Category: General

I’ve been thinking for some time of writing a series of Blogs on how our business plan evolved from planting 50 vines around the hot tub to making 1200 cases in just 8 years. I haven’t really figured out how to put it together, since it’s a long twisty series of events that have lead us here. I do know though that we’re in the middle of an important transition this year.

In 2005 100% of the grapes we used were purchased grapes. We did use some grapes we had grown on our own, but that wine was made at home and not commercially.

In 2006 95% of the grapes we used were purchased and 5% were grown by us. In 2007 that changed again to 65% purchased and 35% grown by us.

This year we will ‘flip’ that number. 30% of our grapes will be purchased, 70% will be grown by us. Eventually I believe we will be at 80-90% grown by us, and 10-20% purchased.

New vineyards have been leased, new projects added, and older plantings are either being restored or coming on line. All these factor give us access to more grapes that we have controlled through out the growing season. That’s really important, because I think we grow great fruit.

This year sees an important part of that transition continue. From 2005-2007 we used Cabernet Sauvignon from the Uvas Creek Vineyard, which we bought each year. This year a vineyard we’ve farmed, the Crimson Clover Vineyard, has come on line at 4 years old and is ready to be harvested this morning. Crimson Clover is near Uvas Creek, in the same AVA, and same band of soil, altitude and training. It is however, farmed by us and will replace Uvas Creek this year.

We’re off in just 10 minutes to start picking grapes from Crimson Clover.

I’m sure any attempt to sort these out would just lead to more time in front of the computer than I want to spend. We got everything done pretty fast today and made it back by 3:30, well ahead of schedule. Stef is making empanadas right now for the crew tomorrow. We may get a trip in to the gym tonight, but more likely I’ll make some pasta and we’ll watch football.

First Picture for Neil in New York’s daughter. Sophie in the winery. This will be her 4th harvest. The first she had to watch in a little pen as she was just a 8 week old puppy.

If you look real hard you can see Jerry removing netting. They started at 7am and finished about 2PM.

Every bottle of Stefania, has some Stefania labor behind it. Here she is loading 1/2 ton bins in the pick up truck.

I lost. I’m the one who had to jump in the bin this year.

The Nielsen’s 17 year old vineyard dog. She just barely makes it outside to check on us and then settles in on the porch.

Stef said I looked like a hippie. We pulled about 200 pounds of Zinfandel from a little backyard vineyard down the street from Crimson Clover. If it turns out ok, it will make its way into the Haut Tubee blend. (That’s a brand new $1200 Seguin Moreau barrel in the background)

More for Neil in New York. Wild Turkeys on the road.

And a young doe in a driveway.

Jerry and Estelle’s son Axle. Mostly when he comes out with them he plays with the dogs. At Chaine d’ Or he swims with Sophie in the pool. He also likes to catch quail and then keeps them as pets. Here he’s looking for nests in the vines.

We leave in 15 minutes to start the day. This morning was actually pretty leisurely. I was up at 6:20 and made coffee and brought in the paper. We’ve worked through the pot and the paper and Stef is getting ready to go now.

Our first stop will be at the Crimson Clover vineyard to drop off bags and boxes to store the bird netting. Jerry has been working there since 7AM. Next we will drive to Chaine d’Or, about 50 miles and load up the two pick up trucks. We’re going to try and get everything in one load. Five 1/2 ton bins, and about 60 30lb picking bins. We’ll bring those down to Crimson Clover.

Next we’ll pick a few hundred pounds of Zinfandel down the street from the Crimson Clover vineyard that will go into the Haut Tubee blend. Than means getting it back to Chaine d’Or for processing. At some point around 3 PM we need to get back to San Jose to pick up a third rental truck for tomorrow.

If all goes well, we should be done by 5PM tonight, although a set back or two could push us back to 8PM.

So much of winemaking is logistics. Getting the right equipment, to the right place, at the right time.

Today will be an Office day for Stefania. I’ll be at work, we gave Jerry the day off.

Tomorrow, we start going full speed, all out, non stop. We’ll be moving bins to the Crimson Clover Vineyard and Jerry and his wife Estelle will be removing the bird netting. Stef and I will try and get all the bins moved in one block with two pick up trucks. We’ll also help with the nets before heading off to pick up a third rental truck.

Sunday we pick. Probably about 1 1/2 tons. Normally I’d say 2+, but yields have been low this year. This vineyard is 4 years old, and next year yields will like be around 3 tons. We’ll also be picking a little Zinfandel for the Haut Tubee blend.

It will be a busy day, shuttling the Cabernet to Big Basin, and processing it there, then the Zinfandel to Chaine d’Or.

Monday Jerry will clean out all the bins, and Stef and I will do more truck swapping. The rental will go back, and my Dad’s truck will go back to him, and we will rent a long bed. Long bed trucks fit two 1/2 ton bins perfectly. Then we drive up to Eaglepoint Ranch. Our pick there is Tuesday, and we drive back to Big Basin. Hopefully things will go well and we should finish by 8PM.

Wednesday we’ll sample the Woodruff Family Vineyard, and likely start picking for Pax Mahle on Thursday or Friday. If the numbers look good we’ll pick for Hobo Wines on Saturday, and Storrs on Sunday. In all we should bring in 6-8 tons in that first rush. If we get through that I’ll likely give everyone Monday the 6th off. I’ll return to work, and everyone will rest for a day.

For our first three releases we had used an efax account to get orders. It worked, was portable, and easy to set up. Last release though I got a number of complaints that faxes did not get through. We also had a couple of bad days around March Madness, when there were huge delays. That combined with a price increase of the efax service made setting up our own machine in the home office.

It also fit with a general direction we’ve been heading in this summer anticipating Stefania working full time on winery tasks. We plan on bringing in a lot of shipping and doing that ourselves, and Stef has spent a few weeks getting all the accounting in order and taken that over. So, having the orders come in on a live fax machine in our office made sense.

Every morning for the last week our little alarm clock goes off. Ring, Ring, Beep, Beep. The fax machine has started for the day. Usually it’s about 6:30, but one morning it was 5:30. Still we don’t mind at all. “Woohoo“, one more order and we get to keep making wine, is the attitude we have.

One more wave of letters to be released still next week. Stef just walked out the door with the box of them to seal up today. She’ll be in the winery doing lab tests and getting mailers ready. Jerry will be hauling barrels to Big Basin, and I’ll be at the day job today.

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.