So, a blog ain’t no good if you don’t update it. I’m also on Twitter and that ain’t getting updated regularly either.

We’re getting some new equipment this summer! I’ve been gathering quotes, figuring stuff out on how to best expand our production capacity. We’re pretty much maxed out now. Ted and I are both getting too old to punch down bins and lift and tote all the time. And the thrill of crushing grapes and/or loading the press via buckets is gone for our volunteer labor force.

I’m buying two 1,500 gallon stainless steel fermentation/all-purpose wine tanks from a famous name winery in Napa - dunno if I should say who - don’t think they’d care, but….

We were looking at new stuff, but these two were real beauties at a fair price. I really think we need three tanks, but we’ll get by with two this year. Why three? Well, you gotta have an empty tank (Call it Tank C) to move wine to when you’re pressing from Tank A, and Tank B is also full. We can continue to use our small plastic 350 gallon tanks/totes, so there.

Buying tanks for fermentation also means you gotta buy a bigger pump to transfer crushed grapes (must) from destemmer to tank. And you have to have a must collection ’sump’ that fits the destemmer to catch the grapes to feed the pump that’s sending must to the tank. Also required is a glycol chiller unit to provide cooling for the tanks. The chilller requires electricity, plumbing, electronic controllers, etc. And we need more hoses, fittings, clamps, valves and an never ending list of accessories.

It’s beginning to look like we’re going to be distributing wine in Pennsylvania. (The state controls all wine, liquor and beer sales there.) The chief of the product management department in the liquor control agency there approached us a while back about getting m2 wines into PA and needless to say, we’re up for it!

Charles Olken, the head guy in charge of the Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine reviewed both our 2007 Zins in the May issue. (clicky here for a link to his site) It’s the first review of m2 wines by a professional wine critic, ever.

Watch for an upcoming review of a couple of wines by The Wine Whore, aka Randy Watson on his blog site. He’s in the Tampa area, coincidentally also the location of most of our Florida wine places in retail shops and restaurants.

We have to start reporting winery activities to the TTB on a quarterly basis. Should’ve been doing it all along. Annual reports were required at our (then) production level, but no more.

Now my email rant - My main email account is thru ATT/SBC Global, had ‘em for years now. They have their “Spam Guard” spam filter but it doesn’t work right. I’ll be having a business related email conversation with a supplier, or customer, or whomever, everything working fine, then without warning or notice the replies from them to me start going into the spam filter on the ISP site (not my spam folder I use in Outlook) WHY? I’ve had email messages from names that are on my ‘not spam’ list and on all my contact lists end up in the dumper too. ATT online help is absolutely useless - if you try their online chat support you end up talking to someone about UVerse TV rather than ATT email, but that’s the only option you’re given. I think their system is so complex that no one there understands it.

And another rant - one of the worst pieces of software ever written has got to be UPS WorldShip. We use it to process our wine club shipments, online orders and so forth. But it’s extraordinarily difficult to use. I bet there is original code in the program dating back to MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 days. It is a kludgy, crappy program. It updates itself constantly and it’s not an automatic update either. You’ll get a notice that the program has to update itself and it does so, then the program terminates. You gotta start it over and over, almost daily, every time it applies a single update, and it’ll apply 5 or 6 single updates at a time. Frustrating as hell.

Ok, enough for now…..

Wow, what a month. Hard to believe it’s been four weeks since bottling….

New stuff….

Both of our 2007 Zins were picked as “Top 12 Zins of Lodi” by the judges in a competition sponsored by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission. The wines were bottled March 28, the judging was April 1. (The wines weren’t ranked in any particular order, BTW.)I knew the wines were good, but didn’t expect the result seeing as they were just bottled. We skunked out some serious competition too. Some of the wineries whose Zins I regard highly didn’t make the cut.

Also, you’ll notice a major revision, graphical mostly, to the m2 web site. It was time for a change.

