Well today our 2006 wine was bottled. Yippee! It would have been nice to say "we bottled our 2006 wine" but this year the winery where it is housed had a mobile bottling line come in - a big truck that has the bottling line inside - and so it is all over and done with in about 10 minutes! We didn't even go and see it as they were busy doing all their bottling in a week!!!
The first year we made our wine, we did everything ourselves - and filling the bottles was like milking a cow (not that I've ever milked a cow!). So I'm glad we had that experience - even if we seem to do less and less hands on each year....
We haven't finalized our wine label for this vintage yet either.... I wrote a first draft and John changed a few words and that's as far as we have got. Guess we need to get on with that now that there are bottles waiting to be labelled. At least we get to do the labelling..with the help of a machine and some friends.
Each year we change the back label - which is where I write my little story for the year - and we also change the colour of the label. So far we have had yellow, turquoise/teal, and orange. We have agreed that for 2006 we are going with green for the label. It took quite a lot of persuading John - but I think he is OK with it. It's a nice fresh green. My favourite colour is lime green so I was pushing for something like that. Let's hope it works out OK.
Then we'll have to go through the ordeal of keep tasting the wine to see how long it has bottle shock!!! Yes, when first put into the bottle, the wine goes into a state of "shock". We like to track the shock passage by drinking our new wine regularly and seeing how it changes day by day! I know - what a tough job to do!!!
And talking of bottle-shock - we are going to see the movie "Bottle Shock" tonight that was filmed in Glen Ellen and Sonoma! All about the wine competition in 1976 when French wines were up again California wines in a blind tasting - and the California wines won! There was alot of excitement during the local filming and lots of locals had small parts etc - so it should be fun to see the final result.
Naturally I have done some grape pieces of jewelry. Not recently though - these are all older pieces.....pins, necklaces.... I used to show my work at some winery events locally and so the grape pieces were quite popular there. I do less events nowadays - but do have one coming up at Ravenswood winery in Sonoma in September. If you are local - come by and see me. The details are on my website www.birdlandcreations.com
Well, think of us, working hard at tasting our wine and charting it's progress. I'll try not to whine about it!
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4 comments:
I am so impressed! I didn't know you make wine. More and more I think you are living my dream:)
Tough life you have in California, you lucky thing :)
well well well... poor you having to drink all that wine... al for scientific porpouses, of course. IF you need help you know...
What kind of wines do you make, which grapes I mean.
Do post a picture of the label later, sounds interesting. Do you sell or just drink your self blind alone?? :)
Thanks for all the sympathy! We grow merlot - sell most of the grapes to Havens and keep a ton for ourselves for our own wine. We don't sell our own wine - just keep it for family and friends and donations for non-profits!
We haven't picked up our newly bottled one yet.....hope to in the next couple of days.
The label is progressing....yes - I'll post a picture when it's done.
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