Category: General

I originally posted this on the Wine Spectator site, but I liked it so much, I’m reposting here.

Monday turned into a long day. Visited the new vineyard site from 8-10am. Whacked one gopher. You know what winegrowers talk about when they get together? Killing gophers. We all keep a count, it’s like kill marks on a fighter plane. “How many did you get?.” “I got 14 so far this year.” “That’s good, I’ve only got 7.”

Everyone keeps an up to date count, plus a vintage history. “I got 11 this year, but nothing like 05 I got 104 that year.” I heard someone actually say that on Saturday. I know winegrowers who can’t remember exactly what the weather was like 5 years ago, but they can remember how many gophers they killed. Monday was my first kill of the vintage. Millie’s comment. “11 more and your even with me.”

Glamour of the wine life.

I meet with our Bay Area sales reps for lunch and did barrel samples for them. Good kids. They seem so young.

The crew had a spat and I had to go back on site after lunch. Daniel was filling the post holes with too much water and Millie was mad about working in mud. Turned out it was a Spanish translation problem. Last week I had a simliar problem. I backed the forklift around the truck to unload it, and Jerry had said he’d turn the truck around. My Spanish isn’t good enough to tell the difference between “go around the truck” and “turn around the truck”.

Monday the problem was Daniel’s English wasn’t good enough to tell the difference between ‘put water in the holes’ and ‘fill the holes with water’. Everyone made up though and they have 5 of the 34 rows complete.

Total wine stuff 10 hours.
Total miles:104.
Rows installed :5
Sales Reps met: 3
Dead Gophers: 1

Hey folks!

I didn’t get an opportunity to take very many photos during the process as all available hands were on the line working, but follow the link below to see a handful of pictures from our April 1st bottling.

http://www.bubbleshare.com/album/349947

I was grateful that this bottling was small since it was our first time managing the process from start to finish. Inconveniences with suppliers were many, mistakes to be corrected happened, but overall the logistics came together and even the rain stayed away for just one more day.

Once the truck finally settled in (after much ado about the driveway and tree limb) and was sterilized, we hooked the hoses up, got the people in their work positions and hit the big green “Go” button!

Earplugs were passed around, thankfully, and for the most part the operation went very smoothly. There was some fine tuning needed with the fill level of the bottles, the depth of the corks, and the position of the new labels. Once we got started though, we all found or rhythm and hustled through two hours of hands-on assembly line work.

Loading empty bottles onto the line was Millie, getting empty boxes to the end of the line was Kathy – both of them short enough to fit under the overhead racks. The bottle fill station, cork station and label station were all monitored by the bottling crew, then Daniel and I were at the tail end putting the full bottles back into the cases.

We struggled at first, but with coaching from the bottling crew we found a great rhythm and hustled through the two hours.

Paul told me later that he and Jerry were sweating keeping up with us – they had to stop loading the finished cases on pallets when there was an empties pallet change. He thinks next time we bottle we’ll need one or two more bodies to keep the flow moving better.

I thought we did just fine, but that’s because I had my head down and focused on my bottle count the entire time – and the earplugs kept me from getting too distracted.

An enormous THANK YOU to our crew, Jerry Anderson “Winemaker Emeritus” for coaching us, the folks at Top It Off Bottling, and CWT for taking such good care of us.

After 9 very frustrating months of dealing with the Santa Cruz Mountains Winegrowers Association, I’ve decided to give up. I notified them yesterday that we are pulling our membership application and asked that they return our membership check. I also let them know we will be withdrawing Chaine d’Or from the SCMWA next year.

Going forward we will not be participating in any events that the organization sponsors. I’ve also removed the link to the organization here.

It was sad and difficult to deal with the organization from the very start and with as little time as Stefania and I have we could not continue to dedicate time to the organization. It appears to me that the organization is headed in a direction to promote the small 50-75 case backyard vanity projects that exist in the mountains rather than real commercial wineries, and we are headed in a different direction.

I encourage people who are looking for information on the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA to go to:

http://scmwine.wikispaces.com

Dave Tong’s wiki is accurate, extensive and has information on all the wineries in the area, including those like Varner, Ryhs, Clos la Tech and ourselves who do not belong to the SCMWA.

My brother called the other night. He and my mom were just in Chile, he had to be there for work, she tagged along to see friends and neighbors of ours from when we lived there. Of the various photos they have sent me in email to look at, it’s clear much has changed since we were there (30 years ago!).

One thing in particular they both noted was the amount of air pollution, though I figure the dense metropolitan area is much like here, some months are worse than others. I’m sure that once you leave the big city and head toward the coast that the air is much improved.

Because my brother was there for work related business, they didn’t get a whole lot of time to venture outside of the city and see the wineries or vineyards. We talked of planning a trip there together, perhaps in a couple of years when our schedules are more free and our vacation/PTO accounts have the reserves for an extended vacation.

I’m excited to think I’ll be able to travel back to my childhood home and see the country and vineyards with new eyes. I remember fondly the trips to “Tio Tolo’s” vineyard and winery where my best friend and I got to glue labels on the bottles and play in the winery. I also remember the smells of the wine and the oak barrels and of riding horses through the cork orchard. It wasn’t until very recently that I made the connection between the cork trees and wine corks.

My dad once told me that his fantasy plan for retirement from the Army was to own his own vineyard and winery in Chile and not come back to the States. I toss that information around in my brain from time to time and wonder if maybe I inherited that passion to be a farmer and winemaker from him. It’s a fun fantasy to bat around because I’m certain that the hootch my dad would have made would be just that, “vino tinto” whose sole purpose is for daily drinking and in large quantities.

I can still see pictures of him swilling wine from a basketwoven covered green jug of wine hoisted over his shoulder, his neck twisted around so his lips could drink right from the bottle. No doubt he was showing off and being silly. He loved to wear hats and act the part to correspond with the style. Sometimes he would don a FuManchu mustache that was made from real hair.

I could reminisce all afternoon and tell you all the crazy antics I pulled as a kid in Chile. I’m glad my brother called and put all those crazy memories in my head, and glad to have the time to just sit and enjoy memories of my dad and living his dream.

A toast to my dad, he would have said my wine was too fancy, but I can picture him drinking it right from the bottle just the same to antagonize me!

Cheers,
Stefania

If you’re having trouble getting your order form to go through on the e-fax, hang on another day or send it by mail. No telling for sure why we’re getting a “busy” signal, but we figure it may be due to the start of March Madness and the live streaming video of the games hogging the ‘net.

We tested the efax number yesterday with no problems, but have gotten feedback today that some of you are sending faxes that are not going through.

Thanks,
Paul & Stefania

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.