Thanks for a great 2008

Perhaps it is a little early for annual post-mortems, but aside from a wine club event, we're all done for 2008.  The tasting room will be closed to the public until Valentine's Weekend.  Check our list of retailers or hit us up online if you've run dry.  Upon reflection, it's been good year.

• We had a fantastic result in the vineyard that promises to be the best wines yet.
• We had a great year selling some incredibly good Pinot Noirs. 
• Wendy started a successful wine club.  Heck, it's almost like extended family.  I admit not liking the idea at first and continuously challenging it.
• We created what promises to be really nice wine from one of the most difficult growing seasons (speaking of 2007).
• We actually grew the business despite the Q4 economic collapse.  
• We discovered and put in motion 2 new experimental vineyard ideas, gems for future years. 

It wouldn't be Purple Cow unless we admitted our failures, here's the ones that come to the top of my head:

• I wish we had delayed planting the new Tempranillo field because the 90 degree weather on the day we planted seemed to cause great mortality.  I can attribute it to this because there's a clear trend where the areas planted early in the morning are fine while the ones planted late in the afternoon have the high mortality rate.  With careful consolidation, it will work out fine (see next bullet for reason).
• I also wish I changed which clone of Tempranillo we planted in the new field.  After the 2008 harvest, I have some new concerns about clonal variation in ripening characteristics.  We conducted our experiments with clone UCD 3 and then mass planted Duoro.  Given that the sugar on the Tempranillo was lower than the Pinot Noir this year, I'm now wondering if UCD 3 ripens eariler.  Maybe we're lucky we lost some plants in the new field because that's space that can be recycled.
• I wish we ordered a little less Tempranillo because we moved the intended plot for the winery over the top of the planned vineyard expansion.  We really had to be creative to find spots for all the new plants. 
• I wish we left 2007 Kelsey's Edition Pinot Noir in the barrel a little longer.  The Sophie's Edition is doing very well in the barrel and the Kelsey is going to be great, but we actually delayed it's readiness by early bottling.  We were fooled by 3 things. 
  • Supply stress.
  • Light color fooling us into thinking it wouldn't barrel age well.
  • Habit of bottling after 10 months.
• I wish we'd hired a bookkeeper at the start of the year.

That's about it.  In light of the fact that a couple nearby businesses didn't make it, I'd like to thank you for helping us be one of the survivors for another year.  I look forward to earning the opportunity to grace your table again next year. -Jon-