Category: General

Our first Newsletter, Spring 2007, just went out. We’ve been busy these past few weeks with so much office work it’s been hard to believe. As I sit here now, Stef is printing out order forms, which will go out next week, and trying to make the label printer work.

Something easy to forget in this entire endeavor is that it is a small business. Books need to be kept, order forms printed, mail sent out, forms completed and 100’s of other tasks that go with running any business. We joke a lot about being the ‘Accounting Department’ and ‘Shipping Department’ as we sit in the office at home.

This weekend though we’ll be back out in the vineyards doing spring work, and Monday looks like we are set for bottling. It will be really nice to step away from the desk and get outside, or into the winery and smell the smells.

It’s not all drudgery though, the nice part about being at home…. We just opened a bottle of wine to sip on while we work!

I can’t imagine that the second release could be as hard as the first. As we’re a week away now from sending out Allocation letters, almost every thing is done.

We’re really hoping that this first time is the hardest, because it’s been hard. Some big details we’re still working on :The bank hasn’t set up our Visa-Mastercard processing yet, we’re really not 100% sure that the printer can handle 150+ color letters (we had to by a printer two weeks ago). I need to finish the newsletter, but really at this point those are small things.

There have been dozens of little details as well. It never occurred to me to send out confirmation emails for sign ups until a couple weeks ago, so I’ve just started doing that. I had to come up with a point system and I just did that this morning. At least I know a lot of these tasks will be one time deals.

Still it will be nice to get a few sunny days and get out in the vineyard and do some real wine work. The rain seems to be catching up, and I think we’ll have bud break in a few weeks, and the focus can go from the office, to the vineyards.

April 21st, from 2pm-5pm.

Our Release Party! We’ll be at Unwined http://www.unwinedshop.com/ to celebrate the official release of our 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah. Mail orders will start to go out the week before that, so you may get your wine before the 21st, but this will be our official party. We really wanted to have it close to home and the view from the front of the wine shop is very close to the view on our website and the one we’ll likely use on our 2006 bottles.

The details are not finalized yet, check back at our site and the Unwined site as we get closer to the date. There will be snacks of cheese and small tapas. We’ll also have our wine available to try by the glass plus 2-3 other wines we like to try as a ‘flight’. We think the cost will be $10 or $20 per person and both we and Unwined will have tickets.

Unwined will also have a small amount of our wine to purchase that day at $35 a bottle. It’s very likely to be the only retail sale available as it looks like the rest of the wine will be sold directly by mail order and go to a few select restaurants.

The question Stefania and I have heard more than any other is: “When will you have wine?”. I think I even remember one of the neighbors asking that as we were digging holes in the yard to plant our first vines six years ago. Now there’s a date. Monday February 26th we’ll be bottling our 2005 Eaglepoint Ranch Syrah.

Everyone should be able to watch live by following the cam link at http://www.crushpadwine.com/index.php

We’ll both be there through the day.

The wine will need to rest for a bit after bottling, then we should start sending it out in April and May. We’ll have an official release in mid April and a party somewhere in San Jose to celebrate. More details coming soon!

I’ve had a few questions asking if we are going to offer magnums or half (375ml) bottles.

We’re not going to have half bottles this first year. It was price prohibitive to have them. With such a short production run, switching over the bottle line was going to add a big cost to half bottles and they would have ended up having to be priced at $25 or so. With 400+ case scheduled for the 2006 vintage though, we should be able to start offering half bottles next year.

Magnums were a little easier to do. Basically those are hand filled and hand corked, so the bottling line does not have to be stopped and switched over. We’ll have six magnums total of each 2005 wine.

We’re not going to offer those for sale. We’ll keep a couple for ourselves and the other four will be given out as gifts. Right now I’m coming up with a ‘rewards’ point system. Something like Sea Smoke uses, giving their customers points for each purchase, length of time on the list and referrals. I’m also thinking that if people fax or email me receipts from restaurant or retail purchases, I’ll include points for those purchases.

The four magnums will then be a gift to our best customers. It seems like a very small thing we can do to say thank you.

Recently I was talking with a friend about cooking. She wanted to know when I started to cook, and especially how did we get to be able to plate dinner for 15 people at a time. She said she can do four pretty easy, but even six is hard.