I’m now on Twitter. I have known of Twitter for a couple of years; a friend, James Jory, told me about it a long time ago and suggested it would be a good tool to keep people updated with activities at the winery. I didn’t think I had time, or it would matter, but so far it’s been fun and I’ve actually got some followers! You can follow m2 on Twitter by clicking the link on the home page.

We’re working on a budget and plan for adding some equipment to the winery to increase our production capabilities. Tanks, bigger pump, refrigeration, pretty much just straight-forward wine making equipment, but we’re running out of time to make it happen. Crush is five months away.

Stay tuned…… LM

Considering how many things can go wrong when bottling 1,500 cases of wine, and the worst thing that happened is the gas grill catching on fire, I suppose I have to admit that bottling day went very well.

The weather on Saturday, March 28, was nice. It got a little warm in the afternoon - 80 degrees, but we were almost finished by then.

The plan was to start at 7 a.m. The first bottle came off the line at 7:15 a.m. and the last one came off at 2:15 p.m. We had three bottle changes along the way. The most significant bottle change was between a 375ml bottle to a 750ml; that took about an hour. Because we don’t have big stainless steel tanks we bottled our four biggest lots from the tanks at Vino Con Brio, our across-the-parking-lot winery neighbors. We did those four lots first, then the smaller lots of wine that fit into my small plastic tanks.

I didn’t have all of the labels back from the printer yet, so we bottled a couple of wines as “shiners”, or bottles without labels. I also didn’t have enough capsules to finish off the Viognier and ‘Artist Series’ Zinfandel. Those issues were the only wine related problems all day, and they weren’t really problems.

The grill did catch on fire. Karen prepared lunch for all the volunteer crew - burgers and chicken - and after she was finished cooking she left the grill on high heat to clean the grates, and woo hoo, did that baby burn. One of the winery partners, Ted, was a fireman in a previous life back when he was young and strong, so we put him in charge of putting it out. He eventually threw water on it and got it out. Not much damage after all, just a little melted plastic.

I also had more volunteer help show up than I expected and boy, I’m glad. My thanks to Pam, Mike, Bill, Tim, Heidi, Ted, Terry, Matt, Andrew, Ray, Karen, Steve, Suzanne, Brian, and Jean. And especially Mark. Mark spent all day on the forklift moving glass and full cases in and out of the winery. I think I’m forgetting two or three peeps, if so, I apologize! Harry Hakala and Frank, the guys of Mobile Wine Line based in Galt, CA, did their usual professional job as expected, and as usual. Steve at Vino Con Brio was also a great help.

The finished wines are pretty good too. We’ll be having our release party soon, we’re thinking May 2.

I’ll post pictures from bottling day as soon as I get the CD from Tim.

Wow - time flies. I knew it had been a while since I posted anything, but geez…. since December 5? That’s pitiful.

What’s happened since then? Right now the focus is on bottling. We’re going to be bottling about 1,500 cases of wine on March 28 and another 400 or so in the fall of this year. The Petite Sirah and Cabernet are just not ready for bottling and I’d being doing the wines a disservice if I bottled them in March. We’ll end up with a much better wine by giving them another 6 -7 months barrel age.

We’ll be bottling our fourth vintage since we started m2 in May of 2004. We’ve come a long way since then and have learned a lot, especially dealing with vendors and suppliers. This year I’m switching vendor sources for some of the necessities of bottling to the sales guys and companies who actually call on us, have worked at gaining our business and are a resource for information.

The ’07s are going to be, overall, our best wines yet. At least I think so. That’s not to say the earlier vintages were bad, or fell short of expectations, or otherwise insufficient, but … The ’07s are going to be nice.

m2 is approaching our 5th year in business. As I just said, we incorporated in May of 2004 and did our first crush that fall. There’s no connection between that five year anniversary and a couple of visitors I had yesterday, as far as I know, but I did sit down with two professors from Babson College in Boston. Weird, but fun. They were in Lodi doing research for a paper on entrepreneurship in the wine industry. Essentially they’re looking at the differences and similarities in business models and practices between wineries of different sizes and resources. They found m2, and me in particular, based on referrals by other wineries and people in the trade, as someone who has followed an interesting - strange? - pah into the wine business.

