I’m a few days behind here, but this Saturday past marks the next round of madness in the cellar. It was actually a pretty easy start, with a few tons of Viognier from Harry Fralich and a few tons of Petite Sirah from the Russell home ranch. Both harvests were down about 25% from our initial expectations, but WOW!!!! The fruit is just killer.

Harry’s Viognier is as good as it gets out of Paso Robles. Viognier off this vineyard has an amazing combination of yellow and green citrus combined with sweet mandarin orange overtones. Fantastic. The fruit came in at a nice 25.1 Brix and 3.57pH. We popped it directly in the press for a quick squeeze and cold settle and it’s in barrel fermenting as we speak (only six different yeasts this time).

The Petite Sirah looks absolutely ridiculous… tiny, tiny berries and loose little clusters. Exactly what we like. The stuff came off the destemmer almost black, and already stains everything it touches. This is going to be a good year.

Stay tuned for the next round…

Bottling can be a maddening process. I really don’t know why we decided to pull one more bottling run off before harvest (which of course is only a few days away)… but we did. It actually went off without a hitch - all our bottles and cork showed up ahead of time, and the mobile bottling truck (a site to behold in action) was flawless. As a result, we now have all the ‘05 reds bottled and resting and they’re tasting great. We bottled our ‘05 Grenache (co-fermented with a wee-bit of Mourvedre), our ‘05 Syrah (co-fermented with a wee-bit of Viognier), and our ‘05 “The Breadwinner” blend (more on this one later).

Yeah, yeah… I know. More wine “to come.” Trust me, it’s coming.

But we’re finally starting to get a bit of relief. In some spots, the rising Mercury has been helpful (our Santa Maria Grenache)… in others, it’s had us (and especialy the growers) working overtime. Needless to say, we have a few sites that ramped up the sugar over the past week. But nothing too crazy, and nothing we didn’t really expect when we saw the forecast. Either way, harvest is coming, and coming fast. Depending on how the fruit tastes and the numbers look, we’ll likely kick off 2007 with Fralich Viognier and follow it up with some Petite Sirah out of the Russell home vineyard this weekend. Yeeee-haw!