decisions before we could get on equipment to use it.

I discussed our situation with the founder of Crushpad Michel Brill and wanted to know if there were any changes planned to address the needs of commercial clients.  At that point there were not.  Michael wanted to keep the focus on being a community winery and his plan was simple, when someone was big enough to need another facility or more dedicated use of equipment, it was time for them to move on and he’d be happy for their success.

I told him that I though that created a huge revenue problem for his company.  If he was always loosing his largest clients, he’d have to devote a lot of marketing resources and money to bringing in large numbers of smaller ones to make up the gap. That too was a factor in not staying.  I didn’t see the revenue model being sustainable and that would present risk for us if we stayed.

I stayed on good terms with Michael and the staff at Crushpad though and continued to refer both growers and people interested in making wine to Crushpad.  I knew just because it wouldn’t work for us, didn’t mean it would not for others.  Over the years I’ve followed the changes there but not deeply.  I noticed that Michael did seem to shift the business to handle more of the commercial clients.  Eventually it seemed like the majority of the clients where commercial.  I actually didn’t notice though when Michael left Crushpad last year.

A few months ago Crushpad hit the wine news again.  It looked like the situation there was critical an the company was in serious financial trouble.  Yesterday this article closed things off for Crushpad.  The company is shuttered now and there appears to be an attempt to spin off something for the commercial clients.  I wish everyone the best and hope they can get their wine.   We are still grateful for the opportunity we had there and still happy we moved on, and it is sad to see Crushpad closing.

 

 

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Chopsticks

A quick blog post in response to a question about why we would be buying 600 pairs of chopsticks that came up on :

http://wineberserkers.com/forum/

We use them to secure the bottom of our bird nets.  When I learned to bird net I was taught to use plastic twist tie to secure the bottom of the nets.  You MUST tie off the bottom of the nets or the birds will simply fly up into the nets and eat the fruit.  Trying to get nets long enough to just lay on the ground also will not work, the birds learn to lift the netting.

Birds are smarter, and more persistent than we give them credit for.  These are all from our Mourvedre vines in front of the house that go in the Haut Tubee blend.  The first picture is the chopstick through the nets near the trunk of the plant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second picture is how a row looks with all the bottoms secured by chopsticks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last picture is a little more detail of the nets twisted together and then chopstick passed through the nets to hold them.  I told Stefania she should patent this idea: ‘Method for securing bird netting with chopsticks”.  Any patent attorney’s out there who will work for wine?

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Training Camp Opens

Training camp for the NFL opened last week and that signals the start of training camp for us as well.  Each year we pick up the exercise to get ready for the harvest season.

Last year turned out to be very tough on us.  Harvest seson went very long, more than 14 weeks from first pick to last barrel filled.  Most years we count on 8 or 9 weeks from first pick through last barrel and the second longest we’ve had was 11 weeks.  Both of us were really worn out by mid December last year.

This year we’ve actually been training earlier.  Stefania has been treadmilling and running since April.  I’ve been walking 30-40 minutes every day and adding in jogging as well.  We’ve been getting in a hike every week.

We’ve picked up the pace now and have been doing a hike every 3-4 days.   We’re increasing the distance too and amount of climbing.  The running, walking and treadmilling will continue also and I want to add some biking.  Harvest this year looks like it will be early so I’m guesing we only have 5-6 more weeks to get ready.

 

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Boots

After we wrapped up bottling I decided I needed some new boots for the winery.  My current ones are really good but they are heavy and after standing for ten hours my legs and feet felt really heavy and tired.  I was thinking something lighter would be good for the longer days n the winery.  I could wear the heavy ones when I needed heavy water proofing and the extra toe protection and change out into tlighter ones when I didn’t.

This is no easy task.  I wear size 14.  It really limits what is available.  There are also some brands that just don’t fit well.  Nike runs small, I need a 15 so I don’t even bother looking at Nike.  In this round of buying I found out Merrell doesn’t work either the arch is placed weird.  Usually I just go on line and buy shoes.  That’s what the picture above was for.  I took pictures of everything I liked and then figured I’d check Amazon for size 14’s.  The funny side result is that shoes are the only thing I’ve bought from Amazon in the last 10 years so I get shoe sale emails from Amazon daily.  They think I have a fetish, the limits of data mining.

We had some time though last Saturday so I thought we’d run around and see if we got lucky.  Sports Authority was the first stop.  They had two pair of size 14’s.  One was the Merrel and it didn’t fit right.  The other was more of a fashion shoe and not a real hiker it had poor tread and no ankle support.

Next we went to Mel Cotton’s where I got my current heavy duty boots.  No luck, nothing in a 14.  REI was stop number three.  The sales guy was full of confidence.  “Of course we have lots of size 14’s, no problem”, he said.

“Great” I said, “Bring them out.”

“All of them?” He asked.

“Yes, all of them” I replied.

Ten minutes later he came out of the back with one pair of boots.  The same pair I had rejected as fashion boots at Sports Authority.

On to stop number four, Big 5.  There we had some more sales guy fun:  “What are you looking for?” he asked in his best sales guy voice.

“Hiker’s” I said.  “Light weight, waterproof would be nice but is not mandatory”.

“Well which style do you like.  What are you’re favorite brands?” He queries.

“No.  That’s not the way this works.” I say, “The way this works is you go in the back and find all the size 14’s you have and bring them out here.”.

He looked a little puzzled and hurt, not being able to use his best sales technic, but he complied and disappeared to the back for 10-15 minutes.  Stefania thought he might be hiding from me.  Eventually he came out with three pairs.  Score, huge score!  I tried on all three and bought two.  A pair of Hi Tech and a brand called Itica.  Kind of my general rule is if I find shoes that fit and I like I buy them, because you don’t know when that will happen again.

 

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The Day Job

The number one question we used to get was; “Who takes care of your vineyards”.  We still do get that question from time to time from people just meeting us.  Now though the number one question is, “Are you doing this full time?”

The answer is yes and no.  Since we get that questions so much I thought it was time for a crew review.

Millie has been with us the longest, since 2004.  She works for us about 2 days per week on average.  She does vineyard work and any construction tasks we have.  When we do vineyard installations she’s the lead person on those.

Herrardo has been with us since 2007.  We usually refer to him as Jerry since people have a hard time pronouncing Herrardo.  He’s working about one day per week on average.  He does our heavy labor including construction work, netting and major repairs.  He also puts together our crews for us when we need larger groups.  Mostly the crews are his family.

Ron has been with us since 2010.  He works a few days a month on local sales for us.  Getting our wine into local restaurants in Santa Cruz and San Jose.

Jaye is our newest person.  She’s in the picture above working in the winery.  She joined us last September.  She’s done everything for us, vineyard work, winery work, shipping and she’s starting to do a little bit of sales work.  Our plan is when we open a tasting room she’ll run that.  She’s working about 30 hours a week for us.

Stefania is full time and gets a paycheck now, which she cashes about once every 7 weeks 🙂  She’s really become the General Manager.  She runs everything day to day and handles all the winery and vineyard management including the finance side of the business and dealing with vendors.

So my usual response to the questions is; “I still have a day job, someone has to have health insurance.”  I run a group of about 50 support engineers, managers and account managers in the software part at a very big high tech company.  I’ve been there 8 years and have enough vacation time that I can take off the 15-20 days a year when my presence in the winery is really critical.  These days most of my tasks are planning vineyard maintenance and doing the winemaking.