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The Winemaker's Blog documents our travails and triumphs as m2 wines grows. Identities of certain people and places have been changed to protect the innocent (namely me.)
I've categorized the blog by year, rather than by vintage year or by the type of wine we happen to be working on at the time.
Look for big changes here shortly. Thanks to a new friend, James J., we're working to convert the m2 winemakers blog into a WordPress blog where you can post comments, and add links or trackbacks to our site.
Also, check out the new wines on the Our Wines page. We finally got our winemaker's notes put together and posted with our take on all the '05 wines.
I was talking today with Tim Holdener of Macchia Wines here in Lodi and he asked me if I'd been out to see the Soucie Zin vineyard yet. Of course not.... I've been busy. I asked a stupid question, "How long time bloom? Tim looked at me funny and said that the vines already have set fruit and berry development is well along. Well, jeez, I felt stupid. Been so busy that I've paid NO attention whatsoever to what time of year it is. I'm still thinking it's late March. Yikes - harvest is less than four months away!!!!
Zinfest was a hoot for sure. In case you missed it, Zinfest is Lodi's big annual wine tasting event with music, art, food, and almost every Lodi area winery in attendance pouring their stuff. We were the first winery booth after peeps entered the main gate, so we were swamped. We were pouring our '05 Old Vine Zinfandel and the '05 Zinlady - couldn't pour our other stuff because it's not Lodi appelation.
Anyway, a big fun day and we want to say thanks to everyone who stopped and sampled our wine. We had tremendous positive response and that's always gratifying!
So, finally finished with racking all the 2006 wines. AND my stainless-steel keg topping system has finally been put together.
I'm finally almost finished with racking the '06 wines. At least this time, I'll probably rack everything at least twice more before bottling. Six barrels to go. It seems to be taking forever but that's primarily due to our space limitations. Setting up equipment, getting to the barrels I want to rack, then cleaning up takes more time than it should. The actual transfer time to do six barrels - pump out, wash, pump in, takes about an hour, but phone calls, the odd visitor here and there (not odd visitors, just odd as in random) or spending time looking for something I need takes as much time as racking six barrels. Cleaning up takes at least an hour and a half, depending on how much stuff I have to fork in and out of the building.
So, some of the dates below were wrong, like a month out of date. I've updated the errors I made in dating entries ...
And I also caught up on some details missing in previous entries. See the entry for Late March/Early April to catch up on stuff that I missed talking about on a daily basis.
Had a part this evening at the winery - food, music, fun, all the 2005 wines. A couple hundred people came through to pick up futures and sample the new stuff.
We bottled 88 cases of 2005 Zinlady today in about four hours. There's the diff right there between a bottling service and hand bottling - we did 850 cases in less than four hours on April 17.
Was at the winery all today today catching up on racking.
I'm so behind on so much stuff, including this web site. Bottling is behind us, mostly, and the fog is lifting in my head and I am finally getting back into the mood to do stuff! Yes!
At the winery @ 7 a.m., not expecting anything to be ready to go. However Harry and Frank are standing around waiting on us toget started. Frank's a little grumbly about us being "late", but he'll get over it.
Our hired crew shows up as scheduled at 7:30. Frank H. and the labels show up at 7:33 or so. We haul corks and capsules to the truck wrestle hoses and hook up pumps and the first case rolls off the truck at 8:08 a.m. We're finished at 12:15. At one point we bottled 140 cases in 20 minutes. Amazing. Harry and Frank are fast and efficient and everything works. Why do I sound surprised? Go read the January through April portions of the 2006 blog. Last year's bottling was hell on earth and I actually had been dreading this day, but damn, it went well.
We bottled all the '05 wines except for Zinlady, which we'll do next weekend - labels aren't ready yet.
We scheduled next year's bottling for March 1, 2008.
Our thanks to Harry and Frank and Mobile Wine Line!
