Ok Falls Vineyards

Here's a nice shot of the Okanagan Falls area from the fall. Shot by Joe Kyle one afternoon, the direction is looking northwest from the general area of Blue Mountain vineyards. The mountain is Hawthorne Mountain and in the mid-field are the holdings of Stag's Hollow, Wild Goose and Gidda Bros.

Wine Bloggers Planning Big Wine Offline . . .

There's a party being planned. If you've got a blog you'll probably want to attend or at least see what's up.

Looks like it's going to be held in Oregon. Home to the quirkiest wine makers in North America, Oregon acheived statehood in 1859 but it wasn't until 1954 when the federal government actually told anyone. Pretty wet on the left, not bad in the middle and very dry in the east.

The jawflapping pow wow will be towards the middle.

Wine News Youse Can Use

I get a newsletter from Andy Perdue every week at Wine Press Northwest. It's a great way to stay on top of happenings in the wine world of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.
There's a wine of the week and links to various articles in the print version magazine plus some adverts. I like it because it's honest and concise.
It's almost as good as a blog.

If you're in the market for ICE WINE check out the article here. Gosh, what a surprise, BC kicks ass. Especially Bruce down at the factory (Vincor). I bet Bruce gets so much frozen outlaw he can discard everything but the best. I don't mean discard as in 'throw away'. I mean, dump in another tank. And make it into Entre Lac or whatever box is due for bottling.

Here's yet another chance to name a winery. You can win a case of wine a year for all time!
Of course, if you live in Canada, you'll have to pay some kind of exhorbrant combination of taxes and duties.

I'm sure it's just an oversight but I didn't see my name listed as one the experts attending this event. Please use the PAYPAL donate button at the right so that I may purchase a plane ticket and appropriate black tie garb. Thank-you.

Wicked wine job

Every once in awhile a job comes along that's just plain unfortunate.

One of our fledgling wineries here in the Okanagan just released a 2003 Meritage that had to be pulled off the shelves after only a couple weeks. Customers were complaining about cloudy wine. In fact, there was a pretty dense layer of streaky, swirly goo near the bottom of almost every bottle.

It tasted great. But you can't sell wine with the bottom few inches looking like paint.

Turns out that gelatin (a common fining agent)was added to the wine shortly before bottling and there wasn't sufficient time for clarification. The wine went to bottle unfiltered.

I was asked to help with the "fix".

So it was:
collect wine.
ship wine to undisclosed location.
assemble crew to uncork, empty bottles, wash bottles, do not damage labels.
filter wine/adjust SO2.
filter again enroute to bottling line.

Owner of said wine hopes it will taste the same. Not much chance of that.
It will probably be better.
bottle and palletize
ship back.

Hey this is $uper!

My blog is worth $4,516.32.
How much is your blog worth?

Winery Name - The wierd sometimes works

Half a month ago I mentioned the new winery in Sonoma that was soliciting blog readers for suggestions as to a name for their venture.
Sometimes, the wierd stuff works.
Locally, the new owners of the Summerland winery formerly called Scherzinger started looking for a new name. BC winery-naming whiz Bernie Hadley-Beauregard came up with something for them called Dirty Laundry. If you haven't already heard:

1) that's really the name and;
2) it's a runaway success.

Scherzinger plodded along with it's difficult to pronounce (easy if you're from a certain part of the world) name and it's traditional labels for years. It only took a couple months after the new name (label, image, life) came on line to clear the shelves of inventory and create unprecedented demand.
Origination of name? Summerland had a Chinese laundry with a whore house upstairs in the old days. Big deal. So did most towns around here. They probably still do.
But if you put the idea on a wine label and throw in a few sketches of nude female silhouettes for titillation you suddenly have a wine that is slightly risque although nothing much has changed in the bottle.
More power to you if you can get away with it.

But instead of having to rename, relabel and rebrand - why not get it right in the first place?

Try to be a little better than - "Well, hey, there's a hill over there and a bridge over there so maybe we'll call it Bridgehill or Hillbridge."

Name a winery today

Folks down in the Russian River ap are trying to come up with a name for their winery and they could sure use your help!

Check it out

I tried a few but I hadn't had my full prescription of java at the time.

Things I'm up to today:
Going to take a look at the paper chromatography I prepared yesterday to see how my reds are faring in the malo-lactic department. I should have a handle on that and be able to make adjustments as necessary. A lot of the barrels are crackling and such so it's just a matter of seeing how far along they are.

Next, I've got to start with some analysis on the 04 reds and see how they are doing. I'll prepare a topping schedule for myself and my part-time assistant.

There's still plenty of grunt work around the winery. When you're the only full time feller you do it all. So, I've got some equipment cleaning to do before putting it into off-season storage and a mass of picking and fermenting bins to scrub, stack and tarp.