Lodi Wine Country’s ‘Wine and Chocolate Weekend’ is on this coming Saturday and Sunday. I’m curious to see what kind of crowd there will be this year. There is a LOT of stuff going on in the area besides W&C and - how to put this? - I’m not sure the marketing and promotional push by LWC was strong enough. What else is going on? The “tour of California” professional bike race is in Sacramento on Saturday. Amador County is having their “Behind the Cellar Door” event this same weekend and they’ve been advertising heavily in the Sacramento newspaper and on the NPR station. Clarksburg wineries are having a “port and chocolate” weekend. Calaveras County wineries and Placer County wineries are having a group tasting event too. Lots of competition. And then there’s the situation with the economy. And where to advertise? Maybe Sacramento isn’t Lodi’s primary market, even though we do get a lot of visitors from the Sac area. I think Lodi might be better off hitting the Bay Area communities for advertising LWC event weekends rather than Sacramento - I see a LOT of people from the Bay Area - Oakland, San Jose, Palo Alto, San Francisco - places like that, coming through our door. So, it will be interesting to see how the weekend turns out.

Thanks to all the people who stopped by our table at the ZAP tasting in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. This particular ZAP event is a monster, but it was rewarding to have so many people tell me that there was a lot of buzz about m2 Zinfandel and we were a “don’t miss” table.

More later!
Layne

Last Saturday was an interesting day - had a group of people come in and taste thru the wines. A good group that was fun to talk with, they were there an hour or so. I found out later that one of them was the lead member of a famous music/rock band/group - I’m not naming names - and I had no idea. I had no idea because, while I knew of the group, I hadn’t listened to much of their music. And you don’t really expect someone of public renown to walk right in to your winery and be normal. Since Saturday I’ve been listening to their music and like it a lot. I guess I’m getting old. Actually, I just haven’t kept up with the times…. the winery seems to absorb every waking moment. Anyway, if you guys read this (and you know who you are) come back soon. The ‘07 Soucie Zin will be bottled in March or April!

‘08 crush is over, finally. Overall our 2008 wines look like winners. As I’ve stated earlier, quality of the harvest was quite good, but vineyard yields were way down from what we expected. Everything went pretty well. Except for the forklift blowing a relay and being down for three days there wasn’t much drama. Lots of long days, but no problems.

Thanks to everyone who came out to m2 for Lodi Wine Country’s “First Sip” weekend, Nov. 8 &9. We had a good weekend and hope you did too.

Next up for the winery is bottling of the ‘07 vintage and the ‘08 white wines. Logistics, logistics, logistics. Lab testing, ordering bottles, corks, capsules, and labels. Scheduling the bottling truck … stuff like that. As stated earlier, we’re shooting for March/April.

Crush is slowing down, we’ve got seven bins of Petite Sirah to press today and that’s it for ‘08 except for a couple of tons of Mourvedre still hanging in Tumbas Vineyard in Shenandoah Valley. Overall for us the ’08s are going to be good stuff. Our planned production targets weren’t met due to light crop loads in the vineyards, but quality is pretty nice.
The weather has cooled, finally. It always does and always will but the last few days of hot weather seem interminable.
We finally got our Florida distribution deal signed, sealed, and delivered. Three pallets of wine (168 cases) were picked up yesterday and are on their way to Tampa. If you’re in the Tampa area look for m2 in restaurants and retail shops soon. I’ll post a list of places shortly.
One really good thing for the winery is that we’ve added Jean Kohlmeister to the m2 team as Wine Club Manager. She’ll be taking over admin duties for the Cellar Dwellers and she’ll be working to make the wine club a meaningful and fun thing for our club members. A wine club shipment and/or club pickup party at the winery is coming very soon.

It’s really miserable work doing the mundane winery stuff, like washing barrels, cleaning up the crusher or the press, or sweeping out crud from the cellar when it’s 90 degrees and the sun is shining. Ted says I’ll be complaining about the cold and the rain soon, so shut up about the heat and the sun … but I doubt it. Our problem is that our crush area has no shade in the afternoons, and that’s when the work tends to get done because no one wants to show up at dawn to do winery stuff.