Tomorrow is bottling day. I was at the winery until about 6:30 p.m. worrying over the wines, measuring pH, SO2, stuff like that, wondering if everything is ready to go.
We use a mobile bottling line to bottle our stuff. We're using Mobile Wine Line out of Galt this year and the truck pulled into the parking lot at 4:30. After a couple minutes discussion we figured out where to park it and how to set up the flow for tomorrow.
1000 cases of empty bottles were delivered this afternoon from Demptos Glass Company and the corks from MA Silva were delivered this morning. Last year we ordered enough capsules for our 2004 wines and 2005, so we're covered there.
I've got a crew of severn guys hired for the day tomorrow. They're supposed to be here at 7:30 a.m.
Overall everything is ready, I think.
We usually don't filter our wines unless we have to for some reason or another. The Petite and the Zin needs filtration, they're not as clear as we'd like and the residual sugar is higher in the Zin than I'm comfortable with leaving unfiltered. I was able to borrow a plate and frame filter from Ryan, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery, and took care of things with the generous help of Mea and Stan from KLR Machines.
Okay, no day-to-day entries from late March until early April because I'm behind (or was, I'm writing this entry on May 7!) In the run-up to bottling we've got some issues to solve, #1 being tanks to hold our wines while bottling. We can't bottle from the barrels and we don't have tanks to put stuff into. Ryan Leeman, winemaker at Van Ruiten Family Winery here in Lodi showed me a solution that we can afford - 360 gallon "Totes". They're basically a plastic 360 gallon "milk jug" inside a steel cage, the plastic is food grade, the fittings are adaptable to winery equipment and they're cheap. $195 each. They're cheap because they're plastic and it's relatively thin plastic at that. Not suited for long-term storage but perfect to use when racking, settling after pressing, or bottling small lots of wine. We got 'em from KP McNamara out of Ohio.
We also have to filter - and again Ryan helped out, see the entry for April 13.
Chris and I spent time in the winery working on our final blends for 'Trio' and 'Duality.' And the Zin; which we finalized about a month ago. We ended up with about 10% Petite Sirah in the Zin this year, losing the Soucie Vineyard designation, but that's okay. (To vineyard-designate a wine 95 percent has to come from that vineyard.)
Our labels were printed by Bonham Label Company in Livermore, and Frank Haversak, our rep from there. Great job too. Last year's labels, the 2004s, scratched easily and weren't printed on the right paper, and overall weren't very satisfactory. This year's look great; we were able to save enough money over what we budgeted that we were able to emboss the 'm2' on the label. A minor detail perhaps, that no one might notice, but it's a classy touch that was needed.
I've also been racking the '06 wines, transfering clear wine from barrel to tank, washing out the barrel, then refilling. We'll do this process two or three more times as necessary to clarify the wines.
Minor thing but we'll be calling our Syrah/Petite Sirah blend Duality now, in lieu of Duo. Seems like Duo is already being used as a name for a wine.
Ok, here's some links to web sites we like a lot...
Zinfandel Advocates and Producers - speaks for itself...
Vintage Court Hotel, San Francisco - a really nice wine-themed hotel in SanFran. Ask to stay in the m2 wines room. Seriously.
SteveBolerjack.com - Steve is Layne's cousin, he's a professional writer and editor (Steve that is, not Layne) as well as a Yellow Dog Democrat from way back, a stark-raving liberal, and a lawyer.
Taste California Travel - okay, the link is to the page about us, but Dan Clarke and I go way back. We should mention Gary Young here. No web page about him, but we should bring his name in at this point.
Red Zeppelin Winery - we're not pimping Stillman's wines on our web site. Really. Don't buy them. Especially the pink swill. He's not pimping our stuff on his site. So, don't buy his stuff.
We've gotten a LOT of positive results from our participation in the Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) tasting in San Fran this past January. We're talking with distributors in Texas and Deleware and with a broker in SoCal, all of whom are interesting in carrying our wines. I've done some Googling on "m2 wines" and have noticed several positive comments about our wines and ZAP - exciting stuff for us for sure.
