Catching lightning in a bottle!
Plus - a wedding, late bud break, Garagiste Festival, barrel sale
Wine is bottled poetry. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
I like to keep a bottle of stimulant handy in case I see a snake, which I also keep handy. ~ W. C. Fields
Bottling day… finally!
The main winery floor at Magnolia is basically square with an oversize garage door on the east side and another one on the west side. You could literally drive a semi-truck and trailer right through it past all the big fermenting tanks, de-stemmer, crusher and press.
Which is what we did a week ago Thursday, with a big mobile bottling line completely built within an eighteen-wheeler. Except in our case, it was backed all the way in through the east door, positioned near a mountain of cases of empty wine bottles, detached from the cab and carefully leveled over the winery’s floor drains.
I would have posted this final wrap-up last Sunday—what with all the buildup to bottling and all—but I was wonderfully distracted. My son Penn and his fiancé Lia had chosen the very next day, Friday, for an impromptu wedding (elopement? hmm..) before the Justice of the Peace at San Francisco’s iconic City Hall. There were just five other immediate family members and two close friends invited (they promise a big party for everyone else in September), and the schedule of events called for two days of feasting and frolic from downtown San Francisco up through Sonoma to Calistoga and down through Napa.
Yeah, there was a lot of great wine involved, including two landmark winery tastings at Chateau Montelena (Remember the movie Bottle Shock? Their Chardonnay really is that good!), and at Silver Oak for some righteous Cab and a taste of their inspired Timeless proprietary red blend. All very fitting. Congratulations you two!
But I digress…
We were talking wine bottling, right? Not imbibing. So, let’s hear it from the wine bottle’s perspective. Here’s what happens when you get filled (you can follow along in the video below):
[A faint rustling is heard. A muted clink—like the sound of glass against cardboard. Then a soft voice, hesitant at first, as if it had maybe been mute for quite awhile. Not accustomed to talking.]
“Okay, but don’t get too excited. I’m just a marginally-aware hunk of antique green glass born from the earth, not from the womb. Not exactly your sentient life form, or anything like that. Yet, I knew something was up when I suddenly started moving again after months of dark confinement with eleven others of my kind, standing on our heads in an unsealed cardboard case, thousands of which were stacked high and wrapped in plastic, in towers of pallets in a huge warehouse in Fairfield, California.
“Prior to that I had been melted, molded and blown into existence in a glass factory somewhere on the other side of the world, then subjected to weeks of rolling motion as I crossed an ocean towards the promised land. Mostly I just stood on my head for long periods of time at different stops along the way, cognizant of nothing but the occasional sound of forklifts and the constant quiet of delay.
“But now things were different. The movement had quickened and there was light at times, and changing noises. It felt as if I was being taken from one place to another, and another, and another, as if staging for something big. Then final quiet, and darkness…
“Then all hell broke loose!
“My case was flipped over and the down, which had been my up for so many long months, fell out below and I found myself, somewhat unceremoniously, upright on a moving conveyor belt, jockeying for position with my case-mates as we pressed forward into line, screams of clinking glass being the only sounds we could make.
“We passed single file into a wall of industrial sound through a cutout in a plexiglass divider and were quickly grabbed by the neck and turned back upside-down. Compressed air blew out any cardboard dust or shards of glass, and heavy nitrogen gas was injected into my top (once again my bottom) during the final seconds as I exhaled oxygen for the last time. I was then turned back right-side-up and returned to the in-feed conveyor only to be instantly ushered aboard a merry-go-round of individual metal pedestals that rose in sequence to another emitter, which filled me full—a precise 750 millimeters—of something liquid displacing the cold nitrogen gas with a flood of organoleptic stimuli.
“Aah! I somehow knew immediately that I was experiencing my own manifest destiny. That I was created to hold and protect and nurture this elixir of… PLOP! Ouch! This was getting downright invasive. A 44mm long, 22mm wide cork was plunged into the 14mm hole in the top of my head, testing the very stasis of the hard atoms of glass in my neck, which threatened—just for a second—to lose equilibrium and shatter into hundreds of sharp green tears. But the moment passed, and I was quickly topped with a colorful tin capsule that was spun down my neck, covering the top of the cork and conforming to the ridges at my opening.
“From there the conveyor belt did a U-turn, and I began the rattling journey back towards my empty cardboard case, passing through the labeler that held my front and back labels in exact position under a vacuum, to be released and adhered to my belly and backside as I was spun in a perfectly timed pirouette. I trembled with excitement (or maybe just the vibration of the conveyer belt), having truly caught lightning while being beautifully dressed for the event. I rejoined my box-mates in our case, clinking in anticipation of what was to come, and then slid down a ramp to be sealed back into darkness, stacked on a pallet, rewrapped in plastic, and transported into proper storage—until the next act.”
And so it went a week ago last Thursday. All of Tiny Vineyards Wine Company’s approximately 280 cases of its 2021 Vintage now safely in bottles in a dark, climate-controlled, secure facility awaiting their release in just six more months.
Bud break is “late”
With all the cold, wet weather this late winter and early spring most of the vineyards in and around Sonoma simply pulled the covers back over their heads and decided to stay in dormancy as much as a month longer than they had the last few years. I read in the local paper that this wasn’t something abnormal. In fact, it was the way it always used to be back before climate change became an issue. Ned Hill of La Prenda Vineyards Management, who grows a lot of grapes in the area, remembers that they used to consider mid-April as the deadline for when they needed to have all their pruning finished before bud break. Nowadays, that would be way too late and he now plans for as much as a month earlier!
Nobody seems to agree on what this year’s return to “normal” means in terms of how it will affect the harvest date. But one thing is for certain, it needs to get warm and sunny, and stay that way. It’s the amount of daylight and the temperature of the soil that ultimately drives the growth cycle of grapes.
Come see me at the Garagiste Festival!
Save the date! — April 29th at the Sonoma Veterans Hall. It’s the Northern Exposure Garagiste Festival for micro-production (under 1,500 cases) commercial wineries from Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Santa Cruz.
I’ll be pouring “barrel samples” of our just bottled 2021 Vintage, including my 2022 Chardonnay, 2021 Eclipse Malbec, and 2021 Requisite Red Blend. This will be the first time members of the public will get a chance to taste my wines and reserve some bottles. Yikes!
I’m told these festivals are awesome for aficionados of artisan wines, and usually sell-out quickly. Check out all the details right here today!
Anyone need barrels?
Any winemakers out there in need of some clean, premium cooperage, twice-used French oak barrels? I bought them once-used from Spottswoode Winery, a premier Cabernet Sauvignon vintner in St Helena, then used them once myself for my 2021 Vintage. I’m guessing they probably have one or two more years of some oak extraction before they’d be considered neutral. I’ve got 8 red wine barrels and 2 white wine barrels, $100 each.
Here’s the inventory: Reds — five 2019 St. Martin, one 2019 Sylvain, one 2019 Tremeaux, one 2019 Fleur de Quintessence Whites — one 2019 Taransaud, one 2019 Gauthier Freres
Reply to this email if you’re interested.
