A hot one in Napa

It is currently 80 degrees here in Napa.  Hardly seems like February but a nice enough day to take apart some of Prime's old barrels.  I took some time before the Superbowl to disassemble some barrels that I bought in 2007.  It takes a lot less time break them up than it does to make them.  That being said, I am always amazed at how well wine barrels are made.  It takes a lot of pounding with a mighty big hammer to convince them to fall into a pile of staves.  Its really amazing that these are made with only pressure holding them together.  No nails, glue, screws etc.  This batch looks likely to become firewood but you never know, maybe yard art if this heat keeps up.

A toast to 2011...

A huge thanks to all the supporters of PRIME Napa Valley's efforts over the last year.  2010 was a terrific year for us.  The wines received some great press that turned into quite a few new customers.  The best part of the job is getting to meet the people that love the wines.  It is all of you that have shown so much excitement over the  last year that make us want to do even better in 2011.


Speaking of New Years: Everyone seems to do a "best of" list to hit the highlights of the outgoing year.  I never expected to make any of those so I assure you it was a pleasant surprise to come in at #8 at senelwine.com's top 10 wines of the year list!  Check out what he has to say about the 2008 District 4 Chardonnay by clicking here.  My favorite quote: "Move over Sbragia, there's a new Chardonnay ace in town" 


(for those under-informed on wine trivia: Sbragia=Ed Sbragia, famous longtime Beringer winemaker.)

SF Vintners Market

1pm

5pm

The pictures are from the Vintners Market in San Francisco in November. It started out pretty quiet and then a few hours later the crowds hit the back where we were at. I tried to get a picture from the same angle of before and after the crowd came. These types of events are important to us because they give us a chance to meet directly with consumers and in turn these consumers (aka "you") can buy our wine that day and walk out with it. Since we are too small to have a tasting room, it is like a rotating occasional version of a tasting room. We met lots and lots of people during this two day event, thanks to all those who stopped by our table. The magnums were a big hit, maybe for holiday gifts? We will keep you posted on any other "try and buy" events we might be doing next year.

The Bay Bridge in the clear window pane.

2010 Harvest: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ah, 2010 vintage. For me this has been the most unusual year to date since I started making wine in Napa in 1999.  The Summer was very cool and the grapes were weeks behind a normal ripening schedule.

Newbie "Merus" Vineyard

The good was that my new vineyard looked great this year.  This site, that I share with Merus, is textbook perfect in appearance. Here's a pic on harvest day:

The fruit had great flavor and crop level through the Summer and was lookig like it was going to quickly ripen to perfection.

Rain

Thats when the bad happened.  Rain.  Lots of rain.  I was out in the vineyard in a rainstorm tasting grapes and I was surprised on how good the fruit was tasting.  The only problem was that the rain leads to mildew and the vines could only handle a week or so after the last rain before the fruit had to come in.  I think the full potential of this new site probably was not achieved but still I'm tasting some really excellent (and really young) wine from it.



All went well in the winery this year, Jeff and the crew were excellent as usual.  I caught this shot of the last of the juice leaving the hopper on the way to the destemmer-crusher.  I'm hopefull for a happy ending to this year's vintage, only time will tell but so far so good...
 

Last drops of 2010

The Ugly, 90% of Midoriya was lost

Oh, I forgot about the ugly.  Poor Midoriya Hills Vineyard was devistated by the weather.  The cool summer followed by a couple of heat spikes just killed the fruit on the vine.  It shriveled up and died a premature death, well before it was ripe enough to harvest.  I did manage to salvage about 1000 pounds of fruit, and while it looked less that ideal the wine is tasting surprisingly good!

PRIME 2010 Chardonnay

Chard SS and oak barrels

The Berry Lane Chardonnay has officially finished fermentation and made the transition from grape juice to wine.  This is the view as you shine a flashlight into the barrel, the juice is bubbling indicating the release of carbon dioxide and the conversion of sugar to alcohol.

This last week each barrel tested at -1.7 Brix telling me that the fermentation is over (avoided the dreaded "stuck fermentation").  Today we will top up the barrels and send samples to the lab to find out the alcohol, acid levels, residual sugar etc.  Now I can go back to worrying about the Cabernet...

HydeAway Events in San Francisco

On September 16th we participated in a very cool event on the San Francisco waterfront. There was a collective of six small vintners, music by a talented trio, more food that people could consume and it was held in the historic Maritime Museum which has recently been renovated. It is called HydeAway and if this name doesn't sound familiar to you then you are not on our mailing list. The location will change to other areas of the San Francisco Maritime National Park (all near and on Hyde Street Pier). It is invitation only but we do send out an invite to our mailing list so make sure you are on it today! The next one is in November.

View of Alcatraz from the top deck of Balclutha

Gerard's Paella

Trio - but you could probably figure that one out on your own

2010 Harvest. What's that all about?

Winemaker update for y'all (just got back from Texas).  I think most of you may have heard but we have had about the coolest Summer on record in Napa.  That is until a massive heatwave at the end of August and then another one this last week.  Its kind of a catch 22 situation, if its too cool and foggy you have to pull leaves around the fruit to help it dry out and avoid molds.  Yet if you pull the leaves and then you get a ridiculous heat wave the fruit gets fried and can turn to raisins.

The "Merus" block has been saved from this predicament by Larry's quick action with the water valves.  Sadly, Midorya Hills fell victim to the heat spikes this year.  The good news is the damage to Midoriya seems to only be an issue with the quantity, not the quality of the fruit.  For some unknown reason the fruit that was exposed to the sun just decided to die off.  Hopefully what is left will have twice the flavor.  We will see.  The Berry Lane Chardonnay also shows the raisining effect with most of the fruit in good shape but some of the exposed berries turned scary black.

Our handy de-stemmer machine takes the grapes off the stems and leaves the raisins behind.  So, other than the lack of fruit we should be in excellent position for an amazing year when it comes to quality.

TED