Springtime is definitely here. Weather today is mid-70s and the winery is finally warming up. We'll keep it cool this summer, of course, but for now the warmer temperature is welcome as higher temps will cause the malolactic fermentation process to finish up in the 2006 wines.
We're gearing up for bottling our 2005 wines. So I'm ordering up corks, bottles, prepping the labels for printing and generally trying to solve the logistic problems surrounding bottling.
Chromatography indicates only one of the '06 wines has completed the conversion of malic acid into lactic acid. This process, called malolactic fermentation (MLF), is an anerobic bacterial thing. Simply stated, because that's the only way I understand it, the little buggers eat the malic and produce lactic acid. Wines that have not undergone MLF are not biologically stable and will spontaneously commit MLF at some point in their lives, most likely at the worst possible time. White wines usually do not go through MLF, Chardonnay the biggest exception. Red wines almost always do MLF.
How do we get our wines to finish MLF? It's temperature dependent, so once the winery warms up this spring MLF will happen.
Racking is the process of transferring wine from barrel to barrel, leaving behind the fine lees that have settled to the bottom of the barrel. The '06 wines haven't been racked since we pressed, settled and barreled. It has been so cold in the winery that malolactic fermentation has been very slow and I don't like to disturb the wine during the MLF process. So, time to test to see if MLF is complete.
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.
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.
This event is an annual thing sponsored by the Lodi-Woodbridge Winegrape Commission. Most of the wineries in the Lodi area are participating. The theme is, obviously, wine and chocolate. I personally dislike chocolate and wine - kinda like ketchup on ice cream - unless it's a port with certain kinds of chocolate desserts. So, we're having chocolate-rubbed grilled beef.
We don't know what to expect in terms of crowd numbers. The Winter Wine Wander event wasn't as busy as we expected and other folks have told us this one is a big event. We'll see.
Chris and I spent most of the afternoon in the winery sampling the '05s that we're going to be bottling and deciding upon our final blends. We'll be introducing two new wines - 'Duo', a blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah, and our varietal offering of Petite Sirah from Herzog Vineyard in Clarksburg. The Petite is a mouthful of wine, so the Duo ends up as a 80/20 blend of Syrah and Petite Sirah. If you're a Petite Sirah fan, watch out - ours is going to be a blue-tooth wine for sure. HUGE fruit with enough tannin structure and acidity to carry the wine for years.
Ok, that went pretty well after all. I didn't pour out of wine, made some great contacts in the trade and introduced m2 to a lot of new friends and fans. Thanks to everyone I met at ZAP for stopping by and tasting our Zinfandel!
We're pouring wine at ZAP (Zinfandel Advocates and Producers) at Fort Mason in San Francisco today. This tasting is the largest Zinfandel event in the country, mre than 400 wineries and about 10,000 people will be there. I'm hoping not to get lost in the crowd.
Chris and Diana are pouring wines at the Winter Wine & Food Fest sponsored by the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Sacramento tonight. It's a big event too.
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The pic below are from 2007. If you click on (BTB) you'll go to the section of the blog regarding that pic.
Here's Lucas, son of our friends Andy and Laura, modeling the latest in m2 logowear.
Our friend Kevin pulls a sample of wine for a guest during the Wine & Chocolate Weekend. If he looks familiar it's because he's a Cali state trooper and has probably pulled you over at some point. (BTB)
The crowd at m2 during the Wine & Chocolate Weekend. (BTB)
Tanks full of 2005 wine are lined up in preparation for bottling. (BTB)
Stan (top of his head visible above) checks the pressure guage on the output side of the plate and frame filter during filtration of one of the 2005 wines. (BTB)
Harry and Frank check alignment of the labeler prior to starting up the bottling line. (BTB)
The mobile bottling line. That's 2005 Petite Sirah in the tank on the right.