We have been hosting visitors here at the winery lately.  It is just that time of the year as people are curious about how the wines from the previous year turned out, and it is also a slower time for distributors and restaurant people, so they will usually come and visit as well.  This time of year people like to ask me if I’m relaxing.  It is certainly slower than harvest time, but relaxing is not exactly how I’d describe it.  Let me give you a little run down on what I do this time of year:

1.  At the begining of January, I finalize the budgets for the winery, tasting room, marketing/sales, and grape purchases.

2.  I finalize all of my sales and revenue projections for the year.  I also finalize our very particular sales goals and what we want to achieve at this time of year and start implementing those.

3.  When I can, I’m wrapping up the odds and ends left loose post harvest—making sure all barrels are topped, the cellar is clean, etc.

4.  Production planning—setting bottling dates, considering packaging options for the 2008 vintage, ordering barrels, talking with growers about grape projections in 2009, going out to vineyards to discuss pruning options and techniques, ordering my bottling supplies, etc.

5.  Sauvignon Blanc—we bottle Sauvignon Blanc in March, so I plan for that, order labels, make sure the alcohol is measured correctly, check the residual sugar, etc.

What I always find difficult about the winter time is not the cold or the short days, but the sudden transition from the intense, physically-demanding workload of harvest to the sitting-on-my-butt-doing-computer-work-all-day routine.  I am not criticizing those who do this kind of work all the time—actually I applaud them because we need them and they are willing to do it—but for me and my personality, finding a balance betwixt the two is the difficult and sometimes frustrating part.

Our Tasting Room Manager, Jane Beery, is the brilliance behind our current window display in our Tasting Room. I really like this photo and had to share. She has plans for many more holiday- and season-related displays in the future, so stay-tuned.

A colleague and friend sent me the link to an excellent article by Clark Smith on Appellation America about Santa Cruz Pinot Noir. This is one of the best articles I’ve seen so far to delineate and describe what can be a somewhat vague term—Santa Cruz Pinot Noir —to most people (one of whom was myself, certainly for a long time), and if you are at all interested in Pinot Noir in general, I highly suggest you read it. There are so many microclimates and different soil types in those mountains that a profound diversity of Pinot abounds, and he explained that diversity very well. There is a section of the article where he describes clonal characteristics. I have worked with all of the clones he describes and he’s pretty much got it nailed. He also writes a commentary regarding the judgement of Pinot by those self-proclaimed critics out there. We all tend to walk around with a certain idea of what Pinot should be —but thankfully, because of Pinot’s unique inclination to mirror the characteristics of the site on which it is grown and how it is handled in the winery, I believe there is a Pinot to fit anyone’s ideal, and he does, too. Hopefully in the future, as Mr. Smith suggests in his article, wine criticism will change from final judgement in the black and white halls of criticism to a more responsible mindset of offering descriptions of wines and essentially flinging the doors of the court open and leaving the ultimate judgement to the consumer, for that afterall is the most important judgement that I know of in this business!

*******

We had a great time on Sunday at our “Port”, aka non-vintage “Dessert Wine” release party at our tasting room in Carmel. Yes, this is a port-like wine that we cannot call Port out of all due respect to the Portugese and their centuries-old port industry. Anyway, we had many wines and food to go with it and it was a great time! This wine is available only at our tasting and comes in 750mL bottles for $35.00/bottle. The other thing I couldn’t mention on the label (the government says that to state on the label that the wine is blended with spirits is to imply that consuming the product might make a person intoxicated...go figure) is that I blended the base with with a very nice brandy I procured from Germain Robin Distillery, and ended up making a nice fortified wine that one wine club member said was “not too sweet, not too alcoholic, and unusually complex and spicy”. There you have it….might make a great holiday gift!

Spelunking anyone? I feel like a spelunker when I where that headlamp. I’m filling the last barrels for the 2008 vintage in this photo. It certainly was a long one for us, and I’m glad it is over. Wine quality overall seems very good. The whites are delicate and fragrant, and the reds show good varietal character so far.

I know most folks think of harvest as grapes being harvested and received, but the real work for us goes far beyond receiving grapes.  It can be a very physically wearing time, and the end of it all is, frankly, welcome.  We can resume our normal lives and actually get the weekends off.  We aren’t off the hook entirely, though, as the wines and barrels need to be monitored.  We check for the progress of malo-lactic fermentation, check on any wines that may have gone to barrel slightly sweet, and monitor any increase in volatile fermentation.  Barrels also need to be topped, additions made, white wines stirred, and all the equipment needs to be cleaned, repaired if needed, and put away.
Here’s a photo from a few weeks ago that I like.This is a picture of a red fermentor after we have drained most of the wine and before we have started shoveling the skins out of the tank and into the presses. The open space underneath is a stainless steel filter which, among other things, helps us to drain the tank.