This afternoon I get to meet with a couple of money people regarding winery investments.

On the immediate horizon, the 05 whites are due for some stability testing.

WINE lately: Besides my own private stock of 03 ME I'm partial to ARG Malbecs lately.

Winery and Vineyard For Sale

SOLD!


Let me know if you're in the market for a cute little winery operation here in BC. The two parcels are about 12 acres. Winemaker and inventory included. Two cellar door retail outlets.
Long term contracts with growers in place. Three modest residential buildings on site. Production: about 5,000 cases annually with lots of potential in the existing plant to double that number. Loyal customers throughout the metro Vancouver market. It's essentially a turnkey operation. Drop me a line for more information.

Wine in a Tetra Box

If the link below works, it should take you to an interesting story about wine packaging.
If screwcaps didn't rock their boats, these little packages should really get the cork geeks cranked up.
http://www.decanter.com/news/69689.html

In case your didn't know. . . Peller Estates (Andres Wines) bought Red Rooster winery here on the Naramata Bench to give Peller some 'street cred' with the wine buying populace. Up til now all they've been was a brand with a very industrial street scene in Port Moody.

Also, the Holman empire continues to mushroom with the recent addition of Lang Vineyards.
So thats Spiller, Mistral, Benchland and still another being eyed at this time to join the stable.

http://www.dallasobserver.com/Issues/2005-11-10/news/feature.html

Love those retailers, click on the link above to read about one horrendous wine retailer. This is why selling wine to the public will always be an uphill battle with cretins like this dude around.

Wine or SKI?

Time to head into the winery this morning to do some "caretaker" duties including monitoring and maintaining the last of the red fermenters.
I'm now heading into the next phase of operations where I begin to assess what's resulted from all that fermenting and make some decisions on how each batch will be handled.
Racking and barreling and such and working some tentative bottling dates into the 2006 winter schedule. Calendars are deceptive. All that white space quickly gets eaten up and soon I'll be on deadline, trying to get wine ready for market.
Speaking of fermenting, I'm sure I was the last to realize Tom Wark's astounding Fermentations blog had to change it's name and is now without an 's'. If you haven't had an opportunity to read Tom's stuff you should do that right now. Fermentation
I wonder if I'll get a call someday from legal beagles, telling me I have to alter something in my blog?
In the meantime... I'm planning a winter break and for me it's all about the snow. I'd like to get some skiing in somewhere I've never been to before. I'm thinking maybe Big Sky in Montana
or one of the Oregon spots or maybe Fernie. Got any ideas? Not interested in Colorado, NM, Utah, Nevada or California. Two hour plane ride max.

The Longest Vintage

I don't keep records for start to finish dates in regard to vintage but...

It seems this has been the longest fruit receiving session I've experienced in some time. We started bringing in fruit in mid- September and I'm hoping to bring in some Cab Franc today to put an end to this endurance contest.

We don't make ice wine or any other sticky so this is all about standard table wine values.

The fruit has been good and sound; I wouldn't say exceptional. There is greatly varied levels of maturity that doesn't seem to follow any patterns. The only thing I can say about the harvest that applies across the board and has affected 90% of the wineries here in the Okanagan valley: the tonnage is down.

For the consumer: the quality will be there but the volume won't be. Expect many of your favourite aromatic whites to be sold out by late summer if not earlier. And 18 months from now certain reds from 2005 will be in short supply as well. Expect some producers to be quite happy as they clear out inventory that had been stockpiling due to stagnant sales or previous bumper crops.

Grapes 50 - Vintner 50, It's a tie game, folks!

Vintage (crush) has reached the halfway point here in my little world.
Everything else is scheduled to come in over the next week or so, weather and transportation permitting.
Our growers who still have crop hanging are a pretty miserable lot: complaining about the birds and the loss of tonnage.
So far the star in the cellar is the 05 Chard crop which has all the right attributes at this time to be a real kick in the pants.
I'm still looking for the Cabs and some slow whites.
Frankly, we didn't get the kind of autumn I was hoping for back in August. Nothing extreme but no real sunshine party either.
Time to jam my breakfast down, put up a take away coffee and walk down through the vines to the winery to start punching the 23 red fermenters currently on the go. I'll take my AM Brix and temps as I go and formulate a plan for the day based partly on those numbers. I already know we'll be crushing about 4 tons of Sem and I'll probably want to press the first of the Merlot fermenters. Trouble child of the day: custom crush Gew that came in at 25.5 Brix and only 5.5 TA. Must intervene so save patient.
Today's shoppping list:
another hose gun
beer
Perlite
red dry erase marker
more beer