I dragged all the empty barrels out of the cellar room this week. (pic on left) We’ve got 62 empties right now, most of which had the ‘06 wines in them. Every barrel got a wash, inside and out, and gassed again with sulfer dioxide. As I’ve said before we’ve also got 12 new barrels that went unused last fall that we’ll use this year. We beat a pretty big price increase due to the value of the dollar vs. the euro too.

We had a huge ‘ZinFest’ Saturday (May 17) and a gigantic crowd at our release event the next day and we want to say thanks to everyone who turned out and had fun and tasted wine and listened to “The Detours” rock the house. Too bad it was so blazing hot; everyone complains about it, but no one ever does anything about the weather.

Other stuff: I’ve also been working on some behind the scene changes with the m2 web site, nothing you’ll ever notice, but hey, it’s taken a lot of time. Also, you can now join our mailing list via the web site. Right now the only place to do so is on the home page, but I’m going to be adding the code/form to other pages. The wine order page has also been updated with all the new ‘06 and ‘07 wines.

We’re also busting butt to get the labels for the 2007 Viognier and the 2006 Artist Series Zinfandel printed. We didn’t have the artwork finished in time for our bottling on March 1 and since it wasn’t a priority we’ve kept putting it off until now, after it’s way too late and everybody wants the wine.

We’ve got a lot of events planned for the summer and fan so keep an eye on the website and the events calendar!

Spring has sprung and summer is here. Significant frost hit the vineyards in NoCal a while back. Our Lodi Zin vineyard had no damage, our Fair Play Cab vineyard had minimal damage, our Napa Cab sources are suffering however. Predictions are that Napa vineyards might be down to 25% or so of last year’s crop. Hide and watch….

Lodi’s ZinFest was this past Saturday (May 17) and our booth at Lodi Lake was slammed with people. Thanks to everyone who stopped and tried the ‘06 Soucie Vineyard Zinfandel. We got a lot of “Your wine was the best all day” comments, some even from sober people!

Our new wines are officially out and I think overall the ’06s are the best wines we’ve made, but are very young tasting still. It’s hard to pick a favorite, but in my opinion the Zin, Viognier and Trio are the best right now. That will change as all the wines spend time in bottle but those three are not to be missed right now. We’ve got some ‘05 Cab, Petite and Duality in inventory though - and these wines are drinking beautifully right now, which leads me to be convinced all our wines benefit from at least a year in the bottle to show their true potential.

We’ve got a lot of events at the winery planned for the summer - June 14 is the official release date for our ‘Artist Series’ Lodi Zin. Check the events page of the web site for more events.

Construction Update …

Drywall is up, tape and mud finished. Painting soon. The floor in the tasting room is going to be an acid wash/varnish to look like aged leather. Diana is working with a friend of hers who does faux painting and is designing something nice for the walls in a sophisticated faux-painting scheme to match the floor. Tile in the bathroom is a dark, mottled stone look. The grates for the floor drain are in, and we’re setting the sand/oil trap on Wednesday, pouring final concrete on Thursday. We’re putting in a big stainless steel sink and I’m revamping the lab area. It’s gonna be great to have this finished and working in the winery will be so much easier. Speaking of…

Wine Update …

First racking of the ‘07 reds is almost finished. We’re behind on this, Steve over at Vino Con Brio is finishing up second racking on their stuff. The ’07s are off to a good start and my earlier pessimism is dissipating. Chris reminded me the other day that I’m always pessimistic about the new wines this time of year …

As noted in earlier blogging we ordered way too many barrels this past fall - there are several still sitting empty and unused. I don’t feel so bad about it now though. The 2008 price list from Seguin Moreau just arrived and hoo, boy… as I expected prices on American barrels are up about 10% - Frenchy barrels range from $925 to $1,170 at today’s exchange rate. Those six empty Francois Ferre barrels that we didn’t use but paid for are looking like a bargain!

Wine Availability Update ….

For months Chris and Diana have been talking with several wine brokering companies to represent m2 in California. We’ve been cautious about hiring/using their services/paying someone to sell our wine for us; we’re new and small and don’t have THAT much wine to get into broad distribution but do need to get more m2 in the hands of the people who want it. Now, however, a wine brokerage firm in Napa named 5 & I Wine will be representing m2 across most of California, from Bakersfield to the Oregon border, San Francisco to Reno.

