Tomorrow Crush ‘07 begins in earnest for us. Seven tons of Zinfandel on 10/4, six tons of Petite Sirah on 10/5, two tons of Zin on 10/6 are coming in. An assorted seven tons of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Petite Verdot destined for our 2007 ‘Singularity’ bottling will be coming in sometime the week of 10/8. Not much for bigger wineries, but it’s a lot for m2.

Right now I’ve got 1.5 tons of Petite Sirah from a vineyard near Calistoga fermenting away, along with a pain-in-the-tookus, half-ton of Merlot that I’m making for a custom-crush client.

The early-pick Zin is pressed, and the sluggish fermentation is still sluggish, but still working. The flavor, however, is tremendously wonderful and the color is a beautiful deep red; quite different than the purple-red I’m used to from Soucie’s fruit, but rich and strong anyway.

Our 2007 Clone Six harvest/crush is in doubt right now. Yields from Napa look to be 30% to 40% below whatever ‘normal’ is, and since we’re not under contract with this source of fruit, availability of our expected tonnage is a question yet to be answered.

Hmmm…. what else to report? Well, after we fill the orders for vino from our Connecticut distributor and The Wine Garage, along with the ‘Trio’ that’s going to Jamaica, we’re nearly SOLD OUT of our 2005 vintage. We’re not bottling the 2006 stuff until March of ‘08 so we’re holding back about 35 cases each of ‘Trio’, ‘Duality’ and our ‘Row 23′ Petite Sirah. We want to have something to sell during our massively huge upcoming special events - ‘Chinapainting’, who’s performing on October 21, “The First Sip” on November 10 and 11, and the “Wine and Chocolate Weekend” coming up in February.

Check out the details on that stuff on the events page.

More later.

We pressed our first three tons of Soucie Old Vine Zinfandel Saturday. At press Brix was 2.5, pH was 3.67. Fermentation is still proceeding, albeit ve e e er r yy slow. Hence, the title of today’s blog entry. I told Kevin I wanted a refund. I used two different and new-to-me yeasts on this lot - Anchor NT1112 and Lalvin BM 4×4. I’m told both are hybrid crosses of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and Saccharomyces bayanus. Turns out the still-unfinished vino has incredible flavor despite the sluggish fermentation. I knew these two yeasts would be slower fermenters than other yeasts I’ve used, and had high nutrition requirements. Soucie’s Zin has a very high natural YAN, so I figured I wouldn’t need much supplemental nitrogen. Still, I’m surprised at the lagging fermentation rate. I think the slowness now is due to low must/juice temperature. Still I wonder, yes I does.

Obviously, from my ramblings here, I don’t know what to make of the experience with these two yeasts.

We also pressed all of the Pratt Vineyard Cabernet this weekend. 2.5 tons of fruit yielded 420 gallons of new wine. After first racking we’ll end up with six barrels of wine.

We barreled down two-thirds of the pressed Lani’s Vineyard Syrah on Sunday - 12 barrels, with another six to go. Incredible color on this stuff. Brix is at -1.3 and my Clinitest tablet test shows less than .05% RS, the limit of the accuracy of the test. I’ve got to take a sample to the lab to be sure, but I’m fairly confident this stuff has completed alcohol fermentation.

Nothing much fermenting right now except for one ton of Cabernet Sauvignon from a vineyard on the Sonoma County side of Mount Veeder. I’m making this ton of fruit for a small custom-crush client.

Our other X-tons of Zinfandel is still in the field, not ready yet. Brix is adequate for harvest but the flavor development is not yet at it’s peak.

Check out the events we’ve got coming up - Taste of Lodi and Best of the Best are this coming weekend. We’re also doing our first ever Winemaker Dinner on October 20 and the musical duo known as Chinapainting, Jim Goodin and Daryl Shawn, will be playing at the winery on October 21. Jim is from New York, Daryl lives in Mexico. They play really cool acoustic music, and rehearse and perform via the Internet. They’re live at m2 on October 21.

Later!

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!

Zinfest was a hoot for sure. In case you missed it, Zinfest was held this past Saturday.

It is Lodi’s big annual wine tasting event with music, art, food, and almost every Lodi area winery in attendance pouring their stuff. We were the first winery booth after peeps entered the main gate, so we were swamped. We were pouring our ‘05 Old Vine Zinfandel and the ‘05 Zinlady - couldn’t pour our other stuff because it’s not Lodi appelation.

We had a lot of positive feedback from the crowd and many people told us that they thought our Zin was the best they had that day. In fact, someone stole the bottle from our display. Didn’t know what to think of that, but evidently we’ve got a new fan.

Anyway, a big fun day and we want to say thanks to everyone who stopped and sampled our wine. We had tremendous positive response and that’s always gratifying!

We’ve gotten a LOT of positive results from our participation in the Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) tasting in San Fran this past January. We’re talking with distributors in Texas and Deleware and with a broker in SoCal, all of whom are interesting in carrying our wines. I’ve done some Googling on “m2 wines” and have noticed several positive comments about our wines and ZAP - exciting stuff for us for sure.

Ok, that went pretty well after all. I didn’t pour out of wine, made some great contacts in the trade and introduced m2 to a lot of new friends and fans. Thanks to everyone I met at ZAP for stopping by and tasting our Zinfandel!

We’re pouring wine at ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers) at Fort Mason in San Francisco today. This tasting is the largest Zinfandel event in the country, mre than 400 wineries and about 10,000 people will be there. I’m hoping not to get lost in the crowd.

Chris and Diana are pouring wines at the Winter Wine & Food Fest sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Sacramento tonight. It’s a big event too.