Finally, An Update
Wow, where does time go? It’s been forever since I’ve written anything here …
What’s new? Lots of stuff and more to come.
First, we’re about five weeks away from our bottling date on March 1. The logistics of it all are coming together fairly well. Corks ordered. Art files for labels at the printer, bottles set for delivery on February 28. We’ll be bottling about 1900 cases of wine, doubling our production size from last year. For better or worse we’ll be turning bottling day into a special winery event, so come on out to the winery and get a look at this very satisfying aspect of the wine bidness.
Chris and I have pretty much figured out our blends for Trio and Duality, and the blend for our new artist series Zinfandel. This has been an exciting project for me; the label features a commissioned artwork by Tahoe area artist Reds Regan and the wine - “Zinfandel de l’Artiste” - is a blend of our best barrels of Zin from Soucie Vineyard and Todd Maley’s vineyard on Ray Road in Lodi.
Coming up on February 9 & 10 is the Lodi Wine Country Wine and Chocolate Weekend. All participating Lodi wineries will be featuring some sort of chocolate-themed activity. We’ll be grilling various meats with chocolate grilling spices. Yep, chocolate grilling spices. Good stuff too. We’re also featuring cookies from Kelli’s Cookies of Sacramento.
On the winemaking side of things, it’s been very cold and damp in the winery lately. Everything is in a kind of suspended state, no pop pop, fizz fizz of active malolactic fermentation because of the temps. Working in the winery is no fun when the weather’s like this.
If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the photo album on the web site. Right now there are three sets of photos, with more to come. Did you know that there are almost 20 versions of the song “Red, Red Wine” out there? Barry Manilow wrote it. His version is truly awful. For some reason the song is popular as a Reggae tune or with a lot of Carribean influence. I like UB40’s version the best but intend to put a different version as background music with each set of photos.
Among the many things I plan to do better in 2008 is keeping the blog updated more often. We’ll see how I do….