Looking back 5 years: Joan's story

Grand Opening day, 2007

Sept. 22, 2012 will be five years to the day that I first stood behind the tasting counter eagerly awaiting our first customers. I can still see the first vintage of our Estate Syrah at the end of the lineup. My first grape babies, from the grape vines I nurtured for three years, were in those bottles. I knew people would appreciate the great wine Tim made from those grapes. But when I looked at the bottles of that wine I saw so much more.

Emma helping, first planting day, 2003

It all started many years before. We purchased the land in 2001, began the infrastructure work in 2003 and started growing the grapes in 2004. The challenges for me were many, from learning how to grow grapes to setting up an agribusiness to trying to squeeze one more productive hour out of a day. There were many days of exhaustion, sore muscles and what sometimes seemed like too many problems to solve.

The rewards have far outweighed the challenges. This has been a family endeavor. My children, Kathryn and Ian, and my daughter-in-law, Rhian, have all given generously of their time and talents.  Sharing in this with them has been priceless. When I walk the vineyard or look around the tasting room, I am filled with a boundless pride. We all built this together.

Some of our friends and frequent bottlers:
Nikole, Matt, Mike and Steph (and Ella,
who was adopted at Canelo Hills)

Many other people have been part of our success. The other AZ grape growers and our friends have all helped out. One of the best things that came from the tasting room has been meeting so many wonderful people, many of whom over the past five years have become good friends, volunteering their time to help.

When you come in the weekend of Sept. 22-23 to join in our celebration, I will behind the same tasting counter. When I am filling your glass I will be pouring all the love and experiences of the last five years along with our wine.

Zinfandel - Yummy!

Arizona Zinfandel is fabulous, the problem is that it's a bugger to grow it in this state. Oddly for an arid part of the world, the summer rains (monsoons and hurricanes from Mexico) come at exactly the wrong time - harvest, when the thin skinned and tightly packed Zinfandel just plain old rots before it ripens. "Once in every 8 years", that's the local lore about Zinfandel Harvests. 2009 was a dry year and one of those once in 8 years. Peter Lechtenbohmer of what was then Sweet Sunrise Vineyards (now Sand Reckoner) delivered a load of Zinfandel that has become absolutely delicious. It got bottled this past weekend by one of our experienced bunch of volunteers.





Brian perfects the role of "Philip"- the bottle filler.




Laura and Amber are "Corkey" and "Topper" - operating the corking machine and the heat shrinker for the capsules respectively.



Amber steps in as "Topper" and Kaitlyn has mastered "Sticky" - applying labels at the new labeling machine.


Casey excels as "Crew Boss" and Joan loads the finished product.


It was a very successful day. A human bottling line rivaling the reputation of any respectable monoblock (the name of a fully automatic, industrial bottling line). The wine needs to rest for a bit and will ready around New Year 2012.

Very Yummy Yummy Zin

What do you get when you blend together Arizona grown Zinfandel from three vintages (one of which was the 2007 late harvest crop)? You got it - very, very, yummy, Yummy Zin. We have been waiting a long time for this wine. The 2007 vintage dessert Zinfandel was tasty to the extreme and very popular. It was a small experimental batch that convinced me of the compelling power of Arizona fortified dessert wine. This past Saturday Mike and Stephanie (and their doggie Ella) and Matt and Nicole pitched in and bottled 140 cases of small bottles of this wine. Being a mixture of three vintages it is a "Non Vintage" wine and will be on the tasting room the first weekend in October.





Did I mention Adele? What a sweetie. The last time she helped bottle some wine it was the 2008 Sunrise and she was in utero. Matt and Nicole are understandably proud parents and Adele is about the most mellow, easy tempered and gentle soul I have met in the form of a 10 week old child.



Thanks Mike, Stephanie, Matt and Nicole!

ET - 08

The day before The Storm - Amber, Katelyn, Dave and Casey put in a full day's work bottling the 2008 Estate Tempranillo. Although Katelyn is new to the task, the others are old hands and within a case or two the group was humming like a well oiled 4-person powered machine. Seventy cases of absolutely scrumptious wine was bottled. As I was originally composing this blog the next night, The Storm blew in, the power went out and Joan and I were worried but (for the moment) oblivious to the vineyard damage that ensued. I haven't had the heart to get back to it until now, but thanks to the efforts and good wishes of these four and hundreds of other friends, fans and well-wishers, Joan and I are back on track. Another one of life's lessons learned. Mother Nature is has a mind and desire all of her own. The '08 Estate Tempranillo needs some serious bottle time - huge, dark, rich, oaky wine flavors of a classic Sonoita AVA wine. Look for it to be on the tasting table around New Year 2011. Amber by the way is working on a new member of the Polivchak family - due to arrive in 2011. There is always room for one more on the bottling line.

Sangiovese - In the bottle

Sunday was a banner day as Dave, Casey, Amber, Michelle and Jason took their stations at the bottling line. It's amazing to me how people tend to settle into their natural niche in the bottling line. Someone who is all thumbs at the corker is a whiz with the filler. The stress of keeping up the pace and paying attention to accuracy with the labeler is a stimulating challenge to another. Wrong stations and the pace is 5-8 cases an hour. Everyone getting their groove on - 20+ cases per hour. What stood before us was about 1300 liters of 2008 Sangiovese from Sweet Sunrise Vineyard. In short order it was in the bottle, corked, capsuled, labeled, boxed and stacked. Now it needs a few months to rest and recover from bottle shock - honest to goodness bottle shock, not the phony baloney type that mysteriously turns white wine brown for a few days. Out of the filler spigot it tasted absolutely delicious and totally reminiscent of the award winning 2007 version.