The current situation with the mortgage crisis and stock market fluctuations is, well, just weird. I can’t tell if it’s affecting sales of our wines. You customer guys are still coming in and enjoying the wines and having a good time with us, and we really appreciate the support.

We’re somewhere near about half done with our expected crush/tonnage/harvest for ‘08. 12 tons of Zinfandel are crushed, fermented, pressed and some of it’s already in barrel. Half of our Syrah is in barrel, the other half is still fermenting and awaiting the press. The Cab for the ‘08 Trio is fermenting nicely. The Grenache for the ‘08 (new) Rhone blend is pressed. The Mourvedre still to be harvested as well as our Row 23 Petite Sirah.

I’m no expert (lots of people will agree with that statement) but from what I’ve seen and heard overall the grape harvest across California is very light this year, but quality is pretty darn good. It’s just a matter of time before someone declares ‘08 as “the best vintage ever.”

Here’s some good news, for us at least. We’ve sold out of our 2006 Soucie Vineyard Old Vine Zinfandel. We had 300 cases when we bottled last March and four months after official release, it’s gone. If you live in the Tampa, Florida, area you’re in luck if you’re looking for some because our distributor there has several cases available through a bunch of retail shops and restaurants in the area. We’ll be previewing the 2007 Soucie Zin during the upcoming Lodi “First Sip” weekend on November 8 and 9.

We’ll also be releasing the 2007 ‘Zinlady’ sweet Zinfandel on November 8 and 9. It’s a nicely sweet little red that is really popular, and I think this version is going to be pretty good.

We’re neck deep in grapes right now - in the hosue are: 12 tons of Soucie Zinfandel, 3 tons of Cabernet Sauv from ElDo County, 5 tons of Syrah from Lani’s Vineyard, four barrels of Viognier, and 700 liters of Viognier headed for a sweet, dessert kinda wine. Also, 1.5 tons of Grenache destined for a red blending component, and 75 gallons of Grenace juice destined for a rose’.
Still to come are Cab from Napa, Petite Sirah from Clarksburg, Mourvedre from Amador and Zin from Maley Vineyard in Lodi.
I’m attempting to get the ‘07 Zinlady into the bottle as well at the end of the month, in time for release during the First Sip weekend November 8 and 9.
Overall quality of fruit this year is really nice, vineyard yields are really low.
Our forklift went belly-up late Saturday night, fortunately it quit at the most opportune time of the day. We had just finished up crushing Cab and Grenache and had moved the last forklift load into place and were cleaning up when it stopped. A bad diode is responsible, it’ll be fixed Tuesday and we’ve got a rental as a substitute til then. A real bad luck/good luck situation. Could’ve been worse and caused real trouble.
We’re nearly sold out of our 2006 Soucie Zinfandel. Just 28 cases left and available to the public. The 2007 Soucie Zin, still in barrel in the cellar, really has improved dramatically in the past month. We’ll be previewing it during First Sip as well, and probably offering a futures/purchase opportunity.
More later, off to kick off fermentation on the Cabernet.

Once I started in on this post I realized once again I haven’t written anything in a couple of months so here goes ….

Yep, harvest season, crush, winemaking time, whatever you want to call it, starts next week - I think. Depends on the weather.

We’re pretty much ready to go for crush. Equipment is clean. Supplies stocked. Barrels ready. No rushing around, just waiting on the grapes to ripen. Been visiting the vineyards about once a week to check on things and watching the weather forecast.

One thing - if you come by m2 during crush don’t ask if we stomp the grapes with our feet. I detest that Lucy show episode where she stomps grapes with her feet. Feet are not allowed anywhere near the grapes at m2 but for most people that’s all they know about winemaking. Inevitably someone asks about once a week if we stomp with our feet. The answer is “NO.”

