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 list of deliveries around Tampa and St. Petersburg.

Tomorrow will be a day of paper. I will have a lot of fun finishing a birthday present for a new friend and I will have a lot of boredom writing up tax reports and compliance papers for the state auditors. It’s a glamorous life, the life of a winemaker. 🙁 Saturdays buried in paper.

All the whining aside, we had an excellent Cinco de Mayo celebration. Some of my spoiled wine that’s not in a condition to sell but is in a condition to enjoy got mixed in with some fruit and ginger ale and cinnamon. We had ourselves a time. (Legal disclaimer: we had all this wine cleared through a licensed vendor in the state of Florida blah blah blah blah blah.)

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 that I hope is just on this side of watchable. Anyway, people have been requesting some outdoorsy footage and some footage of the town around the vineyard. Hopefully these clips will satisfy.

The music is “quelle classe!” by Les Auditeurs (my friends and I just recorded it this week!).

You can see the town hall of Villemoustaussou, the fruit orchard on the vineyard, Muse the Wine Dog, and some pretty blossoms. Excitement abounds on the outskirts of Carcassonne, France.

I’ve been back in Tampa a couple days now and I’m starting to miss mom’s cooking. But it’s good to be in the city that raised me, checking out the old stomping grounds and living in the house I was in before we started this crazy vineyard thing. For those who don’t know, I’m from Tampa so this is where the wine’s marketing and distribution is headquartered for the time being.

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Home, Sweet-Mother-of-@#*!, Home.

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The video isn’t working entirely right… I’ll have to get my mom to reupload it. Regardless, that’s a glimpse of the house my parents built before going into wine. They made the houses like they make wines WAY BIGGER THAN MOST PEOPLE WOULD EVER EXPECT.

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Anyway, I’m in Tampa and I’m ready to start selling wine. A lot of new contacts from the Sarasota Wine Festival. I met David and Deb Hunt from Hunt Cellars, several of the family member at Stanley Lambert including (Jim Lambert, self-proclaimed wannabe winemaker), the lovely family behind Silkwood Wines, and the Michael half of Michael-David Winery (who make Earthquake, Incognito, Pride, 7 Deadly Zins and many many more). They were all fantastic people and I will be keeping in touch with each of them.

I also got to snoop a little behind the scenes, sneaking around the service corridors of the Ritz Carlton, salvaging floral arrangements from the hotel’s trash, and pouring more than a thousand samples in three days. I even got invited to an after-party thrown by one of the bigger distributors and it was fun drinking behind (what some refer to as) enemy lines. At the end of so much good wine, everybody can be good friends.

I landed (finally) and my luggage didn’t. Oh well. I’m in Tampa. I got a few hours of sleep. I’m going to pack the wine and bring it (past deadline) to Sarasota. We’ll see if we can salvage the expo experience despite the Airline conspiracy to destroy my itinerary. I’ve always thought that Charles de Gaul had it out for me (the airport, not the General/President).

Sarasota will be a hoot if I can make it there on time since the wine had to be delivered when I was originally scheduled to land like a day and a half ago.

I tried to do an elevator pitch for Jim Kukral at the Daily Flip. He’s doing an educational contest / promotion where people can get feedback on 15 second pitches about their product or company. I don’t verbally identify myself or my brand so he kind of rips me a new one, but that’s what learning is about sometimes! A big thanks to Kukral for running a series like this.

Here’s the pitch:

I posted a youtube video about the different pruning methods. There’s spur pruning and cane pruning. These are known here as Cordon Royat and Guyot, respectively. At O’Vineyards, we’re in the process of converting from Guyot to Cordon Royat and this video explains why we think this will be good for the wine.

PS – I’m confirming this blog’s entry into Technorati. Technorati Profile It’s a site that catalogs blogs and helps spread the word.

We spent most of the day doing soutirages on some of the Syrah for the 2007 Reserve. It had a lot of lies (that’s pronounced leez and has nothing to do with obfuscating the truth) and it was exceptionally important to make sure that this grape deposit should be separated from the wine at this time.

We also took advantage of this move to put some of the barrels in the center of the room on that new oxoline shelving I was bragging about a couple days ago. It took a long time, but it should be easier on the remaining barrels we have to go through.

More to come!

I just celebrated my 23rd birthday at the beginning of the month and after an incredibly busy pair of weeks in Florida, I flew back to the vineyard. I am currently typing from my office above the winery and I am excited to announce that I finally got around to making a short vineyard video. Hopefully, I’ll keep these coming as a web series on O’Vineyards that can shed some light on some of the cool things we get to do, the way we tend to grapes and wine, our love for this work and this area, all the sweet toys I get to play with, etc.

This installment is on a topic I’m very excited about. I’ve been gone since crush at the end of 2007. In my absence, my parents installed a brand new oxoline system to shelve our barrels. This actually sounds a lot like an ad for them, but I’m not getting paid. (We should look into the sponsorship opportunities, but) This is just a friendly look into one of the cool new gadgets I get to use.

For people who can’t see the video cause they’re at work or on dialup or somesuch:
My barrels used to be stacked on top of each other which is the way it’s been done for a long time. Once they’re full, they’re exceptionally heavy and it’s a little difficult reaching the bunghole (that’s the hole in the barrel, not the naughty part of your body). The shelving system uses space age innovations like wheels and tubes to shelve each barrel independently. This makes the hole accessible, makes it possible to turn the barrel around while full with minimal effort, and turns the difficult process of emptying the last bits of the barrel as easy as turning it upside down. I’m sort of surprised it took centuries of winemaking before an affordable shelf with wheels was invented, but at least we have it now.