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Last night we had dinner at Olio in Campbell.

http://www.metroactive.com/metro/01.24.07/dining-0704.html

Thomas Ricci is the co-owner and chef, and I loved his cooking when he was at Arcadia in San Jose. He’d always make us something special, and ask how things were going with our wine. We visited Olio last week to see his new place, and he again asked how the wine was coming and when he’d get to try some. Last night we brought him in a barrel sample of the 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah, which will be bottled soon.

Thomas recommended the Lamb Shanks, which I ordered, and we sampled the wine with him and his bar manager Kevin.

Then we got our very first, official, ORDER.

We’ve had lots of people say they’ll buy the wine when it comes out, but this was the first actual, money commitment. In late March, or early April, Stefania Wine will be on the wine list at Olio in downtown Campbell. Lots of people know the thing I’ve worried about most is selling wine. I don’t think I’m a great salesman by any stretch, so this was a huge, huge deal! 49 more cases to go 🙂

We are just about ready to set up with a shipper, we’ll have a final meeting with them this Monday. So, it’s time to finalize up what we are going to do with prices and allocations. Our first release will be 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah. The letters should go out the end of February with shipping as weather permits starting in late March.

I think on pricing I’m set. A 3 pack will be $105, a 6 pack will be $200. Shipping will be billed directly by the shipping company, but I think I’ll subsidize a little of the cost. It’s not going to be cheap to ship these boxes, it looks like about $18 for a three pack and $25 for a six pack, and that’s with me covering some of the costs. I wish I could offer single bottles or other combinations, but it’s going to be too expensive to ship.

For allocations, everyone who has signed up so far will be allocated a 6 pack. They’ll also be able to choose a 3 pack if they would like. That’s a little risky for me. I’m counting on not everyone ordering wine so we’re actually allocating more wine than we have. I’ll give people the option to ask for more if we have enough left. People who sign up after today will be allocated a 3 pack.

I’m not set yet on pricing for the 2005 Uvas Creek Cabernet Sauvignon, it will be in the same range as the Syrah I think. Odds are pretty good that I’ll have the same allocation for that when it’s released in September, but it seems likely that anyone signing up after April or so won’t be able to buy wine from us until next year’s releases.

The states we’ll be able to ship to are: Alaska, Arizona, California, District of Columbia, Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, Wyoming, Virginia, Colorado, Texas, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Florida, Washington

For other states I’ll recommend a storage site. We’re pretty excited about New York and New Jersey, we thought those would be tough and we have about 40 people signed up from those two states so far.

The most common question I get this time of year is, “Will the cold weather hurt the grapevines?”. The simple answer is “nope, not even a little.”

Vines go dormant like apple trees or roses during the cold winter months. The sap pushes back down into the roots to stay warm and the wood hardens off to protect the tender part of the plant. Vines will go happily through the winter as long as the temperature doesn’t drop below -15F, something that just never happens in California.

There’s no real threat of damage to the plant until it begins to have bud break again. That’s the point when a lot cold snap or frost can damage the tender new shoots. When the vine looks like this there’s danger from cold:

We’re still at least a few weeks away though from the plants pushing open. We also have the added protection in each of our mountain vineyards of being on a good slope. Cold air is heavy and it moves down the slope, this helps prevent frost from forming, so we don’t really have any cold worries at all.

The lack of rain is a bit more bothersome. Unless we make up for the loss of rain in the months ahead it means we’ll have to think about turning on the drip systems in our vineyards this spring and summer, more than we might do otherwise. It’s a small change, and just means we have to be even more attentive to how the plants are doing.

January 22nd is St. Vincent’s Day. St Vincent was a 4th century martyer from Spain and his holiday was part of the merger of Roman holiday’s into Christian ones in the 4th century, meaning he had a holiday named after him almost right after being killed.

St Vincent is the Patron Saint of vinegrowers and winemakers. The holiday and feast is celebrated in all of the Catholic wine growing areas of Europe, especially in Burgundy. The day begins with a morning mass, and the winemakers bring a bottle to leave at the alter. There is then a long feast that starts in the early afternoon and goes on late into the night. Everyone is expected to bring fine bottles to share with the other grapegrowers and winemakers at these feasts.

Before St Constintine merged the Roman religions with Christianity in the 4th century, the holiday was celebrated as Paganalia. Pagans were people who lived in the country and worked the land. The celebration started after the fields had been prepared for planting and the vines pruned, usually by the 3rd week of January. There was a huge feast, and people from the city would come and bring gifts and goods to the country people and wait on them at the parties, a kind of reversal of normal roles. Masks and costumes would sometimes be worn, so that no one could tell who was rich or poor.