Up until now C & D (Chris and Diana) have been primarily responsible for most of our outside accounts - meaning restaurants and retailers who carry our wines. I’m great at cold-calling on places and introducing them to m2, but am lousy at the follow-up required (read that as closing the sale.) Chris is good at networking and he knows a lot of people in the retail wine business. Diana’s really good at it the follow-up thing- but it takes time and time is something we’re always short of.

Short version of a long thought process here … we’re excited that 5 & I Wine is representing us. Look for m2 soon at your favorite wine shop, and if you don’t find it there, tell them to call 5 & I Wine.

Event Update…

May 18 is the date for our release party and fourth anniversary of the creation of m2. Capitol Cellars in Roseville is hosting a release party for m2 at their shop on May 31.

I hate construction. Last post, you’ll note I was excited. Now I’m disgusted. Everything construction-wise is going really well, but I am way past ready for it to be over.

The concrete for the trench drain was poured yesterday, we’ll be able to drive on it Saturday. We’ve passed inspections on plumbing, electrical, framing, insulation, and a very up-close flea check…. Ok, I got no idea what that means…….

 The worker guys are finishing up the drywall installation even as I type and if everything goes well we’ll be DONE next week. The fancy frenchy-style door between tasting room and winery is six weeks away, but who gives a fooey at this point, the rest is almost done.

We’re doing a fancy aged-leather acid wash floor finish in the tasting room and some really nice tile in the bathroom. One of these days we’ll be building a permanent tasting bar to replace the wine barrels and boards system we’ve used until now.

On the wine side… I took a case and a half of Zinfandel up to the Lodi Wine Country Visitor Center on Wednesday. They sold out of it in less than 24 hours and I delivered three more cases today. The ‘06 Soucie Zin isn’t officially released yet at the winery, but the austute reader can purchase said wine at the visitor center, or at the winery if you ask nicely. This Zin is probably the most eagerly awaited wine in the short, yet fabulous, history of m2. I think it’s better than the ‘04, but others disagree. I like the ‘06 over the ‘04 because the aforementioned Zin is lower in alcohol, yet as rich and fruity as the ‘04. Others disagree, primarily due to their love of ethanol and jam.

We’re shipping our first Cellar Dweller wine club shipment in almost a year next week. It will include the ‘06 Trio and Petite Sirah. The ‘06 Trio is the wine I was trying to make when we started this whole thing back in 1999. I think the Trio is all that it should be and all that I wanted it to be back in ‘99… just took us seven years to get it done.

Come see the new stuff at m2 and put your signature on the big white wall in the new half of the winery……!!!!

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….

I expected this crush season to be very short; back in early September it looked as if everything was ripening at once, due to an unusual temperature spike, and we would be overwhelmed with incoming fruit. Well, not so. After that brief heat spell the temp moderated and now things are being r e a l l y stretched out.

On October 11 I barreled down the Herzog Petite Sirah, 18 barrels. Last Saturday we pressed the remaining Soucie Zinfandel. Yesterday I pressed two tons of the Maley Zinfandel and crushed two tons of fruit from our Napa Valley Combsville Cabernet vineyard that is destined for the 07 Singularity bottling. This coming Saturday we’ve got more Petite Verdot coming in, and sometime in mid-November, if the weather holds, we’ll pick a couple of tons of Soucie Zin for our Zinlady late harvest wine.

I’ve got a new yeast for the Combsville Cab - a new, future, product from Lafford. The yeast was isolated from Chateau Latour in Bordeaux and only 10 kilograms were made available in the U.S. this year. I’ve got a 500 gram brick of it to use on the Cab, and I’m really looking forward to how this yeast turns out.

The First Sip weekend, an event sponsored by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission, is coming up on November 10 and 11. All Lodi wineries are participating and we’ve got a lot of stuff planned. We’ll have a Master Cooper on site from Canton Cooperage demonstrating barrel building and Reds Regan will be creating a new painting inside the winery. Also, there’ll be music and some sort of foodie items too.

I’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then to get ready, mostly cleaning up and organizing the winery space. I know I’m ready for crush to wind down.

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!

Wow. The winery was packed from 11:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. And I mean packed. We’ve got about 18 bottles of ‘04 Zinfandel left and only seven cases of ‘04 Syrah.

A GREAT weekend at the winery. Our thanks to all the new people to visit and a big shout out goes to our friends who volunteered to help pour wines.