Our two tons of Viognier pressed out to about 275 gallons of juice. I kicked off fermentation on Wednesday - two barrels got D352, two barrels and three 15.5 SS kegs got R4600. I’m fermenting the three SS kegs in a chest freezer re-fitted with a thermostat to keep the temp at 50 or so.

Numbers after pressing were 25.5 Brix, pH of 3.65 and TA of .705, or 7.05% depending on where you like your decimal place. Very very pretty taste to the juice. I’m looking forward to how this comes out.

Next week we’re expecting Lani’s Vineyard Syrah - not sure what day yet. Brix was 25 yesterday, I’m looking for 27 or so.

Two tons of Viognier arrived at the winery courtesy of Bill Bertram at 2:00 p.m. on Saturday. Vineyard source is Perry Creek Estate in Fair Play, El Dorado County.

Beautiful stuff, clean fruit, very little MOG but more dead leaf than I would have liked. As discussed earlier I did whole-cluster pressing which yielded about 150 gallons per ton of dee-li-shush juice. The Bucher Xpro 8 worked beautifully, the only downside is that we were able to press only 1000 lbs at a time. I expected it to hold at least 1500 lbs. I think that if we had destemmed the fruit it would have held that much.

Anyway, the press cycle for unstemmed, whole clusters takes two hours. Max pressure was 1.6 bar, pretty gentle. We were only able to do half the fruit Saturday and finished up pressing on Sunday. I did a light fining with Bentonite at .75 grams to the gallon and sulfited to 50 ppm. The juice will sit and settle until Wednesday; I’ll rack the clean juice into the barrels and innoculate for fermentation then.

I had talked with one of the local labor contractors and hired two guys to work on Saturday but they didn’t show up. On Sunday Nick, a guy who works for the landscape company next door to the winery came and worked with me all day, loading grapes, unloading pressed grapes and helping clean. I’ve got to watch out for my back. I have a minor herniated disc and if I over-do the physical labor I can really get into trouble. It’s way too early in the season to go down for a week with sciatica trouble.

Pictures coming soon. I left the camera somewhere …

Yowza, I realized it’s been July since I’ve written anything new here…

Grapes coming tomorrow, our first for 2007 - two tons of Viognier from the Fair Play AVA in El Dorado county. I’m going to do a barrel-fermentation and if all goes as planned we’ll have a great white wine for release in May of 2008.

 If you read this between now and Saturday afternoon, come on out to m2 and see what’s happening. We’ll be doing a whole-cluster press to get the juice off the skins as fast as possible, then a light bentonite fining. After settling I’ll rack clean juice into four neutral oak barrels and the balance into stainless steel kegs. The kegs will be cold fermented and the barrels will ferment at ambient temp in the winery, about 63 degrees. I’ll add dry ice pellets daily to keep the temp in the proper range if needed. We’ve never done a barrel-fermented white; we’ve done several small lots of whites in our past pre-bonded winery days - Sauv Blanc, Gewurztraminer, Riesling, so this is new.

Lots of other things have happened in the past month - Chris and I met some great folks at the Family Winemakers of California event in San Francisco August 19 & 20 - we’re exploring options on distributing m2 in Texas and Jamaica! Hey Mon! A big shout-out to Jamaica Paul and Texas Kasey, glad you enjoyed the wines and we look forward to future possibilities.

Also, Diana and Chris have done a kick-ass job at sales lately. You can now get m2 wines at Capitol Cellars in Roseville, CA. Marcus Graziano, the proprietor, loves our ’05s and carries our Petite Sirah, Trio, and Duality. He also has some of the very last bottles of the 2004 Dos Arkies in stock. You need to go check out the shop, it’s one of the best in California.

The 2005 Old Vine Zinfandel is essentially sold out. We’re holding back some cases for future library wine, but there’s no more for sale. We are offering futures on the ‘06 vintage, come taste it at the winery.

On the winemaking front, we retired a significant number of older barrels in July. I don’t like to use stuff more than six years old, so several 2000 and 2001 era barrels are now moving on to their next life as planters or decorations.

Our crush plans are now at 32 to 34 tons of fruit, scaled back from our original plans due to space constraints and budget issues. 30 or so new barrels are set for delivery in mid-September - Francois Feree, Demptos, Nadalie, Canton and Seguin-Moreau. Some of the 2006 wines will go into some of this new oak; we were a little short on new barrels last year and some of the ‘06 stuff could use a higher percentage of new oak in the mix, the ‘06 Zin especially and the Petite Sirah, both need more sweet oak notes. I bought 30 used 2005 barrels to use for our 2007 stuff from a top-notch, world-famouse Napa winery too.

Now for something completely different…. Check this out -

If you can’t read the sign on the passenger door it says ‘Allied Driving School’. I can imagine that phone call . . . “Mom! I failed driving school again. Oh, and the instructor is dead.”

I saw this car being towed to a repair shop, or junkyard, the other day driving home from the winery. It made my day.

Later doods!