What were we thinking???

Every once-in-awhile, Matt and I ask ourselves that question; "What exactly were we thinking?  Who's idea was it to buy vineyards???"  This coming off of our third weekend in a row of vineyard work and now labeling, yet again.  Yes, you all must be getting sick of hearing about us labeling wine and packing boxes for shipment.  But, that's why you read my blog right?  To hear about the glamorous life of a "Winemaker" in southern France?! Well this is the reality of our "living the dream." On Thursday after pruning for awhile, I drove 2 hours to a town north of Beziers to pick up the labeling machine and capsule crimper, then 2 hours back.  Friday I pruned most of the day since it was the end of the Northern Planting Time for this month- the bio-dynamic calendar is what I am referring to here.  Then Saturday we got up early to get started boxing up our next shipments: 100 cases to the Kermit Lynch store in  Berkeley, 28 cases to Seattle, and 15 cases to Maryland!  Great news, we are thrilled that the wine is shipping, BUT!- we have to get it ready. 

Setting up the label machine always takes awhile, getting the spacing right between the front and back labels - not to mention trying to remember how to properly thread the labels through the maze of the machine.  Ugh, that was the first slow-down.  Then we go to plug in the capsule crimper and there's an error message on the display. Double Ugh.  Nothing doing, we call the man we rented it from, he has no idea, and is 2 hours away, he's no help what-so-ever.  Finally we realize that it's not going to work and if we're going to get these shipments ready for the end of the week, we'll have to find another capsule crimping machine.  Luckily our dear friends at Rouge Garance, have one and were willing to loan theirs to us for the weekend.  Once again I ask myself how we would get along with out them! 

Finally after getting it all set up, we started out about 3pm.  We got about three quarters of the way through the big order for Berkeley and we called it a night around 8pm. Poor Serge, who happened to stop by, got roped into helping us for an hour or so, which was a wonderful boost to our morale, his son Matthias loved helping and was a spitfire when it came to speeding us all up.

With the help of the Till family, we worked all day today, getting almost everything labeled, even beyond what we are immediately shipping.  We sent them home around 3 and decided to keep on working, we had another 500 or so bottles to label, plus maybe some magnums.  The only problem was to get to the magnums, we had to move a bunch of other bottles.  By this time our bodies were so sore from transferring the bottles, boxes, pallets, etc. around all day we just wanted to climb into a hot bath!  This was when I looked at Matt and asked him; "What were we thinking when we bought these vineyards??!!"  We both laughed, decided to work a bit longer and then call it a day, this is at about 7 o'clock.  Both of us have busy days tomorrow, I'm starting 3 days of tasting Côtes du Rhône and CDR Villages, and he's busy with his paying job at Cisco!

After we finished dinner, I was reading and he was studying up on some biodynamic practices.  Matt went upstairs to print something out and he discovered a fax that had arrived yesterday and had fallen onto the floor.  It was from Kermit Lynch.   He had just opened another one of the  bottles of the 2006 that we sent for him to taste late last year.   He was happy with it!  Saying, among other things... "it is a neat wine and should be a success."   

Just what we needed to hear.

Comments

[Tim Stephens]

I'm so happy for you regarding Kermit Lynch's comments on the 2006. And I'm so happy for me that you've found a distributor in Maryland! Now maybe I won't have to circumvent "the system" anymore by having my brother put together a Care package that contains "commercially processed and packaged food items". :-)
It'll be kind of sad, though, in a way. It was kind of fun to be an "outlaw" and flaunt the interstate commerce laws and Maryland's archaic direct-to-comsumer laws. Civil disobedience at it's finest, I say. Henry David Thoreau would be proud, I think... :-)

[Steve Lanum]

I think you should ask Matthias to autograph a few labels. I want a bottled he labeled.

[Eric LECOURS]

The day to day details are thoroughly interesting. Please keep them coming.

[pleiades]

those 15 cases for MD are almost here. I am looking forward to tasting the wine and giving it a whirl; We're looking forward to re-ordering soon!