This morning, the Cabardes did one of its regular organoleptic test flights.  That’s a pretty fancy way to say we get together and taste newly bottled Cabardes wine. The primary purpose of these tastings is quality control.  We want to make sure that everybody is putting their best foot forward with their Cabardes wines.  But [...]

For every good idea I have, I get at least three ridiculously bad ideas.  And some of those bad ideas make it far beyond the planning stages. So, last week, I was joking about the rhetoric we terroir-lovers tend to use.  We get very wrapped up in the importance of a wine reflecting a sense [...]

Joe and Ryan O’Connell are ascended fanboys. Why do I always say that, and where does the phrase come from?  TV Tropes. TV Tropes is a wiki-styled site where people store away cultural references and catalog the use of certain recurring tropes in fiction.  The scope is large and its users proudly forgo wikipedia’s notability [...]

Wine Information: What a difference a week makes! Great potential!

I get a lot of questions about the nuts and bolts of vineyard finance.  Honestly, I’m not really comfortable posting all our costs and returns on the web or even talking about them openly at wine tastings.  But I understand when people get curious.  I mean, somewhere in the back of their minds, they want [...]

I just got back from a long two weeks of tastings around Western Europe. We went as far north as Normandy (Cherbourg) and we went all the way down to Logrono in the Rioja region of Spain. We drove past a lot of vineyards on our tour, and I have to make a confession. I [...]

Pigeage is more than just a funny word with indecipherable vowel distribution. It’s a way of life. For weeks, all of our wines are going through an extended fermentation where the grapes and grape juice are turning into delicious red wine. This is a critical period known as maceration when the wine will draw its [...]

Sometimes, I take a weekend day off and just do a nice all-day wine tasting with one of my retailers. Which retailer depends on where I’m staying and what I want to do that night. This past Saturday was at The Butcher’s Block in Sarasota. I got some video footage that should demystify my job [...]

Today is a day of deliveries. I expected to get started sooner because somebody at Whole Foods was registered to be in at 8:00 AM. The wave of relief when I called in to find he wasn’t there that early is best left hidden. But I’m going to leave the computer soon for a long [...]

I finally had a bit of time to compile some of the vineyard footage. Please excuse the low quality. I’m recording all of this with my laptop’s built-in webcam and the macbook icam is not meant for these sweeping outdoor shots. Add Internet compression to that and some psychotic time-lapse editing and you have video [...]