bottles and barrels and wine

Wednesday morning I went and picked up 59 cases of burgundy bottles from Saintsbury up in Sonoma. There were supposed to be 100 cases available but two of the flats were bordeaux bottles so... Yes, you are right, if you are saying "it's a little early for bottles" what with grapes still a twinkle in their bud's eyes but at $4 per case we needed to jump on them. The other great thing about this is it saves us from having to decide what kind of bottles we want! Of course we'll need more bottles for the syrahs and depending on what comes out of the Anderson Valley vineyard, at that point I think we'll jump right back onto the wine classifieds and if we end up w/multiple bottle types we'll be all the better for it.

After Saintsbury and dropping off the uhaul Dan and I made our way up to Petaluma to talk shop with the first, and most likely choice, of the two custom crush places that have considered working with us. It was a great meeting, we discussed the space, the tools, the protocol, the wine process, their vineyard and we sampled a couple of their latest workings from the barrel. Two very clean classic California pinots and a big spicy cab that I'm eager to see bottled. After that we headed up to Sebastopol to visit crush facility # two. This was a much larger full-facility custom crush with a number of highly respectable clients. This was also a great visit, getting the rundown on the facility, the process, the way they work, some history and some general bullshitting about winemaking, this year's historic frosts and the industry in general. As great of a visit as it was we walked away realizing that it probably isn't optimal for the small scale of what we are trying to do this year.
All-in-all a productive and enjoyable day. A couple steps closer!