The deep dark days of early October weigh heavy on my mind….

It’s not even time to “fall back” and get an extra hour of sleep due to the switch from daylight savings time to standard time.

Sixteen tons of fermenting grapes inside the winery laugh at me. ‘You think you can make us wine? Ha!” “We taunt you, winemaker boy!” “Our sugar will defeat you and our inherent bacterial load will beat you down and make you cringe in the face of our superiority!” “We laugh at you like an illegitimate red-haired stepchild!”

Ok. Time for bed. And less gin and tonic.

So it rained last night in Sacramento. It didn’t rain in Lodi. I dunno about Napa or the Foothills.

Kevin Soucie says a little bit of rain on the grapes at this time of year is no big deal - it’s when it becomes a quarter of an inch for two or three days in a row that you have problems. Hmmm…. I don’t know enough to say either way.

Ted and I pressed 1.25 tons of the Pratt Cab (Fair Play AVA) yesterday. I’m pressing a little sweeter this year so as to not have too much tannin extraction in the wines. I think our ‘06 Napa Clone Six Cab is too tannic; Chris disagrees. We left it on the skins two to three days after it fermented out and since seed tannins are soluble in alcohol, we got a lot of tannin. Ok, fine for Clone Six, maybe. But since the Pratt stuff is headed for the ‘07 Trio/Treo/Treos I don’t want too much tannin.

The first three tons of Soucie Zin are my problem child wine this year. 24 hours post-crush Brix was 30. Yikes. Fixed that issue, I think, yet the yeasty-beasties crapped out at around 14.7 alcohol with 3 Brix to go. I started up a fresh yeast today to re-invigorate the existing fermentation. We’ll see how this goes. I used some new yeasts (new to me) this year on this batch … Nt1112 and BM4×4 … two hybrid yeasts. I’m less than impressed so far with my choices. Color isn’t right, fermentation not as vigorous as I like. I think on the second and third picks of Soucie Zin that I’m reverting to my tried and true D254, D80 and BM45 yeasts.

More later….

Okay, no day-to-day entries from late March until early April because I’m behind (or was, I’m writing this entry on May 7!)

In the run-up to bottling we’ve got some issues to solve, #1 being tanks to hold our wines while bottling. We can’t bottle from the barrels and we don’t have tanks to put stuff into.

Ryan Leeman, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery here in Lodi showed me a solution that we can afford - 360 gallon “Totes”. (see pic at right) They’re basically a plastic 360 gallon “milk jug” inside a steel cage, the plastic is food grade, the fittings are adaptable to winery equipment and they’re cheap. $195 each. They’re cheap because they’re plastic and it’s relatively thin plastic at that. Not suited for long-term storage but perfect to use when racking, settling after pressing, or bottling small lots of wine. We got ‘em from KP McNamara out of Ohio.

We also have to filter - and again Ryan helped out, see the entry for April 13.

Chris and I spent time in the winery working on our final blends for ‘Trio’ and ‘Duality.’ And the Zin; which we finalized about a month ago. We ended up with about 10% Petite Sirah in the Zin this year, losing the Soucie Vineyard designation, but that’s okay. (To vineyard-designate a wine 95 percent has to come from that vineyard.)

Our labels were printed by Bonham Label Company in Livermore, and Frank Haversak, our rep from there. Great job too. Last year’s labels, the 2004s, scratched easily and weren’t printed on the right paper, and overall weren’t very satisfactory. This year’s look great; we were able to save enough money over what we budgeted that we were able to emboss the ‘m2′ on the label. A minor detail perhaps, that no one might notice, but it’s a classy touch that was needed.

I’ve also been racking the ‘06 wines, transfering clear wine from barrel to tank, washing out the barrel, then refilling. We’ll do this process two or three more times as necessary to clarify the wines.