A few weeks later the party would be reversed and the country people would head to the cities to bring gifts and wait on the city people. There was also costume wearing and great parades and dances. This holiday was called Fornicalia.

Paganalia became St Vincent’s day, and Fornicalia is now celebrated as Carnival or Mardi Gras around the world.

Here’s my experience with one of the six shipping companies I’ve evaluated so far.

First, someone always answers the phone there. It’s the receptionist, she’s not very helpful, but the phone has been picked up every time I call. She claims to take a message every time as well. So far 25% of my calls have been returned from them.

In addition I received an email response from them to one of four emails I sent.

That makes them far and away the most responsive of the six companies.

One company, I finally got through to a live person, I said, ” I’m inquiring about opening a new account, I’m a small winery…ect.”. She transferred me to someone’s voicemail in …….. accounting. New account, accounting, hey it was close. A very nice lady in accounting did call me back and said, “sorry, I’m the wrong person, you’ll get a call from so and so.” So and so never called back.

They are in second place right now as the second most responsive.

In third place is a company, that I managed to get a call back from in December. This was after three phone calls and an email. They didn’t want to fax me pricing, since they had new pricing coming out in two days. They promised me they’d fax the new pricing in two days (this was in mid-December), I’ve not heard from them since. Three more phone calls, two more emails, nothing.

If this is the level of service these companies provide, I’m afraid I’m in for a whole lot of headaches in the shipping area. Everyone’s been telling me it’s bad, and it’s a headache, but I didn’t think that the level of unresponsiveness could be this bad.

Another bad thing is it looks like I won’t be offering single bottles. I really wanted to do that. Since we’re a new winery I wanted to offer people the chance to taste and try a single bottle if they wanted. The pricing is just too much. It would be at least $17 to ship a single bottle from any of these companies. I had planned on eating some of the shipping costs, but at that rate it would still be $50-$55 a bottle to try a single bottle.

We got off to a good start this weekend on pruning.

The weather was excellent, cold, but clear no rain or damp fog that can making pruning so difficult. Even the ground was ok, a little mud but not too much. Some years the combination of mud and grass gets so bad that we joke about “adobe boots”. You have to stop every 15 minutes or so and work the mud off your boots to go on.

Saturday we got the entire Elandrich Vineyard done, all sections, about 2 acres total and still had time to get Kathy and Millie home done as well. The vineyard looked really nice, and it was especially nice to have no signs of Powdery Mildew, after fighting it so hard in 2004 and 2005. There is still one section of Cabernet that is lagging behind, but everything else looks great. We pruned mostly to a single bud per shoot. That’s pretty severe pruning, most people leave 2-3 per shoot.

I like the dappled sunlight and better airflow though that this severe pruning allows. It also means I don’t have to go through in August and drop a lot of fruit trying to get the rest to ripen. Or pull a lot of leafs off to let sunlight in. Basically I’m doing all that work now. This lets the vine naturally concentrates all it’s energy on the fewer bunches. I end up with 1.5-2 tons per acre vs 4-5 tons per acre for most places and super concentrated fruit.

Sunday we finished most of the Llama Vineyard, just a few rows to go there this week. What a drastic change in this vineyard from the real mess we took over. Now all the vines have reestablished trunks and proper V.S.P. training. We should get our first good yield from this vineyard this year, even though it needs about 70 plants still replanted.

It was nice to have mother nature cooperating, we’re off to a great start this year.

A couple of years ago I started pruning after the first full moon in January. Before that I did it more or less randomly in January, when I could.

There was no real good reason for this. It was just traditional. People used to wait until after the first full moon in January to start pruning and they tried to finish by St Vincent’s (The patron saint of winemakers and vinegrowers) day on January 22nd. Modern followers of the practice, including bio-dynamic farmers, believe that the moon’s pull on the vines subsides after the full moon, and the plants will heal faster from the pruning and not loose as much ‘energy’ through sap bleeding.

I just figured “can’t hurt”.

I have seen better performance in my vines the last two years, but I’ve made so many other changes, who knows if the moon is having any effect at all. I remember Jerry Anderson telling me; “Farming is not science, it’s trial and error, and you can never limit it to one variable”. That’s so true. I don’t know what effect, if any, pruning on the moon phases has had, but I know it hasn’t hurt, so I’ll keep doing it.

