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We didn’t make a lot of wine in 2005. Just 100 cases total. 50 cases of Syrah and 50 cases of Canernet Sauvignon. In 2006 we made 16 barrels, 400 cases, so four times more. Still not a huge amount. This year we’re planning on 23 barrels, about 575 cases of wine.

I big part of this approach was to not make more wine than we could sell ‘part time’. Build up slowly, get the wine out there, build a mailing list and some key restaurants and go from there.

I also know I’m making pretty unique wine. I like wine with a great smell, and well balanced. I don’t like thick wines, and I don’t like wines with brown flavors or jammy flavors, so I don’t want to make wines like that. Those are the kinds of wines that are simple crowd favorites and fill up the bottom shelves at the supermarket. That’s easy appeal, and nothing wrong with that, but I’m not out to compete with Little Penguin. I knew our wine would have to find a market. People who like elegance over thickness and pretty scent over ultra ripe flavor.

I know those people are out there, and I know they will love our wines. But I also knew that making 2000 cases to start off with would have been a hard search to find them.

We’re never going to make 2000 cases of anything is the bottom line. We’ll make small amounts of a few wines from special sites that let me get great balance, scent and flavor in a bottle. 100 cases here, 200 cases there, just small amounts. Copain was successful doing this, and Brian Loring, so I think it can be done. I don’t want a confusing amount of wines, or wines from all over. Our wines will always be from mountain vineyards that let me make a wine I’ll like. I hope enough other people like them too to let us keep making them.

A bad streak of colds, allergies, computer problems and getting ready for the Release Party have kept me from blogging.

I should be back at it now though. The party went very well with 40 people coming and trying our wine. We’ve gotten it out to Olio this week and Twist next week to get on thier wine lists, and almost all the orders have gone out.

I’ll be catching up in the vineyard this weekend and trying to update everyone on what’s going on!.

I’ve thought a lot about making a Pinot Noir. The hard part for me has been finding fruit to buy that I like. There’s not much Pinot Noir available for sale in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I’m also very very picky about the vineyards we’ll use and making sure that they are farmed for the highest possible quality.

That’s meant for the past two years the only vineyard I’ve been interested in has been the Schultze Family Vineyard in the Southern Santa Cruz Mountains. The Schultze’s make what I think is the best Pinot Noir in the Santa Cruz Mountains from their vineyard under the Windy Oaks name. They also sell their fruit to Thomas Fogarty, David Bruce, Testerossa and Mark Alfaro. Jim Schultze is so dedicated to perfection to his vineyard that this is some of the most sought after fruit around.

Every year I call Jim and Judy and beg for fruit, and every year they call back and say, “Sorry”. This year though, Jim said, “Maybe, I can give you 2 tons.” So my fingers have been crossed, they’ll let me know after fruit sets in June if I have a Pinot source. I ordered my barrels just in case, and then haven’t thought much about it.

Then last week, through a series of connections another great source became available to me. The owners of one of the oldest and most sought after vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains called Bradley Brown at Big Basin Vineyards. They were looking for a new winemaker and vineyard manager for their vineyard. Bradley is busy this year planting more Syrah, so he referred them to me.

The vineyard is fantastic, but it was too far away for me to take care of well. At 10 acres it would mean I’d have to dedicate almost 100% of my weekend time to it and I couldn’t see doing that with all the other vineyards we have (We’re up to 5 we take care of, and 3 we consult at now). So, I started making frantic phone calls.

Yesterday I called back the owners and said, “Yes I think we can do it.” Ted at Uvas Creek Vineyards is interested in partnering with us on the project. He’s a fantastic farmer and he’s about 30 miles closer than I am. We can split up the vineyard work, and then split the fruit. We still need to work out the details, but it looks like we’ll have 1-2 tons of Chardonnay and 3-4 tons of Pinot Noir this year.

Barring some real unusual error over the next day or two, shipping will start on schedule next Monday April 9th. I plan to release all orders, to all states next week. The exceptions will be a few special deliveries that have been requested. Those will go out after the official release of April 21st.

The wine should start to arrive as soon as next Wednesday and Thursday to California addresses. We did send out a small number of late offer letters this week. It looked like we would have 2-3 cases left after first round, so I sent out 18 offers for three packs to the first 18 people who had signed up after the first cut off.

I’ll deliver restaurant orders starting the week of April 23rd. Olio in Campbell and Baci in Vacaville are confirmed. We will also likely be at Twist in Campbell as well. That should be confirmed next week.

Our official release day will be Saturday April 21st. We’re celebrating with a party at Unwined in San Jose : http://www.unwinedshop.com/index.html from 2 to 5pm. There will be snacks, champagne and our 2005 Stefania Syrah Eaglepoint Ranch by the glass. Unwined will also have a limited number of bottles available for purchase at the store.

If you would like to receive more details please let me know. It looks like we should have about 50 people at the event and it should be a great time.

Unwined will also have their regular selection of by the glass tastes available during the event. We’re hoping that we’ll have shipments out before that date, I’ll update everyone on that in the next blog.