Well I started cooking when I was twelve. Mom started working late and my sister and I would cook before she got home. While my sister loved Mac and Cheese, I liked to try new things. I really got serious though after watch Martin Yan’s, “Yan Can Cook” in the late 80’s and early 90’s. I went out and got his cookbooks and cooked through them.

That seemed an odd explanation to her, since I rarely cook Cantonese, or any Asian food for guests. But I told her I learned three important things from Martin Yan that helped me become a better cook.

First, he always stressed the importance of good fresh ingredients. Part of his show was always devoted to where you can find the best ingredients and how you can tell if they are fresh. He always stressed you could not make great dishes with out great ingredients, and that good ingredients would make up for any mistakes.

Second, Cantonese food is all about preparation. You have to have everything prepared and ready to go exactly when you need it. Since cooking happens so fast, you can’t stop and chop some garlic in the middle if you forgot it. Everything has to be planned in advance. This has helped be able to get 15-20 plates with 3-4 things on it out together, hot, and ready to go.

Finally he taught about understanding how elements come together to create a dish. If you add carrots after onion, you’ll end up with either underdone carrots, or burnt onion. You have to understand how each thing cooks, so you know when to add it to get the best flavors and textures. This taught me how important timing is in cooking and how to bring things together at just the right time.

And all this made me think of something that happened earlier that same day. We were at Crushpad, testing our wine and settling on bottling times. At the same time another person making wine was there. He was talking with one of the assistant winemakers about his 05 Cabernet and saying he wanted to get more structure in it.

I thought that was one of the oddest conversations I’ve heard. The 2005 Cabernet’s are already ‘cooked’, we’re just figuring out now when to ‘plate’ them. It’s too late to add structure to a 15 month old wine.

If you wanted more structure you needed better ingredients, and you needed to have everything prepared to add structure to the wine at ‘cooking’ (pump overs, submerged caps, extended soaks, new oak), and finally you needed to understand when to apply these things to get the ‘dish’ right. It’s to late now for new oak, or pumping over to have much if any effect.

So I thought what a great teacher Martin Yan is. Not only can he teach Asian cooking, but his teaching can be applied to plating 15 Rib Eyes with crusted veggies and cranberry salad. It also turns out it’s pretty sound advice on how to make wine.

Last night we drove over Hwy 17 in the rain to Felton to do the first real tasting of our 2006’s. The wines have not finished Maloactic Fermentation yet, and need to be racked, so they are not really ready for tasting yet, but we wanted to get an idea where we are at so we could put a racking plan together.

2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, Uvas Creek Vineyard, Santa Clara Valley – 5 barrels total + 20 gallons of topping wine, should make about 130 cases. Alcohol 14.6, aging in 40% new wood. (the wood wasn’t really showing yet on any of these wines). Much darker color than last year, deep red with a similar nose as the 2005 at the same point, minty with lots of berry fruit, much fruitier than the 05. Already showing a savory finish, with good balance and length. We we’re very happy with this.

2006 Cabernet Sauvignon, Santa Cruz Mountains – 5 barrels total +10 gallons of topping wine, should make 125 cases. Alcohol 13.9, aging in 20% new oak. Darker than the Uvas Creek, almost purple, tons of black cherry and dark berry flavors and aromas, long and smooth and very plush. We all got the sense that this wine was really something special. This was a mix of Martin Ranch Cabernet with a little Merlot from Elandrich Vineyard. No one wanted to spit this wine.

2006 Syrah, Eaglepoint Ranch, Mendocino County – 5 barrels + 40 gallons on topping wine, should make 140 cases. Alcohol 14.8 Aging in @ 25% new oak (one new and one once used + 3 neutral) Red garnet color, with berries and mango. Very ripe tannins and sound acidity. This wine has been the slowest on Malo and we think that was what was giving it a tropical/berry nose right now. It was much more intense that the 05 at the same point.

John kept commenting on what a good job we did bringing in ripe, problem free, fruit. He said it was a real treat to work with all these fruit sources and watch the wines go with so little need for intervention. We’ll be back every weekend for the next few weeks to check on barrels and get everything racked. I left very happy, I think all these wines are better at this point than the 2005’s were at the same point last year.

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.