We’ll start on Saturday, and I’ll work hard for the next couple of weekends to finish all the vineyards before St Vincent’s Day. It also means 2007 is officially under way in the vineyard.

Since we haven’t bottled wine yet, it would seem impossible to have problems with our shipping company, but we have.

I picked out a small storage and shipping facility in the South Bay in April. I wanted somewhere local, that could deliver to restaurants in San Jose and ship to people as needed. They seemed to fit the bill well and we marked them off on our permits.

Well November came, and I wanted to sit down with them and make sure they’d be able to ship inter-state well, and could handle the wide spread of our customers. So I called, and emailed, and called and emailed, and nothing. I think they are still in business, but they never called me back. So I started checking around. There’s one other shipper in San Jose I found, but they were geared for large volumes. The smallest price they had was to ship a case, and they could not even quote shipping single bottles.

So I started asking around. Kevin at Copain, Randy Sloan at Match Vineyards, and Bradley Brown at Big Basin all had recommendations I checked out. Some places never got back to me, or said they would send me information and never did, or just never responded to me. I figure some of that is the holiday season, so I’ll contact them all again after the 1st. Still the experience has been something. Randy Sloan had a good quote: “I can’t say I’m happy with my shipping company, but they are not pissing me off at the moment and that’s about as good as it gets.” Everyone else had simliar comments.

So I’ll spend a lot of time in January it looks like tracking down a storage and shipping company and it will likely be in Napa. More time in a truck for me, I never thought winemaking would mean so much time behind the wheel.

A couple of weeks ago Bradley Brown, owner and winemaker at Big Basin Vineyards called me. Originally he was looking for some vineyard sources in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and wanted to know if I had fruit to sell in 2007 (I won’t, I’ll use it all). We ended up talking for over an hour on all kinds of subjects. Mostly we talked about fruit quality in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and our marketing efforts as two new wineries in the area. Bradley is just a few years ahead of us.

He invited me to come visit his facility and taste his barrels and wines. So, I managed to get some time last Friday and took the drive over to see him and his assistant winemaker Ian. I had a good idea of where to find him, since I’ve been to the golf course at Boulder Creek, and he was just past that. Still in the mountains you don’t want to count on Google or Yahoo, so he left me detailed instructions.

He’s built a beautiful little winery on his site, all out of redwood milled on the property. The space above the winery is a yoga studio. All the equipment is state of the art for such a small operation.

We tasted wines from 05 and 06 out of barrel and a bottle of 2004 Rattlesnake Ridge Syrah. Bradley has only made Syrah’s so far and he and I both agree Syrah has a great future in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He also gave me a little sample of his first ever Pinot Noir from the 2006 vintage.

All his wines are plush, deep and full bodied Syrah’s. Great dark fruit, with excellent complexity and depth. If you can I’d sign up now for his mailing list, as the secret is starting to get out and scores of 90+ are rolling in from Wine Spectator and Robert Parker.

We talked over our winemaking styles, techniques and preferences and we had a great deal in common with what we are trying to do. Bradley uses a bit more new oak than I do, about 50% vs 25% for my Syrah’s but his fruit stands up to it very well. He’s also not made any Cabernet, and asked me to bring some samples by when I can. Everything he and Ian do is well thought out, and no corners are cut in making great wine. It was a great experience to see another start up not cutting any corners and going top of the line in making wine.

We talked at length about what we might be able to do to help each other out, particularly with some marketing ideas on how we can get the word out on the new high quality wineries just coming on line in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and if some of the other new wineries might be interested in talking with us also. He was off to visit family for the holiday’s but we agreed we’d meet again in January and see where we might take things together in the future.

I know it’s been awhile since my last update, but there really is very little going on in the wine world right now.

In the winery everything is settled down in barrel and the 2006’s are going through Maloactic. So there’s no tasting and no fiddling with the wine. Just let it sit and finish it’s work. The 2005’s are also sitting. No more racking or changes for the Syrah until bottling in February. The Cabernet will go through one more racking in the late Spring.

In the vineyard, it’s also sit and wait. I start pruning after the full moon in January, so no work on the vines for 4 more weeks. The ground has been to hard to do any work on trellis repair, but we did get some rain this week. That should soften things up enough to start work on fixing any hardware issues.

I do have a trip out on Friday to Big Basin Vineyards to report on, so the next update will be Friday or Saturday.