For 2008 we’re increasing production on three ‘mainline’ wines - our ‘Trio’ Cabernet/Syrah blend, our Lodi vineyard-designated Zinfandel from Soucie Vineyard and a GSM/Rhone blend (Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre) made from our Shenandoah Valley vineyard sources. We’re also doing limited quantities of other stuff to keep things fun - Viognier, a bit of Sauvignon Blanc, the Artist-Series Zinfandel, the ever-popular ‘Zinlady’ and our Napa Cab, but the Trio, Zin, and GSM are going to be our biggest wines this year.

Our vineyard sources weren’t much affected by the frost this past spring. It’s been a pretty good growing season so far too. State-wide I’m hearing the grape crop is light, a lot of Napa lost of a lot of fruit to the frost. I’m just hoping that we don’t have a stinkin’ over-100-degrees-heatwave in the next month.

Chris discovered what we think is a pretty hot little Viognier vineyard - Tumbas Vineyard in Shenandoah Valley. It’s about three acres - planted in 2001, rows running down a slope, then up a steeper slope in a north/south orientation, almost an amphitheater-type hollow. I’ve had wines from this vineyard made in a style that’s not my favorite (too much oak, too much malolactic fermentation, too much residual sugar) but the underlying fruit is pretty incredible.

We picked up a new distributor in the state of Florida this summer. m2 wines will be available in restuarants in the Tampa area this fall. Diana also established a couple of new accounts in San Diego and in the Tahoe area. I’ll update the “where to find m2″ section of the main web site soon.

We’re going to release the 2006 Clone Six Cabernet Sauvignon in the first part of October - watch for m2 propaganda about that.

We’ve also got a LOT of events coming up between now and Christmas - stay tuned for information overload on that stuff.

Enough for now, I’m fully intending to post more in a few days…. until then, Cheers!

Layne

I was out in our Lodi Zin vineyard with our grower, Kevin Soucie, a week ago checking on the grapes, complaining about the weather and watching the crew do some pretty intense leaf pulling. The crop load this year is wild. We were looking at a potential crop of 10 to 12 tons per acre, even in our 1916 block (92 year old vines.) - easily more than twice as much grape as we want on the vines.

Our Zinfandel vineyard is grown as ‘head-trained’ or self-supporting vines. Spacing is 8′ by 8′. On these vines there are generally 20 to 25 ‘arms’ with, ideally, two fruit-bearing shoots per arm with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

On trellised vines (using wires for support) you have two, sometimes four, ‘cordons’ or arms with 6 to 8 nodes per cordon and two fruit-bearing shoots per node with one cluster of grapes per shoot.

We were seeing four to five fruit bearing shoots per arm with four to five clsuters per shoot. Crazy heavy. It’s kinda hard to see in the first picture, but you’re looking at about 10 clusters when you should be seeing two or three. The immature clusters were already huge, as long as my hand - 8.5 inches. The primary cluster and the ‘wing’ as Kevin calls it, were almost the same size and the shoulders were already as big as clusters of Clone Six Cabernet. There was a considerable amount of shatter but when the grapes start to mature and fill in the shatter will aid in opening up the clusters

Kevin said he hasn’t seen this much fruit on the vines for 15 years. There’s no real way to explain why the crop load is so heavy this year. Could be lack of spring rain, could be a “light” crop last year…. no single reason explains it, but there are way too many grapes on the vines for a quality harvest.

Four to five tons to the acre is optimal production for our block of Zinfandel. More than that and the grapes don’t develop their best flavors and less than that doesn’t make much difference between “wow” flavors and “wow” flavors in the finished wine.

The fix to excess crop loads is easy but can get expensive. Essentially you just send the crews through the vineyard and reduce the crop by cutting out the excess fruit.

How is the vintage of 2008 looking? Too early to tell in Lodi. The weather has been good, but temperatures are trending cooler than ‘normal.’ Our Foothills sources suffered minor frost damage this past spring. Napa is looking at a very light year due to frost damage and I’ve heard that some people are already writing off ‘08 Napa as a “bad” year. That’s crazy talk at this point. Much depends on the weather between now and September/October.