Bottling Hypnosis

Volunteers are the backbone of our family winery. This is especially the case when a large task comes along such as harvesting grapes or bottling one of our bigger batches of wine. On Memorial Day Nikole, Matt, Mike, Steph and puppy Ella all pitched in to help bottle the 2008 Chardonnay. Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to bottle wine. As I’ve mentioned before, farming and wine making consist mostly of a collection of repetitive tasks that in the doing lend themselves to contemplation and meditation. But in this case having two aerospace engineers, a planetary scientist and a health care professional involved in the job, turned a routine assembly line task into a challenge of process engineering and planning. Remove empty bottles from case, fill bottles with wine, stuff in cork, shrink capsule, apply label, fill empty case with full bottle, stack case. Repeat. Shave a little time here, reduce movement there, cross train at each station, find the task each one is most efficient at. In very short order we were all a finely tuned machine and at our peak we were sizzling along at a rate of 28 cases an hour.


Pretty darn good. Good company. Good wine. Many thanks from Joan and me to Nicole, Steph, Matt, Mike and, of course, Ella.

We're Bottling!

The last couple of weeks have been busy for us. We are bottling the 2007 wines and crushing this year's harvest. We've had some return volunteers and some new ones helping. A couple of weeks ago Karla, Alicia, Mark and, of course, our daughter, Kathryn, bottled the Syrah. This past Sunday Casey and Amber Polivchak spent one of their rare days off bottling the Sangiovese. We finished that bottling early so they also labeled some Malvasia. Tim and I feel very fortunate to have so many wonderful people involved in the workings of our winery.

A Rose is a Rose is not a Rosé

Back in May, Joan and I tested our new bottling line (in anticipation of the Chardonnay bottling party blogged last week) by bottling 50 cases of Nebbiolo Rosé. It has settled down after the trauma of bottling and it is ready for release this coming weekend. I think it’ll get even better in the bottle over the next year or so. It is a lovely clear pink color and tastes just as refreshing as it looks. Definitely Nebbiolo, it is tart but very smooth and pleasant in the mouth with just enough fruit (cherry) and oak in the nose to complement the perfectly ripe flavor of a “gotta eat this one right now” strawberry and soft tannins in the finish. It is completely dry at 11.9% alcohol and will be for sale for $15 a bottle and as always a 10% discount for any 12 bottle case.

Music to bottle by

As we headed into a full day of bottling the 2007 Chardonnay, Sonya, Karla, Alicia, Kathryn, Joan and I started out with no music.

Although the rhythmic “squeak – kashook” of the corking machine provided us with some distraction, real live music was called for.



With the help of a mix of pop love (mostly forsaken) songs and country love (mostly about trucks and beer and broken hearts) songs we were rolling along.




We rotated the jobs – moving the empties, filling bottles, corking filled bottles, shrinking the neck wrap, labeling and stacking full cases.

Eighty-two cases later we were done.



After a few weeks resting to recover from “bottle shock” it’ll be available in the tasting room.

Sparkling

Making wine fills me with anxious expectations, but even more so the making of sparkling wine. First there's the task of making a sound base wine, in this case a Chardonnay with grapes from Cochise County. Then the yeast has to be "build up", meaning getting it used to living in a high alcohol environment. A measured amount of sugar is added to the base wine (4 grams per liter for each desired atmosphere of pressure) and the built up yeast is pitched to the wine. I always wait overnight to make sure there is some fermentation action, then the sugary, yeasty, base wine is bottled in champagne bottles and sealed with a crown cap. Over the next few months the yeast turns the added sugar to alcohol and carbon dioxide, but as opposed to primary fermentation, the production of carbon dioxide is the main goal. The tightly capped bottle prevents the gas from escaping and it becomes dissolved in the wine, AKA bubbles. This is the basis of the methode champenoise. It takes the yeast so long because they don't like the high pressure and increasingly high alcohol environment. When they are done and die the chore will be to get them out of the bottle, but that's the other half of the story.

Bottling

On St Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2007, we bottled our first wines – the 2006 Riesling. The wine analysis for relevant physical qualities was perfect and the individual barrels were tasting just great. Besides, we needed about 3 weeks in the bottle to get past bottle shock in order to be ready for the Wine and Farm Festival on April 28. Chris Hamilton loaned us his bottle filler (reverse milking machine Bob Westlake christened it) and with the help of Kathryn and Nathan we bottled 70 cases. Actually we ran out of bottles and will need to finish the rest later, not to mention the remaining bulk wine will give me an excuse to try sparking some Riesling. It turns out to be a very repetitious task, made easier by loud music and the company of friends and family. It is also fairly backbreaking and I was stiff for more than a week. But for the lack of a pile of cash I would buy a bottling line – hook up the wine, stick the bottles in on one end and out pop labeled, filled, corked bottles on the other.