Has Spring Sprung?

Ok, awful headline….

Spring seems to have arrived in NoCal. Not much is happening in the vineyards yet in terms of bud swelling or bud break, but the sap is rising in the vines and everyone who hasn’t pruned yet is scrambling to do so. We’re a little more than six months away from harvest time; it’s time to think about our fall plans. And it’s time to rack the ‘07 wines, test chemistry and SO2 levels, and get everything squared away in the cellar. I know that malolactic fermentation has completed in some wines, but not in others. The warmer days has accelerated MLF, you can hear the light fizz of carbon dioxide being released when you listen to the barrels. 

We’ve finally been able to expand our winery, doubling our square footage from 1,800 to 3,600. The existing winery space will be used for barrel storage, finished case good storage and tasting room only. The new half of the winery is dedicated to storage of equipment for now, and we’ll be using both sides for winemaking in the fall. 

As I mentioned earlier we’ve finally started construction of our final winery improvements - drainage, tasting room, and bathroom. This final phase is long overdue and when finished will make working in the winery much easier, especially the drainage. The place is a disgusting mess right now though, concrete dust all over, giant holes in the floor, noise and hammering all the time. BUT once work is done I’ll be able to take a hose to the entire place and wash down everything and watch the water flow into the floor drains!

Mike Dunne, wine writer for The Sacramento Bee newspaper wrote a very nice article about m2 in the January 23, 2008 edition of the newspaper. Here’s the link to the article. Check it out.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Winemaking, Day To Day. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.