We’ve had great response so far to our first offer letters. Right now we’ve booked about 53% of the total wine we have available. It does look like we’ll sell out before our official release date of April 21st.

There’s a small chance that those people who signed up after March 8th and have not yet gotten an offer letter will get one after April 1st, but I think that’s about a 25% chance now. The waiting list for an offer letter has gotten over 30 people long.

I really didn’t want to rush people or pull the trick a lot of Napa wineries try and use about ‘a long line behind you if you don’t buy’, but it honestly does look like if you don’t get your order in soon, we’ll be out of wine.

The situation in the Fall looks even worse. We’re averaging 2-3 new sign ups a day right now. I think that very well may keep up through the summer, especially as the wine starts to get out around the country and people try it. We could have a waiting list of 150 by September to get the Cabernet release.

Yesterday we took our first day off in what I think was eight weeks. It’s been a pretty consistent schedule for weeks now. Work the day jobs Monday – Friday. Then weekday nights are spent in the office, sending out letters, processing orders, planing the 2007 budget, and answering emails. The weekends come and it’s out in the vineyard or into the winery.

Yesterday we just played around all day. Drove to Monterrey and searched for Spot Prawns. There where none, too windy for the fisherman we heard. But we did stop for some abalone and Vouvray on the wharf.

Today I’ll head back off to the vineyards. I need a new weed-whacker. I cooked mine last week. The second engine failure on this one, so I’m not going to try and rebuild it again. It’s also time to start spraying sulfur regularly, and even though there is some rain coming Tuesday, I want to get sulfur down.

We have bud break and good growth starting at home, so it’s likely I’ll see a little today in the mountain vineyards. By next weekend, everything should be starting to grow and the real spray schedule will start.

After frantic weeks of working with banks, credit card companies, shipping companies, cork suppliers and tons of other details we finally got back out in the vineyards this weekend. It was a beautiful weekend in Northern California, really perfect for working. Except for the weed whacker dieing on me, it went pretty well.

Home Vineyard and Ottigurr Vineyard – Both had bud break. These little suburban vineyards are great measuring sticks for how things are going in the mountains. Both are usually 2-3 weeks ahead of schedule of the mountain vineyards. It really helps with planing and scheduling our spread out vineyard sites to be able to track these two closely every day.

Mount Madonna – Reed’s Vineyard. I spoke with Reed last week, and things are going well. He’s mostly self sufficient now, and just calls on us for advice from time to time. He’s decided to not fruit the vineyard this year, and instead concentrate on shoot positioning and cordon strength. A gutsy move on his part, putting off a year three harvest and that first cash flow to concentrate on long term quality. We’ll have Tempranillo and Syrah from here in 2008 and Big Basin Vineyards will take the Grenache and probably any Tempranillo we don’t use.

Morgan Hill Vineyard. We finished pruning on Saturday. Not sure what this one will be named yet. It’s actually not in the town of Morgan Hill, but in the foothills above the town. It’s in a little valley behind the hill most people call “Morgan Hill” (Morgan Hill was a person, not an actual hill, but there’s a cone shaped hill outside of town that most people call ‘Morgan Hill’). This might fit into our long term plans. The vineyard is near Uvas Canyon, where I’d eventually like to plant our estate vineyard, and working it would give me some local experience with this micro-climate. No commercial fruit from here this year, it will be 2008 at least and probably 2009.

Llama Vineyard – Bonny Doon – Looks great. We did some clean up and weed removal. Stef hadn’t seen this vineyard in a long time. Millie and I pruned it this year, and Stef was amazed at the progress. This has been a painful vineyard to restore, but it’s in great shape now and should get us 1000-2000 pounds this year. This little location is only 6 miles from the ocean, but gets very hot during the day. It was 5 degrees warmer here on Saturday than in San Jose.

Elandrich Vineyard – Portola Valley – The weed whacker killer! It’s killed my weed whacker twice now. Millie got started on some serious end post repair work (jackhammer and 50lb bags of cement serious). I got through about 70% of the weed removal. The plants look pretty good here. We need to replace the bird netting with a better quality netting this year, and if we can do that should see 2 tons of fruit or so.

Everything looks in great shape. This experience in the vineyard is helping so much with winemaking and planing too. The work is hard, but I sure do appreciate all the great knowledge gained.

We got the first wave of order letters out on Thursday evening. They just made the 6PM cut off at our local post office. Everyone who signed up before 3/1 now has a letter on the way.

We sent a test one to ourselves and that arrived Friday. We also had a few orders trickle in via fax, so we know they are starting to get out, at least in the Bay Area. By next Tuesday – Thursday they should have found there way to everyone.

The second wave will be put together on Monday and go out on Tuesday for those people who signed up after 3/1 or got us a mailing address after the first wave. Pretty exciting time right now for us!

Available at:

http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/133849.6fb8485037f

There will be a link on the website soon too.

We’ll be sending out offer letters today. They should start to arrive to you soon.